Apple Ships Hot PowerMac G5
A look at the strongest performing offering that Apple has shipped in years
By Peter Kastner, Executive Vice President and Chief Research Officer, Aberdeen Group

Apple began shipping the single-processor models of the Power Mac G5. Apple is playing the performance card versus its PC competitors for the first time in a long time.

When the high-end G5 with dual processors is tested, using the SPEC CPU 2000 benchmarks, it beats the Xeon and Pentium 4 in integer tests and handily wins in floating point calculations.

Users will also be pleased with the G5's performance, especially in Mac-centric applications such as PhotoShop. In fact, according to Apple, the G5's PhotoShop performance is 2.2 times faster than Pentium-4 based systems. For compute-intensive professionals who are already using Apple products, the G5 is the king of the hill — and the G5 has some bragging rights against the unwashed PC camp too, at least until Intel turns up the gigahertz crank.

The PowerPC G5 chip is a true 64-bit processor, consuming data in wider bites than its 32-bit cousins. The 64-bit design adds some of the performance kicker, and it also breaks the 32-bit memory-addressing barrier — the Power Mac G5 supports up to 8 gigabytes of DDR-400 memory. Enough memory to keep large media files open and to avoid the performance-sapping problem of frequent paging to disk.

We cooked up a $3,998 Power Mac G5 at Apple.com. It comes with two, 2 GHz PowerPC processors, 512 MB of DDR-400 SDRAM, a 160 GB serial ATA disk drive, a SuperDrive which reads and writes DVD-R and CD-ROMs media, an upgrade to the powerful ATI 9800 Pro graphics card, a modem, Mac OS X, and an Apple 17" Studio Display LCD flat panel monitor.

The Power Mac G5 supports a one-GHz front-side bus per processor, which Apple claims, is the industry's fastest front-side bus, keeps data flowing rapidly to and from memory. The latest Pentium 4's support an 800 GHz front-side bus.

The G5's three PCI-X I/O slots make sense, as they support server-grade I/O peripherals at the fastest industry-standard speeds. Also, the graphics support is for the latest, fastest 8x AGP cards from ATI and nVidia. For external I/O, the G5 supports 5 USB ports, Fire Wire 800, gigabit Ethernet, and optical digital and analog audio.

The Power Mac G5 is the strongest performing offering that Apple has shipped in years. It is a legitimate competitor to 32-bit workstations. Work up a spreadsheet on how much more productive you'll be. Confront the boss with how quickly the G5 pays for itself with the new, super-productive you. Hey, we can all dream for an economic recovery.