Apple delivered QuickTime 6.5, and the vital Fink project adapted its gigantic database of open source applications to make them compatible with Panther.Īpple’s latest Mac is housed in an all-aluminum chassis, similar in size and weight to its predecessor, the Power Mac G4. Apple also updated the Xcode development toolset, the included multilanguage integrated development environment (IDE), and upgraded the Power Mac G5’s firmware. The G5/Panther combination is unrivalled in the x86 world.īy mid-December, when this review was written, the Panther operating system had been settled and seen its second major update, 10.3.2. The Panther client is beautiful and practical, while the server is powerful and painless. Panther Server includes the open-source JBoss J2EE application server, complete with graphical administration and monitoring. As has long been true, the Mac is the platform to beat for client Java. Panther server tightens links to Windows and Unix networks reworks its directory services around open standards and a high-speed database and adds a unified management interface that controls the new mail server, a Microsoft-compatible VPN, and streaming video services. The client version firms Apple’s lead in graphics, boosting the performance of overall rendering and dramatically improving the display speed of PDF files. The Power Mac G5 takes the throughput flag, and it’s got something else you can’t get on the Xeon: the Panther OS (aka OS X 10.3). With the Power Mac G5, the penalty for accessing data that’s not in the CPU cache is reduced to a degree not possible with Xeon. In a dual-processor Power Mac G5, the cost of talking to peripherals is also reduced substantially by the machine’s efficient and highly integrated system chip set. Solid processing power and maximum bandwidth rule the day, and the Power Mac G5 has that combination down. Using the University of Virginia’s Stream memory bandwidth benchmark, the Power Mac G5 moves data almost twice as fast as a dual-processor 3.06GHz Xeon system. Apple won’t beat it until IBM gets serious about an architecture-tuned compiler for OS X.Īpple’s marketing choices aside, I believe that I/O throughput, especially memory performance, is infinitely more important than raw computing speed. The Intel compilers are used to create most commercial and performance-sensitive applications for x86 software The x86Īrchitecture has the Intel compiler suite on its side. But wait, doesn’t Apple call the Power Mac G5 the world’s fastest PC? Yes, and I think that characterisation was a big mistake from the beginning.
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