I feel comfortable enough with the benches to have decided to replace my G5s with a P5040 based X5000 (when available).
Enough that I have parted out my 2.7 GHz system.
I retained a 2.5 GHz quad core PCIe G5 for benchmark comparisons.
But even that will be closely matched by the previously mentioned X5000 while drawing a fraction of the power.

These WILL be good (if albiet expensive) systems to run MorphOS on.

Is it just me or does the benchmark differences not look all that impressive? It's faster yes, but for the most part not all that much.

> It's faster yes

...for (non-SIMD) integer operations. For floating point and memory speed, it seems to be the other way round.

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If it wasn't that expensive it could make a nice G5 replacement system. Same speed league as the G5, but low energy uptake and new board (no leaky cooling, no dust, fresh caps, etc.). But for that price...

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Looking at it through 2016-glasses, I'd say it's about on par with all other PPC stuff from more than a decade ago. Who cares what is slightly faster or slower in one or another area of mesurement, when the situation in total is so off the charts behind? The rest of the world moved several dimensions ahead since these performance levels were relevant in desktop computing.


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Hm yeah, and SIMD, floating point and memory are kind of essential for many day to day things, like codex encoding/decoding and other "multimedia" situations, not to mention rendering, image processing, etc.

Can the X5000 (single core) decode and display 1080p x.264 streams in CPU/SW?


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But *it is* that expensive! So the "if only" kind of falls flat...

> Who cares what is slightly faster or slower in one or another area of mesurement [...]?

Some people who raised their voice in this thread certainly do.

>> If it wasn't that expensive [...]. But for that price...

> But *it is* that expensive!

That's exactly what Zylesea said.

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Looking through your 2016-glasses, you should have seen that this is irrelevant today. Can any phone, tablet or low end X64 system decode video without the task being handled by dedicated hardware?

Both OS4 and MorphOS run on systems that give access to dedicated video decoding hardware and should be moving in that direction too, regardless of how important raw CPU speed may or may not be.

[ Edited by rob 30.10.2016 - 17:49 ]

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Yeah, it was kind of rhetorical, didn't really ask for names.

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I know, that was kind of meant as rhetorical as well...

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I believe so, yes.

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I remember HW addons for the A1200 that made it possible to play mp3's. While that is cool, it doesn't mean the A1200 was particular powerful or even suitable in a modern multimedia context.

I wasn't necessarily talking about video decoding either, but about the fact that the X5000 comes as a price tag of a premium 2016 workstation, but despite that we will probably see upcoming discussions saying "...but browsing those complex web 2.0 websites should become faster once JS JIT is properly implemented".

PPC's in the shape of used Mac HW is easy to "forgive". Like: "OK, it's not very powerful, but hey, at €100 it's still cool and fun for what it is". The X5000 will perform about the same as those 2005 Mac's (or slightly less) we use for MorphOS, but with a price tag resembling 2016 Mac Pro's.

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Of course the hardware you mentioned could do that, it doesn't because that would unnecessarily waste cpu power.
Our own hardware could assist in decoding as well, but no one has tackled that task yet.
And our more powerful systems can decode video pretty well on cpu power alone.

Can the X5000 decode 1080p video?
I guess we will have to see.
A G5 can, so it seems likely.
GPU assisted decoding would definitely help though.

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The customers who will buy it just want to run OS4, MorphOS or both. All they want is a machine that runs those OSs and their applications well. It is powerful enough to run both sufficiently well and for some that's the only qualifier they need.

All production runs of SAM440, SAM460 and the X1000 sold out despite the high price. Clearly the price to performance ratio is not as important to some as it is to you when it comes to indulging their Amiga hobby.

I'm actually slightly surprised that the X5000 beats a 2.3GHz G5 in most nbench tests, because I remember the opposite being true when testing the X5000 against my 2GHz G5. However, I just reran the tests and indeed the X5000 wins against my 2GHz G5 in most tests, and that's despite my X5000 only using single channel memory.

However, you need to remember that the CPU core used in the X5000 is basically a G3. A highly clocked G3 with 2 cores, but still a G3. You shouldn't expect miracles from it.

How big is the loss of Altivec on this Cyrus board from the perspective of a MorphOS user?

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And a PPC mac would qualify just fine for this. It has worked very well for MorphOS. The X5000 offers nothing new when it comes to performance. Sure, it will be available as new (but also meaning that it's untried and unproven), it doesn't need as much cooling as a G5, and you could plug in newer gfx cards (for whatever good that may be). So at the same 2005 level performance, are those differences *really* worth 10x-20x the cost? And where are the laptops? And the minis? Or maybe the right question is: Where is the x86?

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The OS4 machine models that has been produced are each counted in the hundreds, tops. Made in sporadic batches, over almost one and a half decade. Most of the time there hasn't been anything available at all, and when it has, it has either been out of financial reach for most, or so underperforming it's hardly usable. Now there are hardly any people left. I wouldn't call this a particularly successful strategy.

> it was kind of rhetorical

I know. I just answered your insinuation that there were no such people.

> didn't really ask for names.

I didn't give any as you know them anyway.

> that was kind of meant as rhetorical as well...

Regurgitating while purpurting to object is a rhetorical figure you just made up on the spot :-)

>"you could plug in newer gfx cards"

Is it worth it?
To me it is, particularly if this means I can uses something better than an X800XT.
I was using R400 cards in my G4 before we even had G5 support and they are more than a little dated.
And the power use of a G5 PowerMac is obscene.

Once I switch to an X5000, I intend to keep a G4 for an AGP system, and my laptop.
That's it, no more new systems until we support X64.

So this will be my last PPC purchase.
I might as well make it the best I can get.

> the X5000 beats a 2.3GHz G5 in most nbench tests

With the nbench tests I conducted, the X5000 wins in only 40% of tests.

> I just reran the tests and indeed the X5000 wins against my 2GHz G5 in most tests

Yes, with the G5 at 2.0 GHz instead of 2.3 GHz, the result should flip over to the X5000 winning in 60% of tests.

> the CPU core used in the X5000 is basically a G3. A highly clocked G3 with 2 cores,
> but still a G3.

Can you elaborate on this classification of the e5500 core? The e500 (Book E / Book3E / Book III-E), which established the lineage the e5500 belongs to, has not been derived from the G3/PPC7xx. The series of ISAs and microarchitectures from e500 to e6500 doesn't fit in Apple's over-simplistic "Gx" scheme.
If e5500 is a G3, then what is e6500? Is e6500 a G4 (AltiVec) or a G5 (AltiVec and 64-bit)? And what is the PA6T? If PA6T is a G5 (AltiVec and 64-bit), does that mean A-Eon's AmigaOne X series has been downgraded from a G5 to a G3?

> you could plug in newer gfx cards (for whatever good that may be)

Availability :-)

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Very true.
Obtaining Apple X800XTs has gotten harder since we adopted them, and they have become more expensive.
We could use newer cards in PCIe G5s (if adopted), but firmware prompts would no longer be available.

The whole system will just simplify upgrading.

And yes, I don't think lumping the e5500 core in with the G3 is fair to it either, its a significantly better core than anything ever used in a G3 level processor. Much closer to a G4, and with some improvements over the e600 core.

On the subject of benchmarks. Sysmon now include socres for an X5000 + R7 250X in the benchmarks section.

Scores for Ragemen.

Sysmon1.jpg


The CPU speed of the X5000 is nearly are third faster.

The X5000 has faster caches, especially L2 but gets oblitrated by the X1000 when it comes reading and writing to memory, apart frrom the "tricky write", whatever that actually means.

Reading from VRAM is over 3 times faster on the X1000 but when writing the X5000 is over 3 times faster. I understand that faster writes to VRAM are what matters and when Amigakit posted the Cow3D results the X5000 put everythiing else to shame.

Scores for SDL Bench.

Sysmon2.jpg

My X1000 has an R9 280 vs the R7 250X in the reference X5000 setup.

X5000 wins in most tests althought the X1000 streaks ahead in the hardware rectfil test at 320X240. Not sure why this is.

> Scores for Ragemen.
> Sysmon1.jpg

RAGEMEM (sans MIPS and VIDEO BUS tests) comparison between my 2.3 GHz PowerMac G5 (=1.00), the X1000 (first column) and the X5000 (second column):

L1
0.59 | 0.65 : READ32
0.84 | 0.93 : READ64
0.78 | 0.87 : WRITE32
0.78 | 0.87 : WRITE64
L2
0.30 | 0.39 : READ32
0.35 | 0.53 : READ64
0.30 | 0.60 : WRITE32
0.24 | 0.53 : WRITE64
RAM
1.04 | 0.27 : READ32
1.42 | 0.48 : READ64
1.97 | 1.12 (0.72*) : WRITE32
2.26 | 1.03 (0.66*) : WRITE64
0.91 | 6.09 : WRITE (Tricky)

*Edit: a more recent report on X5000 RAGEMEM results gives way lower score (about one third less) for RAM WRITE32 and RAM WRITE64, decreasing the relative scores from 1.12 to 0.72 and from 1.03 to 0.66.

> The CPU speed of the X5000 is nearly are third faster.

"Benchmarking MIPS is NEVER relevant. From a benchmark to another, the loop used is not the same, giving different results."
http://os4depot.net/index.php?function=showfile&file=utility/benchmark/ragemem.lha

[ Edited by Andreas_Wolf 26.12.2017 - 12:32 ]

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How do you run Ragemem on PowerMac? Through OS4emu?

> How do you run Ragemem on PowerMac? Through OS4emu?

Yes, like I did with my Mac mini 6 years ago :-)

Results for PowerMac DP 2,7 GHz:

---> L1 <---
READ32: 13843 MB/Sec
READ64: 19109 MB/Sec
WRITE32: 10274 MB/Sec
WRITE64: 20476 MB/Sec
---> L2 <---
READ32: 12895 MB/Sec
READ64: 17083 MB/Sec
WRITE32: 9872 MB/Sec
WRITE64: 19651 MB/Sec
---> RAM <---
READ32: 3030 MB/Sec
READ64: 3059 MB/Sec
WRITE32: 1468 MB/Sec
WRITE64: 1580 MB/Sec
WRITE: 432 MB/Sec (Tricky)

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Those figures would probably be better on a DDR2 equipped Quad 2.5 GHz PowerMac, but we don't support those.
And I'm not sure we should.
It would discourage people from buying X5000 systems.