Enjoy! :)

https://youtu.be/fl0e6PF5y5g

Gawd - that's one keen Aussie dumpster diver. But quite a large number of views for such a video...

Is there really so much of a performance gap between those G5 computers and a new iPad?

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I don't believe the claims that today's iPad's and iPhones have more processing power than those old G5 PowerMac's. But I am biased against all tablet computing devices, so my opinion is not very objective.

Maybe the "top-of-the-line" brand new iPad comes close to, or exceeds the processing power of a 2.0GHz G5, but I would need to see direct comparisons of benchmark tests before I would believe such claims. I do believe that the G5's are very inefficient due to power consumption and heat production, but they appear to me to have sufficient processing power to do many computing tasks quite well. Of course they can't compete with modern Intel, or AMD CPU's, but like one person who commented on that video, the G5, or dual G5 PowerMac towers are still very good at audio processing, effects and editing.

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It depends on which PowerMac G5 model you use as a reference. If you compare a a quad-core PowerMac G5 to a triple-core iPad Air 2, the G5 could be a bit faster (depending on the application, as usual).

Generally, the performance appears to be similar on a per-core basis (with a lead for the A8 / A8X), which is impressive given the size difference between an iPad Air 2 is and a PowerMac G5.

Of course, another way to look at it is this: A years-old PowerMac G5 offers performance that is similar to a state-of-the-art 500+ USD portable computing device, which is selling millions of units, and can be bought for a fraction of the cost or even got entirely for free.

Unlike the creator of the video, I think today´s iPhones and iPads do actually prove how much you can accomplish with PowerMac G5-level performance in 2015 as long as you run software that has been optimized for the target hardware. MorphOS users should be able to appreciate that

> I don't believe the claims that today's iPad's and iPhones have more processing power
> than those old G5 PowerMac's. [...] Maybe the "top-of-the-line" brand new iPad comes
> close to, or exceeds the processing power of a 2.0GHz G5, but I would need to see
> direct comparisons of benchmark tests before I would believe such claims.

About a year ago, the per-core SPECint2000 result of the 1.4 GHz iPhone 6 was found to be only 6% short of that of the 2.5 GHz PowerMac G5:

https://morph.zone/modules/newbb_plus/viewtopic.php?forum=3&topic_id=7675&start=625

MorphOS is really missing the opportunity to become the "greenest" OS. With it's high optimization is could run on low power ARM devces with very good performance.
But no, G5, port to X86/amd64.... totally missing the potential.

@ Intuition

I did not follow all fo this video. The message is "I found 3 G5 in a dustbin and show them in a video"?


@ ASiegel

It is impressive to see that a small portable device like the iPad can eliminate a 10 years old workstation. No more need for these huge boxes. Only we have no access to them through MOS.
The G5 computer today might be "free" or almost free first but the energy costs eat this all up. After running your G5 for 2 years you wasted so much energy that from the paid money you could have bought a new iPad or whatever else.


@ SoundSquare

If you look at the power consumption that MOS has on the G5 then you see that it is far from being green at all. Fans cannot be adjusted, CPU can not be cycled down, you only can disable one core in the Firmware which is not an achievement of MOS. It will take much more effort to make MOS green. And don't forget stability which is missing in MOS completely as we have no memory protection and all that stuff. So even if you could get green crashes you would get as many crashes as now.
And the thing is: an optimization for e.g. Altivec does not help you at all if you switch to ARM. But many optimisations in MOS rely on Altivec.

Disabling one CPU in a PM G5 disables it only Software wise. Power consumption is the same.

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It depends on the use case. If you run a PowerMac G5 for an hour or two every day on average, which is not that uncommon for home / hobby use, the added energy costs over the course of 2 years surely would not be enough to buy a brand new iPad.

> you only can disable one core in the Firmware

Does this really work for anything else than MacOSX?

https://morph.zone/modules/newbb_plus/viewtopic.php?topic_id=9353&forum=11&start=17

> an optimization for e.g. Altivec does not help you at all if you switch to ARM.

The actual code won't help, correct, but AltiVec code could be rewritten into NEON code as a big part of the hard work (identifying vectorizable algorithms, convert scalar code into SIMD code, loop unrolling etc.) has already been done.

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still MorphOS runs pretty decently on Efika, considering the poor hardware (most issues on Efika are due to the very small amount or RAM on the board). Altivec doesn't do all.