G5, Athlon Faster, But Not That Much?


Pitting G5, Athlon 64 and P4 systems against each other, an Associated Press article sees the potential of 64-bit chips, but also argues that their full potential is yet to be realized on currently-available desktop systems.

How does the P4 stand up against these 64-bit systems? Admirably, if these audio and video tests are anything to go by. A 2.8GHz Pentium beat out a 2.2GHz Athlon 64 when ripping audio to WMA format. Using the same CD, the DP 2GHz G5 using iTunes 4 was faster than the P4 by around 15 seconds when ripping to AAC format.

The Mac wasn't tested for video encoding, but the Athlon pulled ahead of the P4 by several minutes, although the AMD unit had a faster hard drive and twice the RAM of the Pentium.

Analysis: The bottom line is that Intel will have to come up with something serious once MS ships its 64-bit Win XP, and Apple release a 64-bit version of OS X. I would have liked to have seen how the G5 fared against the PC systems encoding MPEG in Cleaner though. However, the Wintelians will crow that they can still build a 2.8Ghz P4 white box cheaply, while the AMD/Apple units cost, typically, $3,000.