OT- Quad and or Octo Macs speed vs. old Dual G5s?

Curious as to how much faster the new breed of Intel Macs are at
things like exporting QTs off the timeline, and compressor compressing
things to mpegs for DVD Studio on the new boxes vs. the old.

Does anyone have any idea of the speed differences?
It has been my guess as a Dual G5 user that a new Octo Core would
likely be MUCH faster????

Any ideas?

Unfortunately, the currently shipping Mac Pros are not a good balance between cost and performance.

The previous generation was a lot faster than the last of the G5s. In real-world tests in my environment, a 2008 Mac Pro is more than twice as fast as a G5, processor for processor, when running Compressor jobs.

Trouble is, the currently shipping Mac Pros are considerably more expensive than the last generation, and they're not that much faster.

(It's really important to note that one of the tasks you named ? exporting Quicktimes from your Final Cut timeline ? is rarely CPU-bound anyway. If your timeline is fully rendered, or doesn't need rendering, exporting a just an I/O operation, and will go as fast as your disks allow. Rendering is handled partly by Final Cut Pro and partly by the Quicktime component that handles your timeline format, so how it performs on a multi-processor system will vary depending on what format you're working with. ProRes, for example, was specifically engineered to scale linearly up to eight processors, so ProRes rendering on an eight-processor system will be on the order of four times as fast as ProRes rendering on an otherwise identical two-processor system. But that's just one use case; other Quicktime components scale up differently.)

Very good points indeed!
Apple will have to be careful with their pricing as
Windows Boxes will be sporting in the near future
Octo-Intels, and 12x AMDs
(right now this is vaporware, but it is extremely likely)

My point is, Apple will have to be careful not to alienate its
loyal base with too high a price; otherwise people will be
going over to Premeire Pro on Windows.

(and I HATE vista)

Back on off-topic >: I did a test between my old Squeeze 4.1
and the built in Compressor 3.

I fed both a 38 minute SD DV clip to convert to mpeg for DVDSP.

Compressor 3 took 1 hour 5 mintues, whilst Squuese did it in 40.
As for settings they were identical 3.8Mps, etc....


...So, I am glad you told me that my G5 is still a valid mac and not a
museum piece!



Jeff Harrell Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Unfortunately, the currently shipping Mac Pros are
> not a good balance between cost and performance.
>
> The previous generation was a lot faster than the
> last of the G5s. In real-world tests in my
> environment, a 2008 Mac Pro is more than twice as
> fast as a G5, processor for processor, when
> running Compressor jobs.
>
> Trouble is, the currently shipping Mac Pros are
> considerably more expensive than the last
> generation, and they're not that much faster.
>
> (It's really important to note that one of the
> tasks you named ? exporting Quicktimes from your
> Final Cut timeline ? is rarely CPU-bound anyway.
> If your timeline is fully rendered, or doesn't
> need rendering, exporting a just an I/O operation,
> and will go as fast as your disks allow. Rendering
> is handled partly by Final Cut Pro and partly by
> the Quicktime component that handles your timeline
> format, so how it performs on a multi-processor
> system will vary depending on what format you're
> working with. ProRes, for example, was
> specifically engineered to scale linearly up to
> eight processors, so ProRes rendering on an
> eight-processor system will be on the order of
> four times as fast as ProRes rendering on an
> otherwise identical two-processor system. But
> that's just one use case; other Quicktime
> components scale up differently.)

Sorry, but you missed my point: your G5 is a museum piece. It's not an apples-to-apples comparison, but Compressor on my system just took a half-hour SD show down to MPEG-2 in five and a half minutes.

All I was saying is that if you're ready to upgrade, look for a refurbished 2008-model Mac Pro, instead of shelling out for a brand new one. You'll get comparable performance for a lot less capital investment.

>I did a test between my old Squeeze 4.1
>and the built in Compressor 3.

Not sure if you ran Qmaster. If you're on a dual G5, you can enable 2 instances, which I think should be comparable to Squeeze.

>Compressor 3 took 1 hour 5 mintues, whilst Squuese did it in 40.

1 hour and 5 minutes sound long if you're going for speed. You should be able to hit under 30 minutes off a dual 2.0 Ghz G5 even with 2 GB of RAM, or maybe less if you use a constant bit rate. But that's going for speed.

But the Mac Pros are much MUCH faster. It's like strapping on a jet pack.



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