Apple's Mac Pro - A True PowerMac Successor
by Anand Lal Shimpi on August 16, 2006 12:27 PM EST- Posted in
- Mac
Power Consumption
According to Apple, the biggest reason for its switch to Intel processors was the chipmaker's future roadmap and its promise for lower power consumption and better performance per watt.
We've already seen how much smaller the Xeon heatsinks are in the Mac Pro compared to the older G5 units, and we've talked about how much quieter the Mac Pro is than its predecessor, but what about power consumption at the wall?
At idle, the Mac Pro with four cores uses no more power than the dual processor PowerMac G5. Of course at idle, each core's cache is being powered down, the CPU is being underclocked, and all of Intel's famed power management is hard at work.
Under load, running the multithreaded CineBench test, the Mac Pro consumes significantly less power than the PowerMac G5 even when running with all four cores enabled.
And just to save you from doing the math, here's a graph of performance per watt when running the same CineBench test:
At 65nm, the Xeons in the Mac Pro are obviously more efficient than the 90nm PowerPC G5, but the performance per watt these new parts offer is tremendous.
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plinden - Saturday, August 19, 2006 - link
No point in arguing with this guy - he's shown just how much he knows about the subject. How could someone regularly read AnandTech and not know about EFI? And then profess to have confused it with some obscure mobo manufacturer?Oddly enough, I can't find any motherboards for sale manufactured by a company called EFI - either it's very obscure or he's making it up. I wonder which one it is?
michael2k - Friday, August 18, 2006 - link
EFI isn't a manufacturer, it stands for "Extensible Firmware Interface", see the link in the other post.Lian Li had an aluminum case first, but Apple's design was COPIED by Lian Li. Read the Anandtech article in which half the comments for the case review claim "G5 ripoff".
plinden - Friday, August 18, 2006 - link
I laughed out loud at this. You're absolutely right, EFI is no DFI or ASUS, not even close.
You've just proved you know fuck all about this. I suggest you read up on EFI (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensible_Firmware_I...">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensible_Firmware_I... before posting about this in the future.
I'm not going to tell you makes the Mac motherboards. I'll leave that up to you to research.
Petoschka - Wednesday, April 1, 2020 - link
Well, my Junk Pro from early 2008 is still running.pervisanathema - Wednesday, August 16, 2006 - link
I want one. :otakeshi7 - Tuesday, January 7, 2014 - link
Just a small correction on page 2: The Power Mac G5 PCI-E also has 3 USB 2.0 ports on the rear panel.