Geek Patrol

Zombie Social

Every time I see this ad for the Zune it freaks me out. The guy in the ad looks like a zombie. Just look at his eyes! Where did his pupils go?

Speaking of the Zune, it sounds like it’s not doing terribly well. I know people are saying that you can’t count Microsoft out based on the history of the Xbox, but at least the Xbox has compelling exclusive content; the Zune’s just a big, ugly, iPod.

Geekbench Platform Popularity

One of the great features of Geekbench is that it’s available for a number of different platforms and a number of different architectures. Lately I’ve been interested in how popular Geekbench is on each platform and architecture it supports, and the easiest way to do this is to look at download statistics and result browser statistics.

Download Statistics

According to Urchin Geekbench 2006 has been downloaded 18,488 times. Since Geekbench has separate downloads for each platform it supports, it’s easy to figure out how often Geekbench is downloaded for each platform.

I’ve always suspected that Geekbench is the most popular on Mac OS X (if for no other reason than Geek Patrol started out, and still is to a large degree, a Mac-oriented website). Geekbench is popular on Windows, too, but not as popular as I’d expect (or hope) given Windows market dominance compared to Mac OS X.

Geekbench popularity on Solaris and Linux PPC might seem low, but Geekbench for Solaris has only been available since October and Geekbench for Linux PPC has only been available since last week!

Result Browser Statistics

In addition to the download statistics provided by Urchin, there’s also all the results stored in Geekbench Result Browser; looking at how many results are submitted per platform is just a simple exercise in data mining.

While the result browser statistics are approximately the same (in terms of percentages, at least) as the download statistics, it is possible to differentiate between Mac OS X PPC and Mac OS X x86 with the result browser statistics (since Geekbench for Mac OS X is distributed as a Universal Binary but submits results under the architecture it runs on). It’s interesting that the number of Mac OS X PPC results are surprisingly close to the number of Mac OS X X86 results.

Final Thoughs

I’m not surprised by the relative ordering of Geekbench popularity by platform; I always suspected Geekbench was the most popular on Mac OS X, with Windows a close second. What I am surprised is the total number of times Geekbench has been downloaded; I’ve been working on Geekbench over the past two years in my spare time, and I never thought it would be this successful!

Geekbench 2006 for Linux PPC

Geekbench 2006 for Linux PPC is now available in both 32-bit and 64-bit flavours. Download it and give it a try! You should be able to run Geekbench on any Linux PPC system running Fedora Core 4 (or later); let me know if any particular chip or configuration causes trouble for you.

Hosting Issues

So, I upgraded Geek Patrol’s hosting plan yesterday. More disk space. More bandwidth. More awesome. While most things just worked after the upgrade (or required minor tweaks to work) it looks like the forum software (PunBB) won’t work on the new host thanks to some bugs in PHP.

Super.

For now the forums are offline. When they come back, I doubt I’ll be able to migrate existing users and post to the new forum software (whatever it’ll be, since I can’t use PunBB anymore). Crap.

On that note, does anyone have any recommendations for forum software?

PlayStation 3 Performance

Update: Check out the latest Playstation 3 benchmarks which use Geekbench 2 (the new hotness) instead of Geekbench 2006.

On Sunday I saw a clip of Fedora Core 5 for PPC running on the PlayStation 3 over at Kotaku; I’d completely forgotten that Sony was going to make it easy to boot other operating systems on the PlayStation 3!

On Monday I started receiving requests for Geekbench for Linux PPC so people could run it on the PlayStation 3. I managed to get a beta version out last night and while it’s not quite ready for public release yet, one beta tester sent in the results for his PlayStation 3 which I thought I’d share. To give the results some context, I’m going to compare the PlayStation 3 results against one of the first Power Mac G5s running at 1.6GHz.

Update: Geekbench 2006 for Linux PPC is available now, if you’re interested in benchmarking your PlayStation 3 (or PPC-based Linux box) yourself.

Setup

• Playstation 3

  • Cell Broadband Engine @ 3.2GHz
  • 256 MB RAM
  • Fedora Core 5
  • Geekbench 2006 (Build 243)

• Power Mac G5

  • PowerPC G5 @ 1.6GHz
  • 1280 MB RAM
  • Fedora Core 4
  • Geekbench 2006 (Build 243)

I’m reporting the baseline score, rather than the raw score, for each test (where 100 is the score a PowerMac G5 1.6GHz running Mac OS X would receive on the same test). As always, higher scores are better.

Results

Conclusion

There was a comment on Slashdot last year that made the following assertion about the Cell processor:

The problem is that though the main CPU is PowerPC-based like current Apple chips, it is stripped down, and the Altivec support will be much lower than in current G5s. Unoptomized, Apple code would run like a G4 on this hardware.

Turns out the comment was right; Cell processor performance is comparable to low-end PowerPC G5 performance (which in turn is comparable to high-end PowerPC G4 performance). I can’t comment on Altivec performance, unfortunately, since Geekbench for Linux PPC doesn’t measure Altivec performance yet.

Geekbench also isn’t able to exploit the eight vector processors on the Cell processor. Any program designed and optimized for the Cell processor should be a lot faster than one designed for a generic processor (like, say, Geekbench). So while the Geekbench results might seem disappointing, keep in mind that Geekbench can’t exercise the PlayStation 3 to its full potential.

Geekbench 2006 Updated (Build 242)

I’ve released a new build of Geekbench that includes a 64-bit build of Geekbench for Linux systems, as well as some minor bug fixes. You can read the release notes here, and download the latest version of Geekbench here.

PlayStation 3

I saw the lineup for the PlayStation 3 outside my local Future Shop yesterday. I was kind of surprised that a dozen people would already be lined up a good sixteen hours before the consoles went on sale (especially given how cold it was yesterday), but now that I’ve seen what a PlayStation 3 is going for on eBay, it makes a lot more sense. $5,500 for a game console? Madness!

Did anyone here brave the elements and camp out for a PlayStation 3 (or is planning on camping out for a Wii)?

MacBook Core 2 Duo Performance

Apple released updated MacBooks on Wednesday; among the improvements is an upgrade from the Core Duo processor to the Core 2 Duo processor. I thought I’d take a look at the performance of the new Core 2 Duo MacBooks with Geekbench.

Setup

Here’s the setup of the two test machines:

• MacBook (Late 2006)

  • Intel Core 2 Duo @ 2.0GHz
  • 1024 MB RAM
  • Mac OS X 10.4.8 (Build 8N1106)
  • Geekbench 2006 (Build 230)

• MacBook

  • Intel Core Duo @ 2.0GHz
  • 1024 MB RAM
  • Mac OS X 10.4.8 (Build 8L2127)
  • Geekbench 2006 (Build 230)

I’m reporting the baseline score, rather than the raw score, for each test (where 100 is the score a PowerMac G5 1.6GHz would receive on the same test). Oh, and for the baseline scores, higher is better. I’m also reporting the results for the 32-bit and 64-bit version of Geekbench for the Core 2 Duo since it’s capable of running both.

Conclusion

Apple’s claiming up to a 25% performance increase from moving the MacBook from the Core Duo to the Core 2 Duo, and for once, Apple’s claims don’t seem entirely unreasonable; overall performance went up by 18% with the switch to the Core 2 Duo at the same clockspeed, and I’m sure the increase would’ve been larger had we compared the Core Duo @ 1.83GHz against the Core 2 Duo @ 2.0GHz. MacBook 64-bit performance is impressive, too (over 28% faster overall than the Core Duo).

What’s also impressive is the Core 2 Duo MacBook is slightly faster than the Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro I tested a couple of weeks ago, especially when you consider the Core 2 Duo in the MacBook Pro is 160MHz faster. ZOMG!

Overall, when it comes to processor performance, the latest MacBook is an impressive laptop.