February Mac BYTE Benchmarks
BYTE Senior Tech Editor at Large
According to preliminary BYTE low-level benchmarks, the new Macs introduced 10-Feb-93 are performance winners. Internally, they indicate interesting directions that Apple is taking. I’ll avoid some technical details, since you’ve probably read numerous articles on these machines already.
The Color Classic’s 16 MHz 68030, 10 MB RAM ceiling, and built-in 512- by 384-pixel display sounds suspiciously like the feature set of the Mac LC II. This happens to be the case: according to developer notes, the Color Classic places most of the LC II’s components into a compact Mac chassis. The low-level benchmarks confirm this: the Color Classic’s performance is virtually identical to a Mac LC II. The exception is that, unlike the Mac LC II, the Color Classic can have a 68882 FPU installed.
The Mac LC III posts nearly the same performance as a Mac IIci. Note that the system we tested lacked an FPU. This is decent amount of horsepower to pack into the LC’s small frame, and it should continue as one of the top sellers in Apple’s product line. I’ve talked to several LC/LC II owners who plan to purchase the LC III upgrade when they can.
Now we get into interesting territory. Compare the test results of the Centris 610 to that of the Mac IIfx. As you can see, the 20 MHz 68040-based Centris 610 easily outguns the 40 MHz, 68030-based Mac IIfx. The floating point performance is very good, especially since the Centris 610 I tested had an FPU-less 68LC040 processor. (However, the IIfx lacked the boost of Omega SANE in its floating-point calculations.) This computer is definitely the answer to the "I can buy a killer 486 system for around two grand" argument.
The 25 MHz Centris 650 just edges ahead of the 25 MHz Quadra 700. Several design changes help. First, Apple finally cleaned up the memory sub-system, making it more efficient. They did this using an interleaved memory design in which data occupies adjacent memory banks, and on memory reads the hardware steps through these banks rapidly. The result is that burst reads eliminate two clock cycles on each initial address setup and for each successive read. Apple claims a 10 to 15 percent performance boost with interleaved memory, and on the average, that’s what the BYTE CPU benchmarks saw (about 13 percent between the Centris 650 and the Quadra 700). Also, the I/O bus on the Quadra 700/900/950 has gone away: it’s been folded into a custom ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuit) called the IOSB. The IOSB is clocked at CPU speeds, so on the Quadra 800 most I/O functions operate at 33 MHz. (An exception is Ethernet, since these transceivers are clocked at 16 MHz.) Finally, the engineers eliminated one wait state from the built-in video’s VRAM frame buffer, speeding that subsystem up. The result is Quadra performance in a IIvx frame.
The Quadra 800 has all the design advantages of the Centris 650. Its performance is a tad faster than the Quadra 950’s. The smaller mini-tower form factor allows you to park it under the desk or on a desktop.
The PowerBook 165c is nearly equal to the PowerBook 180 in performance. However, the display performance is much slower. The reason is that while earlier PowerBooks used dual-ported VRAM for display frame buffers, the PowerBook 165c uses DRAM. The display speed slows when the display controller and CPU contend for access to this DRAM. Note that the PowerBook 165c QuickDraw test, which uses QuickDraw heavily, ran nearly as fast as the PowerBook 180. Since most Mac applications make heavy use of QuickDraw, the PowerBook 165c’s screen drawing shouldn’t appear as slow as the tests indicate. For example, BYTE’s Slow test algorithmically fills successive circles using a seed fill, rather than a QuickDraw region fill, so the effects of DRAM on the video subsystem are emphasized. If you think a PowerBook 165c is part of your future, check out the display quality and speed before buying.
This latest crop of Macs also indicates interesting design trends. First, many of the Macs provide (typically with a VRAM upgrade) 16-bit video. The PowerBook 165c is the exception. I call these Macs "video-ready," in that to adequately represent a frame-grabbed image or QuickTime movie made from an NTSC signal, a Mac must have a 16-bit display. In this sense Apple is incorporating multimedia support across its desktop product line. Also, with the phasing out of the 68000-based Classic, a grand unification of Mac application software can begin. Until now, a developer had to contend with supporting both old QuickDraw (the 68000-based version, which knows nothing of color) and the current 68020/68030-based QuickDraw, which knows of color, GWorlds, and pixels of various sizes. Now the Color Classic uses the same "universal code" found in all Mac ROMs since the IIci up to the Quadras. This universal code consists of 68030-based object code that implements 32-bit QuickDraw and some virtual memory mechanisms.
Certainly there are still millions of 68000-based Macs to support, but over time we can expect the developer’s life to get easier because of this unified environment. Furthermore, at some point developers can compile applications exclusively to 68030 code, producing faster applications.
Last but not least, if anything moves Macs, it’s the computer stores eliminating old inventory. I heard of amazing fire-sale prices on the Mac IIci ($1500 for the Mac, keyboard, and monitor) and the IIsi.
BYTE Low-level Macintosh v2.0 benchmark results (preliminary)
(all figures in seconds, other than the Indexes):
Table 1
Clr Classic LC II LC III IIci C610
CPU
Matrix 18.7 18.6 10.5 10.2 4.3
8-bit move 94.1 94 51.6 49.1 29.8
16-bit move 53.9 53.8 27 24.6 16.6
32-bit move 40.6 40.5 14.7 12.3 10.3
Sieve 9 9 5.2 5.1 2.7
Sort 11.4 11.4 6.2 5.8 2.5
FPU
Math 60.2 186.9 105.6 70 37.9
Sin(x) 17.8 95.6 54 34 19.7
e^x 18.1 102.9 58.3 45.8 20.9
Video
TextEdit 3.4 3.6 1.9 1.8 1
DrawString 1.7 1.8 1 1.1 0.5
Slow Graphics 27.6 27.1 14.3 10 4.4
QuickDraw 0.3 0.4 0.2 0.2 0.1
Indexes
CPU Index 1.04 1.04 2.03 2.18 3.86
FPU Index 4.72 1.04 1.83 2.66 5.07
Disk Index 1.24 1.01 1.48 1.06 2.12
Video Index 1.08 1.03 1.95 2.17 4.37
Dhrystone 2000 2083 5000 5555 16666
Table 2
IIfx C650 Q700 PB180 PB165c Q950 Q800
CPU
Matrix 6.1 3.5 3.5 8.2 8.9 2.6 2.6
8-bit move 32.5 22.8 25.7 39.6 40.3 19.3 17.9
16-bit move 16.7 12.6 15.5 21 21.9 11.7 10.2
32-bit move 8.8 7.5 10.6 11.7 12.5 8.1 6.5
Sieve 3.2 2.2 2.3 4.1 4.3 1.7 1.6
Sort 3.7 2 2 4.9 5.2 1.5 1.5
FPU
Math 45.8 6.1 6.1 25.7 27.4 4.6 4.6
Sin(x) 21.8 2.8 2.7 8 8.4 2.1 2.1
e^x 29.5 2.8 6 8.2 8.6 4.7 2.1
Video
TextEdit 1.7 0.8 1.3 2 14.3 0.8 0.7
DrawString 1.2 0.4 0.8 1.2 13.2 0.4 0.3
Slow Graphics 6.2 3.6 3.7 12 21.2 3.6 2.8
QuickDraw 0.1 0.1 0.1 0.2 0.2 0.1 0.1
Indexes
CPU Index 3.36 4.98 4.4 2.6 2.47 5.85 6.36
FPU Index 4.1 35.25 27.52 10.68 10.07 35.8 46.71
Disk Index 1.77 3.1 1.83 1.72 1.51 3.35 3.12
Video Index 2.68 5.29 3.93 2 0.52 5.89 7.02
Dhrystone 10000 16666 16666 5555 5000 25000 25000
Notes:
Mac Classic II has an index = 1.
Mac IIsi equipped with FPU and Apple video board.
Mac IIci equipped with Apple cache board and used Thunder/24
display board without acceleration.
All systems ran System 7.1 with AppleTalk off and
extensions disabled.
Mac LC III lacked FPU.
Centris 610 lacked FPU.
Color Classic equipped with FPU.
Disk tests removed for brevity.