G4 vs G5
========

Yesterday I was  able to compile my  FEA [1] software [2]  on a PowerPC
Mac, finally. Even  with some graphics output (it's just  a simple GLUT
window, nothing  fancy). It  was on  my PowerBook  G4 (1.67GHz  CPU, OS
10.5). Today I repeated the same  on my (first generation) iMac G5 (1.8
GHz CPU, OS 10.4).

I read  a lot of articles  about G4 vs  G5. Some people claim  that the
latest G4s  (my G4 it  the latest and fastest  one) are faster  than G5
(and my G5 CPU is one of the  oldest) but some claim that G5 is a newer
generation CPU and it is obviously faster.

So I have  decided to test it  on a real-world problem.  On some simple
structural  analysis with  use  of  finite element  method.  I ran  the
solution three times  and recorded an average from the  last two (there
was 1s difference between them in both cases).


I got these results:

* G4 (1.67 GHz): 148 seconds
* G5 (1.80 GHz): 98 seconds

Even if we consider the difference of frequencies (the G5 has 8% higher
frequency than the  G4) the G5 is clearly faster  (1.5-times faster, it
I'm not mistaken).  And the G5 computer has traditional  HDD but the G4
one has a SSD. Thus for me the G5 is a clear winner.


References:

[1] gopher://gopherpedia.com/0/Finite%20element%20method
[2] https://github.com/jurabr/ufem