Specifications

Performance Overview

Apple’s Xserve G5 is designed to deliver phenomenal performance with industry-

leading ease of use. Thanks to 64-bit processing power, server-optimized I/O, and a

high-throughput storage architecture, Xserve G5 is optimized for demanding server

and cluster operations. To assess its performance, Apple compared preproduction

Xserve G5 units with several currently available 1U servers.

Processor Performance

Featuring a dual-pipeline Velocity Engine and two double-precision floating-point

units on each 64-bit PowerPC G5 processor, Xserve G5 can manage complex calcula-

tions crucial to users in image processing, media encoding, and scientific computing

environments. In fact, the Velocity Engine on dual processor Xserve G5 systems can

execute over 35 billion single-precision floating-point operations per second, or

35 gigaflops per U.

To demonstrate this superior processor performance, Apple tested Xserve G5 using

popular benchmarks in the scientific computing community. The following results

are based on benchmark testing performed in January 2005 by Apple in a laboratory

setting using publicly available software. The server configurations outlined below

were tested:

• Apple Xserve G5. Dual 2.3GHz PowerPC G5, 4GB of PC3200 SDRAM, three 80GB Apple

Drive Modules, dual Gigabit Ethernet, and Mac OS X Server v10.3.7.

• Dell PowerEdge 1850. Dual 3.4GHz Xeon, 4GB of PC3200 SDRAM, two 74GB Ultra320

SCSI drives, dual Gigabit Ethernet, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3, update 3 ES x86.

• IBM eServer x325. Dual Opteron 250 (2.4GHz), 4GB of PC2700 SDRAM, two 74GB

Ultra320 SCSI drives, dual Gigabit Ethernet, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3, update

3 ES (AMD 64-bit version).

For each system, Apple installed the operating system on one drive and used the

other drive or drives to create a data volume. On the Xserve G5, the two remaining

drives were configured as a single volume using RAID 0; the other systems used the

single remaining drive for the data volume. The Xeon- and Opteron-based systems

used 15,000-rpm drives.

Technology Overview

Xserve G5