Thermal calibration G5 ASD, new discovery

[bengi3]

I have just calibrated a G5 2.7 and a G5 2.0 after a 2.5 transplant.

ASD says tads out of range or other amenities, but once booted off OS X both macs are quite and everything works as it should.

In the past I kept running ASD and thermal calibrations over and over after reseating and swapping the processors. 
This time I rebooted forgetting to press the “c” key and discovered that thermal calibration, regardless ASD messages had gone through.

Indeed I tried to rerun thermal calibration but ASD said that processors were calibrated and there was no need to run it.

Hope this is useful.

 

[360alaska]

This is pretty typical, I'm just thankful it saves the new settings before it errors otherwise it would be really noisy. Many point the G5 as hot and inefficient but to be fair compared to the Pentium D it's really not that bad.

 

[CC_333]

@360alaska Agreed.  It's easy to criticize the G5 as a hot running, inefficient, power hungry beast of a CPU with relatively poor performance-per-watt when comparing it to anything remotely modern, but it's actually fairly competitive compared to most contemporary Intel CPUs (particularly earlier Netburst CPUs), which I think people tend to forget nowadays.  This was especially true in 2003 and early 2004, when the G5 was new.

However, they did age pretty badly, and by mid 2005 or so, Intel surpassed the G5 by quite a bit in terms of speed and efficiency.  By 2006, the writing was on the wall for the PPC architecture, and Intel was the clear winner (hence why Apple switched over).

c

 

[Unknown_K]

@360alaska Agreed.  It's easy to criticize the G5 as a hot running, inefficient, power hungry beast of a CPU with relatively poor performance-per-watt when comparing it to anything remotely modern, but it's actually fairly competitive compared to most contemporary Intel CPUs (particularly earlier Netburst CPUs), which I think people tend to forget nowadays.  This was especially true in 2003 and early 2004, when the G5 was new.

However, they did age pretty badly, and by mid 2005 or so, Intel surpassed the G5 by quite a bit in terms of speed and efficiency.  By 2006, the writing was on the wall for the PPC architecture, and Intel was the clear winner (hence why Apple switched over).

c

The core CPU didn't come out until July 2006 and AMD had the Athlon 64 which was dominating Intel Since 2004.

Power Mac G4 and G5 versus Pentium 4, Dual Xeon, and Dual Athlon (barefeats.com) shows some benchmarks between CPUs of the time including the G5. Not too bad for the G5 and pretty decent for A64.

Apples problem was that they were not buying enough G5's (since they could not be used on laptops) nor investing any money into their design to spur speed increases to keep up with Intels shift to core which murdered even AMD.

Intel sucks for speed vs efficiency at the moment but they still sell every CPU they can make. On a side note I would say that the smartest thing AMD did (besides ditching its foundry and using TSMC) was going with chiplets instead of the monolithic CPU that intel still uses. Because of the core wars making CPU dies much larger and Intel still using 14nm the amount of usable CPUs per wafer is way down causing a supply problem.

 

[Unknown_K]

And I should note that the G5 2Ghz MP was 100W which seems power hungry compared to a G3/G4 but not compared to a P4 or even something you would buy today.

 

[CC_333]

Ah, I didn't even consider AMD!

Yes, AMD was definitely also ahead of Intel.  However, per the linked benchmark, the G5 was definitely on top, with AMD slightly ahead in a couple areas; and only with the base G5 at that (the Pentium 4, of course, was consistently among the slowest despite having one of the highest clock speeds;  only the 3.06 GHz dual Xeon held its own, slightly beating the 2.5GHz MP G5 on the Cinebench 2003 benchmark).

That was only in 2004, though. 

c

 

[Unknown_K]

I never really cared for the P4 line much except for late era machines that would still run Windows 98/ME (single core retro gaming screamers). The G5 was an interesting blip for Apple machines and I have 4 towers and a few iMacs using that CPU. PPC in general should be very collectable down the road just like 68k Macs.