Regarding Jared Strong’s July 3 column “Ignorance is bliss for Apple computer users,” I’d really like to know who is spreading more fallacies — Apple Computer, or Mr. Strong himself? Once I read his statement about Microsoft “tossing a life preserver in the form of boatloads of cash,” I knew he hadn’t done his research. If he’s referring to the $150 million payment from Microsoft to Apple in 1997, this was made to settle patent disputes and to form a business alliance.

Apple agreed to promote Internet Explorer in its operating system, and Microsoft agreed to produce Microsoft Office for the Macintosh for the next 5 years. A simple Google search would have produced all this information for Mr. Strong.

The benchmarks Mr. Strong are referring to come from a report published by Veritest two weeks ago. The reason the numbers for the Dell computers in the Veritest report are lower than those provided on the SPEC Web site is quite simple. The numbers on the SPEC Web site were submitted by Dell and obtained using Intel’s icc compiler.

Being a closed-source design and written directly by the chip manufacturer, how can we know what tweaks lie inside of it to explicitly recognize benchmarking code?

Veritest used the open source gcc compiler for their benchmarks. This is the default compiler that ships with Red Hat (yes, the benchmark scores were higher under Red Hat than Windows) and while it does not produce as good of code as Intel’s compiler, it does a fairly good job.

I must ask why would it not be fair to use the same compiler on both the G5 and the P4/Xeon processor? That is the purpose of a benchmark, isn’t it?

If Mr. Strong read the report, he would find that Veritest used nearly identical configurations for both the Dell Xeon and P4 systems, and the Apple G5 system. Both compilers had flags turned on to use a special fast malloc library and to enable specific instruction tuning.

In summary, I would say this report is about the most fair comparison you can do between two inherently different computers.

Sam Miller

Senior

Computer Engineering