Mac (Under) the Knife: Interesting Lit and Other Bits

This blog post references my cover story, 'Mac (Under) the Knife: Piecing Together the PowerPC Puzzle' in the September 15, 2005 edition of EDN.

Here, you'll find links to files and websites related to the topics discussed in this hands-on benchmarking project, aside from the links already found in the article and in other 'Mac (Under) the Knife' blog posts, all of which I also encourage you to peruse. This'll be a 'living' (i.e. regularly updated) blog entry, which'll likely blossom into a multi-part series over time, so I encourage you to regularly revisit it. In particular, over the next week or so I'll be weeding through and culling the multi-month archive of electronic and print tidbits that I've accumulated, so you should expect a relatively large number of updates to this blog entry through the remainder of this month (September).

Tonight, I have several goodies for you. First off, here's a link to a ZIP archive (1.3 MBytes) of all the SPECINT report files. Make sure, when you extract files from it, that you preserve the directory (or, for those of you too young to remember DOS, 'folder') hierarchy. In Windows using WinZip, for example, you'll want to enable the 'use folder names' option. You'll see that there are empty placeholder directories for not-yet-obtained SPECFP results. Disregard the system information text at the top of each report, along with the hardware details and flag notes at the bottom of each report. They're not valid, simply because I didn't customize the descriptive text in the configuration file used for each benchmark run. Trust me, each report correctly matches the referenced hardware configuration; I'm quite anal retentive about such things!

Secondly, here's a link to a ZIP archive (140 KBytes) of all the Xbench report files. Again make sure, when you extract files from it, that you preserve the directory hierarchy. And again, you'll see that there are empty placeholder directories for not-yet-obtained 7200 RPM HDD results on the Mac mini, due to lack of product availability.

Finally, here's a link to the Excel spreadsheet that formed the basis for the article's Table 2 SPECINT results, and here's a link to the Excel spreadsheet foundation for Table 3, the Xbench results. Slice-and-dice the data to your heart's content! And please, no whining about 'proprietary Microsoft formats'….just use OpenOffice if you don't want to give your bills to Bill, ok?

G'night…….

Continued with 'Mac (Under) the Knife: More Interesting Lit and Other Bits'….