MacBidouille posts, what it claims to be, early benchmarks from PowerMac 970 machines.
The site has hinted that it has received such benchmarks, but has not published them until now. English translations are provided on their site. In brief, the site claims to have both early benchmarks as well as graphs depicting production machines running at single 1.4GHz, Dual 1.6GHz and Dual 1.8GHz.
The preliminary benchmarks reportedly reflect that the single 1.4GHz PPC 970 is anywhere from 87% to 254% faster than a current Dual 1.42GHz G4 machine depending on the specific test (Photoshop, Final Cut Pro, Alias|Wavefront Maya Render).
The second series of benchmarks (supposedly on production machines) shows different benchmarks (Cinema 4D-XL, Photoshop, Bryce 5) as comparison, which again shows significant (thought perhaps not as dramatic) improvements of the 1.4GHz 970 vs the Dual 1.4GHz G4s, and also graphs Dual 1.8GHz 970 machine perfromances.
- Looking closely to these results we understand why Apple didn't need to wait for a 64 bits OS to launch the PPC 970. We'll take advantage of a 50% gain of performance between he up-market Pro G4 and the first PPC 970. We can imagine the difference with the top level PPC 970. It will be the best evolution ever between two Mac generations.
Note: Several users note that Bryce (in its current form) does not support Multiprocessors.
Fake?:One reader notes that the graph times for the PPC G4 Dual 1.42 and Pentium IV 3GHz are identical to old benchmarks posted at Barefeats. Barefeats appears to use their own test suites rather than any standard suites, making these numbers appear suspicious.