And the 2.0 GHz Core 2 Duo Mac mini introduced in 2007 scores 2767 – almost 8% more powerful than the Core Duo at the same clock speed. Mac mini has a higher Geekbench score than any G5 except for the Late 2005 Quad, while the 1.66 GHz Mac mini has a level of performance that falls between a dual processor 2.0 GHz and 2.3 GHz G5. Here are some results:Īnd here’s how it compares to early Intel Macs released in 1986: Modern benchmarking software such as Geekbench 3 no longer supports PowerPC systems, but Geekbench 2 did. With only the Power Mac and iMac ever available with G5 CPUs, and with the iMac not supporting enough memory to justify using 64-bit operation, the software industry pretty much ignored 64-bit PowerPC support. Researching online, here’s the list I’ve come up with:Īll of these came with OS X 10.5 Leopard. None of this means much unless you have software designed to take advantage of the 64-bitness of the G5 CPU – and there wasn’t much. Unfortunately, the kernel itself remained 32-bit to maintain compatibility with existing drivers. And best of all, the 32-bitness and 64-bitness were intermingled into a single operating system – and on top of that, Leopard was the only version of Mac OS X to support both PowerPC and Intel architecture from the same install disc, and both platforms could boot from a hard drive formatted using Apple Partition Map (APM) instead of GUID, which only supports Intel Macs. With Tiger, 64-bit apps couldn’t access the GUI at all. In its review of Leopard, Ars Technica says, “The PowerPC instruction set was designed with a 64-bit implementation in mind” but 64-bit was a much more significant thing for Intel’s x86 architecture.įor the first time, the Mac OS had a full 64-bit GUI (Graphical User Interface). It was OS X 10.5 Leopard that took the PowerPC 970 (G5) as far as Apple ever would into the world of 64 bits – and the real beginnings of 64-bit support for Intel Core 2 Duo processors.
On a G5 Mac, any application could use 64-bit address space, thus accessing more than 4 GB of RAM.
It wasn’t until OS X 10.4 Tiger arrived in April 2005 that those 64-bit G5 Macs gained a bit of real 64-bit support. OS X 10.3 Panther, released in October 2003, didn’t have much more, but the software could take advantage of the G5’s 64-bit address space, 64-bit registers, 64-bit integers, and hardware square root function. About the only thing it could do was address more than 4 GB of RAM on dual-processor Power Macs, which support up to 8 GB. Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar, which was current at that time, had almost no 64-bit support.
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