[MILAMBER]

I certainly wouldn't say that the G5's are slow, because they are not. It's very impressive how they went the extra mile and used SATA instead of IDE disks, and I really like the new 133 mhz PCI bus that they are incorporating.

Unfortunately, Thoran is right. A dually or quad Opteron system will crush nearly anything. With the Opterons, the front side bus is built into the chip, so the bus runs at the speed of the processor rather than being limited by anything else. Opterons are also 64 bit so they can use as much memory as ghe G5's can.

I found it odd that Apple chose to benchmark against Intel rather than selecting the AMD Opteron which is a much better match.

One thing I will say: My old man works in the aerospace indurstry. He's currently working on a missile defense program. They do government contract work and they have a number of "mission critical" computers that they need to run highly specialized software with outrageous system requirements. They've tested a number of different chips from a number of different manufacturers and the IBM chip being used in the G5 is what they finally decided to use. It had the best overall mix of performance and stability.