Obviously you do not actually DO any supercomputing or run applications that use it. The Top500 list is considered a joke in the supercomputing community -- it is a very narrow benchmark that basically measures how DSP-like the instruction set is. The PPC ISA literally has DSP instructions built into it; not much good for most real supercomputing apps, but great if you are running LINPACK.
The accepted general purpose supercomputing benchmark used by the supercomputing community is probably STREAM, which maps very well to general real-world performance (LINPACK has almost no mapping to reality outside of a couple narrow apps like fluid dynamics). For STREAM and most other benchmarks, the Opteron soundly outperforms the PPC970 by any metric you care to use. It has 50-100% more bandwidth, fully half the latency, slightly faster CPU performance clock-for-clock, etc. Yes, the PPC does moderately better at the outlier case of CPU-bound DSP codes, but it is mediocre everywhere else. If your business was to know these things, you would know that the AMD64 system architecture is preferred by a wide margin over PPC for supercomputing apps.
I use PPC all the time, but it is also my job to understand its limitations. It excels at DSP, and is mediocre everywhere else. Like most people (and most people that run supercomputer apps), my codes are not at all DSP-like. Clock-for-clock (which roughly means dollar-for-dollar), an Opteron will outperform PPC970 on our supercomputing codes by 50-100%. I like the Macs, but they aren't that hot performance wise in the areas that matter for supercomputing e.g. memory latency. All our heavy lifting is done on Opterons, which simply cannot be beat for performance on a very large number of codes.
You are drinking the same marketing Kool-Aid the Apple was serving when they used that ridiculous Photoshop "benchmark" to show that their older systems were "faster" when everyone knew they weren't. They use an extremely narrow strength that doesn't apply to 95% of everyone, and then imply that it is a general indication of performance. Same story here. The system architecture of the PPC970 is mediocre and the Opteron does school it -- I see it every day because we use both -- but Apple dumps scads of marketing dollars on LINPACK to give it supercomputing "credibility" with the masses (not with the actual supercomputing industry) to imply that the system is more capable than it actually is.
Give me a break. Stop drinking the Kool-Aid. AMD pulled a real rabbit out of their hat and everyone in the supercomputing industry knows it. I would point out that there is a good reason that none of the supercomputing companies have selected the PPC970 for their proprietary systems, but almost all of them have opted for the AMD64 platform in their upcoming systems. I use high-end Macs every day (and right now in fact), but I'm honest enough to admit their limitations.
Show me a real benchmark that is something other than a publicity stunt. Nobody in supercomputing actually uses LINPACK for a number of reasons. Take your pick: STREAM, SPEC, lmbench, etc. and compare the PPC970 numbers to an equivalently clocked Opteron. If you are a PPC zealot, you will not like what you see. This has been hashed out many, many times on the supercomputing mailing lists and forums. The information is out there, if you care to look.
Thank you for the reply.
No, I don't do any supercomputing. I appreciate your explanation and information.
The Kool-Aid remarks are not really necessary. Just explain it as you did.
I am not a PPC fanatic... I do appreciate OSX. If Apple were to pick up the AMD and provide an OSX version for it, or if IBM were to address the issues you and antiRepublicrat have brought up, I would be very happy.