In fact, I am eager to know the double precision floating point performance of G5 system comparing to those comparable Pentium4 system using Intel Compiler. Is it fair? Definitely not! The reason is that so far no one was trying to do AltiVec code for double precision.
Then think about the metric of MFLOPS per hundred dollar..... I think G5 is totally OUT for our future computing nodes purchasing plan. Think again, is it fair? Yes! We have to face the reality.
References:
1. http://members.cox.net/craig.hunter/g5/
If your metric is GFLOPs/$, wait for the G5-based XServe's. They will be an excellent deal. Buying G5 towers is an expensive way to get raw computing power.
well, the key verb here turned out to be "wait".... I'll keep looking into the configuration of Xserv. Hopefully we can buy some of those.