PoserPC vs Intel - "bang for your buck"

[Tony K.]

Although I am an advocate of using YDL (and MacOSX), I also run Red Hat
7.3 & 8.0 on a Athlon desktop.  I don't know about benchmarks, but
unless you are going to use a laptop, you are going to get a much large
"bang for you buck" (dollars/performance) by building a Athlon desktop
rather than buying a PPC G4 Mac.  I built a new 1.2 GHz Athlon for a
total of about $500 (a year ago).  You can get even higher performance
now for the same $$$.  The least expensive G4 desktop will be about 3X
as expensive.  Benchmarks don't mean that much to me as "bang for the
buck".  Although Apple makes great products, I would rather spend $500
to run a standalone Linux box than spend $1699 to run a comparable PPC
Linux and MacOSX desktop.  The "dollar/performance" benchmark would blow
PPC out of the water.  There is also more Intel based Linux
distributions to choose from and they are more up to date.  SuSE and
Mandrake PPC distributions lag behind their Intel counterparts.

But on the other had, there are four fingers and a thumb.

A laptop is a different animal.  You buy a laptop for portability and
you want something that works, no matter where you are or how your
connected.  You can't build a laptop, at least not easily or cheaply.  I
spent a lot of time deciding whether I would buy an Intel based laptop
or a Mac.  The decision boiled down to a "Sony VIAO SuperSlim" and an
"Apple iBook."  I decided that since Linux is not smooth sailing on
*any* laptop (as evident by this mailing list and many others) it would
be better to have native laptop operating system that I would be happy
with.  And as far as I know, Apple makes the only native unix laptop.  I
am not a M$ fan as you can guess.  So for virtually the same price I
could buy either an Intel laptop which I could run Linux (and that other
operating system), or I could by an iBook with unix based MacOSX and run
Linux.  Apple iBooks start at $999 now and you can run many unix
programs using FINK on MacOSX.  I have Gnome and several useful unix
programs installed with FINK.


On Mon, 2002-11-25 at 17:11, vkuznet wrote:
> Hi,
> I"m newbie to powerPC and wonder to buy one and I'm Linux guy.
> The only question I have where to find a fair comparision of
> Intel/PowerPC performance. I'm really interesting in performance
> of PowerPC running Linux and Intel running Linux.
> 
> Any links would be very welcome.
> 
> Thanks,
> Valentin.
> P.S. Could you please reply directly to this Email since I'm not
> in a mailing list.
> 
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