Apple clones

[Thierry de Coulon]

On Monday 02 June 2003 17:58, Gary Shelton wrote:
> As far as performance goes, this guy's done some benchmarking between a
> G3 and an Athlon at the same clock speed. For most CPU-intensive
> operations that were written with the architecture in mind (not a port
> from another architecture, like most games), I've found the G3 to be
> about 1.5 to 2.0 times faster than an ia32 processor at the same clock.
> Of course, ia32 has the edge in clock speed, so it's cold comfort...

Sorry to say, but most of the time benchmarks sucks. They simply say NOTHING! 
Most wonderfull benchmarks for the Mac are purely based on special Photoshop 
functions optimzed for the G4. "Real life" benchmarks are made when working 
with applications.

So my experience is that my 733 Mhz G4 (640MB) is mostly SLOWER (running OS X 
apps) than equivalent apps on my 600 Mhz (200MB) ia32 notebook. On the 
quicksilver, disk access and video sucks (I have run Wolfenstein 3D on W98 on 
the notebook with a Trident Cyberblade but never managed to run Soldier of 
Fortune 2 on the Quicksilver that runs a GeForce 2 MX).

CD/DVD access is also slower on my Macs.

But only the Macs run OS X :)

My point is: if you have a Mac and want to run Linux on it I'd recommend YDL. 
If you want to run Linux and look for a platform, ia32 is the choice: faster, 
cheaper, more programs to run. I upgraded my main machine to a double Athlon 
last year for 1/3 of the price of a double processor G4.
The exception might be the iBook (maybe the 12" PowerBook too) that beats most 
PC notebooks.

Now that's only my point of vue, of course!

Thierry

-- 
Smile . . . tomorrow will be worse.