Apple clones

[Gary Shelton]

hmm, well, these time benchmarks are using the unix 'time' command to 
measure cpu usage and the system time required to do a few fairly 
simple tasks. hardly the rarely-believable photoshop benchmarks that 
are so often touted.
since you didn't check the results, I'll give away a secret - the 
athlon is faster than the g3 he's comparing it to, and faster than a g4 
at about the same clock.

i've seen some preliminary reports that the newer P4s have good 
performance in multimedia if the app supports SSE2, but I can't find 
anyone who's done a really clear, easily repeatable test. My own 
testing using older hardware (500MHz G3, 733MHz G4, 1400MHz P3 Tulatin, 
2000MHz P4) doing things like MPEG1 encoding (video or layer 3 audio) 
shows the G3 is about equal to a 1000MHz P3 doing MPEG encoding, and 
the G4 is generally quite a bit faster than either of those two ia32 
chips. admittedly these are all very specific functions (but things i 
do every day), and all done on old hardware. no doubt ymmv.

i agree that from a performance standpoint, ia32 is generally superior 
to the ppc platform. if i were looking to build a new machine to use as 
a new linux workstation, i'd go x86-64, personally. but that's my 
opinion.

On Monday, Jun 2, 2003, at 16:32 America/Los_Angeles, Thierry de Coulon 
wrote:

> 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.
>
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