8/19 what's the deal with Mac claiming that the G3 is 2x faster than
Intel's chips. It even claims to be faster than a PII 400MHz.
Any explainations? Mac's suck by the way...
\_ The greatest factor in determining the speed of a machine is
not necesarilly the processor but how well the operating system
was design and how well it manages memory. Bad OS's tend to
swap things in and out of memory a lot. Most of the time it
isn't the processor that's being overtasked but the i/o system.
Pentiums and G3's are very comparably but the Mac architecture
PII and G3 speeds are very comparable but the Mac architecture
is much cleaner than Intel's. I'm a linux user myself so I opt
for intel machines. Mac's don't really suck. Their OS does.
\_ This claim is mostly specious. So far as I've heard, G3's are
2x faster on one or two things, and comparable or slower in the
rest, and in particular, aren't 2x faster in SPEC. --PeterM
\_ Even PC magazines agree that the G3 is faster than
PII's, if you believe in things like SpecNN. Whether
that will translate to a faster machine is another matter
there is also bus, memory, ... to consider.
But then hey, PowerPC >> x86 long live RISC
\_ About two months ago Ziff-Davis or c|net did a benchmark for
commonly used software between P2's and the notebook G3s. I believe
the results highlighted the dubiousness of Apple's claim. In
particular, the performance of the G3 in floating point intensive
applications like Photoshop was markedly (20-40%?) better in the
P2 than for the lower clock speed G3. The lack of a commonly
known consensus reflects, I feel, the good feelings most
computer journalists and people-in-the-know have towards Apple
and their efforts. That's what I remember.
\_ The G3 might be a faster chip than the PII, but since MacOS
is mostly still written in 68K code, the user experience and
app benchmarks lag because half the time they're in emulation.
\_ Last I checked, Apple's claims are based on Byte's benchmark
tests for integer operations. In these tests, which
don't necessarily reflect real-life speeds, the G3 did
outperform the Intel chips by a wide margin.
\_ And since the benchmark is distributed as source
code, the compiler can seriously affect the results.
Apple has a page on their own website showing a
PowerMac 8500/180 scoring from 3.75 to 10.46 on the
integer test depending on the compiler.
\_ What good is a powerful processor if you dont have well written
software to run on it? Whichever platform runs the software
YOU want better is the better platform.
\_ More importantly, Mac OS can't do multithreading or pre-emptive
multitasking at this moment so their claim is misleading.
\_ BZZZT! MacOS has provided multi-threading for years.
(Available as an add-on to System 7.1, included in 7.5
& later versions). And lack of multi-[threading/tasking]
doesn't make their performance claims any more or less
bogus - CPU speed is CPU speed - how you use it is a
different matter.
\_ Neither can Winblows 2000.
\_Nothing says that you have to run Mac OS on a Mac--check
out LinuxPPC or MK Linux. (And what marketing claims--
from any company--AREN'T misleading?)
\_ Not so. Apple refuses to release specs for their G3
based machines so non-MacOS operating systems can't
be ported to G3 systems (which is unfortunate because
BeOS was about to take off).
\_ Funny, I'm running MkLinux on my G3. linuxppc also
runs on it. BeOS is worthless. -tom
\_ is your G3 an upgrade card by any chance?
\_ no. -tom
\_Not so. You can install it on a G3. See:
<DEAD>linuxppc.org/install/G3<DEAD> and
<DEAD>www.mklinux.apple.com/hardware.html<DEAD> -icrew
\_ Amen.
\-Look analyzing a marketing comment as a technical one
is ridiculous. It is like wondering if that "world's best
apple pie" sign you saw in Visalia was for real. At best they
took some narrow statistic from a fast G3 and compared it to
a slow pentium. --psb
\_ Amen. |
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