News First Mactels: Developers impressed with speed

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2005/07/14/Mactels_Speedy/

 

Uhhh, who here finds this surprising? I mean, aside from the fact that they actually ADMITTED it.

 

sorry but i don't buy it. If thye backed the claim up with figures then yes i would be inclined to agree but to just say it's faster than a duel g5 sounds a bit fishy.

There is a lot of good discussion on this over at slashdot at the minute if anyone wants to check it out.

 

First, it states that 3.6g is faster than 2.0g - No surprise there, but 2.75g macs are shipping now. (the dual proc thing doesn't mean much when you are talking about single threaded processes.)

Secondly - we all know that IBM is a little behind intel in developement of desktop personal computer processors.

 

Eh, dream, I'm not sure I totally agree. For instance...AMD 2.2ghz will smoke a p4 3.0. At certain tasks. All about the efficiency of the operations, not the speed.

But, the mac crowd is world-renowned for disavowing that ANYTHING is better or faster or easier than mac hardware. And there are a lot of mac users on this site that are more realistic than most, I'm speaking of the *general* mac crowd (So GOO, Haz, and RTT, don't get mad at me! )

 

I am the first person to tell others that megahertz does not equal megahertz and that you can't just compare clock speeds as an indication of performance -
the oversimplified (Yes, I know it's not the whole story, but it makes it easier to talk about.) way to determine performance would be to multiply efficiency (Here, how much a proc can do per cycle) times speed (number of cycles) -
If you have a proc that can do more per cycle than it can perform better at a lower speed.

But, in the examples listed above, the the p4 (3.6) is 180% faster than the g5(2.0) but the p4 in your comparrison (3.0) is only 136% faster than the AMD(2.2)

That would mean that if the g5 is less than 180% more efficient than the p4 than the p4 will outperform the g5.

That's why I wasn't surprised.

 

Oh, ok. Sorry bout that, I think I actually misread your post, not just misunderstood it. My bad!

 

No worries -
healthy discussion is good for everyone. Wasn't bothered at all.

 

Don't forget Jamie, Fred and Rob (spike, fly, cheese)

 

Yeah, it's a little mac-a-licious over there.. And how bout chris? He have a spare one kicking there for when he's hating the windows upgrades?

 

It's creeping mac-titus with Chris. He's got an apple keyboard... I don't believe he has a mac yet. But he's on the slippery slope.

 

I'm thinking of picking up a 12" ibook at some point too, but I don't have the cash right now. I wonder how it'll work out regarding batter life and heat in the notebooks once the switch happens there.