I found this article over at Tom's to be a great read. Intel's future may not be as dim as it had begun to look over the last year and a half.
http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20050525/index.html
http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20050525/index.html
Maybe because the marketing people have got everyone believing that the faster the processor clock speed the faster it will be so the engineers make processors that can run at faster clockspeeds regardless of how efficiently they do it.Platform said:What is it with CPU's......for every new generation that comes they become less sufficient.....
G4 clock = better than G5 at same clock speed.
PIII clock = better than P4 at same clock speed.
caveman_uk said:Maybe because the marketing people have got everyone believing that the faster the processor clock speed the faster it will be so the engineers make processors that can run at faster clockspeeds regardless of how efficiently they do it.
And of course a P4 must be better than a P3 as it's got a 4 in it
This is simply not true. The G4 is a nice chip ( I use them every day ) but the G5 has a much better Floating Point unit, it is capable of doing more instructions per cycle and is not crippled by a 167 bus. A 1Ghz G5 would blow my 1Ghz G4. check this out Unless by "better" you mean cooler, and even this would be questionable. We have never seen a 1.5 Ghz G5Platform said:G4 clock = better than G5 at same clock speed.
Interestingly on that chart, I see the results for the Dual 1.4G4s as very competitive for the dual G5 2.0s (chips running with a much higher FSB and 50% higher clock speed). The only time the G4s really suffer is on the graphics intensive tests which says a lot more about the AGP system than it does the CPU core.Pedro Estarque said:This is simply not true. The G4 is a nice chip ( I use them every day ) but the G5 has a much better Floating Point unit, it is capable of doing more instructions per cycle and is not crippled by a 167 bus. A 1Ghz G5 would blow my 1Ghz G4. check this out Unless by "better" you mean cooler, and even this would be questionable. We have never seen a 1.5 Ghz G5
Pedro Estarque said:This is simply not true. The G4 is a nice chip ( I use them every day ) but the G5 has a much better Floating Point unit, it is capable of doing more instructions per cycle and is not crippled by a 167 bus. A 1Ghz G5 would blow my 1Ghz G4. check this out Unless by "better" you mean cooler, and even this would be questionable. We have never seen a 1.5 Ghz G5
The P4 was an architecture intended to clock really high with bigger pipelines and a nice branch prediction ( above 4Ghz ) and that high frequency would compensate for its design "failures". However, it didn't scale as nice as intel imagined.
caveman_uk said:Interestingly on that chart, I see the results for the Dual 1.4G4s as very competitive for the dual G5 2.0s (chips running with a much higher FSB and 50% higher clock speed). The only time the G4s really suffer is on the graphics intensive tests which says a lot more about the AGP system than it does the CPU core.
I would take a dual G4 1.4 with 2MB L3 cache over anything less than a dual G5 2Ghz any day. Those dual G4s are a lot cheaper as well as a more flexible form factor.
caveman_uk said:To be honest whilst the G4 and G5 are comparable at the same clock speed, I very much doubt that we'd be up at 2.7GHz if we'd waited for Motorola/Freescale to get the G4 there. The current G4's only reach the speeds they do because they have no L3 cache and that is what made the last of the G4 powermacs so competitive....
There's a lot of people thinking that a G5 powerbook will automatically be much better than a G4 one. Unless there's a real difference in clock speeds I think people are going to be disappointed.
Platform said:What is it with CPU's......for every new generation that comes they become less sufficient.....
G4 clock = better than G5 at same clock speed.
PIII clock = better than P4 at same clock speed.
Xapplimatic said:I remember the embarassment of Intel that P3s were faster than P4s, given..
But a G5 slower than a gee-4.. um.. NO.. remember 64-bit versus 32.
To start with that's twice the bandwidth at any given same clockspeed, not to mention the buss is multiples of times faster.. You can engineer a test to advantage a G4 in one area, but you can't fool me and say that any 32-bit slug-speed FSB G4 is gonna give anything even close to similar overall system speed than a Hyper Transport-equipped 64-bit G5.. It just isn't possible. The G5 will kick the G4's buss every time.. (and I don't even have one yet ;(
Myth #4:
Myth: My application will have much faster performance if it is a native 64-bit application.
Fact: This is true for some other architectures because the number of registers and the width of registers changes between 32-bit and 64-bit mode. However, the PowerPC architecture does not have either of these limitations. It was designed for 64-bit computing from the beginning, and supports 64-bit arithmetic instructions in 32-bit mode. Thus, on PowerPC architectures, software does not generally become faster (and may actually slow down) when compiled as a 64-bit executable.
Xapplimatic said:I remember the embarassment of Intel that P3s were faster than P4s, given..
But a G5 slower than a gee-4.. um.. NO.. remember 64-bit versus 32.
To start with that's twice the bandwidth at any given same clockspeed, not to mention the buss is multiples of times faster.. You can engineer a test to advantage a G4 in one area, but you can't fool me and say that any 32-bit slug-speed FSB G4 is gonna give anything even close to similar overall system speed than a Hyper Transport-equipped 64-bit G5.. It just isn't possible. The G5 will kick the G4's buss every time.. (and I don't even have one yet ;(