cubist said:
Even Yonah is crap, really. Two cores on a chip that have to communicate off-chip? Stinks.
Switching from PPC to Intel is like switching from Mercedes to Hyundai. It has nothing to do with quality, performance or power consumption. It is Apple saying "good enough" and going for the mainstream, increasing market share.
I have found that Albeton Live is a great judge of cpu horsepower.
My pentium 3.2ht is rated the exact same as my pro 1.8 G5 single. And using them side by side, the overall computing experience is smoother with the mac, web pages load a lot faster and I havent had barely any software issues.
I think that with rosetta running at 85% that means you need a 15% horsepower edge in memory controller and cpu to have a balanced transition. Thats why the developer macintel is a 3.6, to match a 2.0 g5 single's performance. Thats why a single 2.0 is the base for their on the fence performer, the iMac, clearly good enough for just about everything but not super fast. When there are dual core intel chips running at what equates to thier p4 dualcore running at 4.0ghz, then we have over 3.6ghz of G5 dual performance. Add that to a newer tigher integrated custom motherboard (to keep vista away), and the 2006/7 macs will be smooth.
There is also a consumer issue affecting all the r and d decisions, people want luxury feel over techno logic. They want computing to be simple, elegant and painless. Sometimes speed is not the only way to acheive that.
$#