Originally posted by ddtlm
Mr. MacPhisto:
You are in no position to accuse anyone else of worshiping a company.
Obvious? Fact? Yeah, perhaps its obvious when you can't think clearly about the object at hand for all your Apple worshiping. In reality the 745x is an out of date design that memory bandwidth and cache cannot compensate for. Certainly it could be reworked with better scalar floating point power and superior out-of-order execution, but as it stands now its just not that impressive. I've asked many times for someone to show me processor/memory benchmarks where the 17" AluBook 1ghz G4 with 166mhz FSB significantly beats the 15" TiBook 1ghz G4 with 133mhz FSB. If bandwidth were the problem I would expect 25% more of it to make some difference.
Worship.
Worship.
I think the SDR bus helps to limit any improvements the PBs would have by going to 167MHz or using DDR RAM. 25% is not all that much of an increase when you're dealing with such slow speeds. Although I would imagine the 17" PB is a bit faster than the 15"
As for worship - I can accuse who I like when it is quite obvious that some people absolutely love what Intel is doing with the x86. I'll admit that I do have
faith in IBM and their ability to produce a superior chip. Moto, not so much, but I think they can do better.
I'm also not debating the 74xx is out of date, my point was that it could still do quite well if those updates are made - and would likely be able to match many of Intel's current CPU's in raw performance. Seeing as the 74xx is outdated, it's impressive that with a redesign it could still be a pretty good chip.
But the 74xx needs to be improved upon and replaced if Moto/Apple/Intel intend on keeping a 32bit processor around for a while. Either that or we'll wait on the Power5 derivation next year, which should be a very impressive chip and should send the 970 into the low-end by 2005. That's still a long time to have to use the current architecture of the 74xx, but the 750VX may solve that problem.
I'd also hate to disappoint you, but I'm not an Apple worshipper so much. I love the machines regardless of processor because I it is reliable and efficient, but I'm also only a recent convert who has been in the PC world since the age of 5 over 20 years ago. I've experienced the x86 in many incarnations and am less impressed with every iteration. Admittedly, the Pentium M is probably the best thing Intel has gotten out of x86 in a decade, but I doubt it will last and I don't expect Intel to really come up with much for the future.
I've also experienced Centrino in real life and was not overly impressed. While they run cool, the laptop I used for a few days experienced quite a bit of lag and still suffered under a miserable OS (XP Pro). Everyday tasks fucntioned slower than they do on my 2GHz PC desktop (w/ 1GB). Menu's lagged somewhat on the IBM Thinkpad T40 w/ 1.2GB of RAM and a 1.3GHz Pentium M. There's no reason why there should be any lag in regular activity with that much speed and RAM. I ran Half-Life on the machine (while plugged in and at fullpower) and encountered ALOT of slowdown. My 2GHz P4 did a lot better with an older 32MB Radeon card (purchased over 2 years ago and running on older AGP tech). True, laptops aren't really meant for gaming, but this machine was supposed to run faster than my desktop.
It also managed to crash only a few hours out of the box (though that's not Intel's fault), thus why I keep my iBook and do more on it, despite the fact that it only has a 700MHz G3 - which is snappier than the 1.3GHz Centrino based machine. That has a lot to do with the OS, but still - color me unimpressed with Intel's latest and greatest.
