Originally posted by gopher
G4s don't suck a floating point calculations. Name one PC that can do 15 billion floating calculations a second. Name ONE!
Name one Mac that can do 15 billion double-precision FP calcs/sec. As a matter of fact, name one Mac that can do 2 double-precision GFLOPS/sec. The 15 GFLOPS number is for vectorized single-precision FP only.
Sorry I don't buy your fairy tales. The integer measurements of
the PC are biased because they rely on error free code which
is practically impossible to come by in the real world.
If you're referring to the most recent SPEC benchmarks (which had to be obtained for Macs unofficially because Apple was presumably too ashamed to do it themselves), why does the fastest (1GHz PPC) fall virtually dead last against ALL other CPUs tested? I mean, c'mon, it's dead even with the equivalently-clocked Pentium III and gets spanked by a MIPS R14000A at half the MHz. Not to mention the PA-RISC, Itanium, Power3/4, P4, Athlon, and UltraSPARC, which all destroy it. The 2.2GHz P4 is
several times faster at both integer and fp.
Altivec optimization isn't that hard. Just tell your developers to follow O'Reilly publishing's Altivec guide.
Why should they expend such effort when they can write code that runs optimally on what ~95% of the world uses - x86 - with no extra effort on their part. You're a developer, and you want to write a piece of software. Are you going to write it in nice, portable, platform independent code that screams on x86, or are you going to write it in a weird proprietary vectorized manner which renders it dog-slow on all but some strange embedded processor used by 3% of the desktop market?
The G4 is faster than all PCs at video and image manipulation. That's where you need the speed.
To be more specific, it's faster than all PCs at vectorized single-precision floating point, and that's about it.
Oh and if you need a fast spell checker go with Nisus Writer. If you need fast web browsing go with Omniweb or Mozilla.
You must be joking. A 500MHz Celeron with a decent video card is so much smoother than a rev B TiBook at web browsing that it makes me, as a rev B TiBook user, want to cry.
Honestly, there isn't anything a PC can do faster than a Mac at all levels. There will be some things a PC is faster at in some calculations, others a Mac is faster at just because different portions of code are optimized for the processors differently. But where it counts, the Mac is faster.
If "where it counts" to you is in vectorized single-precision floating point code, then I agree. Unfortunately, the reality is that the G4's integer speed is terrible, and its double-precision floating point speed is ATROCIOUS.
