How did PPC compare to Intel?

[Sunnzy]

Just wondering if there is an easy way to know how fast a PPC chip is compared to Intel Chips?

AMD has an easy numbering thing like Athlon64 3200 is like P4 3.2. So I wonder if there a way to know roughtly (very roughly I guess, since performance depends on a lot of things.) how would PPC compared... e.g. G3 500mhz.

 

[Yoursh]

The PPC architecture is completely different from x86 processors so there's no exact comparison. I have heard in the past though people giving a rough estimate by saying 'double the PPC freq. to equal a x86 freq.'. For example a 1.33GHz PPC would roughly equal a 2.66GHz x86 processor. Though given duel PPC processors and the like, it's probably not an acurate measurement.

 

[gauchogolfer]

Sitting here working happily away on my powerbook I take exception to your use of PPC in the past tense. Youngsters these days....

 

[livingfortoday]

I would recommend going to http://geekpatrol.ca/geekbench and looking through their results browser to compare Macs. That program seems pretty solid and it might give you a good feel for performance comparisons across the different CPU's.

 

[bousozoku]

Back in the days of the Pentium 2 and Pentium III, PowerPC processors like the 604 and 604e were almost always faster but the operating system slowed them down dramatically.

Once the G3 processors arrived, Motorola was having clock speed issues and Intel wasn't. The G3 was faster than the 604e on some things because of the backside cache but performed poorly overall until recently when IBM brought back higher performance to the design. The G4 was and is a pathetic G3 with an amazing SIMD unit. Perhaps, considering the size of the SIMD unit, it's the other way round.

 

[Sunnzy]

Sitting here working happily away on my powerbook I take exception to your use of PPC in the past tense. Youngsters these days....

And I am working on a G3 as I am typing this message, if not anything, this is the reason why I started this thread.