"Again, however, remember the 970 probably won't appear in systems for almost a year, and a lot can happen in a year. Intel's Pentium 4 will be pushing 4.0GHz by then, allowing the x86 to maintain the same 2-to-1 clock frequency advantage over the PowerPC that it enjoys today. Other competing processors will be faster by then, too. Of course, clock frequency isn't an absolute indicator of performance,"
This statement near the end of the pdf depressed the hell out of me! When will an Apple be on top of the speed issue?! I don't really care so much about minute speed differences, but the larger the difference, the fewer Apple customers there will be. That will mean limited 3rd party support, as we've seen year after year. For the multi-media professional with an Apple-based setup it means headaches and disappointments.
These are all forward looking statements from last year and speculation based on how they believed the Pentium 4 would stack up against the PPC970 this year!
Nothing to worry about.
They mention volume production for the PPC970 in H203, that's june onwards of this year, they speculated that intel could have 4Ghz P4s by then, they won't.
Intel's roadmap clearly shows 3.2Ghz by Q403. Apart from the increase of ondie L2 cache from 512K to 1Mb, an increase in bus speed from (133Mhz x 4) to (200Mhz x 4), the pentium 4 design that will be competing with the PPC970 isn't significantly different to the current design, it's certainly not going to be 4Ghz vs 1.8Ghz that's for sure, maybe 3.2 vs 1.8 by the end of this year at the worst.
Benchmarks on one of the PC sites for an overclocked P4 running at 3.2Ghz on an 800Mhz bus only showing it to scale in performance according to the clockspeed increase, even though the large L2 cache would make the actual P4s perform better, it's been mentioned in quite a few articles on sites like arstechnica how an 800Mhz bus that consists of 4 x 200Mhz isn't as efficient as an 800Mhz bus that's simply 2 x 400Mhz.
