Mac vs. Window's mhz

[iQuit]

RE:

Well...PowerPC processors are built a whole lot different and run more effecient and smoother. On general things such as video editing and web and etc. the difference is the PPC is multiplied by 2.2. Also Mac OSX runs a whole lot smoother considering it is built better and on UNIX. Generally though PPC is faster except for gaming,not because the Mac's suck at games...just they are ported over and don't run too well on a Mac. If there were developers that were more interested in Mac's..they have much more potential in running games smoother with there faster processors. PowerPC's are really great and will smoke a PC in video editing,and graphic editing.

http://www.asia.apple.com/g4/myth/

Go there Here,it will help explain more in a short video

 

[wrldwzrd89]

That was what I said

I thought you meant that Windows has more programs than the Mac in ALL areas (knocking out part of my point), so I came back with the argument that Mac cuts out all the garbage

 

[BornAgainMac]

Slow

I noticed a Pentium III at even 450 Mhz doesn't "feel" any slower than a Pentium 4 running at 2 Ghz with the same memory and both running XP. I tried a Celeron 2.8 Ghz machine running XP Home and it seemed much slower than my old 233 Mhz running Win2000. Maybe today's PCs are downloading too much spyware and with the addition of all the addon programs you need to have running to keep from getting a virus and keeping PC running good the additional load is killing the performance. XP isn't helping anything either because of it's memory footprint.

I did have a friend encode uncompressed AVI files to MPEG-1 on his Athlon 1.3 Ghz to compare with my Pentium 3 450 Mhz PC and it was only a 30% improvement in performance. I couldn't control what was installed on his PC or memory configuration so I can't conclude any thing from that benchmark.

 

[Platform]

Yes, but notice how you need DUAL 2.7GHz chips for a 1.55 factor for this difference in the speed of the system (using your factor of 1.55).

The G5 is not as efficient as the P4 or Centrino. A single 2.7GHz PPC 970 chip would probably not be as fast as a single AMD chip rated at 2.7GHz.

Yes that is bad,but that is proberly the reason why apple sell Dualies Anyway SP G5 2.0Ghz and above is enough power for most people

 

[malevolent_i]

The speed difference really depends on the application. I think many mac apps are just poorly optimised (esp. games like d3).
Mac mhz = 2x windows/x86 mhz?? no way!
just look at the benchmarks at barefeats.com.
I would say a G5 is comparable to athlon's 64 fx line in terms of mhz/performance ratio. If u look at cinebench ratings, a g5 1.8 (mono) compares well with a p4 2.5 w/out hyperthreading.
A g4, on the other hand...is significantly slower. it's hampered by its puny bus speed of 167 mhz. The g4's bus, coupled with slower floating point calculations means it does worse than the g5 in games. However, the g4 has a more straightforward vector calculations unit and so i think it does better than the g5 in those types of calculations. Vector calculations are only used in many productivity applications that take advantage of it (not in games though)--photoshop does a good job in that, for example.

btw, I dunno about u guys, but i always thought windows' UI felt faster! unless u have lots of spyware and open apps bogging the system down, don't u feel like windows resizing and moving is faster in xp?

 

[Applespider]

btw, I dunno about u guys, but i always thought windows' UI felt faster! unless u have lots of spyware and open apps bogging the system down, don't u feel like windows resizing and moving is faster in xp?

Ah..that well known snappiness™ which is the Holy Grail of every Mac OS update. Windows does resize windows faster but it is apparently all to do with how the two systems draw their windows which would take someone far more technical than me! IIRC it's something along the lines of the Mac redrawing each pixel of a move, whereas Windows doesn't. It's basically also the reason that the Mac has attractive drop shadows around windows whereas XP is 'flatter'. You makes your choice and you takes your trade offs.

I know what you mean about feeling faster. I used to think that my Windows (work) PC opened applications faster than my Mac at home does until I actually timed it from clicking on the app to it being available to use and discovered that they're pretty much identical. The difference I was 'seeing' I think came from the way that with Windows, the program identifier came flashing up on the screen and then the program loaded. In the Mac, it bounces a couple of times in the Dock and then opens. The bouncing isn't as noticeable as that big icon in the middle of the screen.

 

[Mav451]

Ah..that well known snappiness™ which is the Holy Grail of every Mac OS update. Windows does resize windows faster but it is apparently all to do with how the two systems draw their windows which would take someone far more technical than me! IIRC it's something along the lines of the Mac redrawing each pixel of a move, whereas Windows doesn't. It's basically also the reason that the Mac has attractive drop shadows around windows whereas XP is 'flatter'. You makes your choice and you takes your trade offs.

I know what you mean about feeling faster. I used to think that my Windows (work) PC opened applications faster than my Mac at home does until I actually timed it from clicking on the app to it being available to use and discovered that they're pretty much identical. The difference I was 'seeing' I think came from the way that with Windows, the program identifier came flashing up on the screen and then the program loaded. In the Mac, it bounces a couple of times in the Dock and then opens. The bouncing isn't as noticeable as that big icon in the middle of the screen.

Opening apps has little if any to do with the OS. Its all about the I/O connection >> mainly the hard drive itself. SCSI? 5400/7200? SATA vs. ATA? WD Raptor 15ks? FW800? RAID? You get the idea. RAM plays a part, afterwards, but the initial launch is all in your hard drive.

 

[maxvamp]

Maybe today's PCs are downloading too much spyware and with the addition of all the addon programs you need to have running to keep from getting a virus and keeping PC running good the additional load is killing the performance. XP isn't helping anything either because of it's memory footprint.

I did have a friend encode uncompressed AVI files to MPEG-1 on his Athlon 1.3 Ghz to compare with my Pentium 3 450 Mhz PC and it was only a 30% improvement in performance. I couldn't control what was installed on his PC or memory configuration so I can't conclude any thing from that benchmark.

You cannot go out and directly compare an Apple OSX system to a Windows system. There are too many variables.

I could go out and make two different benchmark suites right now that would show two different result on which was faster. This is where Steve gets in trouble because he does exactly this.

As mentioned above, there are many more factors that affect a PC's performance. The simplest one is comparing which Microsoft OS is on your system.

Mac users may say that OS X.4 feels a little sluggish on a G3 233 compared to OS 9, but they can still be productive. A PC person running a Pentium 233 would never be able to be productive on a system upgraded from Windows 98 to the latest WindowsXP revision. The OS has way too much bloat from 98 to XP. This bloat slows down the procs.

Another thing that skews a result in the two processors is if the applications are written and optimized for the host processor. If you take photoshop that will use Altivec, a clearly superior SIMD engine, then a PPC always wins on certain filters. However, if you take generic open source programs that generally have little to no platform tweaking ( such as DB4 ), then clock speed becomes a factor and the x86 platform can clearly win.

In short you cannot say one proc is x faster than another, because even within the families, this is not always true. G4 Altivec vs G5 Altivec, PIV against P-M, etc.

Max.

 

[shane1]

A PB 867MHz G4 will probably feel like a 2.4 - 2.6 GHz P4. However, when it comes to the hardcore intensive stuff, the P4 will be faster at the processing. But again, in terms of "feel", it'll feel like the P4 I mentioned.

It may also feel a bit slower than the first Centrino chip released. Forgot what it was (a 1.3GHz?).

Yikes. I like my mac as much as the next guy, but that's fanboyism at its finest. You're not doing anyone a favour by blatantly lying.

 

[vatel]

As has already been said you really have to consider what OS and software your running in addition to just how fast is the G4 vs P4. For example the extremely poor cinebench and SPEC performance of G4 machines doesn't really reflect in my real world computing experience

I find that for most 'normal' tasks (email, surfing, text editing, spreadsheet) there isn't any difference between my PB and my Dell or my friends' Centrino laptops. The difference comes up when running computationally intensive code. For these tasks I've found as a rule of thumb the G4 is roughly equivalent to a first gen Centrino 1.6 (Banias), and significantly slower than either a straight P4 or the newer Centrino's (Dothan), these difference seem to be due mainly to the higher cache in the Dothan chips.

Workflow is also an important consideration. For example the much maligned window resizing issue, doesn't bother so much because I rarely resize or even move windows on PB desktop, especially as compared to how often I perform the same tasks on my Dell. I also find Expose allows me to handle multitasking faster and more efficiently than on my Dell.

I wonder what the formula is for comparing a G5 to a G4 processor?[/QUOTE]

G4 and G5's are about equal (on a per GHz basis) for tasks which:
1. Don't require significant I/O from memory
2. Don't involve double precision floating point code
(or non-vectorized single precision code)

Once memory bandwith or floating point math become factors, a G5 can run around 2x faster than a G4
(You can see this in barefeats' comparison of iMac vs PB performance)

As long as memory bandwith is not a factor, the G4 can actually run vectorized code faster than a G5.

 

[zach]

the g4 and the g5 arent much different .. and when the g4 reaches higher speeds .. the g5 is much more powerful

2 ghz g4 vs 2 ghz g5 .. the g5 wins

1.6 ghz g5 vs 1.67 ghz g4 .. the g4 wins

hjh*

That's purely conjecture.

You are correct in your latter, however there IS no G4 2 GHz chip, therefore you cannot make that statement.

And from what I know of the G4's architecture versus the G5's, the 2 GHz G4 would in fact beat the 2 GHz G5.

 

[auxplage]

The iMac 1.6ghz does do video much more efficiently than the 1.67ghz Powerbook as mentioned somewhere above.

 

[Maedus]

A PB 867MHz G4 will probably feel like a 2.4 - 2.6 GHz P4. However, when it comes to the hardcore intensive stuff, the P4 will be faster at the processing. But again, in terms of "feel", it'll feel like the P4 I mentioned.

It may also feel a bit slower than the first Centrino chip released. Forgot what it was (a 1.3GHz?).

Yikes. I like my mac as much as the next guy, but that's fanboyism at its finest. You're not doing anyone a favour by blatantly lying.

He's not saying a PB 867MHz G4 is as fast as a 2.4 - 2.6 GHz P4 but that when you're doing simpler tasks, it will feel as fast as a 2.4 - 2.6 GHz P4. This is because with simpler tasks, neither processor is really being pushed to their limits and so they "FEEL" similar. Its when you're doing hardcore processing where the G4 will max out before the P4 that you can tell the P4 is faster. So no, he's not being a fanboy nor is he lying.

I notice it on my computer. My pitiful 266 MHz G3 sometimes FEELS just as fast as the AMD Athlon XP 3200+ on some tasks but there's no question that the AMD is a more powerful processor which becomes noticeable as soon as I do anything remotely complicated on the AMD.

 

[mklos]

Nah, 2x was with G4's vs. P4s. I'm not the expert here (some others could help me here), but I believe the G5 is much less efficient compared to the G4 (instructions per clock).

The G5 is way more efficient than the G4. The G5 was perform 215 instructions per clock cycle vs 16 on the G4. HUGE difference there!

 

[Maedus]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it's kind of like multiplying the speed x2 for the mac. So a 1.5 would be a 3.0 P4...

I think the 2x multiplier originated around the times of the G3's and the early G4's to get the equivalent pentium of the time. Probably a P3 but I don't remember offhand.

And I think the 2x also was used not because it was an exact conversion but because it was easy to tell somebody "multiply the mac's processor speed by 2 to get a rough idea how it stacks up to a pentium" rather than creating a more accurate conversion rate which might end up being something like "multiply the mac's processor speed by 1.87593 to see how it'd measure up to a pentium" or more than likely "use this formula [insert complex formula] with x being your mac's processor speed and y being your mac's bus speed and z being your memory and so on and so on in order to a mutli-faceted answer that tells you what kind of pentium, motherboard, chipset, memory, etc it equals. Gah.

So the 2x comes from an older age when 2 was an easy to remember and easy to calculate number that gave you a ballpark answer for converting a mac processor to the contemporary pentium processor. Today I doubt you could devise a number that could easily do this since bus speeds, memory speeds, GPU speeds, etc play a much more noticeable role in computers overall speed than they did back then.

 

[minimax]

A PB 867MHz G4 will probably feel like a 2.4 - 2.6 GHz P4. However, when it comes to the hardcore intensive stuff, the P4 will be faster at the processing. But again, in terms of "feel", it'll feel like the P4 I mentioned.

It may also feel a bit slower than the first Centrino chip released. Forgot what it was (a 1.3GHz?).

hahaha LOL what drugs are you taking?

 

[solvs]

The G5 is not as efficient as the P4 or Centrino. A single 2.7GHz PPC 970 chip would probably not be as fast as a single AMD chip rated at 2.7GHz.

Depends on the AMD chip. I have a 2GHz Athlon XP that doesn't seem as fast as my friends 1.8GHz G5 iMac, but the newer AMDs are supposed to be really fast. Those dual core ones are way faster than the G5 (and the dual core P4), but they're expensive. The G5 is better than even a higher clocked P4, so I don't know what you mean by more efficient. The high end P4 have more cache, but are really hot, and not that much faster, they just reach higher clock speeds. The Centrinos are really efficient, more like the old P3, but also aren't clocked as high. The G4 is a pretty good chip, and even more efficient (and cooler temp. wise), but it's hampered by poor memory bandwidth. The highest G4 FSB being sold by Apple right now is a paltry 167MHz, and it barely supports DDR RAM. FSBs and memory bandwidth are a lot more important than clock speed.

Plus, it's hard to measure anyway. This has been discussed ad nauseam, if you do a search in this forum you'll see. Benchmarks don't mean much, it's all about what applications you use, and some will be better on one platform than another. It's all a matter of perception, and has a lot to do with Windows and OS X as well.

 

[auxplage]

The whole FSB is without doubt important, but let us remember that most of the current P4 chips being sold really only have a FSB of 200mhz which is only a 20% improvement over the present G4. Of course Intel says the FSB is 800mhz because of the whole 4 instructions per cycle, but that is only theoretical. The FSB is nowhere near 800mhz – it is most likely closer to 400mhz. The G4 should be able to move up to a 200mhz FSB with the 7448.

 

[Mav451]

The G5 is way more efficient than the G4. The G5 was perform 215 instructions per clock cycle vs 16 on the G4. HUGE difference there!

Hrm...guess I was wrong.

 

[paperinacup]

This is VERY confusing. So is what I'm hearing tat the G4 is better than the G5???!!! Then what's the point of waiting for a new PB?

Excuse me if I sound confused.... becuase I am.

 

[mad jew]

This is VERY confusing. So is what I'm hearing tat the G4 is better than the G5???!!! Then what's the point of waiting for a new PB?

Excuse me if I sound confused.... becuase I am.

I think the arguments are that a processor with very similar specifications (clock speed etc.) the G4 would be better than a G5. I'm not saying this is true or anything, but it's kind of irrelevant because the G5 is better than the G4 at the moment. Whether this is a result of the larger R & D the G5 has received in recent years or because of their different architectures is kind of a moot point.

 

[anubis]

Apple learned about 15 years ago that when it comes to computer processors, "less is more". If my memory serves me correctly (not even going to google it. going to go out on a limb here), Apple introduced its first "Power"Mac in 1992, based on the PowerPC architecture. This architecture (still found in the G5 today) is called RISC - "reduced instruction set code". A long time ago, Apple realized that if you took a computer chip and stripped it down so that it could only perform a few very basic calculations, then you could reduce its die size, power requirements, and clock speed while drastically increasing performance. Macs, and indeed all RISC-based architectures, run software that is highly optimized, coded and compiled using fewer possible types of instructions than the CISC based architectures. With a simpler, smaller instruction set, RISC processors can whip through data a lot faster than its more primative and complicated CISC counterpart (which has been around since the 70s, btw).

Think of it this way. If your G5 can only "understand" and perform 30 unique operations, it can perform more calculations per clock cycle (say 1 complete calculation in 5 cycles) compared to the P4, which can perform say 100 unique operations, but each complete calculation takes 15 cycles because the chip is larger and more complicated. That's why a 3GHz P4 runs like a piece of crap compared to a 2GHz G5.

And wouldn't you know it, Intel is finally starting to realize that, but only by accident. The Pentium M Centrino line of processors was initially designed with power conservation and small size in mind. But in the process, they found that a 1.5GHz Centrino is faster than any other 1.5GHz chip they made. That is, when they finally decided to make a chip simpler rather than more complicated (each incarnation of the Pentium line has a larger instruction set than the previous one), they found that it was actually better. That's why you hear everyone talking about how Intel is going to start pushing for the Centrino in desktops as a P4 replacement.

Now of course, this is a gross oversimplification of what is really going on. Other factors include caching, the tree structure, incorrect estimation penalty, and other nuances of modern CPU design that vary greatly between the x86 line and the PowerPC line.

Here's one last idea for you to chew on: the world's fastest supercomputer, the 70+ teraflop IBM bluegene, only runs at 700MHz.

 

[aswitcher]

It would be nice if there was some sort of website that indepdently compared G4/G5s versus pentiums for different programs etc. Good place to point wouldbeswitchers

 

[jiggie2g]

The G4 is about 1.5x faster then a P4 at same speed.

1Ghz G4 = 1.5Ghz P4 = 1.1Ghz Athlon XP
2Ghz G5 = 2.2Ghz G4 = 3Ghz P4 = 1.8Ghz Athlon 64

Thats my Formula based on all the benches i've seen.

 

[solvs]

It would be nice if there was some sort of website that indepdently compared G4/G5s versus pentiums for different programs etc.

http://www.arstechnica.com and http://www.barefeats.com are good places to start.