To Ffakr
Quotes are getting long, I'm skipping them and going to the point instead.
1) I'm not asking for either 1.7+ GHZ Pentium M's or PPC970FX at 2.0 GHZ, i'm simply constructing a situation where Pendium M, a chip we know by intel marketing that should be a low power chip, isn't.
Also, spotlight that uses the power of a nightlight is oversimplifying my statements. A correct analogy would be a desklamp that uses the power of a nightlight, or a flashlight that uses the power of an LED, both of which are now possible thanks to LED (which by the way, was held back by massive marketing funds poured into the old fashions of lighting, and is only now seeing light, i bought my first LED flashlight on Ebay 4.5 years back).
2) By PURE floating point unit (FPU) comparison. For a glimpse of what i said here, refer to
http://arstechnica.com/cpu/01q4/p4andg4e2/p4andg4e2-3.html
Understand that by design, the G4, and G4e were never meant to crunch floating points.
If you quote me numbers on crunching filters in Photoshop, please stop. Even adobe is sick of apple's distortion field and I believe back a while there was a link on this very website that shows adobe pointint out that a 3.0 Ghz P4 with hyperthreading is faster than a dual 1.42 MDD.
However, marketing arguments aside, the numbers posted at SPEC.org and the following tests using photoshop
http://www.digitalvideoediting.com/2002/07_jul/features/cw_macvspc2.htm
both support my theory that the G4 is overhyped and underperforming.
3) But of course Apple would have significant inputs to the G4 design. After all, Apple is the Second biggest purchaser of these processors in volume. You'd think if apple had significant inputs actively and proactively (telling them what to do, and moto would oversee what might be needed and modify the cpu design), then the biggest buyer must have had even bigger inputs. If you go to moto's website, you'll see that these processors are shown and listed
http://e-www.motorola.com/webapp/sps/site/taxonomy.jsp?nodeId=03C1TR04670871
is described by the manufacturor to be embedded use. Just look at the fact that Moto is in no way appears to be pressured by Apple when apple demanded faster clock speeds shows that they are happy with the processor because it is selling well to the primary customer - Cisco and subsidiaries.
If the manufacture of these CPU's categorize them as embedded, then I guess whether they intended to or not design this for embedded, it is by definition an embedded, this, of course, offers indirect evidence of what i said about these processors are designed for. Either way, the means aside, the ends are the same.
You mention of the fact you are able to play games with your system. But of course! Only that games run the way they are on newer systems to stimulate the hardware industry. Now, I don't support that bit, I don't think the market should be a closed loop system where purchasing something should entice you to purchase another object in a closed-loop fashion, it almost sounds like scam. There is no reason why new games can't be optimized to run as good as the previous gen, at the same time offer new things. But getting back to the point, a G5 1.6 Ghz with a ATI Radeon 9600 pro can only struggle out 20+ fps in UT2004 (i guess this would be a hardcore game, so this doesn't go toward your statement, i'm just making mention of this anyway) at ANY reasonable resolution and settings. This is because the frame rate is limited by the CPU, not the GPU. The CPU on this particular mac has to process all game AI, network, AND mix sound streams. Translation, this particular Mac lacks hardware ethernet and hardware sound. This has been the case for as long as I looked at the problem and is continuing.
I agree with you that your 800+ Mhz processor is fast enough to deal with most situations. What would be even better is if you had a 1.6 Ghz, then have some kind of speed-step (my fav) technology on it, so you can run it at 500 mhz for DVD's, or 1.6 for encoding, or 100 mhz to leave the computer on over night to download something, there is no reason either why that should not happen. I was happy with my previous pIII laptop that had this feature, you could program it to run at any frequency and bus frequency (almost any), and shut down parts of the CPU when not in use (optimizations, mostly). I guess its because most northamericans are wasteful, so the similar situation happens in cars as well. We all know the in new cars the cylinders fire using computer programmed timed-detonation. With a simple programming, you can set up so that you V8 skips injection and detonation of every second cylinder, hence effectively a V4, or better yet, you can go further, and bring it down to a V2. You won't haul with that, but in idle, who needs all 8 to be firing ? In everyday city driving, on average, firing 6 to 5 cylinders is sufficient, this brings down gas consumption and emissions, and it requireds very very minimal change to the current engines, but like i said earlier, the corporate air-heads would make you believe this CAn't be done through their awesome power of the marketing. We all know the vehicle industry doesn't try to improve anything unless a huge demand is on them, just go read
http://journeytoforever.org/biodiesel_404.html and Ralph Nader's book from the 1970's i believe called "Unsafe At Any Speed" and know that the president of GM at the time had to publicly apologize to Nader for harassing him and spreading untrue rumours...
4) My performance measure is something that will run everything I run now. My REAL performance measure is having a new generation of chip that performs better than previous at the same clock speed AND consumes less power. That would be a win-win situation.
5) I personally don't find earlier durons to consume much power, they were quite a bit better, I haven't used a duron since then.
6) Corporate cross-licensing is possible. Costing a bit more is nothing compared to the devastation of the environment. Can 500 dollars U.S. buy you back the rain forest ? Can your precious money buy you clean oceans ? This just goes to show the typical ignoranc attitude among our communities. And being part of the corporate externalizing, money rolling machine, the corporate goons have one real reason for anything they refuse to do - it will cost them some money. How much more can such chips be ? Manufacturing processes have matured since the first days of CPU's and bigger wafers reduced the cost per chip, and yet, these CPU's still cost anywhere in the few hundreds in the retail markets. Where did all the money saved go ? Obviously it went to profit instead of seeing the light of the day with the customers. Just look at the CD situation, cd's used to cost a bit to produce, but now they literally costs pennies a CD to be printed, and still, they prices are same as years ago, hovering around 20 dolllars a CD. The actual manufacturing price of a chip with multiple advanced technologies isn't expensive, it's just that when you add margins like the backfat of a pig, any lean meat is turned into bacon.
