speed machines

[maelstromr]

Can someone give me a fairly basic and jargon-less explaination of the difference (in magnitude) between the speeds of a G4 800mhz, dual 800mhz, 933mhz and dual 1 gig (old model)? Also, how close does the powerbook G4 800 and 667 come to these? Of course I recognize that their are improvements as you move up, but I was wondering what the REAL and NOTICEABLE difference was and what the opinions and experience of this forum had been.

Thanks in advance.

Seth

 

[firewire2001]

Re: speed machines

Originally posted by maelstromr
Can someone give me a fairly basic and jargon-less explaination of the difference (in magnitude) between the speeds of a G4 800mhz, dual 800mhz, 933mhz and dual 1 gig (old model)? Also, how close does the powerbook G4 800 and 667 come to these? Of course I recognize that their are improvements as you move up, but I was wondering what the REAL and NOTICEABLE difference was and what the opinions and experience of this forum had been.

Thanks in advance.

Seth

btw: sp = single processor; mp = multi processor

well.. if you were to compare an 800mhz SP to an 800 mhz MP in doing stuff like ms-word, you would see little or no difference at all because it only takes advantage of one processor.. rather if you were comparing them with stuff like photoshop tests, the difference would be dramatic since it uses both processors...

i explain a lot of this in anotehr post which may be useful to you..

so apps take up a certain amount of cpu time based on the how complicated the task is. lets say that you are running serveral intense program that require more resources than what is available on one processor -- then the porgrams have to cycle the processor -- they take turns at using the processor for some amount of time, which makes the syustem run quite slowly. However with a second processor, you can cut down on this "cycling" process by just doing that extra work on the second processor, saving precous cpu time.

however, apps that take advantage of both cpus can do the same amount of work in half the time because it can split apart one job so that both prcessors can process it -- as opposed to puttiung the entire job on one cpu and haveing to wait for the current calculation to finish until the next one can start, while two calculations can be going on at the same time on both processors, instead.

-f

 

[mc68k]

Re: speed machines

Originally posted by maelstromr
Also, how close does the powerbook G4 800 and 667 come to these?

The only major differences are video and HD. The hardrive and video will be slower. The rest of the portable is pretty much on par w/the desktop, just no high-power-consumption components.