i can put money on it that my 933 would smoke a 300 mhz G3 in anything, including non altivec tasks. One it is a later gen chip, meaning it has more technological advances...it has an L3 cache...and none of this even mentions the fact that the mhz rating is over 300% of the 300mhz G3 (100% denoting equivalency)...if my 933 is only 273% faster than a 300 mhz...im very disappointed.
I was meaning it terms of faster. By pure clockspeed a 900Mhz CPU is 200% faster than a 300Mhz cpu assuming all factors are equal.
I'm just say they're kind of meaningless because of the fact that there's a lot of benchmarks for the audio app I use and all of them put the 933Mhz G4 and similar models at over 200% faster than my 300Mhz G3. This goes without saying, the hard drive controller is faster, the bus speed is twice as fast, the cpu has a far higher clockspeed and the PPC7455 used in the G4 has a faster, larger cache than the one in mine. Not to mention the PPC74xx has significantly faster floating point performance than the PPC750 aswell. I'm just saying that in realworld terms if a 300Mhz G3 had a score of 100%, a 933Mhz G4 would be more like 310%
The same goes for the PPC7410 vs the PPC7450, on the same motherboard a lot of tests on barefeats came out with the 733Mhz G4 barely scraping past or even being beaten by the 533MHz G4.
Here's a link to a table of results for the audio benchmark I'm refering to.
Protools LE 'Dave C Test' Results
This stresses the CPU mainly but a SCSI card that handles the throughput of the data with it's own controller chip combined with a SCSI drive adds a lot to the performance. So does lot's of RAM and extension tweaks. Seeing as protools runs under OS 9 right now the OS doesn't have much overhead on the performance but people with dual CPUs don't get any extra performance out of the second one and nothing in protools is altivec enhanced either.
The sad thing is, we've got all the cool plug-ins and nice easy midi and patchname manangement on the mac, not to mention a great OS (9) and a downright fantastic OS (OS X) but an Athlon XP 1700+ with only ATA drives and 256Mb of RAM is about 50% faster than the fastest tested mac. In this test at least, the 2Ghz+ Northwood Pentium 4s and the more recent Athlon XP 2200+ based PCs are so sickeningly fast compared with the mac it's not even funny.