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What? No more mhz myth?

I

Ikstej24

macrumors regular
Original poster
Dec 11, 2004
164
0
ATLANTA, GA
This article explains my feelings perfectly about this switch from PowerPC to Intel. I have been using Macs since the black and white classics. One of the most important things to me was that it wasn't one of those intels. Does this mean that all of that bashing they did about mhz myth and piplines is no longer how they feel?

http://arstechnica.com/columns/mac/mac-20050607.ars/1
 
Yep, all of that is gone. There will never be Mac v. PC discussion on hardware anymore, because it won't matter. It will all be about the OS and that is it.

This is a good thing because no one can ever say a Mac is slower then a PC again. It will be more of a challenge to market however since you can't say one machine is faster then the other when they are the same thing.

I wonder if the awesome FSB speeds on the G5 will go down after this? Is Intel running 1/2 proc. clock speed FSB on their systems now?
 
Ikstej24 said:
Does this mean that all of that bashing they did about mhz myth and pipelines is no longer how they feel?
Click to expand...

Their claim is still true - higher clock speed does not directly mean higher performance. Opterons still run at lower clocks than intels, but generally win in benchmarks. It doesn't mean they were lying to you, it just means that eventually the economy of scale won out and now, even though PPC may be more 'ideologically correct' it is just not going to increase in speed as quickly as intel chips. Intel mobile chips (which happen to run at a much lower clock speed than P4s and beat them clock for clock) also happen to kick ass on pretty much every other mobile processor.

Apple never claimed that higher clock speeds mean lower performance either, just that it wasn't a direct correlation (which it is not).

If IBM just can't crank out faster chips, then it really doesn't matter if PPC is more 'correct', they will be slower. End of story. Old PPC chips from 1995 suck by todays standards, it doesn't matter how 'perfect' their design is.

No one has been lying to you, but this is technology - things change. Suck it up.
 
Maybe I used the wrong words. What I am hoping for is that they do not move to the P4. Then I would feel lied to. If they go to a 64 bit dual core then I have no problem. It is just all the comparisons to the P4 that have been going on in the past, now to change to it would not make any sense.
 
Ikstej24 said:
Maybe I used the wrong words. What I am hoping for is that they do not move to the P4. Then I would feel lied to. If they go to a 64 bit dual core then I have no problem. It is just all the comparisons to the P4 that have been going on in the past, now to change to it would not make any sense.
Click to expand...

Fair enough - I honestly doubt that they will move their pro line desktops to the vanilla P4. It will probably be some new chip we don't know about, or some Xeon or itanium. Almost certainly it will be 64 bit and either dual core or dual cpu, or both.

....but even if it was a P4 - the P4 in mid 2006 (if there is one) is going to kill current consumer CPUs. It is worthless to look at benchmarks of the the P4s out now and worry about them not being as fast. Apple won't be using today's P4s. They will probably use the fastest CPU intel has available at that time. I don't think the P4 can even run in a dual CPU system (non Xeon P4s anyway, but I may be wrong) so I really doubt that is what we will see.

Here's what I see (and hope for) in 2006:
Powermacs end up getting some faster G5, probably something at 3.2 similar to the xBox360 or whatever - just a faster G5.
Imacs may go the same way, or may possibly get a mobile Intel (depending on if they can deal with the hear).
Powerbooks, iBooks and Man Minis will all go mobile Intel - and THANK GOD. I have a 1.67 Ghz powerbook and it is slow as a dog. I love that dog, but man is it slow. ...and if anyone is going to respond with "What tasks is it slow for?" I will give you a detailed list, that will include such simple items as 'Running flash animations in firefox while trying to compile code' and if you respond with "you shouldn't be doing that" then I will say - "Why not, I can do that on every other computer I own. Don't tell me how to use my computer because it is just an excuse for them being so damn slow".

Sorry - I'm a little touchy about that ;)
 
Well, I think this is being misinterpreted.

The Megahertz Myth existed and it still exists (a 1.8GHz PowerPC is as fast as a 3.6GHz Pentium).

They are getting rid of the PowerPC because of the Megahertz Myth.

But, Apple just won't have to battle the MHz Myth anymore.
 
I saw on Intels website that they are doing dual dual core P4's but I would much rather have the Xeon. It seems to relate more to what Apple is about (not pure mhz but performance). It will be interesting to see what happens, but part of what I liked the most about macs was the different technologies.
 
mac-er said:
They are getting rid of the PowerPC because of the Megahertz Myth.
Click to expand...

I don't agree - I think they are getting rid of PPC because no one can supply them with reasonable mobile chips using PPC.
 
Ikstej24 said:
I saw on Intels website that they are doing dual dual core P4's but I would much rather have the Xeon. It seems to relate more to what Apple is about (not pure mhz but performance). It will be interesting to see what happens, but part of what I liked the most about macs was the different technologies.
Click to expand...

I hear ya, but I think you'll end up being happier if you just use the computer and judge it based on how it works, not what technologies are being used to do it. To me, that is the Apple experience.

...but again, I hear ya.
 
Ikstej24 said:
Does this mean that all of that bashing they did about mhz myth and piplines is no longer how they feel?

http://arstechnica.com/columns/mac/mac-20050607.ars/1
Click to expand...

Again, again, again. A lot of people seem to have missed Intel's changed philosophy. Have you noticed how hard it is to find the clock speed on new intel based systems? Intel finally admitted to the MHz myth themselves. They're no longer pushing raw clock speed, but looking at architectural performance. That's why the P4 line appears to be dead-ending and they're pushing forward on the P-M (really a redesigned P3) line. To do that they've completely de-emphasized clockspeed on their own lines, because their own marketing was too effective at pushing Mhz.

But again, why do you care what the engine is? The user experience for a Mac running all x86 code on an x86 processor will be no different from the user experience of a Mac running all ppc code on a ppc processor.

Do you really want Apple to fall further behind on speed and power usage (because if you compare the raw numbers of a top of the line centrino notebook to a top of the line PowerBook you'll see the difference is staggering) so that you can feel elite because its a PowerPC? If so, why?
 
stcanard said:
Do you really want Apple to fall further behind on speed and power usage (because if you compare the raw numbers of a top of the line centrino notebook to a top of the line PowerBook you'll see the difference is staggering) so that you can feel elite because its a PowerPC? If so, why?
Click to expand...


Personally I like what the PowerPC offers. I just wish they would have gotten the heat and power consumption down, and they might have. We really don't know what happened between Apple and IBM. That article brought up some thoughts that I had been having.
 
stcanard said:
But again, why do you care what the engine is? The user experience for a Mac running all x86 code on an x86 processor will be no different from the user experience of a Mac running all ppc code on a ppc processor.
Click to expand...

Here here! Now we just have to convince everyone else ;)

I'm almost of the opinion that the mobile Intels are so much faster than the G4s in the powerbook that many of my applications would run faster even if I had to use rosetta for everything. I've read numbers (from Transitive, no link - sorry, too lazy. I may be wrong.) that the performance hit is ~ 70-80%, and the mobile intels are probably double the G4s in the PBs - so bring it on.

I'm upset they didn't just have some products with intel chips in them to offer us now! Heck, many of the people buying iBooks out there probably never use anything other than iLife and OS X anyway, so they'd be laughing.
 
To quote from the article

Finally, it looks like Intel has learned from its mistake and secretly prepping a surprise for the rest of the industry. According to the information we received, Intel is currently working on a desktop, dual-core Dothan microprocessor with SSE3 instruction set that Intel plans to launch sometime in the future. Whether the launch will take place this year or in 2006 is currently unknown.
Click to expand...

Maybe these chips will make it into the first Macintels?

http://www.cooltechzone.com/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=1375
 
mac-er said:
They are getting rid of the PowerPC because of the Megahertz Myth.
Click to expand...

I don't think so. Watch the keynote. It's pretty clear why Apple has switched.
 
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