Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: The MHZ myth
Originally posted by markiv810
Please sir check the facts. If macs were slow when in comes to calculations and floating point operations, why they are used badly in genetics labs or physics. Talking about double floating point operations that is bullsh*t.
Why isn't double precision valid? Oh, because Athlons and Pentiums outperforms the G4s in double precision 10 to 20 times, maybe even better with HT.
You know that the G4's FPU core blows. It's based on the 60x series of the PowerPC line.
You don't think that the kind of technology were used in supercomputing, check it out
http://e-www.motorola.com/brdata/PDFDB/docs/ALTIVECFACT.pdf
I was sarcastic saying that because if you didn't notice, Intel had the MMX in the Pentium-MMX and AMD had the 3DNow! in the K6 long before Motorola with the AltiVec. Fact is, POWER4, which is supposedly a very powerful chip used in supercomputers, doesn't even have a SIMD, until the PowerPC 970 implementation of the POWER4 architecture. There are also many supercomputers with thousands of 604e processors and guess what, 604e doesn't even have a SIMD.
Also what about the pipe lines stages ??? How many 20 versus 7 ???? How about using the same old architecture for so many year, a well job done by intel.
Pipeline sizes are design decisions. Intel had to make a decision and they made a pretty damn good one. Have many pipelines, scale it way further with MHz, and HT; mix in years of experience, mistakes, and modification: you've got the Pentium 4 3.06 GHz that blows out the G4. Problem with having such a low pipeline count is that it might not be able to scale much further in a single processor configuration.
Looking at the G4, its been left behind and Motorola isn't doing much to it.
Using an old architecture is sometimes a VERY good thing. UNIX is well over 30 years old and still going strong. PowerPC has proven a disaster in the past year or two in Macs. Kinda funny that the x86 architecture was so-so until 486 where it hit the wall. But Intel remained committed, and look where it got them at. They've got the world's fastest desktop processor with awesome innovations like HyperThreading. G4 has basically been static, just clock scaling [when the hell are we ever getting the .15m, much less the .13m G4?].
If they are so slow, why the scientific department at NASA had embraced OS X and Macs, why the Biology department at Stanford have welcomed Macs in their labs, why the CIA
has adopted macs. These are people doing real work with computers where performance matters a lot.
When the hell did software come in? I thought we were talking about raw hardware.
The real question is when did they adopt the Macs? After Mac OS X? That explains why. It's Mac OS X combined with a couple of nice software.
Also Why the game called Giants iis 300 MB on PC while being 900 MB on the Mac. Wasn't it ported ??
Again, when the hell were we talking about software?
Your P4 consumes 68 W while the G4 consumes 30 W, and this is simply Intel did not do a good job by trying to maintain the same basically architecture and adding elements so much just to have the speed increase.
I don't have a Pentium 4 but an AMD Athlon XP rather. But it doesn't matter. For laptops, sure it matters. But for desktops, it doesn't really matter. It stays plugged in all the time and I have done the proper cooling measures. The Athlon is happy as ever.
I disagree that Intel didn't do a good job. If they didn't do a good job, then why the hell is the 3.06 GHz Pentium 4 the world's fastest desktop processor? We've seen one version of Altivec with Motorola. We've seen a couple versions of 3DNow!, SSE, SSE2, and soon to come SSE3. Who's innovating? Intel and AMD, not Motorola. Granted it's not Apple's fault, but it's what Apple choice.
I have not being ignorant here, but I have talked to professors and developpers, it's simply true that apps are written for the PC market and then ported on the macs, and macs are faster than pc when it comes to calculations, you can really check it out for yourself, from real people doing real work, not from some geeks who do not know **** and thinking that they know better
AGAIN, when did SOFTWARE come in the equation? This thread is a hardware thread.
PowerPCs are faster than PC processors when it comes to calculations per MHz for MHz, but since Intel and AMD are so way ahead of PowerPC G4. And yes, I've checked it out myself. Have you even bothered to check out that double precision thing I mentioned earlier? Run it and check out other peep's statistics. You'll see the PowerPC G4 blows there.
And why, thank you, for that personal attack! I'm truly enlighted by that. I'm a developer doing web stuff using a various of technologies--PHP, ASP, .NET, etc. That isn't work, eh?
