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Comparing desktop vs. laptop speeds

post #1 of 12
3/8/02 at 10:22am
Thread Starter 
Assuming the same bus speed, and MHz, is it fair to say that a G4 chips for a laptop are slower than those for a desktop tower?
And why?

I've been considering the Powerbook 667 a 733 Tower and the 700/800 iMac?
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post #2 of 12
3/8/02 at 11:26am
If a laptop and a desktop both have an 800 MHz G4 processor, a 100 MHz Bus and 512 MB of RAM, why would one be slower than the other?

(I'm not an expert, so I don't really no anything. Just seems logical to me...)
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post #3 of 12
3/8/02 at 11:35am
The laptop will appear (and be) slower in some tasks, CPU and memory and bus being equal, because the video accelerator is weaker and the hard drive and optical drive are slower.

Depending on what you hope to be doing with the machine, that's a perfectly reasonable tradeoff to gain portability.
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post #4 of 12
3/8/02 at 11:38am
Thread Starter 
I just assumed that laptops used a different varient of G4chips that needed to be cooler and hence less powerful.

But yeah, I know it sounds logical that same specs should mean same speed.
Somehow I remember some of the G3 iMacs were faster than equivalent G3 iBooks.
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post #5 of 12
3/8/02 at 11:46am
[quote]Originally posted by MacAgent:
<strong>If a laptop and a desktop both have an 800 MHz G4 processor, a 100 MHz Bus and 512 MB of RAM, why would one be slower than the other?

(I'm not an expert, so I don't really no anything. Just seems logical to me...)</strong><hr></blockquote>

Hard drive speed.
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post #6 of 12
3/8/02 at 12:42pm
The weakest point of a laptop is the HD, the second point is the graphic chipset. The third point is the lack of L3cache (but there is no L3 cache in the LCD i mac or powermac G4 800.
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post #7 of 12
3/8/02 at 12:43pm
Yes, hard drive speed and graphics, but I was considering actual processing power, not overall speed.
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post #8 of 12
3/8/02 at 12:56pm
[quote]Originally posted by MacAgent:
<strong>Yes, hard drive speed and graphics, but I was considering actual processing power, not overall speed.</strong><hr></blockquote>

In that case the speed will be exactly equal. I think the confusion (not you) came from the fact that in the X86 world the chips designed for laptop and deskstop have a slighty different design (for example the pentium 4 M is slower than is desktop counterpart).
But in the Apple world the two chips are the same, Apple just use the latest generation of chips in their laptop in order to have the less watt consomption.

[ 03-08-2002: Message edited by: powerdoc ]</p>
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post #9 of 12
3/8/02 at 1:12pm
Thread Starter 
[quote]Originally posted by powerdoc:
<strong>But in the Apple world the two chips are the same, Apple just use the latest generation of chips in their laptop in order to have the less watt consomption.
]</strong><hr></blockquote>

So the new speed bumped 800mHz G4 Powerbook at MWTokyo, should be roughly the same speed as the 800 G4 Tower (less HD speed)?
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post #10 of 12
3/8/02 at 1:27pm
Not so sure about that. The PowerBooks use a PPC7440 chip, and the 800MHz tower has a PPC7450. The higher clocked towers have a PPC7455 chip.

Basically the 7440 is a 7450 sans the L3.
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post #11 of 12
3/8/02 at 1:40pm
Wrong,Wrong,Wrong!!!

To edit in RealTime in Final Cut Pro, you need a desktop with 500 MHZ, or a Labtop with 667 MHZ.
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post #12 of 12
3/8/02 at 2:47pm
I recently saw a rating of all available macs on some benchmark suite and hands on test. No available Powerbook could outrun even a 450 Mhz G4. The 677PB was just a couple of points ahead of the 450PM, and the 466PM was faster (barely)than every available PB config.

667PB ~= 466PM

Good. But not great. This should partially explain OSX's slight sluggishness on the Books. Mind you, those were all the standard RAM configs when 256 was standard. A gig of RAM might have a more dramatic effect on a laptop than a desktop, as the laptops have much slower HDD performance (even the 5400rpm laptop drives have less real throughput, slower access, seek, read and write times than a same speed desktop drive)
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