The Ghz Gap
My fellow Mac users, I was just emailing a friend who is also a Mac user, and we were talking about how we wish there was a true benchmark for comparing the fastest Mac (a dual G4 1.25 Ghz Tower) to the fastest Pentium 4 PC instead of those cheesy and most likely rigged Photoshop tests when we both realized that we didn't know what Ghz the fastest P4 computer is. So I went over to the Dell web site, and sweet mother of g-d! You can get a 2.8 Ghz Pentium 4 processor! Megahertz Myth or not, that means that there is a 1.75 Ghz difference between the fastest P4 vs. the G4! How the heck is Motorola/Apple/IBM supposed to catch up with that?
Comments
i am a pc user
sluggish at times vs my amd 1.2ghz
where apple should really concentrate is making
the leap to 64 bit & then take it from there
my little sun u10 is only a 450mhz but it beats
the pants off the ppc & the x86...64bit cpu
pci bus & reg sdram...so its the chip that has the
edge there
frankly the 1.2ghz x86 does everything so speed
doesnt really matter..(heavy compiles, 10gb oracle db etc etc)
the ppc side could use a speed boost & faster ram
ddr across the board.
i suspect as the 10.x series gets optimized it
will be faster...10.2 is a step in the right direction
my 2c
There's also the issue of User Experience. Some people would still take a Mac over a PC even if the "clock speed" is a third of said PC. Why? Because the Mac "feels" better. My work typically goes faster on my Mac than on my PC not because of any different processor speeds, but because my work flow is so much quicker in Mac OS X. I work more efficiently.
Also, you do realize that AMD processors "suffer" from the same MHz Myth, performing just as well as Intel chips do at hundred MHz higher speeds, right? That's the whole reason for AMD's XP some-number+ naming scheme, IIRC.
/me hopes Kestral didn't indent this as flamebait. <img src="graemlins/hmmm.gif" border="0" alt="[Hmmm]" />
I *really* suggest you go and TRY one of the dual 1.25 GHz PowerMacs before you start 'dissing' them. You might find them surprisingly... Snappy?.
- plink plink -
[ 09-04-2002: Message edited by: Brad ]</p>
If Computer A is 10 seconds faster than Computer B for a given task.
Yet Computer A takes the operatator 15 seconds to start the task beyond what the operator of Computer B can do . Which computer is actually faster?
I contend that the weakest link in computers is the person running it. That's the slowest piece.
Apple needs to focus on the Workflow of computing and leave the megahertz wars to someone else.
I value accomplishing my work quickly without risking carpal tunnel drowning in an endless sea of mouseclicks.
<strong>I think the GigaHertz gap will die a natural death with the move to 64 bit processors. When Intel and AMD have to explain to customers how their new 64 bit processors running at lower clock speeds outperform their old 32 bit processors running at higher clock speeds, people will finally realise that clock speed isn't everything.</strong><hr></blockquote>
Intel is the only company that is going to need to come up with an explanation. AMD won't have that problem.
<strong>Apple needs to focus on the Workflow of computing and leave the megahertz wars to someone else. </strong><hr></blockquote>
Your right, I think Apple is all ready doing this if you think about it. Going from XP to OSX I feel I can accomplish stuff faster in OSX even though my processor is slower. I don't think Apple is all that worried about how fast the processor is because they keep pushing the software and making minor improvements to hardware. The hardware will get faster but I'm not worried about it I dropped the Wintel Machines like a bad habit... going from 1 ghz to 700mhz didn't phase me and I don't notice any difference. So if I don't notice a 300mhz difference doing the same stuff in OSX as I did in XP than I probaly wouldn't notice the difference between a 1.25ghz power mac and a 2ghz wintel machine.
It probably matters more to consumer who wants to do lots of little integrated things; users setting up a workstation really only need their app to boot up quick and run fast and stable, their interaction with Windows can be very minimal.
However, people with a little more versatility will probably prefer the mac's integration when it comes time to cut scenes, add effects, and integrate the score, for example, though probably doing any one of those task alone would be faster on an x86 workstation. Mixing things up makes life hairier on the PC because the weight of functional integration falls to the app/suite makers. OSX absorbs this responsibility in a much more elegant fashion for those who need to combine different areas of creation into a more complete picture.
However, even software as good as Apple's has trouble selling their current hardware, and Apple's pricing policies don't help.
I don't think we need more Megahurts per se. We just need machines that irrefutably trounce comparable wintel machines in timed tasks. People can understand the difference betweeen MHZ and actual speed when they see it repeated many times over. The problem for Macs is (at a given price) beating a PC consistently is a very selective game. If the differences were clear, MHZ wouldn't matter.
PS.
In 4-5 years time the GPU may finally let Apple off the hook for their earlier CPU allegiances. Beyond drawing pretty games (or QE's pretty desktops) a GPU may do most of the grunt work. Then as long as Apple gets the same GPU's as the other guys, the CPU differences won't mean nearly as much.
Remember Mac users are generally Windows users a well. I work all day on a PC like many other Mac fans here. This only solidifies our preference for Macs in way. I agree with you though. Users who live in apps all day basically become platform agnostic because their "platform" is Photoshop or Lightwave etc. Howerver where I always "brickwall" is in troubleshooting PCs. Just the other day I was attempting to keep some programs from Auto Starting on my PC at boot. I checked EVERY startup folder on my PC(like 6) and was miffed to find no shortcuts to the offending apps listed in any of them. Thank God for Google..because the Windows built in help failed miserably. Within a minute of my search I was in the registry and deleting the keys for the offending apps. I'm thinking "Why is it THIS difficult for a basic task?". Every second I gain via the PC's superior speed I lose 3 seconds troubleshooting some funky issue.
I think you're right about the Prices to a certain extent. It's going to be difficult to trounce PC's because Intel ain't called Chipzilla for nothing. They have the best and brightest engineers in the biz. But Apple can leverage the fact that they control the HW to a certain extent and the SW. We need to see huge levels of spit and polish. Microsoft hasn't done anything that's made me want to depend on them solely for my computing needs. I feel like my PC is under attack with Developers doing whatever they want when I install software. I hope Apple doesn't go down that road.
One of the three main reasons I have Virtual PC on my Mac is to help my Windows-using friends and colleagues through whatever may be their Problem Of The Week?. I've spent hours and days with some people trying to set up certain things or fix certain problems with Windows. I wouldn't BEGIN to be able to count all the hundreds of man hours I've spent helping people with Windows, sometimes minor issues where the UI just "didn't make sense" and sometimes with more serious issues like DLL hell and registry screw-ups.
Last year at university, I shared a dorm suite with 6 other CSC/CE/EE majors. My roommate was having some ridiculous problems with Windows and we soon discovered that some app mucked up his registry. After a couple of days of all seven of us trying to fix it, he begrudgingly uploaded all his files to my computer (his CD-R wouldn't work, that was another part of the big problem) and we reformatted the sucka' and went about reinstalling all of his software.
(okay, Kickaha, you can make some snide remark about NCSU engineering students any time now.
I should mention mention that I too use both Macs and Windows-based PCs regularly.
[ 09-05-2002: Message edited by: Brad ]</p>
But that doesn't mean we still can't have a superior OS (we certainly do at this point - on virtually every front other than depth of gaming titles (BFD)). It also doesn't mean we can't have kick-ass hardware 6 months down the road. I am pretty sure we will if Apple and IBM have been trying to work around these architectural bottlenecks we have in the current systems.
At this point, I don't even care what Windows users have / do. All I want is a kick ass OS (got it), great apps (got em) and a machine that runs all of it smoothly and reliably (even at 500MHz, got it - at dual 1.5GHz sometime next year, I'll REALLY have it).
I'm not worried about Wintel anymore. They have become irrelevant IMO.