On Mon, 30 Dec 2002 Jimen Ching <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: | Date: Sun, 29 Dec 2002 18:32:20 -1000 (HST) | From: Jimen Ching <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> | Subject: Re: [luau] Re: PPC vs. X86 | ... | You must mean the benchmarks found here: | | http://www.azillionmonkeys.com/qed/apple.html
Actually, the article I read is linked off of the site you listed (thanks for the tip): http://www.digitalvideoediting.com/2002/11_nov/reviews/cw_macvspciii.htm It's a digital video editing site that pitted a dual 1.25GHz PPC against a 3GHz P4 single-CPU system. The tests are not comprehensive, but specific to the multimedia tasks of compression/decompression, encoding/decoding, compositing, filters, etc. To be sure, there are probably some other architectural issues that impact the results, but these are processor intensive tasks. | ... | Can you elaborate on your experience? The problem with personal | experience is that everyone has their own. So one has to understand how | similar the usage patterns are before making conclusions about | experience. I can't tell you much more than I have. Don't get me wrong: I think the PPC is a great architecture, and definitely superior to the P4 architecture. For a laptop, it made sense. If you have to run Mac software it makes sense. If you need a Mac desktop it makes sense. I just don't think it makes sense if you want to run Linux (desktop or server) and get the best performance, price and flexibility. The P4 and AMD chips are better in this regard on all counts. I have to say that, like Warren, I'm very excited to see Opteron and Athlon 64 coming along. AMD had a great ride with the Athlons and if they play their cards right again Intel will have a real competitor. >From what I've read they gambled a little too heavily on the IA-64 and it is not selling well or meeting expectations. It also might be a great architecture, but the market seems to perfer evolution over revolution when it comes to changing computer architecture. --E -- Eric Jeschke http://cs.uhh.hawaii.edu/~jeschke