2 responses to “Dogs and cats living together”

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  Justin Scott June 6th, 2005 at 12:43

  I thought the very same thing when I read that last night. Did’nt motorola make chips for apple once before? I thought that Apple was threatening to switch to either IBM or AMD back then, wonder why they chose Intel over AMD only like 3 or fours years later, it was not even on the able back then, in fact they always ranted on the Intel chip and its inability to have multiple streams… haha, those were the days…

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  Raist3d June 6th, 2005 at 19:23

  I think that for a *very* long time Apple has been lying (yes LYING) so much about the performance of the PowerPC processors over Intel’s that the whole thing isn’t that suprising to me at all.
  While I believe the G5 did a lot of catch up, from what I have seen in real world apps, it trails on average over Intel, let alone AMD.
  A good example from the early days Steve Jobs took over Apple back: “The PowerPC processor is twice as fast.” Of course, to make this claim, what Apple did was to use the ByteMark which by then was considered an obsolete benchmark, taking one aspect of the benchmark only- adding to integer numbers over and over again – and say that because on this test the PowerPC did twice as fast, the Power PC chips were twice as fast.
  Of course, this sounds good except that this is hardly a real world scenario. If we were going by that, then Intel chips would be 3.0x times as fast at least, because with the Katmai (SSE1) instruction set the cpu could be a speed demon. Again, hardly a true real world test case.
  With the G4 there was a point that the macs performance wise because so outdated that it wasn’t even funny. Even classic “altivec friendly apps” like photoshop and whatever it is Adobe has for editing video fell way way behind compared to an Intel PC (and again, let alone AMD).
  With the Dual G5 2.5Ghz I thought Apple at least caught up since the G5 architecture Mhz per Mhz is more efficient than the Pentium 4, and you had two of those processors. But apparently even now they are falling behind again.
  Apple touts AGP 8x and PC’s already have PCI_e in their subsystems – as an example. Oh, and powerbooks simply can’t deal vs the latest on laptop PC’s- though they caught up in features for the price in my book.
  So I really think what is going to happen is Macs are going to be faster. I am already reading apparently Intel’s roadmap for 2006 looks really good as they have had some re-working to be more competitive with AMD.
  I would definitively have liked to see Apple using AMD though, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they mixed & matched just like they do now with ATI & Nvidia.