Analysis: x86 Vs PPC

Gentu writes "Nicholas Blachford (engineer of the PPC-based PEGASOS Platform) wrote a long and detailed article, comparing the PPC and the x86 architectures on a number of levels: performance, Vector processing and Power Consumption differences, architectural differences, RISC Vs CISC and more. The article is up-to-date and so it takes the G5 into account too."

Comments

Hackers

[Anonymous Coward]

RISC is going to change *everything*
<z3r0-c00l> Yeah, RISC is good

Now you can be as smart as they were almost a decade ago.

Re:PPC comes out on top!

[Alrescha]

"UNIX technology was created for the x86 architecture"

In other news, it has been discovered that the current crop of teenagers has invented sex.

A.

dang, somebody better tell intel

[cheezus]

um.... the PDP-11 was an x86?

Law of diminishing returns

[Anonymous Coward]

The Law of diminishing returns is not exactly a new phenomenon, it was originally noticed in parallel computers by IBM engineer Gene Amdahl, one of creators of the IBM System 360 Architecture.

As opposed to economists, thousands of years ago.

Re:These arguments are so tired

[ctr2sprt]

only relatively few well-heeled, game-addicted geeks are going to jump on the PPC just because it's a fews ticks faster this week

Believe me, no hard-core gamers are going to "jump on the PPC" this week or any other week. They wouldn't even consider switching until they had good reason to believe that all future games were going to have full-featured Mac versions released at the same time as other versions. I think it's very unlikely this is going to happen.

No, what this really does is give occasional gamers something to brag about to their friends with PCs. While the aforementioned friend is playing, say, Half-Life 2 and the Mac guy is burning with envy, the Mac guy can at least say "Well, my computer's faster on these benchmarks!"

Re:how long can x86 go?

[Blob Pet]

Which dies first, BSD or x86?