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Intel Mac Performance Behind Hype
Barry Norton writes "Steve Jobs, at the MacWorld tradeshow, boasted: 'the new iMac [with] Intel processor is two to three times faster than the iMac G5.' MacWorld (the publication) has been putting the iMacs through their paces. The results are a good deal less impressive than Steve's boast, showing an average performance increase of 10 to 25 per cent while performing a series of everyday tasks with software specially designed for the new systems." Ars Technica had another perspective on the new systems earlier this week.
Since when? I have never known Steve Jobs to overhype Apple products with fictitious performance claims and grand statements like "Super Computer for your Desktop".
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
No, no it does not. Steve Jobs was very specific about 2-3 times faster being for the specINT benchmark. Ignoring that and talking focusing on the 2-3 times claim is dishonest, plain and simple. Sure, the 2-3 times faster marketing claim is equally dishonest... I'm sure we'll get Apple to stop that kind of marketing when everyone else in the world does the same. Duh.
This article is not only a dupe, it's a dupe of a troll. It's not news, it doesn't matter, and repeatedly seeing such crap really, really has me ( a VERY avid and longtime slashdot reader ) seriously considering not reading slashdot.
I mean, really, if I have to sort through repeated, lame, uninformative news stories, I can scan Yahoo news, Digg, or any other number of sources. Articles like this are just here to stoke the fires of people who know they're crap. I can only assume the reason we're seeing this article is that the last one on the same subject generated a large number of posts... most of them saying the article is crap.
Slashdot's value lies in interesting tech stories not covered everywhere else, with the number of stories being filtered and small, along with insightful commentary by informed readers. I didn't mind too much the first iteration of this story, but the dupe is just so much trolling for pageviews. Really, it may be time for slashdot to consider some sort of article-moderation. Or maybe we should all start voting ourselves, with lots of "Mod Article Down" posts on crap articles like this. Heck, I might just start doing it myself... my Excellent karma is likely to die, but like I care anymore...
How is this misleading when the purpose is to compare the single proc g4 powerbook or the single proc g5 imac to the new intel counterparts with the 2 cores?
He is comparing the spec power of the system he is selling to the user, or, even looking at just the chip level, he is comparing the two chips they have, one just happens to have 2 cores.
He wants to re-asure the Apple community that the switch to the new processor makes sense.
Now what I want to see is how he justifies people switching from the dual core dual proc g5 towers.
-I just work here... how am I supposed to know?
From the keynote:
"Now everything's not going to run 2-3X. You know the disks aren't 2-3X faster, etc., but on the most important benchmarks, 2 to 3 times faster." -- Steve Jobs
Oh, sorry, you were using your post to bitch about a bunch of other off-topic Apple things that didn't have to do with the discussion while praising your expensive nuclear laptop with the 1 hour battery life. My bad.
"Sufferin' succotash."
But the point is that they haven't...
32-bit drivers for a lot of older hardware were provided by microsoft and not the individual vendors in any case
With the exception of standard and universal drivers like ATAPI and SVGA, most drivers WERE supplied by vendors, not Microsoft.
By contrast, the sourcecode for these drivers is available for linux
This is true, but on a more limited scale than what people relize. Not all vendors provide the source for drivers, and many of the drivers are user created versions that A) Are not 100% compliant with the hardware B) Don't support all the features of the hardware.
So sure, you can say there are more 64bit drivers, but just like with my Epson example, I could say by using the ESC/2 drier variant, that I support all the epson printers. This does not mean I can use the CD printing features, the higher resolutions, or many of the other advanced features. (This is just an example, not a basis for argument.)
So in order to run 64bit windows on my existing AMD64 machine, i need a new nic, new videocard, and new soundcard...
Actually, NO... As you said the drivers that were SUPPLIED to Microsoft, even if they didn't write them, have been ported to 64bit versions. WindowsXP 64bit STILL supports MORE hardware than any 64bit Linux. PERIOD.
In fact, it supports more drivers than any 32bit Linux even.
So your argument has basis, it is just not refelected in reality.
And also BTW, when people in the Windows world DON'T have a 64bit driver for some strange piece of hardware, what do you think they do? They create their own, just like people in the Linux world do... When it comes down to it, there is no difference,
Windows users are NOT any more reliant on vendors than Linux users. Unless you have an inside track of vendors releasing driver source code to Linux users that Windows users can't see... And this doesn't happen.
Even when vendors release source for their drivers, Windows developers can grab the source and create a driver just as fast as a Linux user. PERIOD.
Not to mention the fact that i need to get a floppy drive so i can load SATA drivers to even install windows...
32bit windows won't install without a floppy drive either, but that's another matter, and it does support all my other hardware.
Actually, like many *nixes where you also encounter this problem, you can put the drivers on a CD, USB drive, Network Boot Share, etc... PS This would not be an issue for WindowsXP except it was released in 2001, that predates pretty much ALL SATA devices. Get it?