Pitting a Mac Plus Against an AMD Dual Core

In the Age of Computer Bloat someone has decided to do a performance comparison between a 1986 Mac Plus and a 2007 AMD Dual core, each running appropriate software. Computer Bloat does not fare so well. "In order to keep the hoots and hollers of 'unfair comparison' at a minimum, we designed the tests to be as fair and equitable as possible. We focussed on running tests that reflect how the user perceives the computing experience... And no, we didn't include processing-heavy modern software like Photoshop or Crysis! We selected very basic everyday functions that were performed equally by the 1980's and the 2007 Microsoft applications."

Comments

Re:Developer motivation

[Anonymous Coward]

Modern machines do a lot of things in the background, like running full blown TCP/IP stacks, something the Mac Plus could not have done.

Oh really?

TCP/IP is not exactly a complicated set of protocols. Ancient machines can and did easily handle it.

Also

[Sycraft-fu]

It ignores other factors such as relative price. Of course the server is apparently being run on a Mac plus so I can't go back and check the article to see if they listed the specs of the current PC, but a Mac Plus cost about $2500 when it was introduced. Now, take $2500 in 1986 dollars and you get about $4500 in today's dollars. Well, $4500 buys you a shitload of computer. You can get a much better processor than they had, 4GB of RAM, a hardware RAID controller with a bunch of disks and so on. Load up something like that and see what your launch times are like. Given that the system they are using probably is less than $2000 in today's dollars, you aren't even close money wise.

However as you said, it doesn't really matter as the computers are performing on totally different levels. In every way a new system does more than a Mac Plus. Even if you dismiss the usefulness of multi-tasking and look at just the app there's huge improvements. One would be the in-line spell checker. As I'm sure this post is revealing I'm a horrible speller. However in Word it is great, it will check spelling as I go along. After a few times of correcting the same mistake, it just starts auto correcting. It gets to the point where once I've trained a copy I can type a document and it is good to go as it has fixed all the problems.

This is just another example of the great Benjamin Disraeli quote: "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics." Or in other words, you can twist around a test in almost any way you like to make it come out with a result that you want. However that doesn't mean that it has any relevance.

Re:First Post!

[the_greywolf]

Compared to an Amiga, everything is bloated and slow.

... and when do I get fast copper on my PC? Hmm?

Re:Why they didn't include linux in the tests

[morgan_greywolf]

You're talking about *rich* cut and paste. The OP was talking about cut and paste. Still works today. Highlight the text, point in the new text input area, click the middle button. Done.

Re:Developer motivation

[Anonymous Coward]

let's imagine that you can make it boot five seconds faster well that's five seconds times a million every day that's fifty lifetimes Good job Steve:

5 million seconds = 58 days, not 50 lifetimes

Re:Developer motivation

[default luser]

The launch time is a test the modern computer is guaranteed to lose. This is because the peak read rate of hard disks has only improved by 100x in the last 20 years.

Let's start with the admission that the modern OS is 15 thousand times larger (1MB versus 15GB). It's a fair assumption that most applications are at least larger by a small fraction of that - say one thousand times larger.

That old SCSI hard disk would have a peak read speed of around 1MB/s, while the best disks around today are approaching 100MB/s. That's a 100x increase in read delay speed, ignoring access time improvements.

Even if we're generous and say the application code being loaded is a slim one thousand times larger than the version on the Mac Plus, with the pitiful 100x increase in hard disk read speed, it's still going to load 10x slower.

So, why are they so close? Why is the modern system with the relatively slow hard disk so competitive?

* Fast caching architecture with prefetch (on the hard disk controller itself).
* Shared libraries are already memory-resident.
* OS attempts to preload your most-used applications into memory (new feature in Vista).

All these features are designed to get around the limitations imposed by the hard disk. Once we finally find a better solid-state solution, the modern system could potentialy blow the Mac Plus out of the water.