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Meet Max, the G4 PowerPC processor
Arto Stimms sent us
a rather nice
compilation of facts and tidbits about the G4 processor,
aka Max. Main features:
Altivec, MERSI SMP, 2Mb L2, and a 128 bit
data path running at 100Mhz. At 1.8 Volts, a 400Mhz G4 will
only consume 8 Watts.
I just built my new box in December, Its a AMD K-6.2 350, with the 100mhz bus, 4.3 Gig Ultra IDE HD, STB velocity 128 8meg agp, Voodoo2 car, 64 megs of ram, Sound Blaster AWE 64, NE2000 KTI pci network car, 56k Modem, 32x CDROM,floppy and full tower case for under 1000. (All parts where wholesale.) Add my monitor to that and it cost the same as my best friends new IMac. Even he agrees that my system is a hell of alot faster and the graphics look better then his Imac and all for the same price.
Macs are great people, their hardware kicks ass, its just way to expensive and after you run BE and MacOS you will see a diffrence. It like watching Windows compaired to Linux on a x86 machine. MacOS either dosen't take full advantage of the hardware or just isn't optmized as well.
If macs ever get comparable to x86 prices and I can build my own I will and I'll run BE and Linux, but right now I don't have that kind of money to waste.
Unless your a insane speed demon you don't need a 4,000 to 5,000 dollar G4 laptop. Yes x86 laptops run hot as hell so thats why you sould by a strong arm laptop, a AMD laptop or for 5,000 dollars you might as well just by a Net Winde, a Flat Color LCD monitor and hook it up to a small recharagable battery pack. That would probably only cost you around $3,000. I can't think of any practicle reason for having that much power in a laptop and spending that much money on it.
Sure Apple's processors err IBM and Motorola's process are better then x86's but price/preformance ratio they don't even come close.
1)Most of the posts here seem to be addressing which chip is "fastest." We've got people calling x86 CISC outdated (probably), and saying that G3s'4s are faster because they are RISCian. These arguments just don't hold up. Why? Because the G3/4 design is RISCian, but the instruction set is not. The same holds true with x86, be it Intel or AMD. Check out this article at Ars-Technica for greater explanation of RISC vs. CISC.
2)It's not just about the speed!!! If it was, why not argue that someone buy and SGI MIPS box and get all the great FPU performance? Because it costs too much. Sure, at clock speed, the G3/4 kicks x86 (at least integer wise, not sure about fpu). AMD and Cyrix also beat Intel at clock speed. But Intel just ups MHz. Now, the G3/4, probably not only beat Intel chips at clock speed, but at one or two higher clock speeds as well. Here's the thing: you can still get a faster x86 system for much cheaper (note: since we're just talking about speed here, we don't care about friendliness. That's the usual explanation for Mac prices, that you pay for the easiness and friendliness of the system). In october, I put together a Dual P2-350 system, with UW SCSI card, and UW SCSI hard drive, and 64 MB RAM, Matrox G200 vidcard, SB AWE 64, PCI ethernet, and a 12x SCSI cdrom, for $1000. No monitor. But with a monitor, that would have cost the same as an iMac. And there's just no way that the 233 MHz G3 running on a 66MHz bus was gonna beat that system.
So, when the K7, G4, and P3 are all out later this year, if I (a power user), feel like upgrading for more speed, it will most likely be to another x86 chip because speed/$ is much greater.
NOTE: I'm no x86 fanatic (I'm the guy who posted about cheap alphas yesterday), and this discussion does not apply to normal computer users, because to them speed is not all that is important, and they don't understand what makes a computer fast. Fast is not what sells, marketing and gimmicks sell.
He said, "You'll be able to tell your grandchildren that you helped assemble the first NT supercomputer," and I cringed.