Sorry I was wrong about otherwise SMART people. Even children know that MMX/Altivec were supposed to speed up DSP operations, the same operations that your sound and graphics cards run. What's next, speeding up Mathematica with your sound card? He-he.
I doubt it will speed up Mathematica in any significant way.
http://developer.intel.com/design/Xeon/devtools/
and read "Approximate Math (AM) library" entry where Intel says how wonderfully they speed up their computations up to 17 (!) times. You think they are magicians? Damn, these are not precise computations! For G4 it gets even worse -> these computations are not even IEEE-standard.
I am surprised that otherwise smart people bring up Altivec (or SSE or whatever) as if it were general instructions. Come on guys, these are not instructions you can do Mathematica with!! These are special-case very imprecise operations. Intel, Motorola and others decided to use a small part of die to speed up some multimedia computations, because graphics cards were so expensive. But now when graphics cards are vastly more powerful, that argument is gone. G4 or PIII can do 5 or 6 billions of these "operations" ("gigaflops"). Well, Geforce3 card does 100 of these "gigaflops", so what.
Come on guys, give G4 a break. x86 does not compete with Mac. Mac's share now is down to 2%, and it become a truely niche product. x86 is competing against Alpha, Sun and POWER on the high end [actually, successfully, given SPECfp2000 score of 711 for 800MHz Itanium, and SPECint2000 of 586 for 1.7GHz P4 and 539 for 1.33GHz Athlon-> the highest marks in the industry], and against themselves in the mid-range. Nowhere in these comparisons one can find a G4 - for about two years now PowerPC does not enter lists of the highest performing chips.
So you can say that Motorola is at war with x86, but x86 is not at war with Motorola.
references:
Total number of PCs sold in IQ01 - 32.5 mln.:
http://www.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB20010420S0006
Number of Macs sold in IQ01 -751,000:
http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2001/apr/18q2resul ts.html
Thus, MAC's share is 2.3%
I am surprised that otherwise smart people bring up Altivec (or SSE or whatever) as if it were general instructions. Come on guys, these are not instructions you can do Mathematica with!! These are special-case very imprecise operations. Intel, Motorola and others decided to use a small part of die to speed up some multimedia computations, because graphics cards were so expensive. But now when graphics cards are vastly more powerful, that argument is gone. G4 or PIII can do billions of these instructions ("gigaflops"). Well, Geforce3 card does 100 of these "gigaflops", so what. Real Gigaflops are measures with programs like Linpak.
People do not buy MACs because of performance - style, colors, shape. I think Jobs should stop this BS. But, on the other hand, because the MACs are 2% of the market, Intel/HP/AMD/etc do not care a bit. Wintel do not compete with Macs (maybe Apple thinks they do, but not other way around.
I would have thought that question about Motorola processors had been resolved long time ago. In fact, Motorola had dropped from all list of high-performing processors for quite a while now. Interestingly, the fastest MAC (733 MHz) is quite a bit slower than the slowest PIII [not mentioning Athlons]. Below are SPEC benchmarks taken from the SPEC and Motorola sites [I 'm going with SPEC benchmarks because these are the ONLY benchmarks made and accepted for cross-platform testing. They are developed by SPEC with participation from ALL major chip makers, inclusive Intel and Motorola].
Now, given poor scalability of the Motorola part, one can expect for it to catch up with the 733 MHz Intel processor only at 850 MHz in INT, and at 1200 MHz in FPU. Although there are some reasonable doubts that the current G4 will scale even that far. It looks like the average consumer does not believe Jobs' mantras about his "supercomputers" either, which is perfectly reflected in Mac's declininig share of the market: since glorious Steve returned to Apple, the share of Macs in the total dropped from 6% (end of 1996) to 2.3% (IQ 2001).
SPEC Benchmarks
from SPEC site
Pentium III, 733 MHz
INT - 35.7
FPU - 31.0
http://www.spec.org/osg/cpu95/results/res99q4/cpu9 5-19991108-03912.html
http://www.spec.org/osg/cpu95/results/res99q4/cpu9 5-19991108-03910.html
from Motorola site
Motorola G4, 733 MHz
INT - 32.1
FPU - 23.9
http://e-www.motorola.com/collateral/MPC7450FSR0.p df
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry I was wrong about otherwise SMART people. Even children know that MMX/Altivec were supposed to speed up DSP operations, the same operations that your sound and graphics cards run. What's next, speeding up Mathematica with your sound card? He-he.
I doubt it will speed up Mathematica in any significant way. http://developer.intel.com/design/Xeon/devtools/ and read "Approximate Math (AM) library" entry where Intel says how wonderfully they speed up their computations up to 17 (!) times. You think they are magicians? Damn, these are not precise computations! For G4 it gets even worse -> these computations are not even IEEE-standard.
I am surprised that otherwise smart people bring up Altivec (or SSE or whatever) as if it were general instructions. Come on guys, these are not instructions you can do Mathematica with!! These are special-case very imprecise operations. Intel, Motorola and others decided to use a small part of die to speed up some multimedia computations, because graphics cards were so expensive. But now when graphics cards are vastly more powerful, that argument is gone. G4 or PIII can do 5 or 6 billions of these "operations" ("gigaflops"). Well, Geforce3 card does 100 of these "gigaflops", so what.
Come on guys, give G4 a break. x86 does not compete with Mac. Mac's share now is down to 2%, and it become a truely niche product. x86 is competing against Alpha, Sun and POWER on the high end [actually, successfully, given SPECfp2000 score of 711 for 800MHz Itanium, and SPECint2000 of 586 for 1.7GHz P4 and 539 for 1.33GHz Athlon-> the highest marks in the industry], and against themselves in the mid-range. Nowhere in these comparisons one can find a G4 - for about two years now PowerPC does not enter lists of the highest performing chips. So you can say that Motorola is at war with x86, but x86 is not at war with Motorola. references: Total number of PCs sold in IQ01 - 32.5 mln.: http://www.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB20010420S0006
Number of Macs sold in IQ01 -751,000:
http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2001/apr/18q2resul ts.html
Thus, MAC's share is 2.3%
I am surprised that otherwise smart people bring up Altivec (or SSE or whatever) as if it were general instructions. Come on guys, these are not instructions you can do Mathematica with!! These are special-case very imprecise operations. Intel, Motorola and others decided to use a small part of die to speed up some multimedia computations, because graphics cards were so expensive. But now when graphics cards are vastly more powerful, that argument is gone. G4 or PIII can do billions of these instructions ("gigaflops"). Well, Geforce3 card does 100 of these "gigaflops", so what. Real Gigaflops are measures with programs like Linpak.
People do not buy MACs because of performance - style, colors, shape. I think Jobs should stop this BS. But, on the other hand, because the MACs are 2% of the market, Intel/HP/AMD/etc do not care a bit. Wintel do not compete with Macs (maybe Apple thinks they do, but not other way around.
I would have thought that question about Motorola processors had been resolved long time ago. In fact, Motorola had dropped from all list of high-performing processors for quite a while now. Interestingly, the fastest MAC (733 MHz) is quite a bit slower than the slowest PIII [not mentioning Athlons]. Below are SPEC benchmarks taken from the SPEC and Motorola sites [I 'm going with SPEC benchmarks because these are the ONLY benchmarks made and accepted for cross-platform testing. They are developed by SPEC with participation from ALL major chip makers, inclusive Intel and Motorola]. Now, given poor scalability of the Motorola part, one can expect for it to catch up with the 733 MHz Intel processor only at 850 MHz in INT, and at 1200 MHz in FPU. Although there are some reasonable doubts that the current G4 will scale even that far. It looks like the average consumer does not believe Jobs' mantras about his "supercomputers" either, which is perfectly reflected in Mac's declininig share of the market: since glorious Steve returned to Apple, the share of Macs in the total dropped from 6% (end of 1996) to 2.3% (IQ 2001). SPEC Benchmarks from SPEC site Pentium III, 733 MHz INT - 35.7 FPU - 31.0 http://www.spec.org/osg/cpu95/results/res99q4/cpu9 5-19991108-03912.html
http://www.spec.org/osg/cpu95/results/res99q4/cpu9 5-19991108-03910.html
from Motorola site
Motorola G4, 733 MHz
INT - 32.1
FPU - 23.9
http://e-www.motorola.com/collateral/MPC7450FSR0.p df