Apple G3 CPU??

[Armitage]

Ok, here's the deal. I'm moving to a new job. I get a nice shiny brand new Windows PC for e-mail and office, but most of my work will be on Linux & Unix boxes. So I want/need a Linux box @ my desk to effectively work with this stuff. (plus I prefer working on a Linux box over an Windows box any day).

Now, I can't reconfigure that nice new 1GHz PIII with 512MB ram to be the Linux box At least not at first, corporate IT policy & all that.
So they are offering me a surplus Mac G3 that I can load Linux on (that's a subject for OS forum).

Here are the specs:

350MHz G3 1MB L2 cache (is that on chip?!?)
128MB ram (a bit thin..., is it SDRAM?)
16MB Rage128 graphics

But I know nothing about Macs! How does this compare to a PC, primarily for workstation and number crunching type stuff.
Responsiveness & stability is probably my key concern, for serious number crunching, I've got a cluster of Alphas and an O2K available

I've heard that Mac is generally faster clock for clock then x86 stuff. So, about equivalent to a 450MHz PIII maybe?
I have some choice of some surplus x86 stuff also, but I don't know what it is yet.
Thanks

 

[Kipper]

Okay...the RAM in that G3 is PC100. Any PC100 which fits the slots should work. Any PC133 you have lying around will work as well, although it will run at 100 MHz as opposed to 133. The amount of RAM you have should be enough to run most distributions of Linux for the Mac, although having maybe about another 128 megs wouldn't hurt (the G3 has 4 slots). Most popular distributions are Small Dog Linux or LinuxPPC. These are the most popular and most constantly updated versions. There exists an earlier preview version of Linux for the Mac called MKLinux. However, it was discontinued approximately 5 years ago.

According to Apple's tests, your G3 should be the equivalent of a ~400 MHz PII. A PIII will probably beat the living crap out of it. Stability shouldn't be much of an issue because there is little chance for hardware incompatibilities and such (being that Apple has made virtually everything on the PC side incompatible with the Mac except for IDE devices or PCI cards).

Oh yes, and the cache is on-chip, as far as I recall. It is the equivalent of the PC pipeline burst, accessed at half the processor speed (the technical Mac term for this is "Backside Cache"). So in your case, that would be @ 175 MHz. Upgrading this sucker to a G4 should be relatively easy. The G3 uses a standard Socket 7 ZIF. I own one of these machines and it is pretty solid, albeit a *bit* on the slow side when compared to my Athlon.

 

[Armitage]

Thanks, that helps alot!
PII 400MHz isn't bad for something that will likely be mostly used as a terminal on other systems. Nice that it's PC100 ram also. 128 is kind of light, but I can probably scrounge another DIMM somewhere, or come up with $30.