G4 vs. Athlon

[jmjenki2]

Are the days of Apple's superiority over? I believe they are. Check out aceshardware.com workstation benchmark article about how the dual Athlon slaughters the dual G4 800. Are there other benchmarks to support this? Is a reasonable explanation the lack of bandwidth supplied by the G4's bus (PC133)? What aspects of each system's architecture make one superior to the other? The more technical detail, the better.

I turn to the users here to give me more information about this topic. Recently, a maniac Mac user wrote an article for my department's newsletter that extolled the virtues of the Mac over the PC architecture. I fear that this article casts us as morons and am currently working to remedy the situation.

Thanks for your help.

 

[Mingon]

The best place to look for info is the forums at arstechnica and go into battlefront. Going from what I have picked up the newer g4's are slower clock for clock than previous models. Personally I can see no reason to buy a mac unless you like the pretty colours, and I cant stand the Pretentious crap. Damien hurst in an atx case is not what I want

 

[Sohcan]

Please read my posts in this thread. Architecturally, the G4 and Athlon are very similar....they're both 3-way fetch, out-of-order, superscalar cores. The Athlon has larger re-order windows, a better branch predictor (necessary due to its longer pipeline), and better floating-point hardware....on the other hand, the G4's SIMD capability with Altivec is far more advanced than 3Dnow or SSE.

But regarding the ISA, I'll quote myself from the linked thread:


<< x86 apologists look at the Athlon/P3/P4's decoupled execution and x86 -> micro-RISC op conversion, and say that the ISA doesn't matter anymore. Mac apologists look only at the ISA and say that RISC will always be superior. Sensible people look at the whole picture: ISA, microarchitecture, clock rate, engineering, process technology, compiler development, scalability, bandwidth, cache size, etc. >>

The ISA is still important....the steps x86 processors take to bypass x86's limitations, such as decoupled execution & micro-op decoding, introduce longer pipelines and more difficult engineering. Despite register renaming, the ISA is still important as a logical programming model of the CPU....x86's fewer logical registers makes cool compiler optimizations less feasible, like strength-reduction, copy-propogation, and loop unrolling.

But as I said, the ISA is only one part of many of the total equation. In fact, over the past 5 years it seems that process technology has been one of the most crucial components of MPU performance. I like Motorola and their MPUs, but you shouldn't believe Apple's marketing...independent benchmarks like SPEC and that Ace's article you mentioned show that x86 CPUs are at the top of the class in performance, only eclipsed by the latest and greatest (and much, much, much more expensive) high-end RISC designs....again, not just because of ISA, but because of high-end RISC's ability, given their target market, to devote more die size (at the expense of cost) to superior microarchitectures and cache hierarchies.

Then again, once you get past the ISA, Macs now use mostly PC hardware (and sometimes inferior hardware, at that....older video cards, less system & memory bandwidth, etc), so that guy at your office doesn't have much of an argument. Again, I like Macs, they're fine computers...I just hate Apple's marketing BS.

These articles at Ars will be good reads too:
The G4 and the K7: an architectural look at two post-RISC processors
The Pentium 4 and the G4e: an Architectural Comparison (part 1)
The Pentium 4 and the G4e: an Architectural Comparison (part 2)

 

[Moohooya]

I don't know why people keep trying to say a PC is better that an Mac, or a Mac is better than a PC. It's comparing apples and oranges.

For Desktop Publishing, go with a Mac. It may not beat a PC in benchmarks, but it will get a better job done in less time. For the most part, CPUs now are faster than most business users need them. Software is more important.

 

[Locutus4657]

I think this review would have been better if they had chosen applications common to both (x86 and PPC) platforms, and made use of the fastes currently available Xeon CPU for all benchmarks. I do like the AMD scores none the less, if I had money to spend on that kind of thing it might be tempting... But still, this has to be one of the worst benchmarks I've seen them do.



<< Are the days of Apple's superiority over? I believe they are. Check out aceshardware.com workstation benchmark article about how the dual Athlon slaughters the dual G4 800. Are there other benchmarks to support this? Is a reasonable explanation the lack of bandwidth supplied by the G4's bus (PC133)? What aspects of each system's architecture make one superior to the other? The more technical detail, the better.

I turn to the users here to give me more information about this topic. Recently, a maniac Mac user wrote an article for my department's newsletter that extolled the virtues of the Mac over the PC architecture. I fear that this article casts us as morons and am currently working to remedy the situation.

Thanks for your help. >>

 

[Locutus4657]

Which is why PC's are better, the software install base is much bigger... There isn't a single important peice of software available for a Mac which is not available for the PC, however the same can not be said the other way around. There's nothing that can be done on a Mac that can't be done on a PC, and since the applications are all the same (that I'm aware of), I can't see how things will be getting done so much faster on the Mac. And then comes in the issue of Apples infomously bad Operating Systems. Even OSX is a clunky kluge, though admittingly much improved over any previouse version. If apple had allowed cloning and kept up to speed on the OS front maybe things would be different, but they didn't and PC's ended up being the better platform to go with.



<< I don't know why people keep trying to say a PC is better that an Mac, or a Mac is better than a PC. It's comparing apples and oranges.

For Desktop Publishing, go with a Mac. It may not beat a PC in benchmarks, but it will get a better job done in less time. For the most part, CPUs now are faster than most business users need them. Software is more important. >>

 

[crypticlogin]

Once the definition of "better" is made clear and agreed upon by everyone (and I do mean everyone), then maybe threads like these can end up as rational discussions. Some people argue about the aesthetics, others about crunching power *cough*RC5*cough*, others about marketing clout, and even more about how fast you can get your desktop publishing done?


I'm in a pissy mood tonight.