How is the Mac so powerful ... look at its specs

[NakaNaka]

Ok. G4 is 450 mhz and 64-128 MB RAM. What makes it so good?? and expensive??

For 2000 bucks I could get myself a TBird 750 196 RAM

I heard its also a master at Rc5, why is that??

 

[Vegito]

yeah but the stock got pounded down to 30 bucks at 4pm which makes it a better deal.. buy the stock, stock goes up, sell the stock but the computer... = free - hot deal!!

 

[ChrisOh]

The processor in the heart of the computer is the Motorola G4 AVP which is RISC based, and as we ALL (hehe) know, RISC is king for RAW number crunching and Unix, plus you get a cool looking case!

 

[KarsinTheHutt]

G4 is pure RISC, giving it an edge in IPC over hybrid CISC/RISC chips like Pentium III and Athlon.

As for the expenses, I beleive the cause is proprietary equipment and cases. Apple has to make a lot of its equipment, whereas Dell or Gateway can just buy industry standard parts and assemble them.

Macs are SUCK at games though... Apple's continual stubborn use of the aging ATI Rage 128 has me baffled. That Rage 128 can barely beat my TNT!

 

[Soccerman]

ok I'll look at it's specs.. lets see. G4. hmm, that should tell you one thing. it's ALOT faster mhz-mhz then your average P2 at the same frequency.. in some applications its waay faster then a P3, however most of that is due to 3DNow! like improvements.

Mac's aren't necessarily faster for everything, but they have their moments for speed, and they also have a great GUI (it's cool..)

 

[Oreo]

First of all you shouldn´t believe all the propaganda from the Mac camp. Yeah, sure, the Mac is good in Photoshop, even about 50% faster than a PIII at the same MHz, but that doesn´t even tell half the truth (a 1GHz PC trounces a 500MHz G4). For games and alot of other apps (most apps actually) the PC is way faster than the Mac, partially because of the huge MHz differnce. As for the price, basically Apple can charge as much as they wont for their machinces since they have a monopoly on the Mac market and they know they have a very strong commitment from their customers.

 

[Fandu]

The reason the G4 "seems" so powerful is because of a RISC extension set it uses. Altivec is like your KNI, 3D Now, etc. But Altivec is 128bits wide, and has a huge instruction set. So basically, it can process data through altive, 2 and sometimes 3 times as fast as normal. This is the reason specially written apps absoutly smoke on the G4. The reason RC5 rocks on the G4 is because you can fit 2 "keys", 64 bits each side by side in a single altivec register, you then load up 6 registers at 2 keys a piece. Now you still have enough general use registers that you do not have to use register-renaming, thus speeding it up yet more. With your basic MMX x86 cpu, you have to split up each key into 2 registers, and then you do not have enough general registers left to process everything and you have to start moving data and renaming registers..messy.. With the G4, you get 2 keys per register, and you can stream them in nice and smooth, thus the 4X performance difference in RC5.

 

[Robor]

I'm not going to pretend to be an expert on the differences between the Mac and Intel/AMD platform because I'm not. All I know is Mac is WAY behind in application/game support and costs more $$$ for the same performance in almost every application. Plus people I've talked to with experience on a Mac OS will tell me that it's no more stable than Windows. All that said, I've steered a few friends/coworkers away from Mac just because there's no real reason to choose it over a Windows based system.

Rob

 

[jinsonxu]

Wow! Very informative!

 

[Viper GTS]

...no real reason to choose it over a Windows based system...

Unless you want your computer to be color coordinated & match your decor. And don't give a flying four letter word for copulation about performance.

Viper GTS

 

[troubledshooter]

As a life-long Mac use--university grants (till recently) looking at apple in the last year has been pretty sick. When a 350 Mhz G3 was running about the same cost with similar extras as your average pIII 500, and it was OS 9 vs. win98 (not SE) I thought finally apple had figured out that colors or no colors, the bankbook, stability, and speed matter.

OSX has been infinately delayed. Intel has had to compete with AMD. Chipset makers, and graphics card producers have been having hay-days, and apple is worrying about releasing "mullberry" imacs. It makes me sick, though glad I didn't buy stock.

The g4 is amazing, but it belongs in calculation intensive server applications.

$.02

 

[Shazam]

<< yeah but the stock got pounded down to 30 bucks at 4pm which makes it a better deal.. buy the stock, stock goes up, sell the stock but the computer... = free - hot deal!! >>


Looks like Apple did a stock split today...

 

[troubledshooter]

LOL! they split!

 

[OS]

no, apple warned that their earnings would be below expectations so stock holders sold off in droves in after hours. Similar situation to Intel.

 

[Robor]

&quot;Unless you want your computer to be color coordinated &amp; match your decor. And don't give a flying four letter word for copulation about performance.&quot; - Viper GTS

LMAO!! :Q

Rob

 

[utopia]

<< to 3DNow! like improvements >>



you mean SIMD (Single Instruction Multiple Data) extensions?

 

[Fandu]

KNI, SSE2, SIMD, all the same thing. That's exactly what altivec is.. but much larger and using 128bit registers.

 

[Noriaki]

Quoting myself froma different thread:
--------------------------------------
The G4 is a nice CPU, and OSX looks to be a good operating system so they have two things going for them now.

They need to open their standards and lower their prices or something...get some competition into the market. Sure a G4 is a nicer CPU than Athlons or P3s, but lets see:

G3 550 + ATi Rage 128

- or -

P3/Athlon 1Gz + GeForce2 GTS

Funny thing is, they probably cost about the same
--------------------------------------

Why is the G4 a good RC5 cracker ? Because it has a powerful RISC based flatfile FPU. The same reason a Duron beats a P3, the Duron has a better FPU.

Stuff like RC5 is all about the memory system and the FPU, other stuff like your Video card play no part at all.

A P3, K7, and G4 all use the same memory, and the G4 has the most powerful FPU, the K7 the 2nd, so it goes in that order.

But that's at the same Mhz, and Apple doesn't even have a 600 yet, I'm not even sure if they have a 550 yet...and that's just FPU stuff? RISC doesn't hold much of an edge in Integer (Windows/OSX 2D stuff) apps...apple has it's strong points, but it's too expensive and has too many weak points to be really worth it.

But seriously, I have nothing against Macs...I won't buy prebuilt systems, I won't buy Dell or Gateway or Compaq or HP...Apple is just like the Dell of Macs. I won't buy that kind of system.

Mac needs to open it's standards and compete on the open market, if we had IBM competing with Motorola for CPUs instead of just making them for Mot. that'd be good, just like Intel vs AMD is good. But no Apple keeps everything proprietary...that's a big fat NO to buying one in my books.

 

[Argo]

Actually, I studies RC5 algorithm in one of my classes, and I don't think it had a single FP calculaction. I could mistaking it for some other alogorigthm, though, so no flame intended...

 

[BFG10K]

The Mac isn't powerful, it's just the propaganda coming out from Jobs &amp; CO.

Jobs runs the same Photoshop filters all the time, and these are the filters that show the biggest difference. That is, they are the filters with the heaviest Altivec optimisations and the lowest SSE optimisations. All you are getting is marketing bullsh*t when Jobs claims that a G4 500 is faster than a 1.2 GHz P3.

Sure the PowerPC may be a bit faster than a similar clocked x86 CPU, but overall the PC wins a most of the benchmarks. Macs typically have lower memory bandwidth than PCs and don't have write combining or the various burst modes that PCs support. Not to mention the absolutely abysmal performance of Mac OS in comparison to any other operating system.

If you look at real world benchmarks other than Photoshop you will see the PC consistently win, especially in games. The Mac is way overpriced and has a very poor selection of hardware and software.

You can read the current situation of Apple here.

You can see some processor intensive mathematica benchmarks here.

 

[Fandu]

Noriaki:

RC5 &quot;cracking&quot; does not use a single FP instruction. It's all ALU based, 100%. The reason the Athlon is better at RC5 than pentium chips is because the Athlon can process 3 different instructions per clock. Where as a pentium can process 1, or 2 if they are both add. But the Athlon performance is not 3X that of the pentium because we simply have not figured out how to arrange the instructions/registers so that we can use all 3 pipelines per clock.

Also, RC5 is absoutly not dependant on the memory subsystem. The entire alorithm fits in L2 cache, with the actual search routines in L1 cache. This is why you get the same level of performance all the way from the Pentium Pro, through the celerons and up to the 1GHz P3's, they all crack at about 2.8X their MHz in KKeys/sec.

 

[ElFenix]

the athlon is still limited by the x87 fpu, which is a crap design at best. it was built back in the days of the 386, and there simply weren't too many transistors intel could work with back then (like less than half a million, a t-bird is somewhere near 40 million). so they had to do some things to the design that make it a really poor fpu in comparison to what has been done on the RISC side. a very large part of the reason for intel dropping IA-32 is this FPU limitation. AMD can't really get around it either for the SledgeHammer, they just have to do what they can using a whole lot of transistors to create work-arounds.