How long before pc's reach Apple performance

[Mingon]

As the title says how long before pc's start to reach apple performance levels?

 

[Bryan]

Oh, I'd say in about 15 years ago or so.

 

[Zucchini]

in -2 years

 

[office boy]

You are joking right?

 

[Gunbuster]

About 3 years backwards in time

 

[Sunner]

LOL

 

[Mingon]

serious question, Apple at the moment are very good at certain things how long before pc's are on a general par? eg. what would my 1.13tbird be equivalent to? in apple optimised software.

 

[Alfred]

What performance you mean, hyping performance? Quite soon since Intel has hired the one who hyped G4 to promote their P4.

 

[Noriaki]

Well if you consider the CPU in isolation, and limit the x86 CPUs to the same clock speed, then it will be a while.
The G4 is a RISC based design (migrated to a more modern RISC/CISC combination) the x86 is a CISC based design (aslo migrated to a more modern combination), and as such the G4 is much more effecient.

But if you consider the fact that x86s are still available in 2x the clockspeed of a G4 and you take into account the rest of the platform (poor graphics cards, that Windows 3.11 generation OS, and so on) the Mac can't beat a 600Mhz Duron system.

Granted some of those problems are changing. But the Mac has a long way to go to catch up to a PC in performance.

I think you have your title backwards.

Edit: The macs are extremely good at Photoshop when it's highly altivec optimized. That's about it. I'd like to see a 733Mhz G4 compare to a 1.5Ghz P4 if they also optimized Photoshop for SSE2. But in the x86 world photoshop runs on the x87 FPU and it's a well known fact that the x87 FPU sucks.

 

[Gunbuster]

certain things? what it's 3 opp coded photoshop filters and being in fancy cases?

 

[Czar]

Overall performance then I´d say 2 years ago. Now PC's are better than Macs in everything except video editing and photoshop.

 

[Mingon]

Ok what about photoshop what speed mac would compare to my pc?

 

[BigLance]

I don't believe MAC has anything to compete with Dual 1 GHz CPU's, GB's of PC133 or DDR/ RDRAM, hundreds of gigabytes of storage and the video cards the PC has... etc. etc. Thats part of the reason the Mac has a puny share of the market compared to the PC.. along with there closed arcitecture...

 

[Sunner]

Dont forget RC5, they rule at that

 

[Mingon]

So why do so many apple owners laim there machines are quicker? are there any benchamrks I can download to give it a go?

 

[BaLLhAiR]

dude, MACS SUCKS MY BALLZ!!!!
i have a 1GHz AMD TBird ok, there is no mac CPU that can out do that, macs are inferior compaired to PC's, like Bryan said, PC's got better than them about 15 years ago......

 

[Gunbuster]

mackys claim their machines are better at everything to justify the 3-4k they spent to get a "cutting edge" Mac

 

[BaLLhAiR]

nice one Gunbuster, i like that

 

[Mingon]

I have just had a 2 day-argument with someone at work and would like to compare my machine to a g4 to see how it does. So does anyone know any benchmarks for comparisions? I currently have a a7v-133 motherboars with a 1.1 tbird @8.5*133 and 256mb of memory and a geforce2ultra, a reasonable system i think, so i would like to do some benchmarks to get a fair comparision. Also having never used macos how good is it?

 

[Workin']

<< So why do so many apple owners claim there machines are quicker? >>

Usually because they've never used a PC...... and they buy into the hype they are fed. Plus they never want to admit they could have bought 2 comparable PC's for the price of their fruitbox.

 

[Gunbuster]

I will give Apple this: Their Industrial design people can produce some slick looking products, the LCD's, Monitors, g4 towers, and new g4 lappy looks sweet

 

[pm]

<< So why do so many apple owners laim there machines are quicker? >>


I think this is best termed by the press who call it the &quot;Steve Job's reality distortion field&quot; (tm). Why do so many Apple fans claim their machines are higher performance than x86 machines? Because Steve Jobs told them so.

Interplatform benchmarking is tough. There are a lot of variables and it's been pretty much impossible to get anyone to agree on what is a good benchmark. Photoshop is not a terrible benchmark if you are buying a computer to run that one program, but to compare the relative strengths and weaknesses of an entire platform, it's pretty limited.

I like SPEC - SpecInt and SpecFP. They are easily available here, people get to use their own compilers and the best hardware available in their systems, and it's somewhat regulated. Yes, people optimize their compilers to run it, but they are both huge programs and it's argueable that any compiler optimizations that substantially benefit SpecFP (for example) will improve overall system performance. I agree that the suite isn't perfect, but I personally think it's the best interplatform benchmark for general system performance that currently exists.

PowerPC SPEC results are pretty gruesome compared to PC's. Even most Mac sites agree with this - see this link here to a MacEvolution page. One thing to note is that Motorola and IBM aren't really updating their SPEC scores - especially since people are now using the Spec2000 suite. This is usually a bad sign. When a company starts to score too badly in a benchmark, they usually stop publishing results for that benchmark. But the graph at the MacEvolution site - and similar ones at other sites - pretty much tell the story. Check the results at www.spec.org.

 

[Topochicho]

MAC CPUs are not even similar to intel compatible, at least AMD vs Intel comparisons are about CPUs built to acheive the same ends. Nobody ever asks, should I buy this 800MHz cpu for $100 or this 800MHz cpu for $4,000. They ask what can I get for $100. The comparison should be about what people are really asking for. Can a $4,000 PC beat a $4,000 MAC? Sure as $hit it can, slap it about like a red headed stepchild.

 

[pm]

It's actually interesting to compare SPEC scores of the fastest Pentium III, Pentium 4 and Athlon systems against $50k+ Sun UltraSparc systems.

 

[Mingon]

Cant seem to find any spec2000 score for apples? wonder why..