Need relatively smart person to explain pipeline!

[apemaninfintiy]

Anyways is was wondering what exactly this means as i hear that power macs are good because they have a "short" pipeline
sorry if repost thanks

 

[paralazarguer]

Macintosh computers are SLOW. They have a shorter pipeline which basically means that they don't drop or "forget" instructions as often as their PC counterparts. Forgetting would cause them to start over again and do the same work twice. The G4 has some wonder efficiencies but is mostly just marketing. It hasn't changed since 1999 and is an outdated architecture. The famed "velocity engine" or "altivec" is nothing more than a weaker form of SSE2 - it's just 128bit SIMD processing. Nothing to write home about at all. We can see from the Intel camp that as processors get faster they speed of the system doesn't increase unless memory can feed the processor data to work with. The G4 only has a 133 FSB (100 in some cases - not even the celeron is this slow anymore) and is couple with, currently, PC 133 tops!!!!!!!! This setup does not provide a lot of data for the processor to work with and it doesn't need it because it's simply not that fast. Their $2999 model only comes with a 5400RPM hard drive and getting a RAID 0 array with a large stripe size for, say, video editing is a much more expensive proposition than for the PC and will usually involve and external rack. It also doesn't have a spare 5.25" bay to add a breakout box and you're looking at another external device again. To summarize, you can't fit anything in them. They have a slow, outdated processor despite what Apple's marketing will tell you, they have a slow, slow, slow system bus and SLOW memory. The April Issue of Max PC did a crossover with the Editor of Mac Adict and they benched a G4 against an Athlon XP system. Not only did the G4 lose every bench it did it by 2,3, and 4 times slower in each of their categories. It was 3 times slower in photoshop despite the graphics artist's myth surrounding the mac. These people are artists, not techs. Here are some benchmarks of the PC to Mac hardware provided by Goi. Enjoy!
video editing
pc or mac?

 

[Jwyatt]

But the mac looks so much cooler!!

I love the g4 cases. I was thinking of modding one until i found the case alone was going for 200bux on ebay!!

Great style. Great reliability. And even a greater price

I used to have a mac, but wanted to play games and went to the "evil dark side". Thats what mac users call us ya know. hehe

 

[paralazarguer]

Yeah, the cases look cool. Too bad they don't have enough 3.5" bays and only one 5.25" which is occupied and crappy cooling. Yeah, that's a great case. here's a good case

 

[Jwyatt]

thats the case im using now. Well I screwed up and paid full retail for the antec 1040

Newegg sells the sides for a chieftec case. It looks like mine and Im thinking about ordering one, but if the shoe doesnt fit....

 

[paralazarguer]

The shoe will fit. Antec and chieftec cases are made in the same factory by the same child labour. The big difference is that this case is aluminum where yours is steel. They should fit fine tough. I do have an Antec SX1030B which is the same as what you have with a lesser PS and the doors are exchangable.

 

[SteelCityFan]

Here is the ultra simple pipeline explanation.


Basically, a CPU does the following...

Reads Data - Performs some Function on the data- Writes Data

Each section requires a clock cyle. Letting one instruction go through at a time yields 1 finished instuction every 3 clock cyles. To speed things up, you put registers inbetween the stages to store intermediate data. This enables you to put 3 instructions at a time into the pipeline. At any time, one instruction will be reading data, another will be performing some function on the data, and another will be writing data.... so in a perfect world, you now finish 1 instruction every clock cycle.

This does not happen though.. especially if the pipeline is longer. The longer the pipeline the better the chance is for something to screw up the cycle and have to cause a delay. This is why the AMD processor and its 10 (?) stage pipeline does not need to match Intel's Mhz to match Intel's performance.