The Megahertz Myth

The 867MHz G4 processor being compared to the 1.7 GHz Pentium 4 processor (At Macworld Expo New York on 18 July 2001)

Category:

Howto & Style

Tags:

• G4
• apple
• intel
• processor
• megahertz
• gigahertz
• pentium
• four
• computer
• speed
• macintosh
• mac
• ibm

[silntdoogood]

hmm, I'm gunna have to pull the g4 out of me neighbor's mac, and replace it with the Pentium II in my win7 pc ^-^

[DarkMegaNTWarrior]

Why? Pentium IIs are vastly underpowered compared to any G4 processor. Is it just so your neighbour can run Windows natively?

[gamewizard]

They switched because IBM wasn't able to continue making upgrades to the PPC line to keep it competitive in desktops and notebooks and because Intel had made great strides in their designs since this video was filmed. IBM still makes POWER architecture chips but their power consumption and heat dissipation qualities are only suitable for servers.

[BarricadeSlade]

P4 is AWFUL!

[86123maxxi]

@96515325 that isn't comic sans, it is Apple Casual, a custom font.

[Alexlfm]

@kawaiifreak860 At the time, and even still today, the G4 had a considerable advantage when it came to games and graphics over the Intel Pentium 4 especially with the AltiVec engine on the chip. CPU design is considerably more then just pipelines and MHZ. A modern CPU is incredibly complex. The power series has always had an edge in raw computational power. Graphics is 100% computational. This is why EVERY major game console of this generation uses a power chip. This is for a reason.

[96515325]

OMG Comic sans font. This is a sin!!! Why did steve jobs use comic sans???

[archangelsean]

@BarricadeSlade not really there was 2 main p4 designs, if u had a northwood design with enuf cache then was fine, if u had one of the 256kb cache ones it should be badged celeron lol

[kawaiifreak860]

@Killtronsmashtech

PONY PLEASE!

[Killtronsmashtech]

@kawaiifreak860 Not to nitpick, but the PPC/RISC based processor has its uses all over the place. iPods, iPads, Xbox 360 uses a multicore g5, the PS3 uses a multicore ppc processor and so does the wii. Saying ppc processors aren't good for games is just silly when they're the main component of every decent game console out there.

[kawaiifreak860]

LAWL

The stupid thing about this is the PPC really isn't that Good..........

The intel processor has instruction which are very much necessary for things such as Games which the G4 lacks.

Long pipeline = slower

however it also = more calculative horse power.

[kitchenssync]

The fact of the matter is that this is pretty accurate. The deep pipeline of the first Pentium 4 models coupled with the incredibly poor branch predictor caused much slower performance, even at higher clock rates. That's why Intel abandoned NetBurst and based the Core architecture and its derivatives on the older P6 architecture, which had a shorter pipeline. That's why the new, post-Pentium 4 processors had higher performance at lower clock rates.

[kingcrimson234]

this is a joke. the pentium 4 and the G4 are using COMPLETELY different instruction sets! you simply cannot say "the same task" because the code is not even close to the same thing! you can be damn sure they did everything possible to compile sloppy, inefficient code for the P4 and as efficient as they could get it for the G4. end of story. i'm not a big P4 fan, but you can be sure if the test was fair a 1.7 Ghz P4 would crush that 867 Mhz G4. no problem.

[IBratAnarchist]

Dear lord, he's just here to recommend his own products... why even bother looking at this?

Sure, architectures differ, but NO WAY it is such a big difference.

This is just like Microsoft's research which "proved" that IE is the fastest AND safest browser -_-

Apple, go f*ck yourself.