Re: Why relatively slow on Apple G4?
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg25490] Re: [mg25479] Why relatively slow on Apple G4?
- From: Andrzej Kozlowski <andrzej at tuins.ac.jp>
- Date: Thu, 5 Oct 2000 23:50:11 -0400 (EDT)
- Sender: owner-wri-mathgroup at wolfram.com
Most of the speed of a G4 comes form Motorola's AltiVec technology and is particulary noticable when using floating point operations. However, software has to be written in a way that takes advantage of these features (a good example is the latest Photoshop which is considerably faster on a 500 MHZ G4 than on a 1000 MHZ Pentium III. The same is true for several encryption programs.) and Mathematica 4 does not. Andrzej on 10/3/00 11:26 AM, Tom Burton at tburton at cts.com wrote: > I'm a long-time but not-entirely-satisfied PC user. For several years, I > glanced occasionally at "Karl's Mathematica Page", currently > > http://fampm201.tu-graz.ac.at/karl/mma.html > > and noted that the Power Macintosh was nearly as fast as or faster than the > fastest PC. But the Mac OS kept me away. > > With the public beta of Mac OSX looking good so far, I am fixing to switch > from PC to Mac. But now I see on Karl's page and others, accessible from > > http://smc.vnet.net/mathbench.html > > that the G4/500, the fastest available Power Mac, is way down the list. > Indeed, it appears that the Mac is slower than the 1000MHz PC by approximately > the ratio of the nominal clock speeds (1000/450). In other words, the > advantage of Mac/Motorola's RISC architecture seems to have disappeared. > > What happened? Or is Mac's past speed superiority a figment of my imagination? > Tom >