Thoughts about the "slowness" of PowerPC

**whitesaint** · August 5th, 2002, 07:50 PM

Ok hi all. I was just thinking to myself that most of the articles ive read that compare performance of the chips (Intel vs. PowerPC), the PowerPC is usally running OS X. They then assume since the Pentiums always kick the G4's ass, the pentiums are "faster". Well I'm pretty sure the PowerPCs still compare to the x86's, but Mac OS X is a slower operating system. Let's face it - Mac OS X is slow. The PowerPC is an excellent chip, the first G4 was classified as a "super computer" by the US governemt and could not be exported to certain countries. Well my testament of this is if you have Virtual PC, start it up and you can notice that most things are pretty fast. Mac OS X still needs alot of work.

**Captain Code** · August 5th, 2002, 08:09 PM

It's only the GUI part of OS X that is slow. I've noticed that all the FreeBSD parts of it that don't run any GUI are really fast, such as apache, ftp, or ssh.

But, I agree that OS X does need work, and is getting a lot of enhancements and performance fixes in X.2

**theed** · August 5th, 2002, 09:32 PM

I touched on this in the rumours section...

the PPC is really capable for video encoding/decoding, and encryption and certain compressions, and weird math. However...

At simple Integer and AI decision style code, the PPC and AMD chips tend to be really similar per clock cycle. Both seem a bit better than Intel's chips per clock, but Intel keeps their clock speeds high.

For some stuff, the PPC really isn't the fastest chip, so you may have to concede some points on performance in Quake. But OS, and IO, and graphics speed are so critical that it's often those that make or break a machine for productivity. Mac OS X has some slow parts, but it by and large Rocks. The IO subsystem is a bit behind, so that could be helped significantly. The processing speed is really "fast enough" for just about anything you need to do. Better programming is what this world needs far more than better chip design.

**ladavacm** · August 6th, 2002, 03:39 AM

better programming is precisely what this world is not going to be getting.

Let's face it, programming is the only human labor intensive industry left in the world (with the possible exception of clothing industry). Moreover, it requires extremely skilled (read: expensive) labor force, too. In order to meet deadlines and budgets, every corner possible (and then some) will be cut, with inevitable consequence of poorly optimized code.

It is much more cost efficient (by at least an order of magnitude) to increase CPU performance than to increase the software performance.

Granted, sometimes it is possible to improve the software, if such improvement is in an extremely critical path; this is a very rare event. Most of the time suboptimal design decisions will be taken if they are cheaper/faster to implement.

**theed** · August 6th, 2002, 05:06 PM

You have a point, but that's not the whole story. Programming tools, programming environments, languages and compilers are getting better. These improve the effort to reward ratio of spending time on code.

Java, Cocoa, Xtreme Programming, these things have and will make things better. There's still the argument of Total Cost over a product's life vs. implementation cost, but this isn't new, and will also be a trade-off.

Finally, if there is only one human labor intensive industry left in the world, and it's programming, then we are in a non-need based economy, and should be mere years away from living without money like they do on Star Trek. Free Software for everybody.

There is good reason to think that energy and resources are what need to be used with the utmost care. And to some degree, this demands that some extra care will have to be taken on Software Design, and that we will try to stretch our hardware through efficient coding.

**drash** · August 6th, 2002, 10:21 PM

Originally posted by whitesaint
Ok hi all. ...... Mac OS X still needs alot of work.

And so doesn't your Mac OS X. 10.1.5 runs at least twice as fast as 10.1.2. At least it does on my box. And having downloaded and used NetBSD on this same box I can tell you when it comes to the things you can't see like the networking stack, multiprocessing, and non-gui apps like Apache, its right up there with the best of them. Even when using GCC to compile things.

**fryke** · August 7th, 2002, 05:32 AM

*ROTFL* - This is like the perfect TROLL thread... First you say it's about the 'slowness' of the G4 processor (which makes some people mad) and then head straight on to bashing the slow speed of Mac OS X. Thank you for the entertainment, though...