some real world benchmarks (no synthetic ones)

djhpr

Registered
http://www.digitalvideoediting.com/2002/07_jul/features/cw_macvspc2.htm


"As you see, the dual Athlon is still the fastest PC we've tested, but the single Intel P4 2.53 GHz machine runs a close second, and even beats the dual Athlon on some of the tests. And, as expected, the Mac dual 1GHz G4 could not even come close to keeping up with these two PCs. Even though the P4 machine has only a single processor, it was easy for it to leave the dual-processor Mac far behind"

proves that clockspeed doesnt matter, as the dual athlons are clocked at 1.67 ghz (edit//i mean 1.53 ghz =D)
 
The G4 is a great processor and when apps are optimized for it, they typically do outperform the competition. Take Photoshop for example. Unfortunately, Other than Photoshop and a few other apps, not much is optimized for the G4 and AltiVec. 128-bit pipeline is great, but it bottlenecks due to inferior RAM and bus speeds. A G3 at the same MHz can be just as powerful in most instances. This is why IBM thinks the G4 is a joke. They know due to todays lazy programmers, it's all about the MHz baby!

Then you have the Athlon. It's the Dodge Viper of the processor industry. Optimized or not, the Athlon will just brute force performance out of any application. The things a beast. No optimization required.

As for the Pentium 4, it's like a Porche. Fast off the line and corners like no other but is only competition against a Viper if the driver knows what he's doing. Like the G4, if people take the time to optimize the apps for the P4 and SSE, it'll likely outperform the Athlon as well.

Dual processors are great but I'm curious as to how many Mac apps are optimized to take advantage of SMP. If they're not, they'll just run off of one processor with no benefit from the second. Even so, the nice thing about SMP is that you can open up a lot more apps without having to worry about your system bogging down. I have a SMP box and burn CDs, rip mp3s and watch DIVX movies all at the same time. People see this and think im crazy because on a UP box, your burn would screw up, your mp3s would sound distorted and the DIVX movie would drop to about 3FPS.
 
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