🚀 go-pugleaf

: Infoworld-- PowerMac is almost 2x Pentium speed.
: PCWeek (no Mac friend, BTW) -- PowerMac is 2x Pentium speed.
: MacWorld -- PowerMac is 2x Pentium speed.

Hmm...2x the speed....with maybe .000000001x the software availabiltiy,
.10x the market share (ie if you are working at a business, chances are
you'll have to be familiar with Microsoft/Intel platforms, unless you're
workking in music, academia, and a few other fields dominated by right
brainers who seem to have trouble installing CD-ROMs and using a
command-line interface rather than a native GUI interface), and, when you
resort to running PC software in emultaion mode, MAYBE equal performance. 
However, it seems the performance doesn't neccessarily matter here, since
businesses and people buy solutions, not ideal-performing machines.  They
want app availability a decent price, and just like Nintendo,
Intel/Microsoft has a dominant share of the market, and therefore more
developer support.  Politics, not performance, determine the superiority
of a system, unfortunately:  what good is a PPC system if there are so few
apps for it?  If you are so concerned with benchmarks over all else, buy a
MIPS chip.  They get up to 3 times faster than the fastest PPC chips via
SPEC int and fp benchmarks.The price benefit goes to the PCs (kind of
strange, considering the PPC has so few transistors...shouldn't the
systems be cheaper?) The main hope for the PPC was the fact that IBM was
releasing the PC based systems with the chip.  This effort is a dying one. 
BTW, congratulations, Apple.... you finally got PCI.  The architecture of
PCs seems to always be a few steps ahead of the Macs. 

Finally, the P6, whether or not the initial 133MHz version's stats impress
you, will be in an architecture designed around SMP.  Systems with as many
as four procs are expected.  Even Windows 95 would run quite nice with
that kind of power, if the fools at Microsoft had bothered to add
multithreading to the PEM.  I guess you're looking at about 800 SPECint92
there, and that's just ihe 133MHz chip.  The 200MHz chips, of course, will
blow that out of the water.  In other words, Windows NT is still around
for a reason: it will become the standard OS for these SMP systems (though
Solaris would be a better alternative;>)