🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <jragosta-1601961045420001@ppp-1001.dca.net>,
Joe Ragosta <jragosta@dca.net> wrote:
>In article <4de92u$ded@baygull.rtd.com>, Lawson English <kensal@rtd.com> wrote:
>
>> However, the debate that has been raging is:
>> 
>> WHY are the Pentium Pro SPECint/fpXX scores so high in comparison to the 
>> PowerPC and other CPU's, when the BYTEMark scores are so low comparing 
>> the same systems?
>> 
>> 
>> Simply referring us to the half of the figures that happen to favor 
>> Intel doesn't resolve the issue. We KNOW that Intel beats the pants off 
>> of PowerPC's and many other CPU's on SPEC. 
>> 
>> But why is there such a HUGE difference between the SPEC and the BYTE?
>
>Or on applications performance. WinNT on a 604 is much faster than WinNT
>on a P6 (according to Byte Magazine).

Is that a 604-based Mac, or some other box?

In any case, it's the operating sytsem of the PowerMacs that makes them so
slow, not the CPU architecture. Another reason is that to keep prices down,
Apple is putting some pretty lame video hardware into these computers. 
It's the same thing with PeeCee clones, except there is more of an awareness
about the internals. When I see an advertisement for some PeeCee, I can tell
right away whether it has a decent video card or whether it's been emasculated
to keep the cost down. A Mac is just a seamless, integrated Mac.

The poor performance of the PowerMacs is damaging the reputation of the RISC
architecture on which they are based. Just last week a CS grad student was
complaining how slow the PowerMac is that he has in his office. He uses it for
image editing (Photoshop). Everything else is done on some run-of-the-mill PC
running Linux, whose performance is crisp. It's only because the latter has
system software that manages the CPU, memory and I/O better. Just things like
demand-paged executables and virtual memory, shared libraries and the dynamic
buffer cache are what makes the difference, not to mention pre-emptive MT.
On the PowerMac, it is excessive disk activity and programs that hog the CPU
more than they should that make it behave sluggishly.

I'm sure that the actual image processing algorithms of Photoshop would run
more slowly on that system, but you wouldn't be able to tell, or it just
wouldn't bother you because the machine would remain reponsive. Unfortunately,
you can't get Photoshop for Linux just yet, which is why the Mac is there.

The Powermacs are creating, in the minds of some consumers,  an unbalanced
perception of the capabilities of the POWER PC architecture.
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