AmbitiousLemon said:
Well Catfish man you have an odd way of looking at things. What you said in most part completely agrees with what I have said. You had to go to an extremely expensive high end Intel cpu to find something comparable to a PowerMac. But that isn't playing fair. If you want to look at a higher class then you need to do so on both ends. Compare it to a Power cpu.
POWER cpus are in an entirely different class. The support chipset for a POWER5 costs more than an entire 2-way Xeon or G5 machine. Comparing them is ludicrous, and the benchmarks reflect this (>3000 SPECfp for a POWER5+)
Independent benchmarks consistently show the G5 outperforming Intel chips (even holding its own against Xeons and Opterons, which isn't exactly a fair comparison).
Actually Xeons and Opterons are exactly the fair comparison. They're identical to the Pentium-4 and Athlon64, except they support dual processors like the G5 does (I'm not saying compare against the large-cache high end Xeons. I agree that would be unfair).
You also mentioned that Intel pulled ahead around 2000. This again shows the PPC has been ahead most of the time and it was just a short span of time during early 2000s before the G5 came out that the G4 wasn't competing. With the G5, PPC has pulled ahead again and even with the CoreDuo the G5 remains ahead (hence why no Intel PowerMac). Current independent benchmarks confirm this.
I agree that PPC was ahead for much of its lifespan; it's an excellent ISA and had some excellent people working on it. However, I have issues with the statement that the G5 is ahead again. CoreDuo is not a good chip to compare to, as it's intended as a laptop chip. Intel currently lacks a chip really suitable for the PowerMacs, but that doesn't mean that its high end desktop chips aren't as fast or faster than the G5. Faster G5s in the iMac would have been as fast or faster than switching to CoreDuo, but I believe they would have run into heat issues. The iMac is oddly laptop-like.
You also mention cost, mentioning the Xeon system is much more expensive. Also of note is that the CoreDuo is also a more expensive chip than the G5. Apple is having to go with a more expensive cpu for the iMac and Pro laptop in order to garner just a 10% improvement in real world benchmarks. A bump up to a faster G5 probably would have provided a similar improvement in speed (and perhaps at lower cost).
I said the CPU was more expensive, not the system. Switching to Intel allows Apple to get rid of its highly custom (and presumably very expensive) northbridge design. Whether the net cost ends up being cheaper or more expensive, you can't just compare $$$/cpu to figure it out.
PPC technology is simply hands down superior technology to x86, and if you think different you are fooling yourself.
PPC is not a technology, it's an instruction set. The actual technologies behind PPC chips vary in how advanced they are. Freescale is *clearly* behind the curve, having only just moved to 90nm manufacturing fairly recently. IBM is more up to date, but appears to pay a heavy cost in manufacturing reliability on their bleeding edge process. Design-wise PPC has the major advantages of Altivec and fused multiply-add instructions, and a number of smaller advantages (easier instruction decoding, for example). The question is whether Intel's engineers and manufacturing are *enough* better to outweigh the downsides of the x86 ISA. I think that has been demonstrated quite well, although the somewhat disastrous Prescott Pentium-4 design muddies the issue somewhat. Hopefully they've learned their lesson.
The switch to Intel is probably a very good move, but lets not confuse people by trying to pretend the benefits of the switch are technological. Its as I said before, the switch is a good idea because developers of PPC are no longer focused on creating CPUs for personal computing. While the PowerMac remains competive Apple has not been provided good upgrade options for the laptops or low end desktops. Intel chips provide good cometitive products across the spectrum and also provides a more reliable source of chip (since Intel is very much interested in creating cpus for personal computers).
Agreed with everything except the first sentence. Core Duo is not a major upgrade over the G5 (yet), but its a fantastic replacement for the G4 in a way that the G5 couldn't manage. Even with the G5, reports of the new iMacs being quieter lead me to believe that there have been significant savings in heat and power.
Basically, for the PowerMacs, we're waiting for Conroe in the second half of this year. Then do the comparison again. Either Intel has been BSing us (a definite possibility) or it's going to be an awesome chip.
