Star Macs to Get Real POWER?
Linked by Nicholas Blachford on Mon 15th Jul 2002 01:14 UTC
Editorial According to a brief paragraph on MacOS Rumours Apple may be switching to IBM POWER4 CPUs instead of the Motorola G5 for future Macs.
E-mail Print r 0   · Read More · 59 Comment(s) http://osne.ws/11p
Permalink for comment
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Doesn't make much of a difference.
by Rayiner Hashem on Mon 15th Jul 2002 12:38 UTC

If anyone's looked at the SPEC benchmarks lately, a single Power4 1.3 GHz with 128MB of cache loses to a P4 2.53 GHz by a small margin. It beats the P4 by only about 30% in floating point. The key strength of the Power4 architecture is insane I/O bandwidth, multi-processing, and giant caches. Once you strip all that out and put it into a Mac, you've got a chip that's SLOWER than current P4s. Sure, Apple + IBM might be able to ramp up the clock-speed before release, but then again, so can Intel.