Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 13th Jan 2006 23:13 UTC, submitted by sean batten
"While the press brouhaha happily follows Apple about and co-conspirator Intel looks on, smugly hoping its tie-up with the much-loved computer maker will bring it some added kudos in its assault on the consumer electronics market, IBM, the giant ousted from the party, is getting on with business. Big Blue may have been dumped by Apple but its compensation is plentiful. Its Power chips form the heart of upcoming console offerings from Sony and Nintendo as well as the XBox from Microsoft. And let's face it, the press might like Apple and the kids might dig iTunes but sales of a million or so computers annually is pretty small beer in the grand scheme of things."
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Member since:
2005-07-06
Based on the fact that the Intel Core Duo 1.67 GHz, featuring two processor cores, is about 200 MHz faster than a single core G4, I feel that a 60-70% speed increase over the G4 is what I would realistically expect of Intel...
It really depends on the task. Not all tasks are purely arithmetic bound. For those that are, the 3-4x figure isn't unrealistic. The G4 is a PIII-class CPU. A P-M, on the other hand, has a much better branch predictor, much faster (by a factor of four!) bus, much more cache, macro-ops fusion, much better FPU, etc. The Core Duo's IPC is just much higher than a PIII's at the same clockspeed (by 70% or so), and thus much higher than a G4's at the same clockspeed.
Apple's benchmark results are only surprising to those who forget that a G4 is a late 1990s era CPU. It's 2006, processors have come quite a way since then!