>>There is no such thing as "raw horsepower" in computing. Such a concept begs the question of "horsepower to do what?" An Altivec-accelerated has more horsepower for doing JPEG compression or Fourier transforms than a P4 that runs at 4x the clock speed.
But in my opinion, this is not why graphics and video professionals prefer Macintoshes. I think that these aesthetically oriented artistic types simply find the Windows experience less appealing than the Mac experience, at a very visceral level. And I have to agree with them.<<
Dave -
I agree with you about that second paragraph. People who are more concerned with aesthetics are more likely to prefer the Mac, as do I. It's also a matter of how the computer tends to be less in one's way in the Mac environment that in Windows.
I think the concept of raw horsepower is not completely irrelevant, though. I'm just talking about comparing a wide range of different processing tasks. There are specific things that a P4 is optimized for, such as streaming video, and there are things a G4 is better at. For those tasks clock speed isn't so important.
The P4 is not as efficient as the G4, so it needs the higher clock speed. But I wasn't just talking about CPUs. If you compare computers, the P4 has the advantage of a faster memory bus and faster memory, yielding a much higher total memory bandwidth.
As has been observed many times on this thread, Mac performance is currently constrained not just by the CPU, but by the memory bandwidth.
Nonetheless, I'm still very happy working on this 500MHz TiBook. It's zippy enough for all the things I do (including running Photoshop), it's stable like no Windows notebook I ever had was, and it runs a beautiful OS.
- Allen |
