"I never accused Apple tech of rigging benchmarks, Apple marketing yes, just like Intel marketing does. "
I don't think such a distinction was made and I think it is besides the point. You accused APPLE of rigging the benchmark.
From an engineering perspective, PowerPC is a far cleaner design with many technical advantages over Pentium II (I will point out some of them later) and more room for growth The technical merit of PPC 750 over Pentium II is real...yet without a full understanding the issues involved you choose to trivialize PPC 750's performance lead by suggesting that all the data pointing to PPC 750's superior performance were merely artifacts.
"What intrinsic advantage does a 300 Mhz G3 have over a 300Mhz P-II. Larger cache, yes, better hard wired code ?, less heat, yes. What else? "
Memory Caching
PowerPC 750 has twice the amount of on chip Level 1 cache. Four times as much as the original Pentium.
PowerPC 750 supports up to 1MB of Level 2 cache vs Pentium II's current limitation of 512K
PowerPC 750 is capable of supporting L2 cache running at processor core speed. Current Pentium IIs cache bus runs at half multiple of processor speed.
PowerPC 750's has built-in cache controllers that stores cache entry tags onboard for quicker access.
Processor technology
PowerPC 750 is smaller, which means it draws less power, generates less heat, and capable of higher clock speeds. For years Intel relied on hybride of BiCMOS & CMOS to achieve higher clock speeds. For a chip of given transistor count the usage of BiCMOS results chips that are larger and less energy efficient. On top of that, Intel's backward and brain-dead x86 design demands higher transistor count to achieve adequate performance. This results in a large and bloated chip. This is one of the reason why the Pentiums have less L1 cache and supports fewer registers.
PowerPC 750 is optimized for MacOS! Instead of just tuning the chip to get better SPEC scores Apple, Motorola and IBM actually optimzes PPC 750 to make real world application run faster. What a concept eh? Something Intel should try sometimes.
Cross platform benchmark comparison IS a complicated issue. The results vary widely depending on the test. But instead of taking the time to understand why that is the case and extract meaningful data from these results, you conveniently choose to toss everything out and conclude that a Pentium II is just as good as a PowerPC. Bill this is so typical of you and with your cynical views. I'll address this issue in a separate post.
"I have never ever seen any tech basis in your commentary."
Bill, look back at my old posts, 70% of them address technical issues. Many of us here discussed about technical merit of PowerPC long before it was cool to do so or airing of the snail ads. I've made more than a couple dozen posts regarding technical side of PowerPC, Rhapsody, StrongARM, G3...maybe you were too busy whining about Jobs to notice them.
Well..here is the first of a half a dozen post regarding PPC 750 & Pentium II on the Intel board.
techstocks.com
Bill you've made numerous posts expressing your negative view of Apple ...yet you never buy or short AAPL. During AAPL's roughest hours back in Nov/Dec of 97, your Apple bashing was at its climax, the rest of us here were wise enough to recognized AAPL's potential and shared our reasons for optimism on this board. Good thing none of us paid much attention to you and had the courage to add to our positions in Dec at low teens. Those shares bought in Dec and Jan have been very profitable. Bill I hope your investments have been equally profitable.
Again, I'll address the benchmark issue in a separate post at a later time.
Eric |
