" [Apple ads are] so effective, that it almost seems like Macs are now perceived to be faster which I don't think is the case for most users for most tasks (read: things other than esoteric Photoshop masks on giant images) "
You are a victim of PC myth my friend. Reality is quite the opposite to what you have described. If a programmer were to write a set of computation intensive algorithm and compile the code using commonly available compilers for each platform (G3 and PII running at the same clock speed) you can generally expect it to run significantly faster on PowerPC. In many cases it will be over twice as fast. The more elegant and superior PowerPC architecture gives PowerPC a clear advantage(larger L1 cache, RISC instruction set, higher number of registers, on chip L2 cache tag...etc) . This is essentially what ByteMark benchmark measures. It takes a number of well known scientific algorithms, compile it using common compilers and measures how fast they run. Here are some benchmarks macspeedzone.com Comparing two platforms using real world applications is a bit more complicated. HD I/O, graphic sub-system performance and the operating system can all affect the overall performance.
Photoshop Benchmark
There is really nothing "special" about Photoshop that makes it run faster on the Mac or gives it an unfair advantage over x86 chips. Some Photoshop fileters are floating-point intensive but the vast majority of the commonly used functions (opening files, simple image manipulations...etc) in Photoshop are simply integer intensive tasks. Since PowerPC excels at these, as one might expect, PowerPC has been shown to consistently run faster than Pentium II counterpart. This is true of most applications. The part about Photoshop being floating-point intensive is just a myth. By far the vast majority of the time a user spend in the program is on integer processing.
Using Photoshop benchmark does have one complication--MMX. On the PC side, a number of Photoshop filters have been rewritten and hand tweaked to take advantage of Pentium's MMX. This cuts down PowerPC's lead on some tasks and in a few cases few cases even allows Pentium II to run a bit faster than PowerPC. Of course not all filters can take advantage of MMX and hand tweaking the code for MMX is time consuming and expensive. When AltiVec is released for PowerPC early next year, it won't just close the performance gap for these specialized tasks, it will run circles around MMX.
Microsoft Office
Some people like to use MS Office suite as benchmark. I see PC magazines do this a lot. For a while MS Word, Excel...etc really do run slower on the Mac. The problem wasn't because the the Mac hardware was slower it was simply because Microsoft was cutting corners when porting it's applications to the Mac. Instead of writing the code and human interface from scratch and properly supporting the Mac API, Microsoft was using its own API, and relying on translator like hooks to link them to the Mac API. Microsoft also spent very little effort optimizing their applications for the Mac. The result was pretty predictable. If you run Word 6, you'll notice that basic tasks like file launching were sluggish, sometimes system can slow to a crawl if MS's OLE were invoked, it installed a ton of inits to your extensions folder. Sloppy programming makes crappy code...it is as simple as that.
Office 98 changed a lot of that. Microsoft now spends a lot more resources optimizing its codes for the Mac and rewriting interface portion of its apps to properly support the MacAPI. Not everything has been optimized and there are still a number of components that could be made to run faster on the Mac but the performance improvement is obvious. MS Word, Excel and PowerPoint each takes about 1.5 second to launch on my G3/266 Mini-Tower. Speed really isn't much of an issue anymore. For the most part I really don't need these "business programs" to run any faster. I've never had to wait for MS Word to do anything. Having Excel finish a task in 1/8 of a second instead of 1/4 of a second isn't going to impress me--it won't make my charts look better or make Q4 earnings estimate more accurate. What is important is that Microsoft bring new features to Mac versions of its applications and support the superior interface and API that comes with every Mac properly.
Eric |
