One Apple advantage - SPEED!
Every one of us, at one time or the other, finds himself in a discussion with a Mac-skeptic over the issue of who is faster, Mac OS on G3 or Windows OS variant on CISC variant of Pentium variant. Even after getting around all the variations and specifying a one on one measure, the Wintel guy often can't get over the wall of disbelief that mhz alone will not tell the story. It is difficult to tell someone who has three or so thousand dollars invested in their "cutting edge" PC [and be convincing] that a 266 mhz Macintosh is roughly equal to or in some ways faster than their 450 mhz Pentium II.
That's why I was so anxious to post this little tid-bit of information I discovered in this weekend's email. Next time, I'll just give them the statistic and the URL to the SETI website.
'~'~'~'~'~'~'~'~'~'~'~'
From: Kibbles&Bytes #112: SETI, Whales, Butterflies, Color Printers
By: Don Mayer (don@smalldog.com)
Of: Small Dog Electronics ( smalldog.com)
A couple of issues back I wrote about the SETI@home project and have now
been running the software on my office machine. While I'm away from my
desk my Mac is searching the heavens for extraterrestrial intelligence.
Pretty cool! I surfed over to the SETI@home site
(http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/index.html) yesterday and found some
interesting statistics. They say the average Macintosh takes 21 hours
and 30 minutes to process a single "work unit" of data, while an average
"Pentium/Windows" machine requires more than 32 hours. Now my desktop
Mac which started out life as a 266MHz G3 Beige Minitower but now sports
a Newer Technology 466mHz G3 processor has completed 4 work units so far
with an average of just over 10 hours for each unit. As I scroll down
the list of machines doing the SETI research the closest I can find is
the DEC Alpha which also does a work unit in about 10 hours. That's
easily a $10,000 minimum box versus my machine which I would say is about
$3000 worth of enhanced Apple Macintosh. Hmm...maybe we should abandon
those MacBench scores and just see how fast each machine processes a work
unit!
'~'~'~'~'~'~'~'~'~'~'~'
THAT with a 466 mhz upgrade to an older motherboard. And now you can get 400 mhz of G3 speed to "GO!" in the form of the new portable with "10 hrs!" potential battery life for $3499. With all the iMac hoopla, where's the advertisements shouting this shining fact to the beige followers of the Wintel magnates?
HerbVic |
