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For large swaths of life the PowerPCs in a mac significantly faster than any available x86 CPUs. Back in the single core days, clock speed was something that l
by kev009 10y ago
For large swaths of life the PowerPCs in a mac significantly faster than any available x86 CPUs. Back in the single core days, clock speed was something that lay user vaguely understood was correlated to performance. This had a subtle but real impact as Intel and OEMs were effective in marketing clock speed number as something users should care about. It was very effective until it backfired when AMD torpedoed intel with Opteron, and then clock frequency scaling became undesirable.
- StillBored 10y agoThe idea that PPC was faster than x86 back in the PPC mac days is Apple hyperbole. There were a few occasions where the fastest PPC was faster than the fastest x86 available but they were far and few between and very slim. If all you looked at were the very carefully selected/tuned apple benchmarks you can be forgiven for thinking that (the photoshop filter benchmark using altivec comes to mind) there was a huge PPC advantage. Here is a random google search for spec performance over time of assorted CPU arches. http://preshing.com/20120208/a-look-back-at-single-threaded-cpu-performance/ http://preshing.com/20120208/a-look-back-at-single-threaded-... The only obvious case in that graph where PPC>x86 is in mid 1995. I can't find the one I saw a couple years ago detailing the core/clockrate comparisons of PPC's shipped in Macs with common PCs, that was much easier to read and far more obvious.
- Synaesthesia 10y agoIt wasn't just Apple hyperbole, PowerPC really did beat Intel at quite a few instances, and generally kept up until about 2004. AltiVec with photoshop was not just a tuned benchmark but a significant advantage on a common scenario. The Power chips also consumed significantly less power, enabling Apple to put far more powerful CPU's in laptops.