3 ms·

I do remember it like GP. The G4 Powermac came out in '99, and while at 500mhz it could beat a 600mhz Pentium, Intel also released an 800mhz part that year. AMD

by brnt 6y ago

I do remember it like GP. The G4 Powermac came out in '99, and while at 500mhz it could beat a 600mhz Pentium, Intel also released an 800mhz part that year. AMD would release a 1GHz K7 within the year as well. So yeah, the G4 was perhaps winning the IPC battle, Intel and AMD were more than making up for it with higher frequencies.

ido 6y ago
That's exactly when motorola dropped the ball (as the article mentions) - a year before they were still more or less head to head, but once amd & intel started reaching for the 1 ghz barrier they left motorola & ibm behind. Somehow the various RISC vendors managed to remain competitive for a bit longer at the top end[0] - maybe it was easier to compete at the high workstation/server/supercomputer end than at consumer hardware? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercomputer#/media/File:Processor_families_in_TOP500_supercomputers.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercomputer#/media/File:Proc... - x86 only started dominating well into the 2000s.
musicale 6y ago
> The G4 Powermac came out in '99 "We are starting to see some great games come back to the Mac, but this is one of the coolest I've ever seen...this is the first time anybody has ever seen it, the first time they've debuted it...Halo is the name of this game, and we're going to see, for the first time: Halo." -Steve Jobs, MacWorld 1999 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6eZ2yvWl9nQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6eZ2yvWl9nQ