5 ms·

500mhz was really slow in '99 wasn't it? I had my first computer either then or in 2000: 10GB hard drive, 64mb of ram, and 600mhz. It was the cheapest one they

500mhz was really slow in '99 wasn't it? I had my first computer either then or in 2000: 10GB hard drive, 64mb of ram, and 600mhz. It was the cheapest one they had. EDIT: Maybe my memory is hazy and it was more like 300mhz.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Zak 4y ago
Clock speeds are not directly comparable as measures of CPU performance between different architectures. Intel in particular focused on increasing clock speed with little regard to performance during that time period. The G4 had a powerful (for the time) vector processor, which is relevant to media production. It was not slow when used for that purpose with software that took advantage of the vector unit. Apple's marketing cherry-picked benchmarks to claim that the G4 was much faster than Intel chips with higher clock speeds, but the reality was somewhere in the middle.
- _chu1 4y ago
  Exactly like the M1 now
  - santoshalper 4y ago
    It's good to see some things never change. The generous interpretation is that Apple knows that their users tend to skew towards "creative" professions like digital audio, video, graphic design etc. and so they pick the benchmarks that those people care about. You can write the ungenerous interpretation yourself.
  - Maursault 4y ago
    PPCs ran hot and sucked power. Apple's machines at release are ordinarily the most performant machines available for consumers, but that lead never lasts long. The G4 at each new release was indeed more performant than the current Intel machines, but only for a few months. Remember, the G4 was considered a "supercomputer," and the US government banned its export, which hurt Apple, though they tried to make hay with it by marketing this, by the end of 1999, they were desperately trying to get that ban lifted. There still seems to be some confusion about Apple Silicon and the M1. When M1 was released, it wasn't the fastest processor. You could actually build a faster Intel machine in 2020, but it would cost a lot more money and use a lot more power. What was and is special about the M1 is how little power it uses for its performance, which is decent but, like all new Apple products, an incremental increase in performance, and how cheap the low end offering still is. And I'm pretty sure that today you still can't beat the 2020 M1 Mac mini performance and features on Intel for 700 bucks. What is amazing about the M1 is that it is a lateral move, a platform shift, without sacrificing performance, and it is incrementally faster than the 2018 Intel Mac mini at less than half the price.
    - nobleach 4y ago
      But as often is the case with Apple releases, you DO indeed have to sacrifice things. Apple will often use marketing to tell people they don't need features that are standard on other platforms (copy/paste, MMS on the iPhone, more than 8 Gigs of memory on the first M1). So it's hard to call it a lateral move without sacrifice. Granted, Apple always comes around.
      - Maursault 4y ago
        The lateral move was with Macs, not iPhones, which were always ARM. And the 2020 M1 Mac mini had two memory configurations, 8GB or 16GB. Obviously the product would not appeal to users that require 64GB of memory, yet most M1 users report the limited RAM doesn't affect performance. The only sacrifice with switching from Intel that I can think of is no longer being able to run x86 VMs at full speed. It's not like there are sweeping sacrifices everywhere, but instead a nitpick or two.
- wmf 4y ago
  Intel in particular focused on increasing clock speed with little regard to performance during that time period. That wasn't really true in 1999 when Intel was still using the good P6 microarchitecture in the Pentium ///. NetBurst stupidity didn't start until later.
  - anthk 4y ago
    The G4 was much better at 500MHZ than the PIII.
    - mschaef 4y ago
      How well did that hold up as the CPU clock rates went up and the bus speed really didn't? I'd always assumed it was an issue, but never did have metrics to bear that out.
justinator 4y ago
It felt much slower than the Dells I would use in the college's computer lab. These things were not performant out of the gate, given OS 9 totally well: sucked, and OS X itself released a year+ later was not heavily optimized and nothing else ran natively, so you were running everything under the OS 9 env anyways. I think people forget the incremental improvements in optimization of the whole stack that was done and punted off as features. There's an old video of Steve Jobs showing off resizing a window in OS X by the dragging the corner and marveling that it would do that so fluidly and not tear all over the place like the previous version.
- anthk 4y ago
  By 2000-2001 OSX was much better than W98 and even WXP for media production.
  - justinator 4y ago
    You may be misremembering the timeline of OS X releases as OS X 10.0 only came out in March of 2001. It took a while for Cocoa apps to mature.
    - anthk 4y ago
      Ah, yes, sorry. 2001-2002 then. XP in 2002 was taking W98 over, and yet OSX felt superior. Ditto with Linux and KDE3 and a good video and sound card and the -rt kernel. 2.4 or 2.6 preferabily, with Cinepaint and Cinelerra.
      - justinator 4y ago
        It's hard for me to remember, as I didn't do much video back then and I'm not sure when Cocoa version of Premiere came out (or when the Final Cuts did either - which seemed far more popular - how things change!). I did a lot of work in PS and it was certainly better in every way on the G4, but running on OS X was a bit hit/miss as plugins and filters lagged behind. It was real messy for a few years. Not being able to get a fastish G4 in a laptop and never a G5 certainly didn't help. Who would have guessed the jump to Intel would be such a saving grace. Man video was so weird back then. Remember needing to go to like, a special render farm to output your completed Final Cut project? Or local racks of XServes? Or just a weirdo mishmash local network?
goosedragons 4y ago
It wasn't that slow a clock speed at the time of announcement, a smidge behind Intel and AMD at the time. They both had 600+ MHz chips then. But things really heated up and by March 2000 you could get a 1Ghz processor and of course P4 was all about clock speeds so things changed rapidly. PPC took a few more years to get to 1GHz.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

Zak 4y ago

Clock speeds are not directly comparable as measures of CPU performance between different architectures. Intel in particular focused on increasing clock speed with little regard to performance during that time period. The G4 had a powerful (for the time) vector processor, which is relevant to media production. It was not slow when used for that purpose with software that took advantage of the vector unit. Apple's marketing cherry-picked benchmarks to claim that the G4 was much faster than Intel chips with higher clock speeds, but the reality was somewhere in the middle.

_chu1 4y ago
Exactly like the M1 now
- santoshalper 4y ago
  It's good to see some things never change. The generous interpretation is that Apple knows that their users tend to skew towards "creative" professions like digital audio, video, graphic design etc. and so they pick the benchmarks that those people care about. You can write the ungenerous interpretation yourself.
- Maursault 4y ago
  PPCs ran hot and sucked power. Apple's machines at release are ordinarily the most performant machines available for consumers, but that lead never lasts long. The G4 at each new release was indeed more performant than the current Intel machines, but only for a few months. Remember, the G4 was considered a "supercomputer," and the US government banned its export, which hurt Apple, though they tried to make hay with it by marketing this, by the end of 1999, they were desperately trying to get that ban lifted. There still seems to be some confusion about Apple Silicon and the M1. When M1 was released, it wasn't the fastest processor. You could actually build a faster Intel machine in 2020, but it would cost a lot more money and use a lot more power. What was and is special about the M1 is how little power it uses for its performance, which is decent but, like all new Apple products, an incremental increase in performance, and how cheap the low end offering still is. And I'm pretty sure that today you still can't beat the 2020 M1 Mac mini performance and features on Intel for 700 bucks. What is amazing about the M1 is that it is a lateral move, a platform shift, without sacrificing performance, and it is incrementally faster than the 2018 Intel Mac mini at less than half the price.
  - nobleach 4y ago
    But as often is the case with Apple releases, you DO indeed have to sacrifice things. Apple will often use marketing to tell people they don't need features that are standard on other platforms (copy/paste, MMS on the iPhone, more than 8 Gigs of memory on the first M1). So it's hard to call it a lateral move without sacrifice. Granted, Apple always comes around.
    - Maursault 4y ago
      The lateral move was with Macs, not iPhones, which were always ARM. And the 2020 M1 Mac mini had two memory configurations, 8GB or 16GB. Obviously the product would not appeal to users that require 64GB of memory, yet most M1 users report the limited RAM doesn't affect performance. The only sacrifice with switching from Intel that I can think of is no longer being able to run x86 VMs at full speed. It's not like there are sweeping sacrifices everywhere, but instead a nitpick or two.
wmf 4y ago
Intel in particular focused on increasing clock speed with little regard to performance during that time period. That wasn't really true in 1999 when Intel was still using the good P6 microarchitecture in the Pentium ///. NetBurst stupidity didn't start until later.
- anthk 4y ago
  The G4 was much better at 500MHZ than the PIII.
  - mschaef 4y ago
    How well did that hold up as the CPU clock rates went up and the bus speed really didn't? I'd always assumed it was an issue, but never did have metrics to bear that out.

justinator 4y ago

It felt much slower than the Dells I would use in the college's computer lab. These things were not performant out of the gate, given OS 9 totally well: sucked, and OS X itself released a year+ later was not heavily optimized and nothing else ran natively, so you were running everything under the OS 9 env anyways. I think people forget the incremental improvements in optimization of the whole stack that was done and punted off as features. There's an old video of Steve Jobs showing off resizing a window in OS X by the dragging the corner and marveling that it would do that so fluidly and not tear all over the place like the previous version.

anthk 4y ago
By 2000-2001 OSX was much better than W98 and even WXP for media production.
- justinator 4y ago
  You may be misremembering the timeline of OS X releases as OS X 10.0 only came out in March of 2001. It took a while for Cocoa apps to mature.
  - anthk 4y ago
    Ah, yes, sorry. 2001-2002 then. XP in 2002 was taking W98 over, and yet OSX felt superior. Ditto with Linux and KDE3 and a good video and sound card and the -rt kernel. 2.4 or 2.6 preferabily, with Cinepaint and Cinelerra.
    - justinator 4y ago
      It's hard for me to remember, as I didn't do much video back then and I'm not sure when Cocoa version of Premiere came out (or when the Final Cuts did either - which seemed far more popular - how things change!). I did a lot of work in PS and it was certainly better in every way on the G4, but running on OS X was a bit hit/miss as plugins and filters lagged behind. It was real messy for a few years. Not being able to get a fastish G4 in a laptop and never a G5 certainly didn't help. Who would have guessed the jump to Intel would be such a saving grace. Man video was so weird back then. Remember needing to go to like, a special render farm to output your completed Final Cut project? Or local racks of XServes? Or just a weirdo mishmash local network?

goosedragons 4y ago

It wasn't that slow a clock speed at the time of announcement, a smidge behind Intel and AMD at the time. They both had 600+ MHz chips then. But things really heated up and by March 2000 you could get a 1Ghz processor and of course P4 was all about clock speeds so things changed rapidly. PPC took a few more years to get to 1GHz.