3 ms·
The G3 was more powerful per cycle than a Pentium II. Ditto with G4's and similar cycled Pentium III's.
by anthk 3y ago
The G3 was more powerful per cycle than a Pentium II.
Ditto with G4's and similar cycled Pentium III's.
- ido 3y agoBut intel (and AMD) scaled up MHz/GHz a lot further. Motorola was stuck at 500MHz as the Athlon and PIII were already racing to 1GHz.
- anthk 3y agoThe G4 at 800 MHZ was still much more powerful than a Pentium III, or at least on par.
- beebeepka 3y ago"much more powerful" is not anything like "on par". So what if that beautiful and expensive chunk of metal and plastic was slower in games and such?
- NikkiA 3y agoI had a dual-866MHz G4 (MDD) and in most things my Tualatin P3-1200 at the time absolutely beat it. But the G4 was worth using until it literally caught fire just after the warranty ended.
- gattilorenz 3y agoMotorola?
- 90sguy 3y agoMotorola has a long history of making processors, such as the 68000-series. They powered Macs (and Amiga) From Wikipedia: > The PowerPC 7xx is a family of third generation 32-bit PowerPC microprocessors designed and manufactured by IBM and Motorola (spun off as Freescale Semiconductor bought by NXP Semiconductors)
- ido 3y agoSupplier of the CPUs we're talking about (alongside IBM).
- mrweasel 3y agoMotorola was one of the companies behind the PowerPC, but those found in the iMac was made by IBM.
- simondotau 3y agoNo one saying it competed with high-end machines of the day. But it was quite powerful compared to PCs targeting a home audience. The other thing to remember, is that computers were only barely powerful enough back then. Powerful models felt powerful precisely because we were desperate for every last CPU cycle we could get.
- anthk 3y agoBarely powerful in early mid-90's. From 1996 an the multimedia PC and a bit later witht the Pentium MMX, the power gap from a 286 based DOS PC from 1991 was something else.
- threeseed 3y agoIt's completely wrong that the hardware was underpowered. The bottle neck was always macOS 9 which was a pretty rudimentary OS by today's standards.
- astrange 3y agoIt didn't have a SIMD unit. Although x86 only had MMX at the time, which wasn't much better.
- acdha 3y agoAlso MMX was basically the first mainstream use of SIMD so adoption was glacially slow since you had not only limited compiler support but also no libraries and little programmer familiarity with the style. That took a long time for knowledge and tools to improve, especially in the nascent internet era where people couldn’t just look things up on a comprehensive reference site or get help on GitHub.
- astrange 3y agoI'd say there's still limited compiler support for MMX. Because of the strange way you have to use it (it trashes the floating point registers until the next `emms`) compilers won't use it even if it's beneficial, so no autovectorization.
- indymike 3y agoA lot of the performance complaints came from software that was built for the 68k and ran under emulation. As software built for PPC came out, that complaint went away.
- detourdog 3y agoWhat is funny is that macOS 9 was so snappy on the GUI side but you had to start employing RAM disks and given different names to the same application to run them simultaneously. It could really scoot but occasionally a dialog box might bring everything to a halt until hitting OK or Cancel.
- 3y ago
- bombcar 3y agohttps://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/1999/04/28/silly-rabbit-q3test-is-for-macs https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/1999/04/28/silly-rabbit-q... It was a bit of a sore spot For a while there.