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Macs to use Intel chips?

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Comments

  • #62
    L1011
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 72,746 ✭✭✭✭L1011


    WinXP will work well on a PII with less RAM than Tiger needs on a similarly aged G3...


  • #63
    rsynnott
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 4,003 ✭✭✭rsynnott


    Really? Last time I tried using WinXP on an elderly computer (a pIII of some sort) it took 10 minutes to log in, and was unusably slow. (I don't use WinXP much, full stop; that was just the idea I'd got)

    Well, they'd want to hope their intel chips can match this: http://daugerresearch.com/fractaldemos/altivecfractalcarbon.html

    or they'll have trouble getting the mathematicians and scientists over. (If you have access to a G4 or G5 mac, run it. On a 1Ghz G4 here (one of the slightly cutdown eMac ones) it did a bit under 500 megaflops without Altivec, and an amazing 4GIGAFlops with Altivec. (Bear in mind that the G5's Altivec unit is fancier)..

    I'm not sure why you go on about "even MIPS" being beaten; first of all, it's actually still in use (SGI) and besides that, it was never a dramatically fast RISC.

    I think there'll always be a market for well-put-together computers which Just Work with the technology supplied by the manufacturer. Mac is a stable platform; while that holds it back in some ways, it makes it a bit more like a games console to develop for. You always know what's gonig to be there, more or less. Whether that continues to be the case, of course, is questionable. By and large, besides the laptops to an extent, Macs are also reliable. Weird hardware failures are unusual (we've got a lovely lab of high-end Dells in college who's motherboards are slowly failing; it took about a year to get Dell to aknoledge this.)

    And people will spend silly amounts of money on computers that look good. Sony has shown this. There will still be a market. It's possible that they'll drop the servers (MacOS X is a HORRIBLE server environment).

    Ulitmately, Intel are having to add modern-chip features to the x86, now that they have little hope of pushing its clockspeed higher. SSE1/2/3 are a SIMD instruction set a little like Altivec. Pipelines have grown. But they're limited in how much concurrency they can do, and they're limited by those 8 general purpose registers.


  • #64
    Zaph0d
    Closed Accounts Posts: 756 ✭✭✭Zaph0d


    I would have bought an iMac or iBook if it could dual boot with Windows. Otherwise I couldn't use it at work and thus couldn't justify it.

    I think Apple lost many sales this way.

    Their core competence is design.


  • #65
    L1011
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 72,746 ✭✭✭✭L1011


    I until recently used, as my sole working Windows machine, a 266Mhz PII with 160MB RAM. It was -significantly- more responsive than OSX on an iMac 266 with similar RAM, and about as response as a 400Mhz/25MB G4 would be under OSX.

    Another slightly less verifiable claim is SETI@HOME stats, using the BOINC core. My 1.1Ghz Centrino was able to crack a block twice as fast as my 1.2Ghz G4. Similar age CPU core - the Tualatin PIII is -old- by now, and OSX was using a far newer and altivec optomised client.


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