[atlcane]

I have a personal rule that i will buy a new Mac when mine is 4 times slower than the newest Mac. I currently have a 800mhz imac. ( I wish I got a power mac looking back.) How long till we see a 3.2 Ghz?

[Back up 15 and punt]

Originally posted by atlcane:
I have a personal rule that i will buy a new Mac when mine is 4 times slower than the newest Mac. I currently have a 800mhz imac. ( I wish I got a power mac looking back.) How long till we see a 3.2 Ghz?

Probably next September or so.

[Zemrec]

Keep in mind though, that what you're saying is a 4x clock speed improvement. This isn't that great a comparison, as CPUs don't always scale linearly, plus you have to take into account diminishing returns as well as processor design changes.

If there's ever a Mac with a 3.2 GHz CPU, it's anyone's guess whether it'll actually be a full 4x faster than your iMac. For instance, in the x86 world, they've been making internal changes to the CPU (ahem, Intel) that allow for very high clock speeds, but a 3.0 GHz P4 isn't necessarily twice as fast as the original 1.5 GHz P4s.

Hmm. I could go on, but I'm probably rambling, and anyhow all this is out there on other discussions. More than you wanted to hear I'm sure too

[Macpilot]

Those will be announced around the time the dual G5 owners actually get their machines!

[Eug]

Originally posted by atlcane:
I have a personal rule that i will buy a new Mac when mine is 4 times slower than the newest Mac. I currently have a 800mhz imac. ( I wish I got a power mac looking back.) How long till we see a 3.2 Ghz?

By MHz alone, the dual 2.0 G5 is 5X the speed of your iMac.

Also, using ARC2D double precision floating point benchmarks, a single 2 GHz G5 is almost 2.6X as fast as a G4 1.25. Extrapolating, that would mean a single G5 2.0 is 4X as fast as your iMac 800, and a dual G5 2.0 is 8X as fast.

Sounds like it's time to upgrade.

[Hydra]

The New Dual G5 has over 6x's the bus speed of your iMac (they have 133 buses?) alone.

-Jerry C.

[RooneyX]

Originally posted by Zemrec:
Keep in mind though, that what you're saying is a 4x clock speed improvement. This isn't that great a comparison, as CPUs don't always scale linearly, plus you have to take into account diminishing returns as well as processor design changes.

If there's ever a Mac with a 3.2 GHz CPU, it's anyone's guess whether it'll actually be a full 4x faster than your iMac. For instance, in the x86 world, they've been making internal changes to the CPU (ahem, Intel) that allow for very high clock speeds, but a 3.0 GHz P4 isn't necessarily twice as fast as the original 1.5 GHz P4s.

This is not always the case. New features are added to CPUs and when software takea advantage of them then there is an in line and sometimes more than double performance improvement when clock speeds double.

I suspect a PIV with HT running at 3Ghz is faster than a PIV 1.5Ghz which has no HT. And I suspect a 3Ghz Centrino Pentium M would be faster than a desktop PIV at the same speed and three to four times faster than a PIV running at half the speed.

I remember the PII266 ran twice as fast as a Pentium 200 MMX I had at the time. I've always been benchmarking my systems.

If the achitecture remains the same then you won't get double the improvement, depends on the software. But this guy has a G4-800 and will one day upgrade to a G5 3.2Ghz. Not only will he see 4x improvement, but possible 6x!

He'll see a 3x or more improvement today if he got a G5 1.6Ghz.

[RooneyX]

Originally posted by RooneyX:
This is not always the case. New features are added to CPUs and when software takea advantage of them then there is an in line and sometimes more than double performance improvement when clock speeds double.

I suspect a PIV with HT running at 3Ghz is 2X faster than a PIV 1.5Ghz which has no HT. And I suspect a 3Ghz Centrino Pentium M would be faster than a desktop PIV at the same speed and three to four times faster than a PIV running at half the speed.

I remember the PII266 ran twice as fast as a Pentium 200 MMX I had at the time. I've always been benchmarking my systems.

If the achitecture remains the same then you won't get double the improvement, depends on the software. But this guy has a G4-800 and will one day upgrade to a G5 3.2Ghz. Not only will he see 4x improvement, but possible 6x!

He'll see a 3x or more improvement today if he got a G5 1.6Ghz.

[Catfish_Man]

Originally posted by Zemrec:
but a 3.0 GHz P4 isn't necessarily twice as fast as the original 1.5 GHz P4s.

Yeah, the original P4s sucked pretty badly . The current ones aren't nearly as bad (HT, bigger cache, faster bus, etc...)

[ebuddy]

From other posts and other such Apple gossip; Dual 3Ghz machines 12 months from now. (which if they mean 12 mo's from the release of the dual 2Ghz could be sometime next Halloween.) They'll offer up a G5 Powerbook before they go too much further. It might have to be liquid-cooled, but hey...I'd water it.

Go for the 2Ghz machine now.

[Mooga2]

2 x 2.0 GHz G5 Processors = (close to 4.0 GHz technically, but closer to 3.5 GHz practically speaking). Together, the processsors are actually more than the 3.2 GHz that you're waiting for.

[Superchicken]

hehe the G5 would be far more than four times as fast

[olePigeon]

IBM says they'll pass 3GHz for the PowerPC 970 by next year.

Originally posted by atlcane:
I have a personal rule that i will buy a new Mac when mine is 4 times slower than the newest Mac. I currently have a 800mhz imac. ( I wish I got a power mac looking back.) How long till we see a 3.2 Ghz?