[analogika]

Originally Posted by mduell 

300GBps is only from cache to execution units, all inside the core, right? At 5Ghz that's a 512-bit wide cache memory bus, which is twice as wide as Core 2 Duo.

What about Intel's competing server offerings?

[Dakarʒ]

Originally Posted by Big Mac 

It's supposed to be slightly humorous. I am using the term kosher in the popular figurative sense, as in "genuine, legitimate" (the third definition in Apple Dictionary).

I realize it's meant to be humorous. But considering the source, I find my interpretation slightly humorous as well.

[Obi Wan's Ghost]

Originally Posted by CharlesS 

Obi Wan's Ghost, I don't know what you're smoking, but the FPU was considered the PowerPC's specialty back in the day, especially with the 604 and 604e. Integer performance would go back and forth between PPC and Intel, but PPC pretty much consistently lead in FPU performance, from everything I've ever read. Even PC diehards usually admitted this.

I'm glad you later corrected yourself with the Pentium Pro vs PPC article. I don't need to add how much better DEC Alpha was too everything. It still has an unbeaten FPU.

And I didn't even get started on AMD whose Athlon Thunderbird was better than the Pentium III and G3, and PR rated XP series which was a league ahead of the Pentium 4 and the G4.

[TETENAL]

Originally Posted by Lateralus 

When Apple switched to Intel, Steve essentially annointed another architecture. Nevermind the fact that it was the same architecture Apple had been an opponent of for the previous two decades.

So what you and BigMac are saying is that there are not technical reasons why you don't consider Macs with Intel processors "real" Macs. It's just a political reason.

[bradoesch]

The reason I don't miss PowerPC chips in Macs anymore is mostly because I'm a shareholder. That helped a lot.

[goMac]

Originally Posted by TETENAL 

So what you and BigMac are saying is that there are not technical reasons why you don't consider Macs with Intel processors "real" Macs. It's just a political reason.

The way I see it is that Apple likes to use the fastest processors available on the market. The fastest processors on the market right now and in the forseeable future are the Intel processors.

[Laminar]

Originally Posted by goMac 

The way I see it is that Apple likes to use the fastest processors available on the market. The fastest processors on the market right now and in the forseeable future are the Intel processors.

That makes them sound a bit fickle, as if they'll switch depending on whichever's faster at the moment. It took years of the PPC being behind to get them to switch to Intel, and I reeeeally doubt they'll switch back anytime soon.

[olePigeon]

Originally Posted by TETENAL 

The 68k were CISC processors.No PowerPC ever had something like that. The system had a software 68k-emulator similar to Rosetta now.And that's the exactly how fat-binaries worked on 68k and PowerMacs.

So, technically, where is the difference that makes the previous transition "real" and this one not?

Shoulda checked Wikipedia. My memory is obviously horrible.

[olePigeon]

Originally Posted by Obi Wan's Ghost 

I don't need to add how much better DEC Alpha was too everything. It still has an unbeaten FPU.

Reminds me of an old joke:

Q: What's the difference between a DEC Alpha and a bowling ball?
A: A bowling ball has more software.

[goMac]

Originally Posted by Laminar 

That makes them sound a bit fickle, as if they'll switch depending on whichever's faster at the moment. It took years of the PPC being behind to get them to switch to Intel, and I reeeeally doubt they'll switch back anytime soon.

Sure, but Apple kept trying to switch to Intel starting in 1998. Rhapsody was originally available for Intel. And IBM boosted about how Apple was going to switch to Intel in 2003 but IBM stopped them with the G5.

[Obi Wan's Ghost]

Originally Posted by olePigeon 

Reminds me of an old joke:

Q: What's the difference between a DEC Alpha and a bowling ball?
A: A bowling ball has more software.

haha, not going to let you get away with that one YoungPigeon! Windows NT 4 for DEC Alpha shipped with a binary translation tool that was more effective than Rosetta. It translated x86 apps and saved the translated binary to cache so that the next time the app was launched it would be very fast. All x86 NT apps would work on Alpha as long as they didn't rely on specific drivers (such as genlocks or dongles).

[goMac]

Originally Posted by Obi Wan's Ghost 

haha, not going to let you get away with that one YoungPigeon! Windows NT 4 for DEC Alpha shipped with a binary translation tool that was more effective than Rosetta. It translated x86 apps and saved the translated binary to cache so that the next time the app was launched it would be very fast. All x86 NT apps would work on Alpha as long as they didn't rely on specific drivers (such as genlocks or dongles).

Actually Rosetta caches too. I don't think the cache is maintained from restart to restart, but I think the cache is maintained from session to session.

[Obi Wan's Ghost]

Originally Posted by goMac 

Actually Rosetta caches too. I don't think the cache is maintained from restart to restart, but I think the cache is maintained from session to session.

NT's translation was saved permanently. I'm not sure about Rosetta.

[CharlesS]

Originally Posted by Obi Wan's Ghost 

I'm glad you later corrected yourself with the Pentium Pro vs PPC article.

I don't need to add how much better DEC Alpha was too [sic] everything. It still has an unbeaten FPU.

I'm not talking about the DEC Alpha. Unless you think Apple should have used that, it's irrelevant. I seem to remember that they were quite expensive.

And I didn't even get started on AMD whose Athlon Thunderbird was better than the Pentium III and G3, and PR rated XP series which was a league ahead of the Pentium 4 and the G4.

Um, that was later on, when the x86 architecture was smoking the PPC in terms of clock speed, mostly due to Intel's new competition from AMD. When you're running at twice the clock rate, it helps.

Plus, why are you comparing floating point performance against the G3? The G3 was one of the weaker PPCs (along with the 603/603e) in floating point calculations.

[mduell]

Originally Posted by olePigeon 

Moving from a RISC PowerPC architecture to a CISC x86 architecture is very different.

Actually, they're quite similar in terms of execution these days... both PowerPC and x86 have relatively complex instruction sets on the front end that are translated into a much simpler instruction set before execution.

[Obi Wan's Ghost]

Originally Posted by CharlesS 

Plus, why are you comparing floating point performance against the G3? The G3 was one of the weaker PPCs (along with the 603/603e) in floating point calculations.

Maybe because Apple made those comparisons. Let's put things in perspective again, and hopefully you've used these architectures instead of reading theoretical whitepapers (which admitted the PowerPCs fell behind at times because of their slow cache).

The G3 was first compared by Apple to a Pentium III. Remember the snail ads with the Pentium III chip on fire? It was the most misleading ad at the time and the benchmarks raised many complaints for being totally unrealistic.

Then along came the G4, which Apple claimed was 2.5 times faster than the Pentium III at the same clock speed. The reality was that in real world usage the G4 was normally 10% faster than the Pentium III. Appe dared not publish any benchmarks versus a Xeon because that Intel CPU would have been faster than the G4 in just about any benchmark, and in SMP configurations both Intel products would have destroyed the G4.

The Xeon and Pentium Pro were clock for clock faster than the Pentium III because of their integrated faster level 2 cache. This made them superior for FPU than anything PowerPC could come up with.

Then there's AMD. AMD's consumer CPUs, the Athlon and Athlon Thunderbird, were actually as fast as the Xeons clock for clock at a lower price than anything around at the time. PowerPC versus Athlon? Don't even go there.

Pentium 4 ruined Intel's reputation. This is the CPU that got all the competitors laughing. PowerPC was much faster clock for clock but Intel's new architecture allowed them to keep ramping clockspeeds and shipping CPUs at consumer prices. But wait! The Pentium 4 Xeon was being fabbed and was still ahead of PowerPC.

AMD responded with the Athlon XP and used the PR rating system to compare their CPUs to Intel's. These new breed of Athlons were clock for clock much faster than Pentium 4s and G4s. There's no denying it. And Opteron? Destroys G4s and even owns G5s in some respects.

The G5 comes out to the same fanfare and fanboy love that the G4 came out with, and with the same big promises. History repeated itself. Promises were not kept.The G5 is the first PowerPC processor that shows huge promise because it got rid of so much legacy technology, but Intel and AMD kept racing away with newly designed architectures and multi-core configurations.

Intel's Centrino and Core architectures, designed in Israel, disgarded the weak FPU of the Pentium 4 and resurrected parts of the Pentium Pro's architecture. The result is a CPU that is powerful enough to keep up with the G5 clock for clock even though they run on a slower bus and have some bandwidth restrictions.

So now where is the massive superiority of the PowerPC at any stage? The original statements posed were that Intel didn't have a competitor at the workstation and server level. The truth is quite the opposite. SGI's downfall is evidence of that. Apple's concentration on low end consumer machines for a number of years is evidence of that too.

Another statement made was that the PowerPC was the most powerful CPU around, but it didn't compare to Intel's Xeon. It also paled next to AMD's offerings. And in the 90s, and still to this day even though it is no longer produced, the DEC Alpha is clock for clock the best processor ever made for workstations. It didn't need special gimmicks like SIMD for extra performance. It was a beef and veg 64 bit CPU well ahead of its time.

One more note: SGI's MIP processors were also more powerful than PowerPC's offerings but could not compete performance wise against the much cheaper Intergraph machines which featured up to four Pentium Pros. If PowerPC was so fast, SGI could have chosen to build their next generation workstations with those CPUs. Instead they chose Intel Xeon. At first they ran a flavor of Unix with Gnome on those Intel boxes but later moved to Windows NT (SGI were the first company to write third party USB drivers for NT 4.0).

[Stratus Fear]

Originally Posted by Obi Wan's Ghost 

The Xeon and Pentium Pro were clock for clock faster than the Pentium III because of their integrated faster level 2 cache. This made them superior for FPU than anything PowerPC could come up with.

This really isn't the point of discussion, but just a nitpick. It really depends what gen of Xeon you're talking about. To start, the Pentium Pro, Pentium II and Pentium III all shared the same core P6 architecture (with minor modifications between each generation). Each generation of Xeon that matched the same generation of Pentium was mostly the same. The only differences are here: during the Pentium II generation, the Xeon also had the same off-die L2 cache as the P2, but clocked twice as fast. The same for the Katmai Pentium IIIs, up until the Coppermine Pentium IIIs. Those all had on-die cache, Pentium and Xeon alike, running at the core's frequency, and had the same performance per clock cycle. There really was little performance difference between them at that point as they had essentially the same core, and even the earlier Xeons with higher clocked cache than their Pentium counterparts were only percentage points faster in some operations. The biggest difference actually was that some of those Xeons you could get ridiculously large L2 caches (for the time), which was pretty important in some things like database applications. They really aren't as different as you think. The P6 microarchtecture did have decent FPU performance, though, but I have no idea how it compared to PPC because I paid little attention to Macs about the time I started getting into computers 12 or so years ago.

[Lateralus]

Originally Posted by Obi Wan's Ghost 

The G3 was first compared by Apple to a Pentium III. Remember the snail ads with the Pentium III chip on fire? It was the most misleading ad at the time and the benchmarks raised many complaints for being totally unrealistic.

Actually... The snail ad portrayed a Pentium II. And the G3 did most certainly toast the Pentium II clock for clock.

It seems like every post you're making contains statements that are inaccurate and misleading.

[Obi Wan's Ghost]

Originally Posted by Stratus Fear 

The P6 microarchtecture did have decent FPU performance, though, but I have no idea how it compared to PPC because I paid little attention to Macs about the time I started getting into computers 12 or so years ago.

Like I said, the PPC had a good FPU, but it was only 10-20% better than the Pentium III at the same clock speed with Altivec enabled. That as real world performance and not staged demos like Apple did in keynotes. Without Altivec PowerPC was neck in neck with Pentium III but not comparable with Xeons.

When I first switched to the Mac, not fully, I posted benchmarks on MacNN and my blog twice. The first time it was a Dual G4-450 Power Mac versus a single Pentium III-733. This was a Photoshop test running filters on large files. I bought the Power Mac believing Apple's claims that the G4 was twice or more as fast as the Pentium III so I expected the Dual G4 to utterly blow past the Pentium III. The results were totally unexpected. The Pentium III beat the G4. There were no errors in the test. Quite a few loud voices from the Mac faithful at the time, none of whom used a Pentium III and all believed Apple's graphs.

My second test was probably less fair. I don't know if anyone remembers the reviews I did on my blog years back, I posted videos too. It was a PowerBook G4 550 versus a Sony Vaio with Pentium III 933. The Vaio soundly beat the PowerBook. That shouldn't come as a surprise because it has almost twice the clock speed. However, Apple's PowerBook site showed graphs with the G4 beating a 1Ghz Pentium III by 30% !!! Very falicious. I sold the Vaio and kept the PowerBook however.

[Obi Wan's Ghost]

Originally Posted by Lateralus 

Actually... The snail ad portrayed a Pentium II. And the G3 did most certainly toast the Pentium II clock for clock.

It seems like every post you're making contains statements that are inaccurate and misleading.

OK I made one mistake with the snail ad. That's no reason to rubbish "every post" when you've got nothing to offer back. That's really Scientologist of you.

[CharlesS]

Originally Posted by Obi Wan's Ghost 

Maybe because Apple made those comparisons.

Um, yeah... so what? We were talking about the 604's FPU. That makes the G3 pretty irrelevant, doesn't it?

Let's put things in perspective again, and hopefully you've used these architectures instead of reading theoretical whitepapers (which admitted the PowerPCs fell behind at times because of their slow cache).

I only posted two articles. Go search for stuff - there are lots of articles out there, and pretty much all of them mention floating-point as one of the big advantages of the RISC processors, including the PowerPC.

The article I posted made it pretty clear that the PPC had a superior FPU, but that the Pentium Pro could sometimes beat it in some tests due to it being helped out by a faster cache. Which has nothing to do with the FPU itself. The reason I posted the article is because you were trashing the 604's FPU.

The G3 was first compared by Apple to a Pentium III. Remember the snail ads with the Pentium III chip on fire? It was the most misleading ad at the time and the benchmarks raised many complaints for being totally unrealistic.

Don't care about the G3, or the Pentium III either for that matter. The G3 was pretty fast at integer performance when it came out. It wasn't that great at FPU compared to pretty much any other PPC (other than the 603/603e).

So now where is the massive superiority of the PowerPC at any stage? The original statements posed were that Intel didn't have a competitor at the workstation and server level. The truth is quite the opposite. SGI's downfall is evidence of that. Apple's concentration on low end consumer machines for a number of years is evidence of that too.

None, because you're talking about the era of the G4, the Pentium III, AMD as an actual serious competitor, and such. That's the time when the PowerPC's advantages went away. We were never talking about 1998 and later at all. We were talking about Apple's reasons for switching to the PowerPC at the time they switched. Back then, the PowerPC had very real advantages, particularly in floating-point, which it kept all the way through the 604e, and it looked like the PowerPC had a much better future performance-wise than the Pentium. The fact that Intel was able to do what they did with the x86 architecture is frankly somewhat of a miracle, owing primarily to their massive monetary and engineering resources. And even then, they did it by making the Pentium into a RISC core similar to the PowerPC, with a compatibility layer over it.

Originally Posted by Obi Wan's Ghost 

Like I said, the PPC had a good FPU

Okay, then we agree then.

When I first switched to the Mac, not fully, I posted benchmarks on MacNN and my blog twice. The first time it was a Dual G4-450 Power Mac versus a single Pentium III-733. This was a Photoshop test running filters on large files. I bought the Power Mac believing Apple's claims that the G4 was twice or more as fast as the Pentium III so I expected the Dual G4 to utterly blow past the Pentium III. The results were totally unexpected. The Pentium III beat the G4. There were no errors in the test. Quite a few loud voices from the Mac faithful at the time, none of whom used a Pentium III and all believed Apple's graphs.

My second test was probably less fair. I don't know if anyone remembers the reviews I did on my blog years back, I posted videos too. It was a PowerBook G4 550 versus a Sony Vaio with Pentium III 933. The Vaio soundly beat the PowerBook. That shouldn't come as a surprise because it has almost twice the clock speed. However, Apple's PowerBook site showed graphs with the G4 beating a 1Ghz Pentium III by 30% !!! Very falicious. I sold the Vaio and kept the PowerBook however.

Well yeah, during the late 90s and on. I'd kinda think that the fact that the Pentium IIIs and IVs were running at almost twice (and sometimes, over twice!) the clock rate of the PPCs of the time. That can kind of help your performance, you know? If you've got twice the clock speed, you can beat the other chip even if it does have a better FPU, as long as its FPU isn't twice as fast as yours clock for clock.

Again, I'm not trying to argue that the G4 beat Intel's chips during the post-AIM breakup era, as most sane people wouldn't. I'm talking about the reasons Apple switched to the PPC in the first place. It seems like that was what we were talking about. I don't remember why, but I think it was in response to Big Mac's claiming that the Intel switch is somehow different from the PowerPC switch for some obtuse reason.

[Obi Wan's Ghost]

Regardless of specific and small details, my only point was to make a correction. When someone says that the PowerPC was the most powerful workstation and server chip around and that Intel (and that would presumably include all x86 chips) had no solutions for those markets, that is clearly not the truth. NeXT, Intergraph and SGI were just some of the high end companies using Intel. End of story. Now Apple is the king of Intel machines.

[CharlesS]

SGI didn't switch to Intel until 1998, according to Wikipedia. Apple switched to PPC in 1994.

I don't think anyone said that Intel had no solutions. Rather, Intel's solutions didn't look like they were going to be able to compete well with PPC and other RISC-based solutions moving forward, at the time Apple switched to PPC. Things that happened four or five years later don't matter, because if Apple had a crystal ball to know what would happen at the end of the century, they indeed might have switched to Intel instead of PPC in 1994, although then we probably wouldn't have seen many of Apple's famous designs that required a cool-running processor during the Pentium IV era. As it was, there was no way to know that things would turn out the way they did.

[Obi Wan's Ghost]

Originally Posted by CharlesS 

SGI didn't switch to Intel until 1998, according to Wikipedia. Apple switched to PPC in 1994.

We have been speaking about the whole of the 90s and early 2000s.

I don't think anyone said that Intel had no solutions.

Oh yes they did. Quite surprisingly. Big Mac said

Intel had absolutely nothing to compete against the PPC on the workstation level - look at how much further ahead in performance the 620 was.

And goMac responded

Yes, Intel had nothing to compete on the workstation level, but on a consumer level, the PPC was much more expensive, and generally was a lot more power than the consumer needed at that time.

Quite wrong.

[CharlesS]

Those quotes said that Intel's solutions didn't compete with the PPC, not that Intel had no solutions. Obviously, Intel was in the business of producing microprocessors when Apple switched to PPC.

[Obi Wan's Ghost]

Originally Posted by CharlesS 

Those quotes said that Intel's solutions didn't compete with the PPC, not that Intel had no solutions.

Semantics. They were absolutist statements, as was the later remark that the PowerPC was the most powerful CPU around. That was wrong too.

[CharlesS]

Originally Posted by Obi Wan's Ghost 

Semantics.

You're claiming that they were arguing that Intel didn't make microprocessors instead of what they obviously meant, and I'm the one arguing semantics?

[Obi Wan's Ghost]

Originally Posted by CharlesS 

You're claiming that they were arguing that Intel didn't make microprocessors

WFT?

[analogika]

Originally Posted by CharlesS 

You're claiming that they were arguing that Intel didn't make microprocessors instead of what they obviously meant, and I'm the one arguing semantics?

Dude - lean back for a few minutes, maybe go outside, and try that one again.

[CharlesS]

I think it was quite clear that the two people he quoted were saying that Intel didn't make anything that competed with the PowerPC. "Look at how far ahead in performance the 620 was." Not that they didn't have any solutions at all, but that their solutions couldn't compete. Like Apple in the early 2000s - you could call a G4 server a "solution", but not one that could compete with virtually anything else.

Whether that is true or not, I don't know, or even care. I'm just pointing out the obvious here.

[Obi Wan's Ghost]

Originally Posted by CharlesS 

I think it was quite clear that the two people he quoted were saying that Intel didn't make anything that competed with the PowerPC. "Look at how far ahead in performance the 620 was." Not that they didn't have any solutions at all, but that their solutions couldn't compete.

And I proved that was wrong. I shouldn't have even needed to prove such a thing. The existence of NeXT, Intergraph and SGI workstations, Xeons and Athlons is known to just about anyone who was an active workstation user at the time.

Whether that is true or not, I don't even care.

Doh. This is crazy. I'm out.

[CharlesS]

Originally Posted by Obi Wan's Ghost 

And I proved that was wrong. I shouldn't have even needed to prove such a thing. The existence of NeXT, Intergraph and SGI workstations, Xeons and Athlons is known to just about anyone who was an active workstation user at the time.

SGI didn't go Intel until 1998.
Xeons didn't come out until 1998.
Athlons didn't come out until 1999.

We're not talking about 1998-1999. We're talking about the reasons that Apple decided to switch to PowerPC half a decade earlier. Why keep bringing up the existence of things that didn't exist yet? Xeons and Athlons weren't even on the road map at that time.

Obviously, no one is saying that the PowerPC was the most powerful processor in 1999. That would be absurd.

Doh. This is crazy. I'm out.

It is indeed. I'm getting pretty damn sick of this too.

[smacintush]

Yeah uh, I'm having a hard time deciphering exactly how Apple's processor performance history in relationship to Intel has ANYTHING to do with what is happening in 2007…

[CharlesS]

It doesn't. Big Mac derailed it with yet another "Intel is evil" flamefest. For those who have apparently lost track of what this line of discussion was about (yeah, it was all slightly off topic), here's a little summary:

Big Mac: The Intel transition is evil, and the PPC transition was good.

CharlesS: What makes them different?

Big Mac: When Apple switched to PPC, they did so to be different, which is apparently a good thing to do for its own sake.

goMac: They didn't switch to be different, they switched to be the same. They thought that everyone else was going to go to PPC for high-end stuff. Windows NT servers were going to run on PPC, and these other OSes too.

Others: Link please

goMac: Link

Big Mac: The PPC kicked x86's ass, and x86 had nothing that could compete with it. (this is the part where I do not know if it is true or not. What I do know is that at the time, PPC appeared to have a better future performance-wise than x86).

goMac: x86 had nothing to compete with it at the high end, but at the low end PPC was overkill.

OWG: No it didn't, the PPC sucked and had a weak FPU.

Big Mac: What are you talking about? The 604 was great.

OWG: The 604 got "raped" by Xeons, never mind that they were released 4 years later. Also, its FPU was weak compared to the slightly less anachronistic Pentium Pro.

CharlesS: No, it wasn't.

OWG: Yes, it was.

CharlesS: link

OWG: Okay, it wasn't, but it was against the Xeons.

CharlesS: Yeah, but we're talking about 1994, when Apple switched to PPC.

OWG: Bla bla Xeon bla bla Athlon bla bla Pentium III Pentium IV bla bla SGI bla bla G3 G4 G5

CharlesS: We're talking about 1994. Those things were much later.

OWG: Bla bla Xeon bla bla Athlon bla bla Pentium III Pentium IV bla bla SGI bla bla G3 G4 G5

CharlesS: We're talking about 1994. Those things were much later.

<repeat the last two lines a few times>

OWG: Now let's take a left turn into bizarro land and pretend Big Mac and goMac were talking about 1999 when the Xeons and Athlons were around when they said x86 couldn't compete with PPC on the high end in 1994.

CharlesS: ...

[Obi Wan's Ghost]

Now that is twisted, Charlie. Very twisted. I gave PowerPC kudos by saying it was clock for clock faster than the Pentium III and 4 (but not as much as claimed by Apple). I never said it sucked or I wouldn't be typing this on a G4 and waiting until next year for my first Macintel.

[CharlesS]

I paraphrased a bit. I wrote "sucked" where you wrote "raped" and "piss weak". I think these are fairly equivalent.

Originally Posted by Obi Wan's Ghost 

I can substantiate them. I have used these systems and benched them all the time. Many have. The 603/604 was piss weak and even poorer in SMP comfigurations compared to a Pentium Pro or Xeon. The G4 (which had a legacy 604 FPU ) and AltiVec improved the situation somewhat but wasn't helped by Mac OS's poor SMP support overall.

And again, the Pentium III and IV as well as Xeon and anything else that wasn't even close to existing in 1994 is completely irrelevant.

[analogika]

So it has been established that the switch to PPC is exactly the same as the switch to Intel (except, for some weird happy-hippy political reason, to Big Mac)? - The switch to PPC was made because, at the time, PPC was a) faster and b) had a brighter future, while the switch to Intel was made because, at the time, Intel was a) faster and b) had a brighter future.

The end.

(I'm still waiting for Big Mac to show us ONE SINGLE WAY in which the Powerbook G4 was superior to the MacBook Pro - other than being able to run Classic. Just one.)

[Obi Wan's Ghost]

Originally Posted by CharlesS 

I paraphrased a bit. I wrote "sucked" where you wrote "raped" and "piss weak". I think these are fairly equivalent.

OK, because perhaps the DEC Alpha was too much on my mind at the time I was too critical of the 604.

And again, the Pentium III and IV as well as Xeon and anything else that wasn't even close to existing in 1994 is completely irrelevant.

I don't recall the conversation being just about 1994. As this part of the discussion stemmed from talk of NT 4 and Microsoft's PPC support we were covering most of the 90s and early millennium.

[Obi Wan's Ghost]

Originally Posted by analogika 

So it has been established that the switch to PPC is exactly the same as the switch to Intel (except, for some weird happy-hippy political reason, to Big Mac)? - The switch to PPC was made because, at the time, PPC was a) faster and b) had a brighter future, while the switch to Intel was made because, at the time, Intel was a) faster and b) had a brighter future.

The end.

I think it is a little more complex than that. The switch to PPC instead of Intel was because of traditional Mac fan aversion to anything in the Wintel camp. The eventual switch to Intel under Jobs was always on the cards as OS X derives from NeXT which was Intel long before it was PPC. Jobs said himself that OS X was always living a double life and he was a closet Intel man for years.

[CharlesS]

Originally Posted by Obi Wan's Ghost 

OK, because perhaps the DEC Alpha was too much on my mind at the time I was too critical of the 604.

So not being as powerful as the (IIRC) insanely powerful DEC Alpha made the 604 "piss weak"? Sheesh, maybe the DEC Alpha's not being as powerful as the Cray made it "piss weak"?

The 604 was a great chip in its day.

I don't recall the conversation being just about 1994. As this part of the discussion stemmed from talk of NT 4 and Microsoft's PPC support we were covering most of the 90s and early millennium.

This part of the discussion was about Apple's reasons to switch to PPC. The argument was that from Apple's point of view in 1994 when they made the switch, it looked like the PPC was the future of high-end stuff, and that Windows NT and other major operating systems would be running on it, so Apple should be too.

Originally Posted by Obi Wan's Ghost 

I think it is a little more complex than that. The switch to PPC instead of Intel was because of traditional Mac fan aversion to anything in the Wintel camp. The eventual switch to Intel under Jobs was always on the cards as OS X derives from NeXT which was Intel long before it was PPC. Jobs said himself that OS X was always living a double life and he was a closet Intel man for years.

So you're on Big Mac's side of the fence then.

The PowerPC was faster and did appear to have a brighter future at the time. Mac fans may have had an aversion to Intel, but they weren't running the company. You don't bet the company on a huge decision like that for stupid reasons like "Intel is evil". And of course many Mac fans got irrationally pissed off just like Big Mac when the PPC switch came about, what with Apple getting in bed with the big bad IBM, the target of much more Mac fan aversion at the time than Intel.

[Atheist]

Originally Posted by CharlesS 

It doesn't. Big Mac derailed it with yet another "Intel is evil" flamefest. For those who have apparently lost track of what this line of discussion was about (yeah, it was all slightly off topic), here's a little summary:

Big Mac: The Intel transition is evil, and the PPC transition was good.

CharlesS: What makes them different?

...
...
...


OWG: Now let's take a left turn into bizarro land and pretend Big Mac and goMac were talking about 1999 when the Xeons and Athlons were around when they said x86 couldn't compete with PPC on the high end in 1994.

CharlesS: ...

CharlesS, That was awesome... can you do that to the "Religion: How can so many be so stupid?" thread?

[Big Mac]

I'm glad I took a break from this thread. Catching up was entertaining, thanks to CharlesS. (Thank you for characterizing my positions fairly, Charles.)

[TETENAL]

Originally Posted by Obi Wan's Ghost 

I think it is a little more complex than that. The switch to PPC instead of Intel was because of traditional Mac fan aversion to anything in the Wintel camp.

Maybe that was part of it, but again, this is political. Name one technical reason why Intel based Macs should not be considered "real" Macs while PowerPC based Macs should when both transitions are technically very similar.

[Big Mac]

Originally Posted by TETENAL 

Maybe that was part of it, but again, this is political. Name one technical reason why Intel based Macs should not be considered "real" Macs while PowerPC based Macs should when both transitions are technically very similar.

He's not the one making that claim, I am. And I have already discussed my basis for saying it. Maybe I'll pen a treatise on the subject. I'll let you know if I do.

[mduell]

Originally Posted by analogika 

(I'm still waiting for Big Mac to show us ONE SINGLE WAY in which the Powerbook G4 was superior to the MacBook Pro - other than being able to run Classic. Just one.)

Easy: RC5 encryption, for the now-cancelled contests from RSA.

[analogika]

Originally Posted by Obi Wan's Ghost 

I think it is a little more complex than that. The switch to PPC instead of Intel was because of traditional Mac fan aversion to anything in the Wintel camp. The eventual switch to Intel under Jobs was always on the cards as OS X derives from NeXT which was Intel long before it was PPC. Jobs said himself that OS X was always living a double life and he was a closet Intel man for years.

I was there when it happened, and believe me, the "traditional Mac fans'" designated enemy back then was IBM.

NOT Intel.

Announcing the CHRP and then the PPC in alliance with Motorola and *gasp* IBM is the closest Apple has ever come to a lynch mob storming Infinite Loop 1.

And of course, one might note that Steve Jobs' other company, NeXT, ditched Motorola for Intel fifteen years ago...although their decision to give up hardware production altogether put them in a very different situation.

[goMac]

Originally Posted by Obi Wan's Ghost 

Quite wrong.

I'm not sure whether or not you're saying I'm wrong about the PowerPC being expensive... but just in case...

The Quadra 605, which my family actually owned, came out a year before the PowerPC and was discontinued just after the PowerPC came out. The Quadra 605 was $970.

The LC520 with a built in display and CD drive was $1300.

The Performa 631CD came out AFTER the PowerPC was released, and was a 680LC40. This machine was $1600.

The low end Power Macintosh 6100, which did not even have a CD drive or display, was $1820.

[analogika]

Originally Posted by mduell 

Easy: RC5 encryption, for the now-cancelled contests from RSA.

Okay, I've looked it up, and I'll bite:

a) what is the significance of this, and

b) what the hell does it have to do with the Powerbook vs. the MacBook Pro?

[analogika]

Originally Posted by Big Mac 

He's not the one making that claim, I am. And I have already discussed my basis for saying it. Maybe I'll pen a treatise on the subject. I'll let you know if I do.

After three pages, all I can see that's left of your basis is "RC5" (an argument which mduell kindly supplied in your stead), and the verdict's still out on whether that is just facetiousness or an actual point.

[Laminar]

Originally Posted by goMac 

I'm not sure whether or not you're saying I'm wrong about the PowerPC being expensive... but just in case...

The Quadra 605, which my family actually owned, came out a year before the PowerPC and was discontinued just after the PowerPC came out. The Quadra 605 was $970.

The LC520 with a built in display and CD drive was $1300.

The Performa 631CD came out AFTER the PowerPC was released, and was a 680LC40. This machine was $1600.

The low end Power Macintosh 6100, which did not even have a CD drive or display, was $1820.

My dad got a Performa 6116CD with 14" monitor and Stylewriter 1200 B&W printer for $1300 in 1995, which was like a year after the 6100s came out, right?