Benskywalker
The only Apple I ever owned was an Apple IIc. Since then, I've only used Macs at school and haven't had the chance to use a G4 although my university's lab has G3s in it. I don't like the MacOS, although I'm excited to see what MacOS X will bring to the table. All in all, my hours behind a PC outnumber my hours in front of a Mac by orders of magnitude...but I'd still say my Mac experience is significant enough to make the assertions I made.
In terms of FPU vs SIMD, you're absolutely correct. I was confusing both aspects of the CPU. I'm no expert, but if I'm not mistaken, in many programs that are FPU dependent today, if they were coded to take advantage of SIMD - or the compiler made these optimizations - the G4 would shine. And isn't SIMD-optimization where heavy floating-point software is headed in the near term anyways, which would make the G4 great in that situation?
Yes I have used Photoshop on both platforms. I'll take your word on the fact that it is a poor port since I don't have any information to indicate the quality of the port.
Thanks for clearing up the ATI issue. I couldn't remember the details, but if I'm not mistaken the benchmarks that I remember seeing were with the "underclocked" ATI cards.
Anyways, I think this whole debate necessitates a G4 vs Athlon vs P3 review by Anand on a neutral software platform like Linux (
http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.cfm?catid=27&threadid=202611). Most of the apps for linux would be biased towards x86 but it would be nice to get some feel for the power of each hardware platform in a practical setting. If I could get my hands on an Apple G4 right now (and I really would like to if I had the money) the first thing I'd do is slap LinuxPPC on it since I despise the MacOS (I personally think the GUI sucks...but to each his own).
dszd0g
Guess I should make sure of what I'm posting links to...I had no idea it was from a mac biased source indirectly.
xtreme2k
Yeah, I think x86 has always had its strong point in Integer performance even relative to some of the high-performance CPUs from Sun and Compaq (Digital). But I don't think many people run SMP configurations so that Office 98 or Office 2001 for the Mac run faster, which is why I was focusing more on floating-point performance. And if I'd been more intelligible in the area of floating-point performance, I would have realized that FPU performance is seperate from SIMD performance...and that the K7 at least, bests the G4 in raw FPU performance, but that all x86 offerings of SIMD take a back seat to the G4.