On Thu, May 24, 2001 at 07:00:44PM -0700, Mike Egglestone wrote: | Which platform of hardware would be best? | G4 from apple | Pentium something from somewhere
Oh, you mean ix86, not i386 -- I don't think a i386 can compare to any processor made in recent years <grin>. I have an AMD Duron and an Intel 486. My only experience has been with the x86 architecture. I can say that the AMD's are cheaper and have no worse performance than the Intel processors (I don't know if it is better because I haven't really tested equivalent processors, I just know that my AMD is no worse than any Intel P* processors I have used). This Duron has a huge heat sink on it (as do pentiums). I have heard that the PPC processors run much cooler, probably largely due to the slower clock speed. I have heard that the G3/G4 only runs up to ~700 MHz but that the actual performance is comparable to x86 machines. This leads me to believe that Motorola has a better architecture than Intel (or at least they don't over-hype the clock speed). The intel based chips do have a lot of excess baggage for supporting arcane "features" of old versions of the architecture (segmentation, 8-bit, 16-bit, etc instruction sets). I think that either way you will get enough performance out of your system as long as the other components match up (memory, disk, etc). -D
