On Wednesday, October 9, 2002, at 02:31 PM, Brigham Mecham wrote:
> Hello > > Perhaps someone can fill me in on this one. I am comparing the run > time of a perl program I wrote. Using my Mac G4 which has a 1.5 ghz > processor and a 1.3 ghz PC computer (processor chip type I don't know > but could find out) I am seeing that the Mac takes 14 seconds to > complete what the PC does in 6! What's up with that? > > there were a lot of replies to this post, most of them (rightfully) asking for more information regarding the computer, the processes running on them, etc. etc. Also, many questioned the validity of a G4 1.5 Ghz machine. To my eye that just seems like a typo, and is irrelevant in that, there _is_ a legit question here. I too have noticed slowness comparing my Win box and Mac. The reality is that Macs are slower than Intel boxes, and the reality is that it is very difficult to compare different processors as well as clock speeds. In the end what matters is whether or not a specific task generally "appears" to be slow or fast, assuming most normal configs. My Win box is running Apache2, MySQL, SQL Server 7, and Cold Fusion daemons (the user-installed daemons) besides other OS junk). It is a PIII, 800 MHz machine with 512 Mb ram. My iBook is a G3 600 Mhz with 640 Mb ram, and is running Apache 1.3.x besides other OS junk). Yes, the iBook is 200 Mhz less, but it is running a lot less than the Win box, and has a lot more RAM. It is decidedly slower in most all tasks. Java apps crawl on my iBook. Html rendering is noticeably slow, etc. I once did some benchmarking with the benchmarking scripts drieux has put up on his website, and yes, perl scripts were slower on the Mac. Was this the case when the Mhz were comparable? Yes! When my Win box was a PIII 400, even then it "seemed" faster. The bottomline is -- whatever the fancy architecture behind these machines, whatever the Macworld demos by Mr. Jobs might demo, Macs are generally slower (this is an empirical, not a scientific statement -- although sites like barefeats and xlr8yourmac have compared various configs of Moto and Intel boxes and found the same to be true, EXCEPT in the case of some altivec optimized software). The problem may be because software are not written optimized for Macs, the problem maybe because of something inherent in Macs themselves. Whatever, but macs are slow. That said, I still prefer 'em over any other platform, but certainly not for their speed. In spite of them being noticeably slow, they enable me to work faster. :-) Regards, pk/
