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I go to my mailbox and what do I find?
In the Sept. 20 Newsweek, Apple has about 6 full pages (
complete with 3 foldouts) describing
"a new breakthrough in technology"
"This is not just the fastest Max in history. It's the fastest
personal computer in history."
This is a mighty big claim, BUT here are the
details...
The ad claims this:
"sustained performance of 1 gigaflop." (which makes the G4 a
'supercomputer' )
"theoretical performance of 4 gigaflops"
"It is a 128 bit processor, and can perform 4 ( sometimes 8 )
32bit floating pt. calculations per cycle."
"It is 3 times faster then the PIII 600Mhz"
It sounds (FP ops/ sec, etc...) kind of like the
new AMD chip that was discussed on the list not too long ago
On the comparison table between the PIII and G4, they show
this:
Test:
PIII Clock Cycles G4 Clock
Cycles G4
Performance
<- (Adjusted for MHz)
256 Pt. FFT
6.94
4
1.74x better than PIII 1.45x faster than
PIII
They are comparing a G4 500MHz to the PIII 600MHz
It also says it has a 1Mb L2 backside cache, 128mb SDRam (1.5
gig! max) and a 800MHz memory (max) bandwidth.
The 'downside' : $3499 for the fastest they have.
However , if this is true, these could actually crank out LL
tests pretty darn fast. (And, of course, that is a good thing!)
The thing is that I have not heard a word about Apple coming
up with a new computer processor, so this kind of took me by surprise.
Anyhow, back to my Newsweek...
Jonathan A. Zylstra
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