"Phillip M. Jones, C.E.T." wrote:
>
> Well -- Technically speaking the Power PC chip is equivalent to double
> its Pentium III equivalent because its a RISC Chip as opposed to a CISC
> chip which a Pentium mostly is. (I been told Pentium is a hibrid)
RISC, first off, is never double. In theory, the more pipelining you
do, the higher your factor of increase gets (a two stage pipeline, in
theory, would go twice as fast as a single-pipelined machine). In
practice, though, it's not that big of a gap. The best RISC chips
outperform the best CISC chips nowadays by about a factor of two,
despite the larger pipelines on the RISC machines.
Of course, the Pentiums haven't been CISC for years. Intel switched to
RISC a long time ago because they knew the performance was a lot
better. The current line of Pentiums (III, 4, what have you) are all
RISC processors that emulate 8086 (CISC) instructions. They can
pipeline, just like every other RISC processor, but they lose something
in the fact that they have to emulate older, non-standardized-length
instructions.
> In other words a G4-500 mhz Power PC Chip is equivalent to a 1 ghz
> Pentium III. Provided the software is written to take advantage of RISC
> Chip efficiencies and the Altivec engine technologies.
See above. Altivec is a whole 'nother beast entirely and really has
made for some dubious claims on Apple's part.
> The latest version of Mac you can get up to a 733mhz G4, and a super
> Drive that can burn CD's or DVD's
> it also uses a nVida Geforce Graphics card with 32mb VRAM. All for
> $3499.00 american.
In the US, yep. In Germany, nope.
