not a securit question, hardware question

[hexadecimal]

put this here being this is a mac question. and who knows it might shape into a security post


i recently purchased a macbook 1.83ghz gig ram 60gig hdd. love it.

i deffinitly dont have the cash to buy a desktop so im looking on ebay.
now what i cant grasp is.. the extreme jump in hardware.

a G4 450mhz?!
and now there are G5 with dual or quad cores!

did i miss a level or is there just a massive gap.

and i also ask. are macs able to do so much with so little raw power?
im not familiar with the PPC arc.

so these are my questions

are G4s a waste of money. if i get one will it be so slow it wont be worth it.

and 2
why the massive jump between speeds and hardware


thanks!
hex

[nihil]

Hi Hex ,

I think that you must have missed out on a few models perhaps?

IIRC the G3 went up to 1Ghz and I think that G4s went to 1.5Ghz, possibly more?

Maybe you are confusing the Power Mac with the "Cube" model?

[the_JinX]

I'm only going into a small part of this..

A PentiumIII with max 800Mhz..
And now a dual core 4Ghz Pentium IV

What did I miss..

The hughe leap is mostly due to the fact that most PPC's were not used in Macs but in big corporate machines..

Also Apple had a long wait between the G4 and G5 moddels.. In that time Motorola and mostly IBM didn't sit still in developing the PPCs..

[nihil]

Hi, the_JinX ,

The PIII actually went up to 1.4Ghz

Check out IBM's Netfinity line.

[very_unhappy]

I still have my PIII 1Gig ... 768 MB

I really don't see any reason to upgrade since I don't play games anymore (besides ocasional ps2)

I did by WXGA monitor and spray-painted the case black

[the_JinX]

H'm.. good thing I'm not into the hardware buying and selling

Here's a nice list of differences between the G4 and G5 lines of PPC processors..
http://developer.apple.com/technotes/tn/tn2087.html

[The Duck]

and i also ask. are macs able to do so much with so little raw power?
im not familiar with the PPC arc.

I noticed this question hasn't been answered yet...

Basically a Mac using PPC cpu's will be able to do more then an Intel of an equal clock rate because PPC's are based on the RISC architecture. There's to much to explain here so here is all you ever wanted to know about RISC ...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC

The hughe leap is mostly due to the fact that most PPC's were not used in Macs but in big corporate machines..

If Mac's weren't using PPC's then what were they using? Keep in mind the G series is part of the PPC line...

[hexadecimal]

ahhhh i do know abut risc

now that makes some more sense.

ok thanks for the help guys!

i still havnt seen a G4 ppc above 450mhz on ebay yet. im still looking though.

macs rule hehe

[hexadecimal]

AHHHHH! i jsut had my first crash

sitting there on ebay. using the opera browser. and my macbook just froze.
wouldnt even go into sleep when i closed the lid.

had to pull the battery...
i was kinda scared. but it seems to be working fine now

[nihil]

Hi Hex~

Unless it is a box that will be out on the road and running off the batteries, I generally turn off the power saving, as I have come across a lot of problems with "sleep", "hibernate" and whatever type of features. My guess is that they do not check for processes running in the background? but that is a pure speculation, for which I have NO hard evidence

I think that your main consideration should be what you intend to use the desktop box for. Like 450Mhz is quite fast enough for most purposes, and please remember that an Apple running at that speed is a different kettle of fish from an Intel ................just like Cyrix and AMD used "performance ratings" to compare to Intel architecture?

What I would look at in a second user box of that type is the amount of RAM. Also bear in mind that it will probably not be able to support anything above OS 9?

Just a couple of thoughts mate