[MacDV] Re: MAC OS X Panther?

[Steven Rogers]

On Monday, April 28, 2003, at 09:41 AM, Michael Winter wrote:

> On Saturday, April 26, 2003, at 07:36  PM, Thubten Kunga wrote:
>
>> 970 Macs, which will ship with Panther, will run all the current 
>> 32-bit software however faster the motherboard architecture will push 
>> it. Then 64-bit recompiled versions of all our software will run 
>> twice as fast as that.
>
> That's not true, 64 bit processors aren't any faster at most 
> operations than 32 bit processors. The simple way to  think about it 
> is that adding 2+2 doesn't take any longer than adding 02+02. The only 
> time 64 bits speeds things up is when working with numbers that can't 
> be adequately represented in 32 bits, such as in some scientific 
> applications.

But performance isn't all about arithmetic operations as the FAQ at 
Anandtech seems to imply, its also about how the data gets moved, 
instruction fetching, etc. The processor also probably won't be just an 
exact copy of the G4 with 64 bit registers, it will probably be a more 
capable design. So I think the Anandtech FAQ is a little overly 
pessimistic.

SR