[Ti] x86 vs ppc

[Massimo Marino]

Kevin,

your experience is far from being rare. A single benchmark figure might 
show easily one platform better than the other but on real working 
cases I also had my personal experiences of my TiBook toasting a P4 1 
something GHz hands down. My TiBook is a 667MHz model and both machines 
sported 512 MB of memory.

Our friendly test (with a colleague on XP) was transfering a CD to 
iTunes while playing it (he was using hiw own tool, forgot which one: 
just ugly to even look at it, plus he could not play it during the 
transfer!!), downloading a 300MB files, copying from AFS to local a 
directory full of gif files (some 500MB) and running the test program 
for ROOT, a data analysis program.

I finished all that, able to switch from one program to the other with 
the system was still responsive, playing the iTunes CD tracks while 
importing them (his PC was silent). The XP was practically bogged down 
and finished the tasks much later.

On one SINGLE task at the time the XP might be faster but on 'real' 
work situation (multi-tasks) when I hear PC users venting out their 
FAST Pentium I just chuckle :-)

Another example? Together, from Togethersoft. This is a Java CASE tool. 
I work (with other applications running as well) on it without any 
problem. It brings the resources down on the same PC to the point my 
colleague simple can't use it effectively: too frustrating.

Oh yes, the PC has more fps on Quake than my TiBook but who cares?

On Friday, December 13, 2002, at 05:09 PM, PowerBook G4 Titanium List 
wrote:

> Date: Fri, 13 Dec 2002 08:08:48 -0800
> Subject: [Ti] x86 vs. ppc
> From: coccolithophorid at earthlink.net
> Message-Id: <2A0FA40C-0EB5-11D7-A420-003065F6C60E at earthlink.net>
>
>
[...]
>  in my experience, using XP
> straight out of the box on a 1 + gHz machine with 256 MB RAM seems slow
> when compared to my 500 mHz TiBook. How can that be? When I use a
> computer I don't think about how many applications I'm limited to
> opening (I haven't had to since os X) or how much processing the
> computer is capable of. I usually have 5 or so apps open and a lot of
> the time they are all doing something, When I use XP I am limited by
> the bad design, I bog down the computer when I try to use it the way I
> use my Mac, if iMovie is rendering a transition I go read my web sites,
> if iTunes is converting 300 AIFF's into 320 kbps mp3's then I go check
> my email, oh I can see by the progress bar in the dock that iMovie is
> almost done rendering, back to working on my movie. This way of working
> on a PC usually freezes Windows XP. Using a computer efficiently on os
> X is not the same as using a computer efficiently on XP, at least in my
> experience.

--
Massimo Marino
NERSC Division - HPC Department
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory 
http://www.slac.stanford.edu/~marino
On leave at CERN, CH, EP Division, Atlas experiment
phone: (+41) 22 767-1288 fax: (+41) 22 767-8350 Office: 40-3-D16
alternate email: marino at slac.stanford.edu, marino at mail.cern.ch, 
Massimo.Marino at cern.ch