[CUBE] Sonnet 1.4 GHz upgrades

[Joseph B. Gurman]

     John Allan wrote:

>Funny but amongst all the smokescreen of crock at the end of the rainbow
>G5s, no one seemed to notice that Apple reinforced its quite unique position
>as the only computer company that actually releases new computers *slower*
>that is old computers.
>
>Whatever happened to the dual G4 1.4s and why no singles? [ may be because
>there is not that much difference in speed? Single G5 versus dual G4 ... ]

     Er.... maybe because they're faster, rather than slower? I 
honestly don't know, having seen no benchmark comparisons of single 
and dual G5's doing the same things as single and dual G4's, but you 
have to remember that Apple is now selling only two flavors of G4: 
single and dual 1.25 GHz. My guess is that for most individual tasks, 
even multithreaded, the single G5's are a little faster than the dual 
1.25, and a little slower than the previously sold dual 1.42 GHz. 
That can vary so much from application to application, that the clock 
speed is probably not dominant; bus speed and the CPU's handling of 
multithreaded apps may be more so.

     I do agree with how the G5-buying public (according to the rumor 
mills) has voted with its feet (or dollars, or pounds, or Euros, 
or....): in the real world, where most people can and do run multiple 
apps at the same time, and with an OS that has a zillion background 
processes, two (or more) processors are better than one.

     As for 1.4 GHz CPU's in a Cube, great.... if the lack of decent 
bus bandwidth, memory speed, and sufficient disk I/O bandwidth 
doesn't affect what you use the machine for. I suspect that, given 
our experience with the 1 GHz upgrade, it will help Finder zippiness 
and workflow on small to moderate-sized images in Photoshop. For 
other applications, it might not be so cost-effective.

     Anyway, it would be sad if people on this group, of all places, 
succumbed to the MegaHertz myth (now the GigaHertz guff, I suppose). 
There are too many factors affecting how long it takes a given CPU + 
bus + memory + disk + OS combination to perform a certain task to 
fall for that.

						Joe Gurman
-- 
"I love deadlines. I love the whooshing sound they make as they go by."
                                                             - Douglas 
Adams, 1952 - 2001

Joseph B. Gurman, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Solar Physics
Branch, Greenbelt MD 20771 USA