Re: i386 or PowerPc
On Thu, May 24, 2001 at 07:00:44PM -0700, Mike Egglestone wrote:
| Which platform of hardware would be best?
| G4 from apple
| Pentium something from somewhere
Oh, you mean ix86, not i386 -- I don't think a i386 can compare to
any processor made in recent years <grin>.
I have an AMD Duron and an Intel 486. My only experience has been
with the x86 architecture. I can say that the AMD's are cheaper and
have no worse performance than the Intel processors (I don't know if
it is better because I haven't really tested equivalent processors, I
just know that my AMD is no worse than any Intel P* processors I have
used).
This Duron has a huge heat sink on it (as do pentiums). I have heard
that the PPC processors run much cooler, probably largely due to the
slower clock speed. I have heard that the G3/G4 only runs up to ~700
MHz but that the actual performance is comparable to x86 machines.
This leads me to believe that Motorola has a better architecture than
Intel (or at least they don't over-hype the clock speed). The intel
based chips do have a lot of excess baggage for supporting arcane
"features" of old versions of the architecture (segmentation, 8-bit,
16-bit, etc instruction sets).
I think that either way you will get enough performance out of your
system as long as the other components match up (memory, disk, etc).
-D
Reply to: