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-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Nick Kew wrote: > >> But when I see 800MHz my heart sinks. ..SNIP.. > I certainly wouldn't let 800MHz worry you. When the G4 cubes arrived it provided similar floating point maths capabilities as a single Cray processor from 1991 or there abouts, but without the need to have the builders in to build you a cooling system the size of your garage. (Actually Cray later made an M series box with LOADS of memory and similar processors about the same size as an office photocopier, with no fancy cooling required. Perfect for big finite modelling problems). In their "busting the megahertz myth" Apple noted that on photoshop benchmarks the G4 733MHz processor outperformed a 1.7GHz Pentium 4 by 33%. Now no doubt Apple took a favourable benchmark result of those available, but it makes the point. Megahertz is not a meaningful comparion of computing performance except perhaps between different version of the same processor. An 800MHz Itanium is twice as fast at integer maths as an 800MHz Pentium III. Which reflects the trend in design, sure pushing up the Megahertzs is a cheap performance boost if you can manufacture the faster processors reliably. But historically it has been more successful in a technical sense to produce processors that do more each clock cycle in the simplest fashion possible. This was the whole RISC debate, and why SUN use to beat Intel, why Intel has to steal technology from Digital's Alpha processors, and why Intel co-operated to get processor know-how from HP. In a business sense the most successful processors were Intel's, which is just another case of the best technology not winning (except in the end Intel adopted most of it to stay competitive, one way or another). -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.1 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQE+HMfVGFXfHI9FVgYRAsa3AJ4rFA+7ZH38cOeYdUmRUTHaxuzxtACdF0hM yRYT/RqtrZc+t/ym05WiDF8= =4i4A -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG Mail majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxx with "unsubscribe list" in the message body to unsubscribe.