Fsb

How do you find the FSB speed for your Mac? I see L2 and L3 caches on my G4 but nothing about front side bus.

system profiler, it says bus speed under hardware.

deus_ex_machina said:

How do you find the FSB speed for your Mac? I see L2 and L3 caches on my G4 but nothing about front side bus.

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The 1.25GHz MDD is 167MHz...

As Macman stated, you can find it in the System Profiler.

Yeah... I didnt realize that just "bus speed" was FSB. Thought maybe there was more than one... The G5's speed completely blows mine out of the water. What exactly does it help? - talking between the CPU and peripherals or what?

General flow of data to and from the processor for any process. Basically the G5 is the first processor from Apple that really allows their programs to show off what they were designed and programed to do.

The next gen of Apple products are really going to give PC's a run for their money now as Apple's hardware has finally caught up with their software.

To boost the overall performance of a single processor G4 machine requires much more ram than a single processor G5 because of the difference in bus speed.

There are currently two different busses that people commonly refer to as the FSB. The first is the memory bus. On the current G5's it is 200Mhz. The effective memory bus rate is 800Mhz (200Mhz x 2 (DDR) = 400Mhz x 2 (Dual Channel) = 800Mhz). The second bus speed listed is the speed of the bus that the two processors communicate over. Currently that is listed at half the clock speed of the G5s. The higher this bus speed, the more efficient the two processors can communicate, and the better they perform.

johnnyluu said:

To boost the overall performance of a single processor G4 machine requires much more ram than a single processor G5 because of the difference in bus speed.

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You can't really compare boosting performance of G4s vs G5s as the systems are setup in different ways.

johnnyluu said:

The next gen of Apple products are really going to give PC's a run for their money now as Apple's hardware has finally caught up with their software.

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Apple hardware already gives PCs a good run for their money. The PC still has a slight advantage. I would expect this to continue through the near future. PCs will be switching to dual core within the next few months, and that's going to give them quite a jump on Apple's systems, but I'm sure they'll come back with something. I find the Cell processors to be very interesting, and would love to see Apple get one of those in their PowerMacs.