Processor difference AMD/Intel vs. GX

I'm a newb to mac's. I'm just wondering what are the technical differences between an AMD/Intel vs. GX. Is an AMD 933Mhz run the same speed as a G4 933 Mhz?

This movie will answer your questions

mHz Myth

Great thanks!!! that helped a lot. I never realized that a G4 would be that much more efficeint than a Pentium. I love my ibook even more!!

Nice propaganda!

Ofcourse they are playing with numbers to make G4 look cooler than it is. And I'm sure their test program was carefully crafted to take advantage of the strong points of G4. They don't talk about branch prediction. I'm sure both processors do good job in guessing where the program is going to jump next. But there are other types of pipeline hazards and longer pipeline makes them much harder to avoid.

Then there is RISC vs. CISC thingy. x86 are based on 70's technology. They are fast only because they are popular and lots of money gets thrown into them, and they are energy inefficient. GX are newer RISC technology. They have lots of registers and relatively small instruction set (new x86 processors have lots of registers too but AFAIK it isn't that simple because they need to be machine code level compatible with 80386 that only had 8 registers).

Oh, I didn't know about all that technical stuff. Do you know of a website or book explaining the pipeline and structures etc.. of P4 and G4 technology? I would really like to learn more about it.

I think it may be difficult to find any non-biased technical articles comparing P4 and G4. You can always try google.

I know about this stuff because I just went through a course called "Computer Architecture" (I study CS at Helsinki University of Technology). It's just basic course that mostly discusses internal workings of processor. One big part of the course was learning assembly language of MIPS processor. Understanding (nearly) machine level programming is important in understanding how processors work. ~100 hours of work and now I know barely enough to impress strangers on web forums

Only book I know is our course book: Computer Organization & Design. It's 800 pages long and costs around 50 € here in Finland. You can find some online material that might or might not be useful, if you follow that link. There is nothing about P4 vs. G4 there, only something about RISC vs. CISC.

I suggest you go to www.bsdforums.com and ask them. They are usually quite friendly and helpful. And I'm sure they know a lot about this stuff.