MoltenLava said:
That's because you didn't read my earlier post explaining the speed differences.
And you still haven't really rebutted what I said. I never said there is no difference. I said the difference is a few percentage and it's marginal. Are you disagreeing that, or are you just angry to admit what I said as a PowerBook owner?
BTW, the example you are quoting is all wrong. Photoshop filters don't take hours to complete, especially with vector processing engines in the CPU like Velocity Engine or SSE. 3D rendering and raytracing is pretty much the only application that can take hours or days to complete a task. And guess what? People don't use PowerBook or iBook when they do raytracing! It could have been a close example, but really irrelevant.
If you don't agree with something, say what it is, and back it up.
First of all, I never said "Photoshop filters take hours to complete." (Though back in the Pre-PowerPC days, they sometimes took almost that long.) I said
It's not uncommon to have Photoshop filters take several minutes to complete, and digital video filtering, rendering, and encoding can take several hours to process, even on a "fast" computer.
Which is true. PS can take minutes, and DV can take hours.
As far as PowerBook vs. iBook speed, first check out
Apple's website and note that the PowerBook tops out at 1.5GHz. Note that the iBook tops out at 1.2GHz. Look further, and you'll find the PB's have 166MHz system busses, and the iB's have 133MHz system busses. Which means that both processor and memory run at 25% higher clock rates in the top-end models of each.
But, that's just clock speed. Megahertz myth, and all that. What does that mean in real life? I'm so glad you asked.
For those operations (such as DV editing) that depend heavily on processor speed, you will see a noticeable increase. Take a look at the testing on
Barefeats and you'll see that a 1.25 GHz PowerBook is about 10% slower than a 1.5GHz PowerBook in Photoshop operations, and about 19% slower in AfterEffects. (Note that AE is a digital video effects application. Note also that the test they ran took over three minutes longer on the slower PB--I' don't consider that "marginal.") Bottom Line:
processor clock speed does have a noticeable effect on performance.
(EDIT: Note, also, that in my post, I also said
We're assuming, of course, that a PowerBook is faster because it has a faster CPU clock rate. Since we're comparing Apples to Apples, this is almost certainly the case: an task that requires x amount of time on a 1.2GHz G4 iBook will probably require less-than-x amount of time on a 1.5GHz G4 PowerBook...
I never said anything about a PowerBook being faster just because it says "PowerBook" on the front or because it comes in aluminum instad of polycarbonate. I've got a year-and-a-half old PB with an 867MHz G4 in it. I'd gladly trade it for a 1.2GHz iBook.)
