briang said:
sorry that you had to post that again.... from my post count, and previous posts, you may have been able to tell that i'm new to the mac thing.
It's not just a Mac thing, if you have a cheap crappy motherboard on a PC it doesn't matter how fast the FSB is, it just won't use the speed properly. It's similar to the 64 bit problem, it doesn't matter if you have a 64 bit Athlon if all you are doing is running 32 bit software, the difference between the top-end 32 bit offering (i.e Pentium 4's) and the top end 64 bit Athlons is less than 20 per cent when running the same software.
Back in 1989 I owned an Arm2 based system (the Acorn Archimedes) and had a BASIC program which created a simulated globular cluster that ran in 12 minutes. At the time the same program ran on a typical PC in about 25 minutes. A few years later I upgraded to an Arm3 chip, my system went up to 12 MIPS and the said program ran in 5 minutes, at that time a typical PC ran it in 8 minutes. Then a few years later I upgraded to a RiscPC (around 50 MIPS) which ran the program in 1 minute 7 seconds, a typical PC of that time ran it in 4 minutes. Several years on I upgraded to a StrongArm (200MIPS) and at that time the same program ran in under 10 seconds yet on a typical PC still took over a minute.
Unfortunately ARM was sold off and Acorn stopped producing computers and I ended up building my own PCs to try to keep on the bleeding edge of technology (where I'd been since 1978), In 2002 I bought an iMac (one of the first 1Ghz G4 models) purely because it out performed all my PCs (which were not only bleeding edge but bleeding expensive), since then I've kept ahead with PCs and Macs (my next purchase will be a twin 2.5Ghx G5 Xserve box most likely and on the PC front I expect to put together a >3Ghz Ahlon 64 system pretty soon) so if anyone is qualified to coment on performance issues it's me!
(oh, and to top all that I am the head performance guy on the worlds largest air traffic control system consisting of over 700 RS6000 590 servers which I am currently upgrading to PPCs
)
btw, if you are wondering what happened to those superfast Arm CPUs they are currently employed as the RISC cores in Pentiums as well as being the main CPU in Palm systems, Jornados, Mobile Phones from about 10 different manufacturers, GM cars, modems and routers, and probably washing machines as well. In fact I wouldn't mind betting that the typical poster on these forums probably has a couple of Arm chips within a few feet of their current location.
Amen-Moses