You wanna hear another thing that struck us about the G4 introduction? Apple's got some neat ideas about how to win the Megahertz Wars. We're talking about the annoying way in which Intel manages to keep squeezing blood from a stone that most people thought gave its last pint back in '97: the x86 processor architecture. Basically, Intel's engineers are so good, they just keep scraping more and more performance out of a fundamental chip design that, in technological terms, should be dead by now. Actually, make that dead, buried, and converted to fossil fuel. You've heard of dog years? Well, in chip years, the Pentium is probably about seven million years old and still cranking away-- spewing heat and gobbling power, but cranking nonetheless. And so the more efficient PowerPC, while generally acknowledged as faster by those in the know, actually runs at a slower clock speed than the rocket-engines-on-roller-skates Pentium III. But what does the Average Schmoe™ look at when comparing computer speeds? Megahertz.

So here's Joe Schmoe, looking at a Mac and a PC. The Mac has, let's say, a 500 MHz G4 processor. The PC is equipped with a 600 MHz Pentium III. Joe Schmoe's wetware math unit spits out "600 > 500" and voilà: the PC is faster. But those who watched the bake-off during Jobs' keynote know different; in Apple's (admittedly controlled and optimized) tests, the 500 MHz G4 beat the living pants off the Pentium III. But Joe Schmoe doesn't tune into keynote webcasts-- he just looks at the numbers in the CompUSA flyer. And the numbers he looks at is clock speed in Megahertz. Frustrating, isn't it?

So what's the answer? Due to its fundamentally different design, the PowerPC will always lag behind Intel's chips in raw clock speed-- at least, that's what some chip geeks tell us. So waiting for Motorola and IBM to catch up is pointless. Heck, AMD's got 650 MHz Athlon chips now, and CNET reports that Intel just announced a 700 MHz Pentium III that will ship in October-- just about at the same time that Apple rolls out its fastest G4 Mac, running at 500 MHz. So Macs are always going to look slower than PCs on paper, as long as megahertz rules the day.

And that's where Apple's thinking "different." See, Apple's hit upon the reason why "normal" people like to compare clock speeds: "Megahertz" is fun to say. It's just basically a goofy word that people subconsciously like to hear coming out of their own mouths. So Apple's Gordian-knot-cutting solution to the Megahertz Wars is to detract attention from the meaningless raw clock speed numbers, and get people focused on Gigaflops instead. Face it: "gigaflop" is even more fun to say than "megahertz." Plus, since it actually refers to the number of operations that a chip can perform in a given time, it's probably a more useful measure of relative processor speed than clock speed anyway-- at least, for floating point performance. So can Apple get people to look at flops instead of hertz? Depends on how well they play their cards. We at AtAT encourage every viewer to use the word "gigaflop" at least once in every conversation, in an effort to get it to catch on. C'mon, you know you want to...