So is anybody tallying the official death toll now that Intel's lapped Motorola twice around the racetrack? Because we can only assume that being maxed out at 500 MHz (two processors notwithstanding) while the Pentium 4 is now allegedly shipping in 1.4 and 1.5 GHz flavors has driven at least a few of the long-suffering Mac faithful to untimely ends, either by their own hands or just by the sheer crushing shame of it all. In case you've misplaced your slide rules, right now the fastest Mac processor runs at a measly third of the clock speed of the zippiest x86 chip. Meanwhile, we're wiping a solitary tear from our collective AtAT eye as we gaze up at our Macworld Expo Boston 1996 Power Computing poster, celebrating the 604e's 25-MHz lead over the 200 MHz Pentium Pro with the proud battle cry, "Let's Kick Intel's Ass!" Oh, the exquisite irony...

But don't stick your head in that oven just yet! For one thing, it's electric, you numbskull. For another, according to several reports, Intel's new processor isn't all it's cracked up to be. Faithful viewer Matthew Guerrieri sent along a CNET article about Dell's new Dimension 8100, which just happens to have a 1.5 GHz P4 at its core. Now, presumably we were expected to use this as fodder for yet another "Mike Dell's copying Steve again" plot thread, but in the interest of saving the lives of hundreds of depressed and suicidal Mac users, we're going to skip the stuff about how, with its grey-and-silver, slightly rounded industrial design, the Dimension looks like a Power Mac G4 that spent some time under the Amazing Lame-O-Fying Ray. Likewise, we'll even skip the bit about how Mike Dell is now aping Steve's innovative "Pay To Go Slower" initiative from last year. Aren't we thoughtful? ("Slower?" you ask. Patience, Grasshopper... soon all will be clear.)

See, we're in full-on Sally Struthers mode, here ("Save The Children" Sally Struthers, not "Gun Repair" Sally Struthers), and all we want to do is help our fellow Mac brethren through this difficult time. And so our focus on the Dimension review is this enthralling little tidbit: "The bad: Expensive; slower than a 1-GHz machine running mainstream applications." Read that again, just to make sure you understand it. Yes, the 1.5 GHz Pentium 4 may be a full 500 MHz faster than its 1 GHz Pentium III little brother (and to call a desktop Pentium III a "little" anything is a mighty big stretch), but when it comes to running, say, office-type applications, it's actually slower in real-world performance. A TechWeb article confirms that this isn't just some weird anomaly with the Dell system; it's definitely a chip-level phenomenon.

Okay, sure, the P4 is still a seriously kickin' chip when it comes to multimedia performance (we wonder if Steve will use one for the inevitable Photoshop bake-off when he introduces faster Power Macs?), but the big reason we see this as positive news for the Mac community is this: if the mainstream press reports that a 1.5 GHz P4 is sometimes slower than a 1 GHz PIII, then maybe, just maybe, the average shmoe might start to realize that clock speed is a wildly inaccurate way to judge the actual speed of a processor. That gives the PowerPC (and therefore Apple) a fighting chance when trying to fight the perceived "megahertz gap." Hey, we can dream, can't we? By the way, when last we checked, the Dimension 8100 had 108 user opinions registered in the review, and a full 80% of the reader reviewers gave it a thumbs down. Evidently people aren't thrilled about the "costs more, runs slower" thing. Is this the start of something scary for Intel?