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From the Horse's Mouth (5/21/98)
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"Up to twice as fast..." That's the claim that Apple's been making about the speed of the G3 versus the Pentium II. If you know how to squint really well to read fine print at the bottom of commercials on TV, you may have noticed that Apple's speed claim is based on the results of BYTE magazine's BYTEmark tests. There was quite a bit of controversy when the ads first surfaced, as lots of people disputed the results of the BYTEmark testing, claiming that it somehow unfairly favored the PowerPC processor. So it's kind of interesting to see BYTE's posted results and frequently-asked questions, which essentially confirm Apple's claims.
It's not particularly surprising that BYTE subtly tries to downplay the PowerPC's performance lead, given that most of the magazine's revenue probably comes from Wintel advertisers, but the way in which they do so seems a little strange. For instance, there's the way that they claim that the reason the PowerPC absolutely demolishes the Pentium II in one test called "Bitfield" is because the PowerPC compilers "generate code that's significantly different" from that of the x86 compilers. Well, duh. Different chip, different code-- that's always going to be the case. We don't see how that explains anything away.
We seem to recall that several people challenged BYTE to "fix" the BYTEmarks to show that the PowerPC is in fact not that much faster than the Pentium II, but apparently BYTE stands by their results, for the most part. Their answer to the question "are today's G3 Power Macs faster than Pentium II PCs?" is "In general, yes." It's nice to have some validation every once in a while.
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SceneLink (725)
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And Now For A Word From Our Sponsors |
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 | | The above scene was taken from the 5/21/98 episode: May 21, 1998: Microsoft asks for seven whole months in which to respond to a request for a preliminary injunction, fooling absolutely nobody with their transparent attempt to ship Windows 98 unfettered for half a year. Meanwhile, BYTE magazine stands by their benchmark results, which show that the G3 really is twice as fast as a Pentium II, and Mac wizards Newer Technology jump into the USB/iMac game...
Other scenes from that episode: 724: Transparent Much? (5/21/98) Well, after today's court request in the ongoing antitrust flap, the name of "Microsoft" will be permanently married in our minds to the phrase "unmitigated gall." (Not that the two terms were fantastically separate in the first place, but still.)... 726: Newer To The Rescue (5/21/98) Nary a week ago, we talked about the rumor that some major Mac manufacturer was working on a USB hub for the iMac that would provide a set of standard Mac ADB, serial, and SCSI ports. You may recall that we voiced our hope that the "major Mac manufacturer" in question was Newer Technologies, probably best known these days for their killer G3 upgrade cards, but engineers in days past of lots of nifty docks for Apple's PowerBook Duo series...
Or view the entire episode as originally broadcast... | |  |
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