Rumor has it that Cameron Kaiser may have mentioned these words:
>... and I wrote before...
> >
> > My 3-year-old Athlon MP box would beg to differ -- it took a couple of
> > years for Macs to catch up to *it*.
>
>If you're talking clock speed, people in the Athlon world particularly should
>know clock speed is not the whole story because AMD chips are also
>underclocked compared to the "comparable" Intel.
Correct -- and yet, seem to do more work. ;-)
Admittedly, CPU speed (not just clock speed, but overall *speed*) is
normally not a big factor in most things computing anymore -- until you get
into MPEG transcoding & the like. It takes a *lot* of CPU horsepower; and
faster memory is also crucial; everything else is secondary. The
HyperTransport busses on the Athlon MPs give a huge advantage over Xeons
(and Macs, especially 3 years ago) in this respect, for a lot less coin.
I keep trying to justify a dual Opteron system, but I haven't seen the
benchmarks yet; that and Iwill has yet to come out with their dual Opteron
Small Form Factor PC yet they promised back in June, supposedly coming in
September... vaporware bastages. :-/
I'm in the "Jim Leonard camp" on this one -- even if there is a Mac that's
as capable as my system (and 3 years ago, there wasn't) the *software*
required to achieve similar results will break the bank; my software cost
was around $45 for TMPGEnc -- everything else is available free.
> In fact, I would be very
>disappointed if list members here bought into that crap, given the fact that
>there are large numbers of heterogenous architectures used and supported.
You mean like the fact (to bring this back ontopic) that my .89MHz 6809
processor in my CoCo2 is actually faster than the 2.4MHz 80C85 in my Tandy
100 & 200? ;^> That fact certainly isn't lost on me.
Laterz,
Roger "Merch" Merchberger
--
Roger "Merch" Merchberger -- SysAdmin, Iceberg Computers
zmerch_at_30below.com
Hi! I am a .signature virus. Copy me into your .signature to join in!
Received on Fri Jan 21 2005 - 10:33:43 GMT