Mactels

We had a Mactel developers box a couple years ago, but I finally purchased my first Mactel: a 2ghz 17" iMac for my father. To test the power, I used Blender 3D 2.42a and tested against my existing Powerbook (G4 1Ghz, 1GB RAM) and his iMac Dual Core 2Ghz chip and 1GB of ram. In a 1920x1080 (HDTV) rendering, it took about 8 minutes to complete on my powerbook. On his iMac with threads enabled: 48 seconds. This isn't exactly fair apples to apples, but the best I could do until I get home and see what my powermac (Dualcore 2.5Ghz G5, 2GB of Ram) can do on the same scene. Even then, it's not exactly the same, but the closested I can get to Apples to Apples,

Well, you must remember, your PowerBook is a uniprocessor system. Of course it's underpowered by a dual-core system.xboxrulz

When I disabled threads (used a single processor) the render time was 1 minute, 26 seconds. Compare that to 7Minutes and 48 seconds on my machine and....Hell of a difference. I need to run the scene on my Dual Core 2Ghz G5 machine, but it's busy earning money.

It's still weird that your PowerPC processor got beaten by Intel processor. I thought PowerPCs were more efficient and faster than x86s.xboxrulz

Really depends on the application. In the 3D world, PPC lost its luster a few years ago when everyone started to optimize their rendering engines for X86. I just tested the latest Lightwave 9 version on a Dual core 2Ghz G5 vs. a 2Ghz Dual Core iMac and the iMac won with less than half the RAM. Blender is another application which, I believe, is more optimized for the X86 platform since most of the developers and users are either on i386 Linux/BSD or on Windows. So that's what PPC has against it is the software coding. The biggest thing PPC had going for it was in applications like Final Cut and the fact they were Mac only. Also, Shake seems to run a lot smoother on PPC machines, but then again I have Shake 4 not 4,1 universial. Also a couple months ago CDW had MacBook Pro's for $1300. Only 80GB HDD and 512MB of ram, but for another $400 for an external HDD and a GB stick of Crucial ram...

well, that suxxboxrulz

What on the software end of things...yes. If the software was coded to take advantge of PPC features, I still think it would win hands down. RISC is just a better design period. That being said, I completely understand why Apple went with Intel and hold nothing against it. In the long run I think it's a good mood. As much as people love to trash intel, I've had fewer problems with Intel chips over the years than with AMD. I can't wait for OS 10.5 with all it's true 64-bit goodness.