Let me say right off that if gory innards, techgeek terms like SPECfp and SPECint, and looking at charts showing how fast a Photoshop tranform happens are not of interest to you, stop reading now. ::-)

For those of you brave enough to venture forward, here's one attempt at comparing what difference may exist between the current Apple Macintosh hardware heart and the upcoming Apple Macintosh hardware heart (from that techie/geeky viewpoint ::-). Mostly it'll be just a bunch of existing numbers and graphs but I've also tried to include some of the sources from the manufacturers that explain the numbers and graphs in words as well..... so that you have the numbers.... in.... words...... as well.....

(Disclaimers: Due to the nature of the tables, it'll be easier to read if you change to a monospaced font. My apologies for any errors found - please let me know. The following raw numbers do not define the entire picture. How everything gets put together can have a dramatic effect; the work done during a G4 or G5 clock cycle differs from that done during a P4 cycle, etc. Nor does this comment on OS concerns. Source links for this information are given at the end of the message. All Intel CPUs listed below, except for the Celeron, Celeron-M, and Pentium-M can support 64 bit addressing. ***Intel's SSE2 is not available in the Celeron processor.)

Very rough guidelines based upon passed usage: Desktops: G4, G5, PXE, PD, P4, Celeron Laptops: G4, Pentium-M (couples the execution core of the Pentium III with a Pentium 4 compatible bus interface - code name "Yonah"), Celeron-M Servers: G5, Itanium 2, Xeon

*FS Bus: Front side bus

Processor Name/Number | Clock Speed | L2 cache | FS Bus* | Dual Core | | (GHz) | (KByte) | (GHz) | | ------------------------------------------------------------------------ -- IBM/Motorola G4 | 1.25, 1.42, | 512 | .333 | | | 1.33, 1.5, | | | | | 1.67 | | | | ------------------------------------------------------------------------ -- IBM/Motorola G5 | 1.8, 2.0, | 512 |.600, 1, | | | 2.3, 2.7 | | 1.15,1.35| | ------------------------------------------------------------------------ -- Intel PentiumXE 840 | 3.2 | 2x1000 | .8 | yes | ------------------------------------------------------------------------ -- Intel Pentium D 840, 830, | 2.8 - 3.2 | 2x1000 | .8 | yes | 820 | | | | | ------------------------------------------------------------------------ -- Intel P4 571, 570J°, 561, | 2.8 - 3.8 | 1000 | .8 | | 560J, 560, 551, 550J, 550,| | | | | 541, 540J, 540, 531, 530J,| | | | | 530, 521, 520J, 520 | | | | | ------------------------------------------------------------------------ -- Intel P4 670, 660, 650, | 3.0 - 3.8 | 1000 | .8 | | 640, 630 | | | | | ------------------------------------------------------------------------ -- Intel Celeron D 346, 341, | 2.5 - 3.06 | 256 | .533 | | 336, 331, 326 | | | | | ------------------------------------------------------------------------ -- Intel Celeron*** | .95 - 2.8 | 128, 256 | up to . 4| | ------------------------------------------------------------------------ -- Intel Pentium M 770, 765, | 1.5 - 2.13 |1000 - 2000| .4, .533| Yonah | 760, 758, 755, 753, 750, |Low voltage: | | | coming | 745, 740, 738, 735, 733, | 1.3-1.5 | | | 2006? | 730, 725, 723, 718, 715, |Ultra low | | | | 713 |voltage:1-1.2| | | | ------------------------------------------------------------------------ -- Intel Celeron M 383, 373, | 1.2 - 1.5 |512 - 1000 | .4 | | 370, 360, 353, 350, 340, | Ultra low | | | | 333, 330, 320, 310 | volt:.9-1.0 | | | | ------------------------------------------------------------------------ -- Intel Itanium 2 | 1.0 - 1.6 |256 (1500- | bandwidth| | | | 9000 L3) |6.4GB/ sec| | ------------------------------------------------------------------------ -- Intel Xeon | 2.8 - 3.66 |1000 - 2000| bandwidth| | | | |6.4-14GB/ s| | ------------------------------------------------------------------------ --

Floating Point and Integer Arithmetic: -------------------------------------- Apple/IBM/Motorola AltiVec (Velocity Engine): 128-bit vector registers that can represent sixteen 8-bit signed or unsigned chars, eight 16-bit signed or unsigned shorts, four 32-bit ints or four 32- bit floating point variables. supports a special RGB "pixel" data type

Intel SSE2: replacement for MMX and SSE. 128-bit vector registers that can represent sixteen 8-bit signed or unsigned chars, eight 16- bit signed or unsigned shorts, four 32-bit ints or four 32-bit floating point variables.

Performance: ------------ SPECfp 2000 (Bigger is better): - Dual 3.66 GHz Xeon EM64T: 28.6 (IBM xSeries 336: 2M L2 cache, 8 GHz FS Bus) - Dual 2GHz G5: 15.7 - Dual 3.06 GHz Xeon: 11.1 - Single 3 GHz P4: 8.07

SPECint 2000 (Bigger is better): - Dual 2GHz G5: 17.2 - Dual 3.06 GHz Xeon: 16.7 - Single 3 GHz P4: 10.3

Adobe Photoshop 7.01 600 MB file: 45-filter function, 2 GB memory (performance of a single P4 3GHz system is "1") - Dual 2GHz G5: 2.2 - Single 1.8 GHz G5: 1.8 - Single 1.5 GHz G5: 1.5 - Dual 3.06 GHz Xeon: 1.1

BLAST DNA sequence matching (in millions of nucleotides per second - higher is better): WORD LENGTH 10 20 30 40

----------------------------------------------------- Dual 2 GHz G5 | .2 2 2.9 3.1 Single 1.8 GHz G5 | .2 1.5 2.5 2.5 Single 1.6 GHz G5 | .2 1.2 2.1 2.3 Dual 3.06 GHz Xeon| .2 0.5 0.6 0.6 Single 3 GHz P4 | .2 0.5 0.5 0.4

HMMer genome matching sequencing (performance of a single P4 3GHz system is "1") - Dual 2GHz G5: 6.9 - Single 1.8 GHz G5: 4.8 - Single 1.5 GHz G5: 4.2 - Dual 3.06 GHz Xeon: 1.7

Links: ------ G4/G5: http://www.apple.com/ibook/specs.html http://www.apple.com/powerbook/specs.html http://www.apple.com/macmini/specs.html http://www.apple.com/imac/specs.html http://www.apple.com/powermac/specs.html http://www.apple.com/xserve/specs.html http://www.apple.com/lae/powermac/performance/ Intel: http://www.intel.com/products/processor/pentiumXE/index.htm http://www.intel.com/products/processor/pentium_D/index.htm http://www.intel.com/products/processor/pentium4/index.htm http://www.intel.com/products/processor/celeron_D/index.htm http://www.intel.com/products/processor/celeron/index.htm http://www.intel.com/products/processor/pentiumm/index.htm http://developer.intel.com/design/Pentium4/prodbref/ http://www.cpuid.org/PentiumM/index.php http://techreport.com/reviews/2003q3/pentiumm-1.4ghz/index.x?pg=1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_M http://www.amd.com/us-en/Processors/ProductInformation/ 0,,30_118_11600_11613,00.html AltiVec: http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/encyclopedia/A/Al/AltiVec1.htm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AltiVec http://www.tommesani.com/AltiVec.html SSE2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SSE2 http://www.tommesani.com/SSE2Intro.html http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/encyclopedia/S/SS/SSE22.htm EM64T (Intel's 64 bit addressing technology): http://www.answers.com/topic/em64t

http://www.best.de/download/marketing/AMD-Sun-Opteron_I.pd

Wayne