In article <3A5FC650.E20A9960@faricy.net>, David Fontaine 
<dav### [at] faricynet> wrote:

> (And for equivalent MHz the mac chips waste any of them, but they 
> don't come nearly as fast in MHz; I'm pretty sure the fastest PC 
> chips still beat the fastest mac chips. But macs don't count. ;)

The "Mac chips" are PowerPCs, which are mainly made by Motorola. Apple, 
Motorala, and IBM worked together on these chips, but apparently 
Motorola makes the specific ones used in Macs. (and they don't seem to 
be working together as much any more)
And while there are PowerPC G4 machines out with over 700MHz (and dual 
533MHz G4 machines), the different architectures mean you can't compare 
MHz directly to the Pentium compatible chips. There are some things the 
PPC chips are *much* faster at, and other things they are a bit slower 
at, with the same MHz rating. The biggest advantage is integer math, or 
single-precision float math using the Altivec (Velocity Engine) SIMD 
acceleration, which means these processors aren't that great for POV, 
which very heavily uses double-precision floats and can't take advantage 
of SIMD instructions. Not surprisingly, Macs are best at things like 
PhotoShop.

-- 
Christopher James Huff
Personal: chr### [at] maccom, http://homepage.mac.com/chrishuff/
TAG: chr### [at] tagpovrayorg, http://tag.povray.org/

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