Death of the MHz Myth?

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Diego_Knyte's picture
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Death of the MHz Myth?

I just saw a comercial for Intel chips going into Macs. It got me wondering about the "MHz Myth" thing.

If I'm not mistaken, for the last 5 years or so, Macs running at 1/2 the MHz of Intel machines could out perform them in many tasks. This is a generalization of course, that's not my question. Now that Intel CPU's will be used in Macs, will that bring the MHz speed/peformance up to even ground between Macs and PC's?

Will be MHz Myth be dead on the new Mactell systems?

I'm sure there's much more to this like motherboard system architecture, optimization of the Mac OS and Software title updates. I'd like to hear your opinions.

-Dk

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no its no myth look at AMD an

no its no myth look at AMD and there mhz speed being half of the intel P4 and the AMD's out gunning the P4 at a higher mhz even. take a AMD athlon XP that is running at 2.1 ghz and compair it to a P4 running at 3.4 ghz the AMD is faster in some app's if you would downclock the 3.4 ghz intel P4 to the same clock speed the AMD athlon XP running at 2.1 ghz you would see the P4 could not keep up with AMD in any cpu speed test's. The same goes to PPC and a intel P4 take the fastest G5 and downclock the intel P4 to the same speed in mhz that the G5 is running and the G5 will blow the P4 out of the water.

that is how you look at it. Now since intel went back to the drawling board with there cpu's it will be diffrent but the so called mhz myth will still be there

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Re: no its no myth look at AMD an

Right...
and for the Alti-Vec enabled application tasks (like iTunes ACC ripping, for example), the recent G4s, and G5s espescially, blow away even the new hardware... I'm really going to miss the Velocity Engine... I hope Intel comes up with a similar scheme that Apple and sw developers can implement.

It's just not generally known that Intel hit the Ghz wall just like IBM did, which is why some AMD chips were more efficient than Intel's chips at the same proc speed. Intel subsequently had to throttle back the cycles and make more efficent chips (thus, the lower than expected chip speeds in the new hardware).

Jon
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Re: no its no myth look at AMD an

that is how you look at it. Now since intel went back to the drawling board with there cpu's it will be diffrent but the so called mhz myth will still be there

They had de-tuned the P4 to gain MHz. Basically it took more cycles to complete a certain task than it did previously and they ramped up the clock to compensate. That's why a MHz-to-MHz comparision is so much in favor of the AMD and PPC. With the return to the 686 derived core they gained speed of task execution relative to clocks and can run at a lower speed and still perform the same or better. I haven't seen any specs or benchmarks that show the ratio of clocks to instruction completion that the new Core series can achieve, but it far surpasses the P4.

The MHz Myth was a direct poke at Intel for doing the de-tuning to the P4 jut to get MHz. Now that Intel has been proven completely wrong with the NetBurst 10GHz goal, the Myth no longer applies.

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the reason i said that the so

the reason i said that the so called mhz myth will still be there is cause of the chips already made and used now by people

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Actually the new Macs are

Actually the new Macs are less than 2.0 GHz... so the new Intel is fighting against the old Intel chips and the MHz myth.

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