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 At Macworld New York, Apple Senior VP of Hardware Jon Rubinstein detailed why the clock speed of a computer isn’t an accurate way to compare system performance. Overall system design and processor-architecture differences affect real-world application performance, otherwise you might be fooled by what he terms “The Megahertz Myth.” Watch this 8-minute video to see his full presentation. |
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Very, Very Fast. The new Power Mac G4 with PowerPC G4 processors demonstrates its speed against the 1.7GHz Pentium 4. Quite simply the fastest personal computer ever built to run graphics applications, this Power Mac G4 rips through tasks like Gaussian blurs, lighting effects, rotations and color conversions. 
In tests involving 9 Photoshop actions, the new
733MHz system is 33% faster, the 867MHz system is 58% faster and the dual 800MHz Power Mac G4 creams the
1.7GHz Pentium 4 by a blistering 83%.****Based on a suite of performance tests using Adobe Photoshop 6.0. |
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PowerMac G4 You can choose from three super models: the dual 800MHz Power Mac G4 with SuperDrive, 867MHz Power Mac G4 with SuperDrive or the 733MHz Power Mac G4 with a CD-RW drive. 
Either way, you get astonishing processing power. That’s because the chip inside the Power Mac G4 — the fearsomely
fast PowerPC G4 with Velocity Engine — can process information in huge 128-bit chunks, compared with the 32
or 64-bit chunks in traditional processors. This means the PowerPC G4 can perform four (sometimes eight) 32-bit floating-point
calculations in a single cycle — two to four times faster than traditional processors.Processor specifications
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PowerBook G4 At the core of the new PowerBook is the PowerPC G4 processor with Velocity Engine. With speeds of up to 500MHz, the PowerBook G4 packs a tremendous punch, crunching through digital video and rendering huge Photoshop files faster than ever before. And the 100MHz system bus —  the pipeline between memory and processor — and the 1MB of backside level 2 cache with speeds of up to 250MHz make significant performance-enhancing contributions as well.The result? The PowerBook G4 outguns Pentium III-based notebooks by up to 30 percent.* And with industry-leading battery life of up to 5 hours between charges, you can keep outshooting your PC counterparts long after their batteries give up the fight. * Based on Adobe Photoshop tests comparing a 500MHz PowerBook G4 to 850MHz Pentium III-based portable computers. Processor specifications
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More about the PowerPC G4 The PowerPC G4 with Velocity Engine, architected by Apple, Motorola and IBM, is the first microprocessor that can deliver a sustained performance of over one gigaflop — and in fact, has a theoretical peak performance of nearly 12 gigaflops in a dual 800Mhz Power Mac. 
The secret of the PowerPC G4’s phenomenal performance is its aptly named Velocity Engine. It’s the heart of a supercomputer miniaturized onto a sliver of silicon. The Velocity Engine can process data in 128-bit chunks, instead of the smaller 32-bit or 64-bit chunks used in traditional processors (it’s the 128-bit vector processing technology used in scientific supercomputers — except that we’ve added 162 new instructions to speed up computations).These vector processing acceleration advantages give the G4 microprocessor a significant edge when it comes to fast visualization of large data sets, and intensive math for real-time simulations. Making the PowerPC G4 perfect for everything from digital video, graphics and 3D games to astronomy, the biosciences and predictive modeling. Read more about the use of the G4 to accelerate your work.  PowerPC G4 for Engineering, Science, and EducationRequires Adobe Acrobat Reader. |
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