[mythtv-users] Re: New Mac Mini

[Hamish Moffatt]

On Tue, Jan 11, 2005 at 06:42:04PM -0500, Magnus Meinfretr wrote:
> On Tue, 11 Jan 2005 16:28:30 -0500, Mike Frisch <mfrisch at isurfer.ca> wrote:
> 
> > At 1.25GHz or 1.42GHz, my guess is that it does *not* have enough
> > horsepower to decode HDTV.
> 
> What you forget is this is a 1.25GHz PowerPC G4.  This is not a
> Pentium 4 or an Athlon.  Don't fall into the mental trap of thinking
> the GHz ratings even compare.

But don't believe your Mac-loving friends that an X GHz PPC is better
than a 2X or 3X GHz P4. It isn't true, or at least depends on your 
application.

I did some benchmarking for a particular application earlier this year
and found that a G3-class PPC (specifically an IBM 750FX, as used in
some of the iBooks) was roughly equal to a Pentium III for a given
MHz, or possibly slightly SLOWER. That was for integer networking work, 
which is clearly different to video processing.

> This is probably (conservatively) at least as fast as a 2GHz Pentium 4
> for all intents and purposes.  Any code that makes good use of the
> Altivec instructions could very well be beyond current x86 performance
> potential.

But is Altivec better than MMX + SSE + SSE2 + 3DNow?


Hamish
-- 
Hamish Moffatt VK3SB <hamish at debian.org> <hamish at cloud.net.au>