whats up with the G4 chips?

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Originally posted by Hateslife:
Dis Macs all you like; It's fine with me. I think Mac OS is a terrible pain in the arse. Just don't tangle with Motorola. The G4e (aka G4+) really is a nice processor.

For an interesting article about the basic architectual philosophies of the G4e and the P4, visit Ars Technica

BTW, it's an article for non-engineers and stupid people(like me).

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The G4 and G4+ are nice processors, but they still lack the raw power of today's X86 processors. OTOH is Apple and Motorola can hang on to this concept long enough there could be a big payoff for them. Computers are getting big, power hungry and noisy. This isn't something most users want in their living room sitting on their desk.

I think you will eventually see a backlash against 100W chips that don't offer noticeable improvement in their applications. A chip as efficient (performance per watt) as the G4 should be well positioned to take advantage of this.



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Life is complex. It has real and imaginary parts.

I think part of the problem is that Mac people believe that their machines are the fastest because they paid so much for them, and the fake benchmarks show it, etc.
My friend uses Mac's and when he got his cable modem I brought my P166 MMX laptop w/32mb of RAM over to see whose computer was faster. His Mac was the newest iMac, with the memory maxed out and all the options. It was funny to watch my old laptop beat it on page after page, even on complex Java pages.
I have also gotten to sit my PIII 667 next to a G4+ running Bryce4 on both, again my computer was faster, and now that I have my Athlon 1.13 it makes the macs look like a joke.
Anyway, it does not really matter, I have a PC, and I will never have to worry about having someone on a Mac take me down in Counter-Strike, or just about any other good game, because they are not available on Macs. :P

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Originally posted by bobgod007:
I'm at a loss how the G4's front end works, so if someone could clue me in, that would help me understand some of the more basic differences between the x86 chips and the PPC chips. It almost seems as if the PPC relies on a robust back end and advanced decoder units and busses over the balenced, clock speed happy x86.

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There is no decoder, there are no microops. PPC's, like Alphas, are risc designs: each intruction is the same length. Think of it as running straight raw micro-ops, and hence no decoder is neccessary.



[This message has been edited by MSP (edited July 14, 2001).]

Yes, there is a decode phase in all risc designs. It is essential to identifying the operation in order to dispatch it to the execution resources. It just needn't be as complex as a variable length front end found on the x86.



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