The Bard Erin MacDonald
("thebardmacd") When the Power Mac
G4 became the first personal computer to cross the
threshold of one billion floating-point operations
per second (also known as a gigaflop), it entered
the rarefied realm of supercomputing - and got the attention
of the U.S. government. The Pentagon regards supercomputers as "strategic
technology" - in effect, making the Power Mac G4 a
weapon that shouldn't fall into the wrong hands. A fact not
lost on ad mega-agency TBWA Chiat/Day who created such
award-winning ads such as Apple's first Macintosh ad, "1984"
(which has received more awards for creativity, originality,
and efficacy, than any other commercial ad in history) as
well as the Think Different, and the Snail commercials. By the way - once you've seen the
TBWA Chiat/Day's award-winning Apple's
Tank Commercial (3.4
MB) - if you want to know what's behind
the reference to the Pentium, check out the
composite theoretical performance (CTP) values for
Intel's 32-bit and 64-bit processors on Intel's own
website. The G4 is a product of work done by co-developers
Motorola, IBM, and Apple, with the latest breakthrough
coming from AltiVec's "Velocity Engine™" and a
.25 micro production technique. But just how fast is it?
According to independent BYTE Magazine's ByteMarks
benchmarking, the tests show that the PowerPC 740
(a.k.a. "G4" in Macintosh computers) is an average of
2.94 times fasterthan the then-top end
Pentium III 600 MHz. Such relatively radical increases in processing speed are
not without precedence; the change from the older
68ooo-series processor to the PowerPC line of processors,
and, later, the change from the PowerPC 601/603/604 series
to the newer G3's have demonstrated that substantial
increases in processing capabilities are not only possible,
but probable. The problem is that many people have been
taught to use the old measuring standard of a
computer's processing capabilities - i.e., its clock
speed measured in megahertz. This is no longer a way to
get an accurate picture of a processor's capabilities,
because while some chip manufacturers have gone the route of
brute-force and continually strive for more MHz, other
manufacturers (namely those behind the G4, have gone the
route of finesse, by making their processors more efficient.
Therefore, it is necessary to measure the processor's
true performance based on the actual amount of work
performed by the processor, and not just its clock speed.
Fortunately, the term "FLOP" and "gigaFLOP"
measure just that sort of performance. The term FLOP stands
for "Floating-point Operations Per Second" and has been the
unit of measure to determine whether something is just a
computer, or if it is a supercomputer. Based on the rate at which Intel and its
competitors were advancing their chips processing power
(measured in FLOPs), they would not be able to
produce a chip that equals the PowerPC 740's capabilities
for another 2 years! That is revolutionary, not
evolutionary. Great, but who uses this sort of power? Anyone doing
anything with graphics, video, and sound would benefit from
AltiVec's Velocity Engine that is built into the G4.
The Velocity Engine is what is called a "vector
processing unit" - a subprocessor that can handle data
very, very well. Velocity Engine is to the PowerPC chips
what MMX is to the Pentium - if you can compare a Lamborgini
Diablo to a tricycle with rusty wheels.... While MMX and the
Pentium III have added a couple of dozen commands for the
chip to use in processing data more efficiently, AltiVec's
Velocity Engine has added 162 commands that allow the
G4 to manipulate data substantially faster than its
competition. Couple the PowerPC 740's Velocity Engine capabilities
with the hardware that allows one to have up to 1.5 GB of
onboard RAM, direct access to over 100 GB of disk space, a
factory-standard 1 MB Level 2 Cache (pronounced "cash")
running at 1/2 the clock speed of the chip, and the G4's
other built-in features, and you end up with a fantastic
machine at an outstanding price. And you won't have wait for it to evolve another 2 years
to get it, either. - The Bard
"Revolutionary" was created by
The
Bard Erin MacDonald
