Stardate 20021118.1438

(On Screen via long range sensors): The price-to-performance lead for PCs over Macs continues to grow. Apple finally started shipping its latest desperation-speed-up 1.25 GHz dual G4, the so-called "wind tunnel" Mac (because of the awesome cooling fans required to keep it from smoking), but Intel continues to release newer and faster P4's (and AMD is still moving, too).

And Intel recently settled a lawsuit with Intergraph, and can now actually enable hyperthreading in the P4. The hardware for it has always been in there, but they've disabled it until now. The new 3.06 GHz P4 has that feature enabled in hardware, though.

It's always been available in the Xeon, and when I got my workstation I did some benchmarking using it and came to the conclusion that for the kinds of apps I ran I was better off without it, in part because I wanted to run Win2K and it doesn't handle it properly. The system scheduler has to know that it's dealing with hyperthreading, because if it treats it as two separate processors you'll actually lose performance.

But WinXP does handle it properly, and the newest systems based on the 3.06 GHz P4 now support it. And the "Digital Video Editing" web site has done another PC-versus-Mac benchmark, using the latest and fastest 3.06 GHz P4 from Dell and the latest 1.25 GHz dual-G4 from Apple. Both systems were shipped to them from the manufacturers for purposes of the benchmark, and each was, presumably, configured optimally by the manufacturer. And the result?

The single-processor P4 was up to twice as fast on some tests as the dual-G4, and cost more than $600 less, and had more hardware features. And these were tests using major graphics apps which are important in that graphics-intensive market segment which most Mac fans consider "theirs".

And the future does not bode well; for the next year or more there are unlikely to be any significant improvements in the speed of the Mac, whereas there's good reason to believe Intel will be able to continue to ramp up the speed of the P4.

And of course, faster Xeons will become available, too and dual-P4's will be even faster for these kinds of applications (which are multithreaded for precisely that reason, and will take advantage of as much processor power as there is in the box).

I went out to the online Apple store and Dell store and did some playing around. Apple has some presets; one is called "Fastest" and as I write this it's priced at $3299.

Apple PowerMac G4 dual 1.25 GHz G4 512M PC2700 DDR 120G Ultra ATA HD Apple "SuperDrive" 64M ATI Radeon 9000	Dell Precision 350 3.06G P4 512M PC1066 ECC RDRAM 120G Ultra IDE HD 4x DVD+RW and 16XDVD Sonic DVDit! SE (software) 64M ATI FIRE GL 1394 Controller card (Firewire)
$3299	$3075

As tested by Digital Video Editing, the Precision 350 totally outperformed the PowerMac in graphics operations which are important to people in the commercial graphics segment.

As configured, both have Firewire and 1Gbit ethernet. Neither system includes a display. However, the raw list above leaves some things out. The HD that Dell uses is faster than the one Apple has (because it has a bigger cache). It has a USB2 interface. Apple ships a Radeon 9000, which is a consumer graphics card; the ATI Fire GL is a professional level graphics card. The Dell has a floppy drive.

One of the big differences is that the Dell system includes 3 years of 4-hour onsite repair, during normal business hours. The Apple system has 90 days of support at an Apple repair center. (You take it there; you pick it up when they're done.) That's massively important for commercial users. Onsite coverage is available from Apple, but the price is very high.

The "Superdrive" is described by Apple as follows, along with what I can determine about the Dell drive:

	Superdrive	Dell DVD+RW
DVD read DVD-R write DVD+RW write CD read CD-R write CD-RW write	6X 2X n/a 24X 8X 4X	16X 4X 2.4X 40X 16X 10X

The Dell drive is substantially faster than the Apple drive in every case, and supports DVD+RW format, which Apple does not.

And the Precision 350 is nothing like as loud; there is no need for wind-tunnel level cooling fans, because the processor isn't being run beyond its original design spec. The only way that Apple could get the G4 to run this speed is one well known to hobbiests: boost the voltage, run it hot, make sure you have a big fan. And since you've got two processors in there doing that, you're generating a lot of heat, so the case overall has to have a lot of airflow. The Precision 350 only has one processor which isn't being forced to run hot, so it doesn't have that kind of cooling problem. (Dell is getting its speed out of a modern processor architecture and a fast memory bus.)

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