Originally posted by Epoch
Actually, the IBM Power4 chip, which the PPC970(G5) is based off of, is the highest scoring processor in the SPEC database.
And the G5 AltiVec vector unit is far superior to the SSE2 Intel implementation,,,
I don't know the exact spec perf info, but I do remember reading how apple tweak the numbers on their initial web release. A) apple compiled Dell's system GNU optimized leaving out SSE2 implementation B) Apple also used a set of multimedia benchmarks that are difficult to verify and include heavily optimized PowerPC code.
yeah, yeah, I also know the counter argument, where Intel optimizes for Spec. But its comparing apples to oranges since they don't run off the same instruction set. We can only get a general grasp.... with that said:
there's no doubt that AltiVec is superior to SSE2... IBM and AMD really pulled off something designing the new 64bit chips. I only hope that AMD's A64 released this sept will be just as good.