D
dcooley
Guest
The clock speed myth
I hate to get into the religious wars, but I feel obligated to. Most of you sound like first-time car buyers who feel the compulsion to talk everyone into buying a car *just like yours* so that you can feel good about your own purchase. Here's a little reality to cut through the emotion.
Comparing Macs to PCs through clock speed is like comparing amps by their power ratings. PC's clock speeds are computed not through actual clock speed (GHz is in the microwave range, and you'd have to shield the processor to use it!), but the *effective* clock speed achieved through the use of multiple instruction pipes. That, and current Intel/AMD processors are 32-bit, not 64-bit as PPCs have been for more than 5 years.
The G4 AltiVec floating point capabilities are not only as impressive, but are *supported* by the computer music software companies (as are the advanced piping capabilities of the Intel/AMD products, to be fair). This puts a 400MHz G4 box on roughly the same ground as a Wintel box with a "clock speed" of 1.6GHz.
Perhaps most damning is that now that Intel has finally gotten a 64-bit processor out the door, it's 800MHz. Now Intel has to rein in the "clock speed rules!" mentality of the PC world and replace it with something much more appropriate to digital audio: megaflops, or floating point operations per second. Even AMD has had to back off. Noting that the top PPC speed is over 800MHz, you can see why. Not that this is so important except in the mind of the masses, who like to have things boiled down to a single number, preferably an integer. :-/
That said, there are significant drawbacks in both machines. Apple has never really gotten USB to work well for large numbers of MIDI channels (although you need to take care with what devices you have in your chain regardless... I would put any MIDI/Audio devices on their own bus, which G4's provide). Some devices will work better with some software products than with others, so that can be countered. Support for PCI soundcards is relatively weak for Mac, but that's the fault of the cardmakers. OS X has a *lot* of promise to remove much of the latency in any system, but it will require some work on the part of developers to integrate their drivers, and despite some early promise from companies like Emagic, it will be a year or more before I'll make the move. For now, OS9.0.4 is extremely stable, I have very few crashes (which are typically related to, guess what, PCI card drivers!)
On the other hand, Windows boxes are extremely arcane for the casual user, and you need to invest in a *good* box with *good* components (not the stuff you find at CompUSA or Gateway) before you can have a truly stable platform. I have an electrical engineering degree, and was able to figure out my 1990 Mac LC in a couple of days. The Gateway POS box we got a few years back, on the other hand, was a disaster, crashing constantly despite the efforts of a good friend who works in the desktop BIOS division at Intel. True, this was a Win95 machine built by Gateway, but it was a bad enough experience that I'm extremely hesitant to suggest Wintel machines to anyone without significant computer experience. We sold it within a year, and I've gone back to having computers that I spend more time playing with or getting work done on than fixing and reinstalling Windows on. I'm sure things have improved since then, although I notice my work machine (Win2000, *not* used for audio or games) crashes more on an hours-used basis than any of the three Macs I have at home. Thank goodness I have IT at work!
SCSI, firewire, etc, aren't even issues, they are available across both platforms. FireWire has the advantage of not taking up a PCI slot (at least on most recent Macs, not sure on the PC side), which makes it very useful for laptops. However, FireWire drives are simply IDE or SCSI drives with firewire translation hardware installed. Give this another year before FireWire becomes truly useful and available, and then mostly for MIDI/Audio interfaces rather than drives. Regardless, they aren't issues, so you can stop bringing them up as such in this discussion.
In the long run, you are much better off choosing a software application that you want to use (or apps), then buy the computer based on availability and stability and price that will run that app (or apps). Once you've sprung for the high quality components in a PC, you'll find that the price difference between it and an entry level G4 isn't that great. Move down to an iMac using USB or Firewire for audio capture with modest systems, and there's no longer a price argument to make. That leaves being able to run the software you want to run and how hard you want to work at maintaining your machine.
Also, remember that USB, FireWire, GUIs, mice, wireless networking, destop publishing, laser printing, and a slew of other advances were all made commercially viable by Apple, and if you think that PC audio would be *anywhere* near where it is today, you're fooling yourself. The PC world, especially MicroSoft, is horrendously lacking in innovation, and it *needs* companies like Apple to goose the market from time to time. Even if you've got good reasons to use a PC (and there are good reasons, at least for some of us), only an idiot would bite the hand that feeds him or her. Had Apple not stolen Xerox's GUI ideas, we'd all be arguing over the merits of 16 bit processors and whether UNIX was better than DOS and bragging about having a whopping 32 Meg of RAM by now. You may not like the computer, but it's changed the face of personal computing and no amount of chest beating by PC users will make that little fact go away.
One last thing: Get RAM. Lots of RAM. It's *so* cheap now, that you can deck out most machines with four 256Meg DIMMS for less than $200. They *all* run fast with that much RAM.
Doug
I hate to get into the religious wars, but I feel obligated to. Most of you sound like first-time car buyers who feel the compulsion to talk everyone into buying a car *just like yours* so that you can feel good about your own purchase. Here's a little reality to cut through the emotion.
Comparing Macs to PCs through clock speed is like comparing amps by their power ratings. PC's clock speeds are computed not through actual clock speed (GHz is in the microwave range, and you'd have to shield the processor to use it!), but the *effective* clock speed achieved through the use of multiple instruction pipes. That, and current Intel/AMD processors are 32-bit, not 64-bit as PPCs have been for more than 5 years.
The G4 AltiVec floating point capabilities are not only as impressive, but are *supported* by the computer music software companies (as are the advanced piping capabilities of the Intel/AMD products, to be fair). This puts a 400MHz G4 box on roughly the same ground as a Wintel box with a "clock speed" of 1.6GHz.
Perhaps most damning is that now that Intel has finally gotten a 64-bit processor out the door, it's 800MHz. Now Intel has to rein in the "clock speed rules!" mentality of the PC world and replace it with something much more appropriate to digital audio: megaflops, or floating point operations per second. Even AMD has had to back off. Noting that the top PPC speed is over 800MHz, you can see why. Not that this is so important except in the mind of the masses, who like to have things boiled down to a single number, preferably an integer. :-/
That said, there are significant drawbacks in both machines. Apple has never really gotten USB to work well for large numbers of MIDI channels (although you need to take care with what devices you have in your chain regardless... I would put any MIDI/Audio devices on their own bus, which G4's provide). Some devices will work better with some software products than with others, so that can be countered. Support for PCI soundcards is relatively weak for Mac, but that's the fault of the cardmakers. OS X has a *lot* of promise to remove much of the latency in any system, but it will require some work on the part of developers to integrate their drivers, and despite some early promise from companies like Emagic, it will be a year or more before I'll make the move. For now, OS9.0.4 is extremely stable, I have very few crashes (which are typically related to, guess what, PCI card drivers!)
On the other hand, Windows boxes are extremely arcane for the casual user, and you need to invest in a *good* box with *good* components (not the stuff you find at CompUSA or Gateway) before you can have a truly stable platform. I have an electrical engineering degree, and was able to figure out my 1990 Mac LC in a couple of days. The Gateway POS box we got a few years back, on the other hand, was a disaster, crashing constantly despite the efforts of a good friend who works in the desktop BIOS division at Intel. True, this was a Win95 machine built by Gateway, but it was a bad enough experience that I'm extremely hesitant to suggest Wintel machines to anyone without significant computer experience. We sold it within a year, and I've gone back to having computers that I spend more time playing with or getting work done on than fixing and reinstalling Windows on. I'm sure things have improved since then, although I notice my work machine (Win2000, *not* used for audio or games) crashes more on an hours-used basis than any of the three Macs I have at home. Thank goodness I have IT at work!
SCSI, firewire, etc, aren't even issues, they are available across both platforms. FireWire has the advantage of not taking up a PCI slot (at least on most recent Macs, not sure on the PC side), which makes it very useful for laptops. However, FireWire drives are simply IDE or SCSI drives with firewire translation hardware installed. Give this another year before FireWire becomes truly useful and available, and then mostly for MIDI/Audio interfaces rather than drives. Regardless, they aren't issues, so you can stop bringing them up as such in this discussion.
In the long run, you are much better off choosing a software application that you want to use (or apps), then buy the computer based on availability and stability and price that will run that app (or apps). Once you've sprung for the high quality components in a PC, you'll find that the price difference between it and an entry level G4 isn't that great. Move down to an iMac using USB or Firewire for audio capture with modest systems, and there's no longer a price argument to make. That leaves being able to run the software you want to run and how hard you want to work at maintaining your machine.
Also, remember that USB, FireWire, GUIs, mice, wireless networking, destop publishing, laser printing, and a slew of other advances were all made commercially viable by Apple, and if you think that PC audio would be *anywhere* near where it is today, you're fooling yourself. The PC world, especially MicroSoft, is horrendously lacking in innovation, and it *needs* companies like Apple to goose the market from time to time. Even if you've got good reasons to use a PC (and there are good reasons, at least for some of us), only an idiot would bite the hand that feeds him or her. Had Apple not stolen Xerox's GUI ideas, we'd all be arguing over the merits of 16 bit processors and whether UNIX was better than DOS and bragging about having a whopping 32 Meg of RAM by now. You may not like the computer, but it's changed the face of personal computing and no amount of chest beating by PC users will make that little fact go away.
One last thing: Get RAM. Lots of RAM. It's *so* cheap now, that you can deck out most machines with four 256Meg DIMMS for less than $200. They *all* run fast with that much RAM.
Doug
Enough windows-hate vented for today...
on it when it was last reformatted. he said it was good. he was wrong. it does crash very often, any trojan will work fine on it...theres the whole netbios thing with sharing drives on the net..(ive had fun looking at ppl's hard drives with ip scanners and such because of this..)..i havent seen 2000 or xp yet.
.(the SNII belong to my friend)
)