OT: Mac's with RISC no more?

[KB Gunn]

All this talk about Intel chips in Macs starting in a year or two leads me to question if Apple is abandoning RISC or if Intel will produce RISC chips for them. The beauty of RISC vs CISC is that it runs cooler and theoretically has greater potential of expansion than CISC.

 

If they are going to just use stock Intel chips, what is the point of using a Mac anymore? There will no longer be an advantage other than the system X features. Plus what will happpen to the famous mac stability?

[gtrmac]

You are a victim of the myths and urban legends surrounding Apple computers. The new Intel chips run cooler than the IBM and as a user of both Macs and Windows systems I see very little difference in the stability of the two platforms. Stability is usually more an issue of OS and hardware compatibility and in this regard Windows users must choose carefully among the many choices that are available.

[BlueSky]

Here is some good information...

http://www.visionengineer.com/comp/combining_risc_cisc.shtml

 

Basically most CISC processors (Pentium 4/M/D - AMD etc.) have become more RISC like and most RISC processors (PowerPC G4 / G5) have become more CISC like.

 

So these arguments don't really apply to todays CPUs.

[theblue1]

As BlueSky indicates, the PowerPC was more RISC in name and lineage, than anything else. With longer and more pipelines and a power consumption that increased substantially as clock speeds have gotten higher, the PPC was much more CISC like than, say, the AMD families.

 

The Pentium M, OTOH, runs lighter and cooler -- and, according to the SETI@Home figures, is second in floating point operations per clock cycle only to the Itanium. (Itanium 2 showed an efficiency index of 1.3; Itanium "1" 1.9. Pentium M: 3.1, tying an Alpha.)

 

AMD owns much of the mid-high ground of CPU efficiency, as well. (The top AMDs came in starting at the sixth position (skipping over a pair of Alphas) and all tied with a score of 3.5.)

 

But the PowerPC edges out the Pentium 4 by a hair in the stolid midsection of the SETI rankings. (PPC G5 scores 5.2; P4 scores 5.3.)

 

SETI@home Processing Efficiency Ranking

 

The PPC G5 (IBM 970FX) has many powerful features but also it has substantial memory latency issues -- the new 2.7 GHz G5 is nearly twice as slow in RAM access as either the current P4 or AMD Opteron.

 

In addition, the PPC G5 was simply not suited to inclusion in today's laptops at today's speeds because of heat and power consumption issues.

 

 

Oh... and the "Yonah" -- the next gen Pentium M chip that will be going in Macs will have a dual core with a 2 MB shared cache (sharing the cache between the cores supposedly enhances performance over today's segregated cache designs.)

[LOWBOY]

yep...i'm hopelessly analogue...

 

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[not Cereal]

but will it run "the legend of soltare"?

 

(10 points for identifying reference)

[phaeton]

But the real question is if the Pentium chips vs. PPC chips have any real impact on the starvation of a grue.

 

Personal safety is at stake!

[KB Gunn]

Thanks guys for the excellent responses. It puts my CPU (cerebral processing unit) at ease.