Anon (no.delete@this.email.com) on August 4, 2014 1:17 pm wrote:
> Mark Roulo (nothanks.delete@this.xxx.com) on August 4, 2014 8:43 am wrote:
> > Yuhong Bao (yuhongbao_386.delete@this.hotmail.com) on August 3, 2014 2:24 pm wrote:
> > > http://www.mondaynote.com/2014/08/03/macintel-the-end-is-nigh
> >
> > From the article: "The x86 nickname used to designate Wintel chips originates from the 8086
> > processor introduced in 1978 – itself a backward-compatible extension of the 8088"
> >
> > But the 8088 was released in 1979 ... one year after the 8086.
> >
> > As others here have pointed out, the "facts" in the article are either old or wrong.
> >
> > And I see folks still pushing the idea that RISC has a huge edge
> > over x86 for large CPUs ... it worked so well for PowerPC.
>
> You have to remember that the hard core old school Macophile is still caught up in
> the decade of convincing themselves that their PowerPC macs were much faster and
> better than the PCs of the time.. and still yearn for that point of difference.
> These days they are paying through the nose for a bit of trendy design,
> and a BIOS cusomised enough to run their OS out of the box.
> NOT that I am saying current mac hardware is bad - its simply a slightly customised
> PC platform in a pretty box with a markup, but they want MORE than that.
>
> Dont underestimate their need to be 'better', its a strong market force with Apple.

While the PowerPC chips were not continually better they did trade spots with the x86 chips from time to time. In particular the G3 era and the G5's were rather competitive. Case in point was when the first 2.66 Ghz quad Xeon Mac Pro shipped, it wasn't that much faster running native software than the quad 2.5 Ghz G5s that preceded it. (The quad 2.66 Ghz Xeon was the much cheaper base configuration though where as the quad G5 was the expensive high end configuration).

And yeah, the current Mac platform is bad even though it is the same x86 base components. The Mac Pro has turned into a tube with memory being the only internal expansion. Some iMac models now don't even have memory expansion. Apple's laptop line got rid of memory expansion a few years ago. The entire concept of upgradability has mostly been purged from Apple's line up.

This is one of the reasons why people do yearn for the PowerPC era in retrospect. Those systems were obscenely upgradeable. The first AGP G4 systems in 1999 could later be upgraded all the way to dual 1.8 Ghz G4e chips six years later. Sure, a G5 crushed a system with such an upgrade in performance but at significantly higher cost. Apple also shipped the G4's with 64 bit PCI slots so there was bandwidth to add things like a SATA card or a Gigabit NIC.