Apple should use gigaflops, not GHz

[j763]

When your average consumer sees a Dell or a Gateway for the same price as an iMac, but with far greater MHz... they're pretty tempted to get the Dell or the Gateway, right. I mean, 700MHz doesn't sound real fast compared to 2200 MHz, does it? But what if they marketed it in gigaflops... that would sound far more impressive and i really think they'd sell more macs to consumers.

What do you guys think???

 

[mozez]

that's a good idea, they already do that alittle, like 15 gigaflops of power, but they need to end saying how many megahertz all together for it to have an effect. but then people will start asking the difference and wonder why it loooks funny, like you understand when it's 2.2 versus 700 and THINK that 2.2 is better, but if you see 15 gigflops versus 2.2 gigahertz, 15 is so high it kinda looks weird or suspicious, maybe? i dunno, just my two cents.

 

[Chaszmyr]

Well there is a marketting problem because "gigahertz" is kinda a cool sounding word, whereas "gigaflop" sounds like a joke

 

[Tooth]

That and Gigaflops isn't a real measure of performance... the Xbox can do more Gigaflops than a G4...

It's all in the way you decide to measure it.

 

[jefhatfield]

Originally posted by Chaszmyr
Well there is a marketting problem because "gigahertz" is kinda a cool sounding word, whereas "gigaflop" sounds like a joke

i think so, too

once apple has all their gear beyond 1 ghz, it will all look the same to the consumer

it's the sub 1 ghz macs that look suspiciously slow to the consumer

tibook will get at or over 1 ghz soon

imac and emac will get there not much later

two of three powermacs are there already

ibook and crt imac has a ways to go, but apple should keep the speed increases coming

speed will not be a major issue some months or a year from now since there will been a lot a users who saw that 2 ghz on a pc is really not such a big deal anyway

we can only surf of type so fast, and that's what most of us do anyway, consumer wise

 

[benixau]

Originally posted by Chaszmyr
Well there is a marketting problem because "gigahertz" is kinda a cool sounding word, whereas "gigaflop" sounds like a joke

fine, just dont say gigaflops. talk in MIPS (Millions of Instruction per Second). that sounds cool.

"The latest G4 from Apple can do over 1500 MIPS. It runs MS Office like a breeze. Wouldn't you wan that sort of power in a easy to use machine?? I know i do"

See sounds great. 1500 MIPS compared to 2.2gigahertz. MIPS sounds technical, and therefore better. That is good marketing.

 

[MacCoaster]

benixau, and others concerned about speed as marketing:

Speed is important to hear, but the actual performance matters to power users who know the difference, etc.

MIPS is a very poor technical benchmark. Here is why.

In fact, read them all about MFLOPS, SPEC, etc.

 

[jefhatfield]

being a techie, when i first saw amd come out with their new scheme, i didn't like it

then i saw some benchmarks and realized that in every case, amd was being conservative in their numbers

so when i see athlon xp 1800+, i can be sure that it will more than beat a 1.8 ghz pentium 4

i could also possibly see apple doing the same thing with their marketing concerning the speeds of their next generation machines...naming it the g5 1800+, or g5 2000+, etc.

 

[blogo]

f

Then apple would just call their current g4 for G4 8000+

since its over 90% faster than the fastest pentium 4

 

[MacCoaster]

jefhatfield:

By the time those next generation Macs come out, Pentium 4s and AMD Hammers will be at approximately 4GHz already. 2000 sounds puny compared to 4000.

 

[edesignuk]

 

[nixd2001]

Originally posted by MacCoaster
jefhatfield:

By the time those next generation Macs come out, Pentium 4s and AMD Hammers will be at approximately 4GHz already. 2000 sounds puny compared to 4000.

Oh no, not again please.

Tell you what, why not start comparing memory bandwidth capabilities. Although still a somewhat hypothetical number, they are probably closer to providing a meaningful comparison.

IBM 970 opens the bidding on behalf of apple with 6.4GB/S. Would anyone care to bid on behalf of Intel?

 

[Over Achiever]

Ah...someone accidently clicked the post thread instead of the post reply button...

Its probably for that gigaflops thread.

 

[hvfsl]

I use my Mac for more than just surfing and writing. I also use it for 3D graphics and games, and my computer is never fast enough. I am getting fed up with people saying that it does not matter Apple can make very fast machines, saying that we do not need the speed anyway.

Anyway we do not really need the Mhz to go up that much. Sun sells computers that are around 1Ghz for around $9000 and the Intel Itaniam is around 1Ghz. These computers are very fast. So apple just needs to design new motherboards that take as much work away from the CPU as possible. For example, special co-proccessing chips that speed up things like disk access and sound. At the moment the G4 does a lot more work than a P4 or AMD Athlon, it has to do things like proccess sound and other things that AMD and Intel have extra chips on the motherboard for.

For example, below is a list of the speed differences gained when using dedicated chips to proccess certain things:

sound 15%
graphics 30%
IDE 35%
Firewire / USB 10%
Modem 8%
Network Card 11%

I have got the above numbers from doing tests on my PC, turning different devices and cards on and off.

 

[hvfsl]

When I said Sun I meant SGI.

 

[j763]

my 2 cents...

It's not about good technical benchmarks... It's about apple selling more macs

they don't necessarily have to call it gigaflops, they could just call it GF or MIPS.

I just think using anything rather than MHz would be good.

Think about how many more iMacs they would have sold had they been marketed as a 2gf machine? or 2000mips?

 

[nixd2001]

Originally posted by j763
my 2 cents...

It's not about good technical benchmarks... It's about apple selling more macs

they don't necessarily have to call it gigaflops, they could just call it GF or MIPS.

I just think using anything rather than MHz would be good.

Think about how many more iMacs they would have sold had they been marketed as a 2gf machine? or 2000mips?

if we're talking about marketing thrusts, why get into number comparisons on Intel's marketing turf then? Why not do a BMW vs Skoda comparison - sure, the Skoda is cheaper, but do you really want your neighbours to see it? Etc.

Apple doesn't want to be at the very bottom of the price range - everything it has built up is against this. So stress the quality of the product.

Or am I missing something?

 

[sturm375]

Originally posted by nixd2001


Oh no, not again please.

Tell you what, why not start comparing memory bandwidth capabilities. Although still a somewhat hypothetical number, they are probably closer to providing a meaningful comparison.

IBM 970 opens the bidding on behalf of apple with 6.4GB/S. Would anyone care to bid on behalf of Intel?

AMD Hammer: 19.2 GB/s

Q:How many HyperTransport™ links does the “Hammer” architecture support?
A:The “Hammer” architecture are designed to support up to three HyperTransport links. The combined peak bandwidth of the HyperTransport links is 19.2GB/sec.

from: Here

 

[MacCoaster]

Originally posted by nixd2001
Oh no, not again please.

Tell you what, why not start comparing memory bandwidth capabilities. Although still a somewhat hypothetical number, they are probably closer to providing a meaningful comparison.

I never said that it was depenedent on MHz. I simply stated 2000 sounds puny to 4000... FROM a marketing standpoint.

IBM 970 opens the bidding on behalf of apple with 6.4GB/S. Would anyone care to bid on behalf of Intel?

See post directly above for AMD Hammer. As for Intel's Itanium, I'm not sure. Let me check. I'll post the number in an edit.

Okay. Intel's Itanium has 6.4GB/sec memory bandwidth as stated here: http://www.intel.com/products/serve...um2/index.htm?iid=ipp_srvr_proc+itanium2srvr& so Apple and IBM are behind the pack already.

 

[MrMacMan]

Or we could use the AMD way of setting are chips.
1800+ which runs at like 1.6 ghz... Which wouldn't fool many people but hey it could work... +
Well all I know is that we need some Real clock speed, or something that is just mad fast.
Right now.

 

[sturm375]

Intel's Bandwidth

Tom's Hardware says: Here

PC Mark=6.85 GB/s
SiS Memory=3.376 GB/s

Don't know which is the correct value.

P4 2.53 Ghz w/ RDRAM1066

 

[nixd2001]

Originally posted by MacCoaster

I never said that it was depenedent on MHz. I simply stated 2000 sounds puny to 4000... FROM a marketing standpoint.

Agreed, 2000 vs 4000 sounds bad from a marketing performance viewpoint. But my issue was why are we getting in to comparing the numbers? This way of comparing manages to exclude anything about hardware build quality or software quality. I think the Mac community should be trying some agenda setting of its own regarding quality, rather than having to get defensive about numbers. All these number comparisons avoid many significant aspects and I was reacting to seeing another sub-thread starting on just a numbers comparison. For example, I've spent a while reading Cocoa documentation (not quite enough free time to really get down to interesting coding unfortunately though). So, for basically no effort, every text widget can benefit from text-to-speech and textual summarise capabilities - does MS offer this? These have no direct relationship to the performance numbers, but they strike me as pretty significant (at least noteworthy) capabilities. Likewise, when I'm typing, I get a voice telling me that Mozilla needs my attention and the focus remains precisely where it is until I decide to go and see what was upsetting Mozilla. Heck, I've tried that last item on a range of "generic" users and all have them have responded that they'd like to have that feature available. but nowhere in their reaction was there anything close to 2000 vs 4000 comparisons.

So my argument is that, by only talking about how the numbers are not what they seem, Mac users are ignoring the thing that really makes a difference, namely quality.

See post directly above for AMD Hammer. As for Intel's Itanium, I'm not sure. Let me check. I'll post the number in an edit.

Okay. Intel's Itanium has 6.4GB/sec memory bandwidth as stated here: http://www.intel.com/products/serve...um2/index.htm?iid=ipp_srvr_proc+itanium2srvr& so Apple and IBM are behind the pack already.

The memory bandwidth issue is going to be an interesting debate for a good few months to come. Elsewhere, we had a figure of about 19GB/S for Hammer, but spread across three buses, which makes for only fractionally higher peak bandwidth that either PPC970 or Itanium are talking about. It is very believable that the issue of how fast the CPU is is going to be largely irrelevant because future memory systems are going to struggle to keep up.