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UNDERSTANDING PERFORMANCE
What are the different aspects of performance?
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There are many aspects to computers performance.
Computers are like cars - complex systems with many
components. Having more of one thing, without the balance of
the other sub-systems, doesn't mean the whole will be much
faster. (For cars this means having a bigger motor doesn't
mean that much if the transmission can't handle the power,
and the suspension can't corner well, and the wheels can't
keep you firmly connected to the road). Computers are the
same. Hot doggers like to measure each aspect of their
computer with numbers - and then pretend that a bigger
number means the computer goes faster - in reality in may
not make much if any difference at all (unless the whole
system can handle it).
PC's (meaning Intel-clones) biggest problems are that
they are usually dramatically unbalanced systems. They
systems performance is actually the sum of its flaws. The
following areas must all be factored in to get the users
real world performance -
- CPU (Processor) - the
workhorse of a computer.
PowerPC's usually outclass their
Pentium Counterparts. Intel tries to dazzle and
confuse users with flying computer graphics and
pretending that Pentiums have created the MultiMedia
revolution - but fail to mention that those dazzling
Pentium commercials were made on Macintoshes, and Macs
had multimedia for many years before PC's got the
same.
- General I/O (Input/output
systems) - the basic I/O systems.
The Macs are often much better designed when it comes to
I/O systems over all, and PC's are still held back by the
anarchy of design (PC's are not so much designed systems
as collections of features stacked on top of each other)
and their own legacy (the PC's design was old in 1981
when it was created and there has been little real
innovation since then).
- Hard-drives - these are
critical and should be looked at specifically.
The Macs generally use high-quality SCSI, while PC's
often resort to old cheap and usually slow and noisy
IDE. (Nothing like the grinding of an IDE drive to
remind me that
Windows is working)
See each of those links for more information.
If you really need to know which machine will be faster
for a particular application - then you must benchmark
(compare both systems against a benchmark - usually a
stopwatch). Those will be your real world results. I have
done this alot, and that is why I know that most often the
Mac just blows the PC away (with a few exceptions).
So there are many areas of performance, and in almost all
of these areas there are many little gotcha's in system
performance behavior - and there are many trade-offs in
sytem designs. To understand performance one must understand
what each of these sub-areas of performance are and how they
work. In most cases - I usually like the Macs choice of
tradeoffs, and the Macs usually out-perform the PC's
overall.
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