Warren Peace Posted November 22, 2000 Share Posted November 22, 2000 Does CM or CM2 take advantage of the AltiVec engine on the G4 processor? I am thinking of Accelerating my G3 233 beige machine and wanted to know if there is any additional advantage of the G4 other than increased MHZ. Warren Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fatmac Posted November 22, 2000 Share Posted November 22, 2000 Actually, my g3/500 is faster than my g4/400, so probably no altivec enhancements are in CM. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
David Aitken Posted November 22, 2000 Share Posted November 22, 2000 Warren Peace wrote: > Does CM or CM2 take advantage of the AltiVec engine on the G4 processor? Nope. [afterthought: hang on, CM2 doesn't exist yet] > I am thinking of Accelerating my G3 233 beige machine and wanted to know if there is any additional advantage of the G4 other than increased MHZ. The only advantage of a G4 is AltiVec. This may be an advantage if you plan to run OS X – but on the other hand, the inherently slower architecture of your beige G3 may negate any advantage. I have a beige G3/233 too, and I got a 450MHz G3 upgrade from OWC (www.macsales.com). They sell original Apple processor ZIF cards, so they're cheap – look for Mercury ZA. Newer G3s and G4s have a faster system bus, faster RAM, faster PCI etcetera, so you won't be able to take full advantage of upgrades on a beige G3 – a 400MHz G4 ZIF won't make your machine run as fast as a new 400MHz G4, for example – but it's still worth it to an extent. David [This message has been edited by David Aitken (edited 11-22-2000).] Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Slapdragon Posted November 23, 2000 Share Posted November 23, 2000 The advantage of my G4/500 over my G3/233 upgraded to a G3/450 is in disk access and graphic speed, Altivec, while making Photoshop, Media Cleaner, and Final Cut scream (in some cases halving a render which is great when you are talking 11 hours if render time on a 70gb video with 13 layers and a 3D sequence) Has no effect on CM -- there are even ways to hobble it by dropping back to 9.0 and throwing out an extension and you cannot see the effect in CM. That said, running CM off my internal ATA/66 through my 16mb graphics cards renders turns noticeably faster that my biege machine (and even faster than my Dell which has a much higher clock speed) and my G4 seems much better at running CM in the background while I work on photoshop or Word in the foreground on my second monitor. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Shadow 1st Hussars Posted November 23, 2000 Share Posted November 23, 2000 <BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Fatmac: Actually, my g3/500 is faster than my g4/400, so probably no altivec enhancements are in CM.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE> 500 would be faster than a 400....... 100MHz faster Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
David Aitken Posted November 23, 2000 Share Posted November 23, 2000 Shadow 1st Hussars wrote: > 500 would be faster than a 400....... 100MHz faster It should be noted that this is only true in these specific circumstances. It so happens that a G4 is basically a G3 with AltiVec instructions, so when running programs that do not utilise AltiVec, clock speeds are comparable. In most cases however, two given processors will run at different speeds regardless of the Hz value. Hz dictates the number of instructions a processor can give per second, but each instruction is carried out at different speeds on different processors. This is difficult to explain to the man on the street, of course, and most people judge computers by their clock speed alone. David ------------------ My quoting was to the point, it's your posting Mace that wasn't up to what I wanted to quote. – PawBroon Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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