Date: Wed, 10 Dec 97 02:13:06 -0900
From: EvangeList <evangelist@apple.com>
Subject: Followup - Number-Crunching Benchmarks

Keyword: Advocacy, Why Macs Are Better

This follow-up message is from:

Daniel R. Adamo

Since MacMission Control's November 7 invitation to run the Whetstone 
benchmark on your PC, over 100 scores have been reported. Thanks to all 
who contributed! Number-crunching performance on more than 50 distinct 
hardware configurations, from a PowerBook 170 to a Power Macintosh 
9600/350, are now documented at the following URL.

<http://www.MacMissionControl.com/~MMC/>

Additional scores in this database continue to support the observation, 
made in November 7's post, that Power PC processors under Mac OS will 
out-perform x86 and Pentium processors under Windows by a factor of 
2-to-1 at a given clock speed. The Wintel world simply cannot compete 
with Power PC and Mac OS because it's shackled to the x86 CISC 
instruction set. Under Linux, one 80686 processor demonstrated a 40% 
improvement with respect to its Windows score, but the improvement was to 
a level only two-thirds that of Power PC processors running at the same 
clock speed.

Several scores using the new "G3" 750 processors were reported. Optimized 
for integer arithmetic, these chips aren't expected to deliver Whetstone 
scores as high as comparable 604e processors. While measureable under 
benchmark conditions, this performance gap may not be perceivable in 
practice. At a given clock speed, the difference between a 604e and a 750 
is perhaps one-quarter that between a 604e and a 603e.