Date: Wed, 13 May 1998 02:06:11 -0000
From: John Halbig <john@garage.com>
Subject: Tidbit - 266 MHz PowerPC faster than 400 MHz Pentium II

Keyword: Advocacy, Why Macs Are Better

This tidbit is from: 

Chuck Norris

A co-worker in my office just received a new 400 MHz Pentium II machine. 
It's all decked out: 100+ MB RAM, 100 MHz bus speed, etc. One of the 
fastest Windows machines (reasonable) money can buy.

He's a modest guy - not one to crow - but the "I've got the fastest 
machine in the building" *glow* was just radiating from him.

To put some hard numbers behind the speedy reputation, we ran the 
ByteMark benchmark (Byte Magazine's standard benchmark suite - see 
<http://www.byte.com> for details). Even I was not prepared for the 
results. I knew that, cycle-for-cycle, PowerPC is speedier than Pentium, 
but I wasn't prepared to see that my 266 MHz G3 was significantly 
*faster* than the 400 MHz Pentium on most of the test suites.

Here are the specifics (scores are relative to a 90 MHz Pentium):

                  400 MHz Pentium     266 MHz PowerPC
         Integer:      5.86               7.53
  Floating Point:      5.36               5.73

I work in a Windoze-centric office, and hard numbers like these make it 
much easier to fend off those who might encourage (or require! yikes!) a 
switch to Wintel. I'm hoping for the day when I can *emulate* Windoze 
faster than the speediest Pentium!