I have clear memories of those first PPC 601-based Macs and they were
hardly "top performers in their day" even in the Mac world.

They were indeed, for some things.

At the time, I was grinding numbers and the PPC-601 soundly smoked the crap out
of any of the available pentii of the day.

Then the P-Pro came out, and it was best of the heap.

Then the G3 came out and it was better for a lot of stuff then Pent-pro, II and
III. By then I was grinding numbers for chromosome analysis and we tried both.
The G3 could just toast the Pentia by a severe margin in that particular
application. We would have gladly switched platforms at the time, since it was
all $100K a seat vertical market stuff anyway.

Then the clock speeds began to go up as AMD and Intel fought each other and the
G4 lagged behind except on stuff you could put into vector format for SIMD
processing and it still smoked P3/P4 at twice the clockspeed.

Now we get the G5, which I think at least closes the gap. Likely, it's probably
going to run ahead on some stuff and a bit behind on other stuff. But it looks
like it is all in the same ballpark. So what does it matter?

FWIW, I'm still using a much slower Mac because me, the human, is faster using
it.



--
Dr. Nuketopia
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