Is it true that the Mac G4 processor is twice as fast as a Pentium III?
It is true that the G4 is faster than the Pentium III on many tasks. For example, if you run the SETI@home screensaver (which uses lots of floating-point calculations to perform signal processing operations on radio telescope data), a G4 running at 500 megahertz (MHz) will produce a result set in about half the time of a Pentium III running at 700 MHz. This is a remarkable difference in processing capability. When creating a microprocessor, the designer gets to make millions of decisions. A basic limit in the design is the number of transistors that will fit on a chip, so the designer is trying to make decisions that obtain the best performance from those transistors. The designer may also have to worry about backward compatibility with older instruction sets and looming release
