WAY OFF TOPIC: RISC v/s CISC CPUs for music

[Dave Halliday]

There is no real way to compare the two chip designs.  The Reduced 
Instruction Set Computer ( RISC ) does some things much better than 
the Complex I. S. C.  ( CISC ) chips. And it does some things much worse.

Literally, apples ( note the small " a " ) and oranges...

A manufacturer is going to choose the benchmarks that make their
product look the best.  Still, as mentioned, the optimised io and the 
very fast pipelined simple instructions ( grab a chunk of data and put
it here ) make the CISC architecture good for moving large blocks of 
data around. ( music files? )    Windows still needs to work on the
real-time element - process this NOW!


( 2/3's of the way there in Seattle - Linux and Windows NT )  :-)



>     From: "Douglas Wright" <dug at be.com>
>     To: synth-diy at mailhost.bpa.nl
>     Date: Mon, 26 Oct 1998 20:46:59 PST
>     Subject: WAY OFF TOPIC: Re: MacOS 8.5
>      
>     In our experience, running BeOS on both platforms, PC hardware is 
>     faster AND cheaper.  The PowerPC processor is a great design and the 
>     RAW floating point performance is higher per Mhz, but the io subsystems
>     on the PC are much more optimized because of the competition in the 
>     marketplace.  And that whole thing Apple is spreading about the PowerPC
>     233 being flat out faster than the PII 400?  BS.  Here's what 
>     PCMagazine found when they recompiled the benchmarks that Apple used 
>     with a better compiler:
>      
>     <http://www.zdnet.com/pcmag/firstlooks/9808/imac_tests.html>
>      
>     Watch those number DOUBLE when you use a really good compiler.  In 
>     fact, this is why Be has recently switched from using Metrowerks to 
>     EGCS tools for the Intel version of BeOS.  We found that using gcc gave
>     us a 30% performance improvement with the same code.  It would be even 
>     better if we could use the intel compiler, but there is more to a tool 
>     chain than the compiler and we couldn't work it out in the short time 
>     we had.
>      
>     So, as long as I'm here going off.  I'd have to recommend (from my 
>     highly biased viewpoint - you could even say this is a shameless plug) 
>     that you buy an intel machine that will run Windows, BeOS and Linux so 
>     that you are prepared for the coming years and whatever they may bring.
>      
>     dug
>      
>>
>>In a message dated 10/26/98 1:06:29 PM Pacific Standard Time,
>>SMcDonald at doe.mass.edu writes:
>>
>><< 3. Compared to a Pentium II, for most operations the G3 processors 
>     are
>> twice as fast. So, if you buy a 233MHz, double it to 466MHz. That'd 
>     make
>> it comparable to Pentium II. >>
>>
>>
>>Why is this speed difference?, are the two not runing at the same 
>     clock speed?
>>What makes the MAC hardware faster then the PC hardware?
>>
>     >>
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