Nickname: KenC

Review: To Pelucan, the PowerBook had a G4 chip, not a G5. So, that explains about half of the speed difference; and the new MacBook has TWO CORES! That explains the other half of the difference.

Date reviewed: Jan 12, 2006 1:30 AM

Nickname: karltl

Review: Clock speed and actual performance are not the same thing. Certain commands that the CPU executes could take multiple clock cycles, others my execute in only 1 or 2. The primary difference between CPU was that the IBM chips were based on RISC (reduced instruction set cpu's). The gist of that technology was that everytime the cpu fetched an instruction to execute, it had to look up the instruction in a list to figure out, at a hardware level, exactly what to do. The instruction set of the INTEL chips is pretty long, thus, more time spent looking up the instruction before you can actually execute it. There were some other esoteric differences that I'm not completely knowledgable about. In the end, the high end Mac's have always been the box of choice for computing intensive applications (graphic/video editing) even though, in terms of clock rates, they "looked" slower than their Intel counterparts.

Date reviewed: Jan 11, 2006 8:31 PM

Nickname: Craig

Review: Remember that Apple's previous laptops were stuck at the G4 processor because the G5 is HOT and IBM couldn't make a version cool enough (and low power enough) to put in a laptop. The G5 is roughly double the processing speed of a G4 at the same MHz/GHz, so that's half of the "four times faster" in the new iMac. Also, the Intel chip they're using is dual core (the G4 was single core) and there's the other half of the "four times faster". It sounds to me like the new Intel chip is roughly comparable to the G5, but will work in a notebook. That's the key.

Date reviewed: Jan 11, 2006 6:50 PM

Nickname: gedto

Review: The key factor here is dual-core processing. These new laptops are up to 4x faster, but they may perform just 2x or around that in some other tasks. That new iPod will come later.

Date reviewed: Jan 11, 2006 5:36 PM

Nickname: magicianeer

Review: Reguarding Powerbook performance: The G4 arrived in powerbooks in 2000 at 500Mhz. Its latest incarnation is 1.67 GHz in 2005. Over this time, Intel went from P3 at ~800Mhz to P4-Mobile with 3+GHz. So the top Intel laptop offerings have been 1.5-2x faster. Apple got dual core so Jobs multiplies by 2 again (real users will never see it).

Date reviewed: Jan 11, 2006 7:49 AM

Nickname: Pelucon

Review: 4 times faster! I don't get it. So the old IBM processors were equivalent to a pentium III? What happened to the new iPod that was going to replace the iShuffle?

Date reviewed: Jan 11, 2006 12:57 AM