| Wednesday, November 30, 2005 |
16:32 - But how fast will it render drop-shadows?! Tell me! For God's sake, tell me!
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2627&p=1
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Via Steven Den Beste: AnandTech's first look at Yonah, Intel's upcoming low-power dual-core CPU (and likely candidate for the Intel-based Macs, or at least the laptops).
Looks like it comes in fairly square in the middle of the pack, outpaced handily by the top-end AMD64 chips, but better than the previous Intel entrant.
It may be of considerable interest to people geekier than me, but honestly the main reaction I have to this sort of thing is relief. Not that the Yonah is any kind of earth-shattering technological marvel, but that at least this way we won't have to waste time talking about the relative merits of Mac vs. PC performance at the hardware level anymore. No more "megahertz myth" or "pipeline bubbles" or "wider registers" or any of that stuff to deal with. The whole "speed" question has always seemed to me a tedious distraction from the debate—whereas lots of people find great significance in the endless leapfrog game between the latest Intel or AMD chips and the newest-generation PPC chip, to me they obscured the main reasons why you'd ever choose to buy a Mac. Except for very specialized cases like BLAST, it's never for the performance. As I've probably said before and will probably say again, I'd use a Mac instead of a PC even if I had to run it on a 500MHz G3. The software and user experience really are that important.
In the Intel-Mac era, throngs will persist in not using the Mac as a gaming platform, and the Mac will remain the platform of choice for prepress, graphics, and video production. This isn't about speed: it's about software. Game companies won't move their wares to the Mac even if it were running on some mythical chip ten times the speed of Intel's fastest, because the market isn't there—gamers don't buy Macs. And the graphics/prepress/video companies won't abandon the Mac market no matter how wide the megahertz gap were ever to become, because of the very real advantages available on the Mac software platform that Windows simply doesn't provide. That's been the case forever; but now, with everything on the same chipset, there won't be any reason to discuss performance at all, and the debate actually will have to be about the software. 6% increase in the WinBizStone panel over the last Intel chip? Lagging behind the latest AMD chip in Render3DContentStone? Who cares? I'll leave that to Anand to mull over. All I care about is that the stuff that runs on it is still Mac OS X.
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Brian Tiemann
