[BiO BB] Macintosh

Corentin Cras-Méneur crasmen at magic.fr
Wed Jan 16 11:41:36 EST 2002


At 17:57 -0500 15/01/02, FREDERICK TAN wrote:
>. As a beginning graduate student, I have been contemplating the
>price/performance of the G3 and G4 systems (in reality, the iBook vs the
>TiBook).  So that's sort of the situation I am in, examining the merits of
>the respective laptop series.

    If you are a student, maybe you should consider subscribing the 
the Apple ADC Student program (Apple Developer Connection - 100$). 
Among other things (developer tools, systems, other software), it 
will allow you to buy a machine with 20 % offŠŠŠŠŠ
    See http://www.apple.com/developer/


>. In general, how much better do you feel the G4 chip performs on pure
>number crunching operations.  For instance, if I was attempting to run a
>molecular dynamics simulation for seven days on an SGI, and then I ran it
>on a G4 machine and came away with X days, how close would the G3 machine
>perform?  I realize that this may be a very loaded question dependent on
>the system memory and bus speed, but "all other things being equal"....

All other things being equal, there's not much difference between the 
G4 and G3 in term of calculation power.
    You have some other things to take into account though :
The system and other applications use the velocity engine so it makes 
day to day use a lot smoother (especially in MacOS X)
The Screen is soooooooo great !!!

>. My understanding (which could very well be wrong) is that the *only*
>difference between the G3 and the G4 is the AltiVec unit.  Is that true?
>If that is the case, then for the calculations to perform better (setting
>aside clock speed), the algorithm would have to be optimized to take
>advantage of that unit?

Yep.

>
>  >     I'd recommend tons of RAM.
>
>. Probably a given that I'll try and get as much as possible :)

Wise decision :-)

>. It seems that in my price range, that the 133Mhz bus in the TiBook is
>out of reach, and that it would be a worthy investment to upgrade from the
>66Mhz of the iBook.  Memory at 128 seems standard, with options for
>upgrade now/later through Apple/3rd party.  I'll put myself in the
>position of saying "hard drive size and optical drive option is
>irrelevant".  So my dilemma comes down to: is the G4 chip and the 15.2
>inch display worth the extra $700?

Consider the discount you may have as an ADC studentŠ

>. Thanks again for all of your help.

My pleasure :-))

		Corentin






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