Monday, February 5, 2001		On Hardware

A ‘supercomputer’ for designers
By Vipul Verma

COMPUTERS are much more than Pentium, Celeron, Athlon, Duron and Cyrix. There is a strong player in the computer world – Apple that has always maintained its own position and has one of the fastest computers in the world in its kitty. However, it is not yet popular among the end-users.

Apple has been in the computer market since long and at one time it used to be a preferred choice over the PC. However, with the changing times and user-friendly interface, PCs gained in the due course of time. However, Apple has its own market and users, which is growing steadily.

Apple Mac G4 is an advanced computer range of the Apple computers and offers features that are better than other computers or processors available currently. To put it precisely, it is one of the fastest desktop computers that run easily up to a stunning 100 per cent to 200 per cent faster than the Pentium III-based PCs. Moreover, Power Mac G4 is so powerful that its speed is measured in gigaflops, or billions of floating-point operations per second, just like supercomputers. No wonder Apple calls it a supercomputer.

Power Mac G4 is the machine for scientific application developers, designers, and other creative professionals, who find this computer simply superb in comparison to other computers available presently. This is clearly reflected in the Photoshop 5.5 20 filters test, under which the performance of the Mac G4 clearly scores over Pentium 4, 1.4 GHz and AMD Athlon.

Thus Mac clearly stands ahead of the competition given the applications involving designing, video and graphics and offers the users unmatched speed and efficiency. Moreover Mac G4 also has a non-conventional design. However, the heart of Mac G4 is PowerPC G4 processor with Velocity Engine. Using vector processing, the PowerPC G4 brings supercomputer performance to the desktop for the first time. The velocity engine moves vector and multimedia data at super efficient speeds, which can process data in 128-bit chunks, instead of the smaller 32-bit or 64-bit chunks used in traditional processors. However, applications must be specially coded to take advantage of the vector processor. If they do, they can perform certain mathematical operations quickly.

A vector processor executes the same operation on multiple pieces of data at the same time. In the G4, up to eight simultaneous operations can execute in a single clock cycle in the vector unit. This sort of processing power is what makes the G4 so fast when working with math-intensive applications like Photoshop that have been coded to take advantage of vector processing. The Pentium III features a vector processing capability as well, but it is not as powerful.

Power Mac G4 also scores over other computers in terms of the system performance as it is further enhanced through the use of a super fast system bus and 1 MB of backside cache. Normally computer-users, using personal computers, would often get confused with the clock speed of Pentium and Power Mac G4 processor. Intel Pentium has much higher clock speed, but if you take the overall speed into consideration the latest range of Apple Power Mac G4 will be faster than Pentium 4. To put it precisely, Power MacG4 733 MHz runs at a speed of 5.5 gigaflops and is up to 57 per cent faster than the 1.5 GHz Pentium 4 processor.

Power Mac G4 derives its immense power from a powerful and improved system architecture that includes a new 133 MHz system bus, which can carry data at a speed of over 1 gigabyte per second. Other features of Power Mac G4 include high performance 4 PCI slots and one 4X AGP graphics slot, which are preloaded with graphics accelerator. It also has provision for Airport card slot. Besides this, it also has Fire Wire ports and USB ports.

The most outstanding feature of Power Mac G4, other than the one mentioned above, is its upward capacity as in this computer you can put up to 100 GB of hard disk storage space and up to 1.5 GB of SDRAM. These mammoth capacities make it a great computer. Moreover unlike any other desktop computer, Power Mac G4 supports wireless LAN features, through its AirPort card, which allow high-speed local area network access. It also lets you surf the Net without connecting any cables to the computer and thus you may enjoy trouble free and high speed Internet access through the Airport wireless Network.

Now, the question is: Power Mac G4 competes with which processors? Truly speaking, Power Mac G4 competes only with itself as the latest versions of this computer have shown better performance. Though in some of the tests the performance of Pentium range of computers and also Athlon has scored over Power Mac G4 but in totality, Power Mac G4 can be adjudged the most powerful computer. Given the price to performance analysis and also the ease of use and titles available, Pentium and Athlon certainly have their appeal.

Thus for applications involving, graphics, designing, video-editing, DVD film making, developing scientific applications, burning CDs and DVDs etc. Power Mac G4 could be the ultimate solution but for a majority of home-based applications, normal office and business applications, Pentium and Athlon serve the purpose well.