Re: [tlug] Advice on buying a Macbook

["Josh Glover" <jmglov@example.com>]

On 28/11/06, Stephen J. Turnbull <stephen@example.com> wrote:

> Josh Glover writes:
>
>  > Ask anyone who has had to write assembly code for both x86 and PPC
>  > which they prefer. :)
>
> Yah, but the problem is the OS that Apple wrapped around the PPC.
> Especially the file system.  "Tiger" is perceptibly faster than
> "Panther", but HFS+ is still dog-slow compared to any real *nix FS.

Indeed. Linux on a PPC ran pretty well. The fact that a PPC yielded
comparable performance to x86 chips clocked 75% faster should give
some indication that the design of the CPU itself was pretty decent.

I pick RISC over CISC any day, but that battle has been fought and
lost, at least in this generation of CPUs. I predict that as
transistor densities rise more and more, we will see a return to RISC.

But what do I know? ;)

-Josh