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DISCUSSION No. The PowerPC 604 RISC microprocessor and the new Power Macintosh computers with the Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) bus are, on the whole, significantly faster than the PowerPC 601 and original Power Macintosh computers. However, some types of operations Ð intensive rendering is an example Ð stress memory access times rather than microprocessor or bus speed. The memory speed the new Power Macintosh computers is roughly the same as the original Power Macintosh computers. The decision to use similar speed memory was made to ensure easy access to DRAM components. The use of DIMMs and interleaving allows the new memory architecture to be roughly 20-30% faster than the original Power Macintosh computers. In rendering applications that saturate the memory bandwidth, you see a performance increase roughly equivalent to the increase in memory speed. At bottom, even though the PowerPC 604 can render up to two times faster than a Power PowerPC 601, memory speed poses a bottleneck. The new Power Macintosh computers based on the PowerPC 604 RISC microprocessor and PCI bus are significantly faster than the original Power Macintosh computers when performing most tasks. When performing other tasks in rendering applications, such as modeling, screen redraw, and animation playback, the Power Macintosh 8500 and 9500 can be as much as two times faster than the Power Macintosh 8100. Support Information Services |
| Document Information | |
| Product Area: | Computers |
| Category: | Power Macintosh |
| Sub Category: | General Topics |
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