Article:		Developer Notes from WWDC 2003
Subject:		Performance?
Date:		2003-07-02 16:04:11
From:		anonymous2
Response to: Performance?
64 bits is more about address space than speed. It lets you use more RAM; it doesn't necessarily make processing any faster, and might even make it slower in some circumstances. There are a number of articles on Ars Technica (http://www.arstechnica.com/) that discuss this issue in more detail, if you're interested. Also, remember the Dell had processors with a clock speed 50% higher than the G5. The most important point about the benchmarks, whether they're completly accurate or not, is that they show this new generation of Macs has an architecture and processor that can hold its own with the best the Wintel world can put up. That's huge. All that, and they don't cost an arm and a leg, either.

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• Performance?
  2003-07-07 06:28:08  anonymous2 [Reply | View]
  
  
  OK, I understand that.
  
  But 64 bit means also twice the data path and thus the possibility to process twice the data in parallel, doesn't it?
  So I would expect roughly twice the performance of a 32 bit system and not only a few percent more speed.
  
  But we also learned in the meantime that the G5 ran on OS 10.2.7. So there was no 64 bit OS running.
  There is also the bottleneck of slow memory that could not catch up with the speed of the bus.
  Michael