Mac G4 processor is twice as fast as a Pentium III !!!

Is it true that the Mac G4 processor is twice as fast as a Pentium III?
It is true that the G4 is faster than the Pentium III on many tasks. For example, if you run the SETI@home screensaver (which uses lots of floating-point calculations to perform signal processing operations on radio telescope data), a G4 running at 500 megahertz (MHz) will produce a result set in about half the time of a Pentium III running at 700 MHz. This is a remarkable difference in processing capability.

When creating a microprocessor, the designer gets to make millions of decisions. A basic limit in the design is the number of transistors that will fit on a chip, so the designer is trying to make decisions that obtain the best performance from those transistors. The designer may also have to worry about backward compatibility with older instruction sets and looming release dates.

For example, the Intel 8080 processor took something like 80 clock cycles to multiply two 8-bit numbers. It took so long because the number of transistors was severely limited at the time the 8080 was released. Today's processors can often multiply two pairs of 32-bit numbers in a single clock cycle. The difference between then and now is the number of transistors -- a greater number of transistors allows more to happen in a single clock cycle.

If you look at Motorola's documentation, it says that the G4 processor features:

...a high-frequency superscalar PowerPC core, capable of issuing three instructions per clock cycle (two instructions + branch) into seven independent execution units:

• Two integer units

• Double-precision floating-point unit

• Vector unit

• Load/store unit

• System unit

• Branch processing unit

These execution units feed off of a 128-bit internal bus. The feature that gives the G4 most of its speed in SETI@home processing is the double-precision floating-point unit. The G4 can complete one double-precision calculation every clock cycle, while the Pentium III cannot.

The G4 also features an interesting vector processing unit. Applications must be specially coded to take advantage of the vector processor, which allows them to perform certain mathematical operations very 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.

These below search words will help you learn more:

• How Microprocessors Work

• How does SETI@home work?

• How Bits and Bytes Work

• Power Mac G4

• Apple Power Mac G4 - Pentium III PC Face-off

• Mac Speed Zone

• Motorola: MPC7400: Host Microprocessor

• Motorola: MPC7410: Host Microprocessor

• How Does The Pentium 4 and Athlon XP Running Windows XP Compare To The G4 Power Macintosh Running OS X?

Client/ Server vs Master/Slave

Client/server:
Client/server describes the relationship between two computer programs in which one program, the client, makes a service request from another program, the server, which fulfills the request. Although the client/server idea can be used by programs within a single computer, it is a more important idea in a network. In a network, the client/server model provides a convenient way to interconnect programs that are distributed efficiently across different locations. Computer transactions using the client/server model are very common. For example, to check your bank account from your computer, a client program in your computer forwards your request to a server program at the bank. That program may in turn forward the request to its own client program that sends a request to a database server at another bank computer to retrieve your account balance. The balance is returned back to the bank data client, which in turn serves it back to the client in your personal computer, which displays the information for you.
The client/server model has become one of the central ideas of network computing. Most business applications being written today use the client/server model. So does the Internet's main program, TCP/IP. In marketing, the term has been used to distinguish distributed computing by smaller dispersed computers from the "monolithic" centralized computing of mainframe computers. But this distinction has largely disappeared as mainframes and their applications have also turned to the client/server model and become part of network computing.
In the usual client/server model, one server, sometimes called a daemon, is activated and awaits client requests. Typically, multiple client programs share the services of a common server program. Both client programs and server programs are often part of a larger program or application. Relative to the Internet, your Web browser is a client program that requests services (the sending of Web pages or files) from a Web server (which technically is called a Hypertext Transport Protocol or HTTP server) in another computer somewhere on the Internet. Similarly, your computer with TCP/IP installed allows you to make client requests for files from File Transfer Protocol (FTP) servers in other computers on the Internet.

Master/Slave:
In the Master/Slave (or Primary/Secondary) model. The Master application controls one or more other applications, the Slaves. Once the Master/Slave relationship is established, the direction of control is always from the master to the Slave(s). Peer-to-peer is a communication model in which each party has the same capabilities and either party can initiate a communication session.

Other program relationship models included master/slave, with one program being in charge of all other programs, and peer-to-peer, with either of two programs able to initiate a transaction.


A database server is a computer program that provides database services to other computer programs or computers, as defined by the client–server model. The term may also refer to a computer dedicated to running such a program. Database management systems frequently provide database server functionality, and some DBMSs (e.g., MySQL) rely exclusively on the client–server model for database access.
Such a server is accessed either through a "front end" running on the user’s computer which displays requested data or the back end which runs on the server and handles tasks such as data analysis and storage.
In a master-slave model, database master servers are central and primary locations of data while database slave servers are synchronized backups of the master acting as proxies.
Some examples of Database servers are Oracle, DB2, Informix, Ingres, SQL Server. Every server uses its own query logic and structure. The SQL query language is more or less the same in all the database servers.