Do you approve of PPC (in some form) as the future of Amiga?

[Hammer]

Tbh I didn't really follow the G5 much beyond it's launch. It's interesting to see that even afterwards, whilst some of the gap between PPC and x86 was gained, it was still on the trailing edge of performance, except, as before and as you noted: Photoshop.

RE the PIV, a power hungry, hard to cool beast it may have been, but it could still put the kosh to a G4 or a G5.

?? The chart shows AMD64 boxes beating G5 systems in photoshop...

PowerMac G5 (two PPC 970 @ 2Ghz, two cores)
18 sec for 50 MB test
51 sec for 150 MB test

Polywell Polystation Two (K8 Opteron 246 @2Ghz, two cores)
17 sec for 50 MB test
47 sec for 150 MB test

[Hammer]

You're comparing 2003 machines to 2006 machine and are what - surprised?

There are plenty of benchmarks on this, but x86 are stronger in some areas (branchy integer stuff) while PPCs are better in different areas FP and especially Altivec.

Depends on the FP workload. Did you miss Cinebench benchmarks?  SSE is missing some non-desktop application targeted SIMD instructions.

AMD K8 already has 128bit wide FADD SSE and built-in memory controllers. Each of K8's FADD, FMUL and FMISC has it's own instruction issue ports.

Apple were very clever with the timing of their switch because it meant they went from lat year's PPCs to next years x86s and of course the x86s were faster.

Actually according to the benchmarks published at the time there wasn't that much of a difference between them, in fact the G4s could rip music faster than the first mac x86s.

One problem with testing CD ripping speeds is the speed of the optical drives involved.

Did you factor in iMovie HD benchmarks?

Apple MacBook Pro (2.0GHz Core 1 Duo)/Apple MacBook Solo (2.0GHz Core 1 Solo)
vs
Apple PowerBook (PowerPC 7447A 2.0GHz upgrade)

It was only after the Core2Duos appeared that a clear gap emerged, but by then development of desktop PPCs had already stalled.

Have you forgotten AMD64? The topic here is not about Apple's switch to Intel i.e. the topic is PowerPC vs X86(includes AMD64)