dammy wrote:
As you can see, the bogus power consumption arguement has little meaning once you take a hard look at it.
Hmm. This thread (here and Moo-wards) seems to be using MHz as a performance metric. It's well-known that Via chips previous to the.. C5X, is it? I was never much into Bible study
.. had a half-clocked FPU; so far as I know, the 750CX and friends are not so limited. It's not easy to find SPECmark numbers for the Via chips; anyone have any?
Point is, this is apples to kiwifruit, and we should all know better. PowerPC- especially in the G3 low-end- no doubt has a price/performance advantage per watt; in tradeoff, it's obviously not x86-compatible, and top clock rates (upgrade paths for PPC-implemented applications) are limited and expensive (pre-970). The G4 is an extra-special case, since depending on the application- and the skill of your programmers- you either harvest a pretty huge improvement from Altivec, or see nothing at all.
Any "sane" datacenter will netboot much of their hardware, so drives aren't as much of an issue for that market- and places that don't are likely making purchases based on convenience/maintenance cost/religious reasons anyway. Whether anyone wants to acknowledge it or not, the current Amigacentric PPC offerings are competing more with Qubes, briQs, and C3s/C5s than anything Newisys is going to be selling... and people do seem to use Qubes, briQs, and mini-ITX hardware. Transmeta might be up and coming again, and Intel has low-power offerings, but they throw those at the blade market- and charge a fair premium for the privelege. (Okay, right now a 1GHz TM5800 'blade' from RLX starts at $999, and the cheapest 1U Celeron I can configure in 5 minutes on Dell's site is $2,196- admittedly a much more capable machine, but it's not even low-power, and if you're, say, a .com trying to replace the space-heater surplus P-II 300s you began with... PowerPC makes a more convincing argument for business than for home, though of course, so does Via.)
The problem, as always, is amortizing the R&D enough to pass the price/performance on to the customer.... which, again, we should be painfully aware of by now.
