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"There's still nothing for end users that is 64bit. "
a workstation and desktop are the same thing, simpily workstation sounds more profesional, if you use that clasification, Windows 2000 and XP are workstations since they were based off "NT Workstation 4.0" I belive 2000 pro actualy says "NT Workstation 5.0" in the terminal emulator.
Apple is as home-user as it gets, and IBM does, indeed, use 64 and 128bit RISC chips. Keep in mind that RISC in general out preforms IA-86, and Intels new 64 bit chip, along with AMD's are being designed diferently to accomidate the 86 arch. the method IBM and Motorola have chosen however, is the beter method for processing today. It allows itself to be segmentied into seperate 'virtual' processors if you will... OR run in native 64 or 128bit mode. so apple does in fact use 128bit chips (G4) in their new products... why do you think they can release a G4 with only a clock speed of 1GHz and have it benchmark consideribly higher then 1.7GHz chips? The dual 1Ghz G4 PowerMac is definately hard to beat. I've tested one and they are really really fast. (As a referance, I use a popular 3d animation program released by SGI called maya 4, it's used by everyone in the movie industry today (including lucas arts, dreamworks etc.) and is avaible for windows, mac, and linux. GHz wise, mac blows away PC's that are more than twice as fast (GHz) Linux has recently become the OS of choice, becuase it's ends up cheaper just to cluster alot of small linux boxes, then pay for a Mac, Mac comes in second, and SGI comes in third for useage, simply because SGI systems are far too pricy... windows is shunned upon for Maya, and preforms horribly.
For something closer to home, my G3 (64bit) 600MHz has no problem playing a DVD in a window. (Ha. you think... SO? any computer can do that?!) But *I* can actualy drag the window around on my desktop, without any lag (or slowdown) and still see the picture and here the audio just as if it were still... I've only seen this ALMOST accomplished on an Athlon XP 1.7GHz with 512mb ram (i have 256) I say almost because on the PC the audio and video clipped when I dragged the window. |