Now, Apple is looking to rekindle the flame that "toasted" Pentiums in 1998 with a new series of real-world statistics that it hopes will steer consumers away from the "Megahertz Myth."

Bake-Off, Anyone?

Steve Jobs is infamous for delivering "bake-off" demonstrations during his Macworld Expo keynotes. Pitting the latest new Power Mac against a similarly equipped Pentium system, Jobs runs a series of automated tasks in Photoshop or another processor -intensive application. Of course, the Mac always finishes its routine in dramatically less time than its Pentium counterpart.

When Apple introduced its new dual 1 GHz G4 Power Macs in late January, it provided a similar set of benchmarks, claiming its latest desktop is 47 percent faster than a 2.2 GHz Pentium 4-­based PC in Photoshop tests -- and 302 percent faster than the 2.2 GHz PC at encoding DVD video.

Apple provided NewsFactor with complete details of its tests, including the revelation that Streaming SIMD Extensions were enabled on the Intel test system, resulting in a more accurate performance gauge.

Sony's Vaio 590G computer with MovieShaker software was used for the DVD encoding test, which involved converting a 126-second video clip from DV into MPEG-2 format.

BLASTing Off

Also included in the information Apple provided to NewsFactor were details of a test involving BLAST (Basic Local Alignment Search Tool), an open source biotechnology application used to find similarities in DNA and protein sequences.

Apple compared the performance of its dual 1 GHz Power Mac G4 running A/G BLAST to that of a Linux workstation with a 2 GHz Pentium 4 processor running NCBI BLAST. Both computers given the task of seeking similarities between human and mouse chromosomes.

Depending on the type of search performed, Apple said, the Power Mac delivered anywhere from 3 to 50 times the performance of the Linux workstation.

The Almighty Benchmark

Apple is getting some help from the Embedded Microprocessor Benchmark Consortium (EEMBC), which recently published statistics for the MPC7455 -- Motorola's latest incarnation of the G4 -- that is used in the dual 1 GHz Power Mac.

The EEMBC tested 46 different kernels and found Motorola's G4 to be faster than all other contenders across five specific target markets.

"The performance of our MPC7455 is tremendous, setting new records in all five of the application areas that EEMBC benchmarks target," Raj Handa, a Motorola (NYSE: MOT) spokesman, told NewsFactor. (continued...)

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