[Dev] A fascinating article explaining why "macs-are-slower"

[Andi Vajda]

In a sentence, it's not the hardware, but OS X:
     http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=2520

it really makes me wonder why they're moving to Intel. Quoting from the 
article:

   You might not have noticed it, but there is in fact a lot of good news in
   this article for owners of current Apple systems. Gcc 4.0 promises a lot
   better (FP) performance in open source software. The improvement from gcc
   4.0 over gcc 3.3.3 and 3.3 is amazing on the PowerFX family: almost a 70%
   improved FP performance!

   Now that the open source community finally has a decent compiler for the
   Apple platform, Apple management decides to step over to another
   architecture. Ironically, right now, the Intel architecture needs a
   super-optimized compiler (Intel's own) to reach the FP performance that the
   G5 now reaches with a very popular but far less aggressive compiler (gcc).

   A low power Power 970FX is also available and consumes about 16 Watts at 1.6
   GHz; so it seems that IBM, although slightly late, could have provided
   everything that Apple needs. The G5 with its 58 million transistors and 66
   mm2 die size is not really a hot CPU. The Xserve (2 x 2.3 GHz G5) was by
   far the quietest 1U air-cooled server that ever entered our lab in Kortrijk.

Andi..