[geeks] Apple vs. Sun

[Dave McGuire]

On Wednesday, November 6, 2002, at 11:42 AM, Chris Hedemark wrote:
> Now picking on Apple for being overpriced/underpowered seems to be the 
> favorite sport of a lot of people.

   On this point we agree.  I'll add to it by saying "a lot of STUPID 
people" who don't understand that MHz != performance.

>   About the only really tangible thing in favor of the Sun is that 
> Solaris is clearly a more mature OS than OS X (though OS X is rapidly 
> improving).  Also the L2 cache on the Sun is bigger than that of the 
> Apple, though there is no L3 cache (at least none advertised) on the 
> Sun.

   No pun intended, but this is apples and oranges.  The architectures 
are completely different.  There's no guarantee (or even suggestion) 
that there's 1:1 correspondence in cache size vs. performance benefit.  
In general bigger is better, sure, but the point of diminishing returns 
and bigger/smaller L2 vs. smaller/bigger L3 will be completely 
different between architectures with different instruction sets and 
different ways of referencing memory.  I'm sure you know this.

        -Dave

--
Dave McGuire              "So you're really not gonna bite on the
St. Petersburg, FL              transvestite bait?"    -Doc Shipley