The G4 is indeed an fossil in terms of age and architecture, however, it is not as obsolete as it seems.

Real world example. I am running off a Powerbook G4, 1.5GHz. I recently bought my girlfriend a Intel Mini, Core Solo, 1.5GHz.

All in all, same clock, and the Mini has a larger L2 cache and FSB.
In some tests, the Core Solo outdid the G4 by quite a margin, (i.e Cinebench) however, I decided to try some video encoding (which I do a lot of) using quicktime pro, as it is allegedly optimised and running native on both machines.
The results surprised me to say the least.
In 5 tests that I ran, ranging from convert to iPod, to specific codec setups, the Powerbook won 3 of the 5 speedtests! All in all, after average all the times out, the Powerbook came out on top, only by 5%, which is not much, but it surprised me as I expected much better performance from a much newer architecture.

In an interesting side note, when I used CHUD tools to shut down a processor on my friends Dual G5, the single processor was significantly slower in Cinebench than when 2 processors are active, but Cinebench is only rendering in single processor mode.

I am by no means a genius when it comes to processor architectures and the like, however, it seems the G4 still has some uses, and I believe a lot of the significant speed increases that the new Core Duos have are because they are dual processors, use newer system architecture and faster memory and hard disks (SATA vs IDE, not the RPM speed, but the data transfer speed)

In any case, after those tests, my Powerbook G4 does not look as slow as some tests may suggest.

That would really tell us how things developed. As it stands, this distorts and doesn’t show where there was a lack of progress. For example the G4 Powerbook languished for ages. But that’s not obvious from the graphs – or at least not as obvious as it should be.

Shouldn’t be hard to find a site that’ll do this. You could then even plot different products in different colours – four or five should do it.

It’s Freescale’s fault if they can’t make enough of the CPUs, and if they don’t improve them enough, fast enough, to keep up with Intel.

Apple was not Freescale’s big customer. Most of their chips are sold for embedded electronics, in things like routers and automobiles. These applications have requirements very, very different from desktop PCs. And they don’t advance at the same pace as desktop PCs.

I don’t see why Apple would bother going with unproven startups. Maybe they have a chip that looks good today, but that may be all they have. They may hit a wall very quickly, as has happened before to startups promising faster PPC chips.

Another risk is that these startups may not be able to reliably produce chips in sufficient quantities. Even a comparable giant like AMD might have trouble providing enough CPUs for Apple.

The advantage of going with Intel is that Apple won’t be Intel’s only desktop computer customer. It won’t just be Apple asking Intel for faster CPUs, it’ll be all the myriad PC makers, as well as Microsoft. Freescale and IBM probably thought they could safely string Apple along while failing to deliver on promised performance, because (they thought) Apple needed them more than they needed Apple.

Yes, the units are comparable between graphs.

Those other freescale processors can’t meet the needs of apple. As it was apple had a hard time with getting enough processors for their computer demand. Yes, there are 2ghz G4 chips, but not enough are manufactured which is why you only see them in G4 upgrades. Also who would you go with…a new powerpc start up company or intel who has an amazing roadmap? I praise apple for having the balls to change to intel….the G4 is too old and the G5 is waaaaaaay too hot.

I’ll try to get another 2 years out of our MDD 867, which is actually pretty snappy for our needs- I think they’ll be about 10X faster then. . . Although by the looks of the graph, maybe that’l happen this coming spring. If you can get 6 or 7 years out of a machine, it kind of justifies the extra cost of the pro box over the consumer models.

I guess I love my 15″ PB just that much better now. Seems to move along. Just think what the MacBook Pros will be like in a couple years!