[bitwize]

That's funny, I too remember things differently. As Mac advocates often, and loudly pointed out, the Mac consistently smoked the PC -- especially at the only benchmark that mattered, Photoshop filters. It was the 90s and RISC architecture really was gonna change everything. At the time, Intel was playing the "megahertz myth" heavily in its marketing, the false belief that more MHz made for a faster CPU, which just wasn't true when comparing across different microarchitectures like Pentium and PowerPC.

And of course, as those from the Lost Amiga Civilization recall, it took about a 500 MHz Windows 9x PC to feel as responsive as a 25 MHz Amiga.

[cmiles74]

It's been a long time, my memory is less a collection of data and more a hazy soup of anecdotes.

I do suspect that Photoshop filters might get some real performance gains out of AltiVec instructions, maybe my boring developer style workloads weren't reaping similar benefits from the availability of those instructions.