"The Power Mac 9500/132 was twice as fast as the Gateway in all Photoshop tests but one, and even there it bested the Pentium PC by 58 percent."

"In a practical application, like the beta version of Photoshop 4.0, MMX is at the most equal to the PowerPC, often the MMX system is even drastically inferior. Though the software is 'MMX optimized', according to Adobe, it only selectively shows a distinct performance increase."

"Just for fun we performed not only the platform independent HINT-Bench, but also the 'bilinear interpolation' an algorithm that Intel uses in its own Media-Benchmark for trying to show off the advantages of MMX technology. Intels overkill-processor Pentium II with manually optimized MMX Assembler code was not able to notch up any advantage compared to the PowerPC with standard C (!). In fact, a 200 MHz with MMX was even only half as fast. Without using MMX instructions Intels fastest Pentium line was hopelessly inferior."

"Ever think that your 200mhz MMX equipped Pentium Pro could be outshined by anything? Well, guess what, it is. Believe it or not, Apple's Macintosh computers are the fastest desktop and laptop computers available to consumers."

"the Pentiums now lag seriously in clock speed."

"Apple says the 533MHz Mac will have twice the performance of the fastest Pentium Pro machines. It has already demonstrated a 450MHz model and a 200MHz PowerBook (with the odd codename of Hooper) should hit the market in about two weeks. So far, no Windows notebook runs at that speed."

"Preliminary benchmarks, with more speed to be squeezed out, indicate performance greater than double that of a 200MHz Pentium Pro on typical CPU-intensive tasks such as running Photoshop filters."

"Because of that drawback, the performance of a 233MHz Pentium II with a 512KB cache option is at or below that of a 200MHz Pentium Pro with 256KB cache, sources said.

Despite the performance, Pentium II-based systems will be priced higher than Pentium Pro offerings.

"It's a difficult position to explain to workstation customers why they should pay more for a slower system," said an executive with a Top 5 PC maker."

"Intel not only made the chip faster, they made the application slower, but just for certain processor types.

How did they do that? Intel actually did the Photoshop optimization themselves. Adobe handed Intel the code, Intel tweaked it and gave it back."

"...the two PowerPC processors are smaller in size, less expensive per CPU, and run cooler than the PII. They also offer considerably better floating point performance -- the 300MHz PII has a SPECint rating of 11.6 and a SPECfp rating of 7.2 while a 300MHz Arthur clocks in at a SPECint rating of 12.2 and a SPECfp rating of 11.8. And last but not least, thanks to their smaller die sizes, the two PowerPC processors have significantly lower overall power consumption than the PII. In fact, Arthur uses a mere 5 watts vs. a whopping 42 watts for the 300MHz PII!"

"According to sources, the system will provide more than twice the performance of a comparable-speed Intel-standard PC running a Pentium II with MMX."

"Though this was the "entry-level" Arthur - 270 to 300MHz versions should be available soon - the speed was double that of the fastest Mac on the market today. You read it right: twice as fast. Benchmarks came in at twice those of a Power Mac 9600/200, and the Newer guys told us that they've seen 20-30% better on early versions of the faster chips in systems with large L2 caches."

"Point is, we're on the cusp of an exciting evolution of the Mac, just on the hardware side. In so many words, Macs will kick any PC's butt six ways to Sunday."

"At last month's WorldWide Developers Conference, a prototype G3 desktop Mac was publicly put to the test against a 266MHz Pentium II-based PC, mainly running demanding Adobe Photoshop tasks. It performed about 70 per cent faster than the Intel/Windows machine. And that's without VMX: next year's technology."