While the competition in the race for the fastest processor already seems to be lost, Apple could only show a processor-update of 500 MHz. Although the clock rate of a processor alone states nothing about the performance of the chip, it is nevertheless considered as psychologically important. The experience shows that undetermined computer-buyers rather take a computer with higher clock rates for the same price. The fastest Mac uses chips with 500 MHz and achieves a third of Intel clocking.
Nevertheless caution is appropriate with the comparison of the number of cycles.
In the comparison with the Pentium 4 one must therefore take the architecture advantage of the Risc chip G4, which is actually named PowerPC 7400, into consideration. The Pentium 4 is like the G4 a 32bit-processor, which is however based on the Cisc technology. The swivel to the Risc technology on 64 bits Intel only carries out with the Itanium processor, whose introduction on the market was planned for the second half-year 2000 but however hasn't yet finished by Intel. Already in the Pentium 4 Intel offers a procedure which shall compensate for the advantage of the Risc processors. The so-called Rapid Executing Engine 3 executes integer instructions with double processor clock, thus with up to 3 GHz.