[geeks] Microsoft Surface...

[nate at portents.com]

> That may have been the benchmarked claim, but from the user perspective,
> those first few PPC machines were just absolute dogs.  (Then again, Macs
> have always felt sluggish to me compared with the PCs they were
> competing against at the time, with the possible exception of the Plus
> and the original Mac II.  The gripping hand is, I suspect half the
> problem was classic MacOS's unspeakably wretched memory management.)

The performance problems of the early PowerPC Macs didn't have to do with
the OS so much as the bus architectures.

Apple was very slow to drop the 68k bus architecture because they wanted
to retain NuBus, the 32-bit parallel bus architecture developed at MIT and
commercially marketed by Texas Instruments, and they also wanted to
provide a hardware upgrade route for all their old users.  Apple teamed up
with Daystar to create PDS upgrade cards for their entire line of Quadra
68040 machines, and even produced a PowerPC upgrade that fit into the CPU
socket of the Quadra 605 (a slim, LC-style Mac).  All the first generation
PowerMacs had a 68040 bus running at a maximum of 40Mhz (and a maximum
NuBus speed of 20Mhz).  While this provided a smooth transition of sorts,
the fact that the PowerPC wasn't running the most ideal buses in the world
hurt performance of the whole system (and performance was also negatively
affected if the CPU wasn't running at a multiple of 40Mhz, making the
80Mhz and 120Mhz first-gen PowerMacs the best performers).  It wasn't
until the introduction of the 7500, 8500, and 9500 that Apple finally
moved to the PCI architecture, a native 60x bus, and started using
OpenFirmware.

- Nate