PBS | I, Cringely . June 9, 2005 – Going for Broke
Question 1: What happened to the PowerPC’s supposed performance advantage over Intel?

This is the Altivec Factor — PowerPC’s dedicated vector processor in the G4 and G5 chips that make them so fast at running applications like Adobe Photoshop and doing that vaunted H.264 video compression. Apple loved to pull Phil Schiller onstage to do side-by-side speed tests showing how much faster in real life the G4s and G5s were than their Pentium equivalents. Was that so much BS? Did Apple not really mean it? And why was the question totally ignored in this week’s presentation?