Mac Plus almost as good as an AMD Athlon

A BOGGER has done a comparison test between an AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+ and a 1980's Mac Plus and found that for the software that most people use the ancient Mac was better.

Hal Licino said that while modern PCs have more functions, this causes code bloat and means that the software that you use the most runs less effectively.

He ran a Mac Plus with a nine inch black & white screen and all-in-one packaging and compared it to an AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+ running Vista.

He said that the Mac Plus needed a megabyte of RAM to be able to multitask, connect to a network, print, display WYSIWYG in millions of colours (on modular Macs), as well as run a reasonable GUI.

But, the Windows PC needed at least 500 times more memory under Windows XP and 1,000 times more memory under Windows Vista.

The System 6.0.8 in the Mac needed a MB of hard-drive while Windows XP requires 1.5GB and Windows Vista 15GB.

System 6.0.8 was more compact because it was written in assembly code. AMD's combined 4.8GHz is about 1000 times faster than Apple's Motorola chip.

However without trying Web surfing, because that would be unfair to the Mac, which had not got the software, the tests focused mostly on Word, Excel and Time to Boot.

The result was that the the 1986 vintage Mac Plus beat the 2007 AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+ in nine tests to eight.

Out of the 17 tests, the antique Mac won 53 per cent of the time! It also beat the AMD from the time the Power button is pushed to the time the Desktop is up and useable by nearly a minute. Of course it does not take into account that in our experience the Mac was more likely to catch fire than the newer AMD.

More here. µ