Is Intel better than Power PC?

Question

Hi
Is Intel better than Power PC?
The reason I ask this is that Iv been transferring data from my old 350 G4 to my new Mac Book Via Fire wire (G4 in target mode) and Iv had some crashes with the Finder. This pretty much never happened with my old Mac. Force quitting does not save me like it use to if an app crashed. It just goes into a spin and stays there, thinking. Reminds me of Windows XP.
Any Ideas. Thoughts. Etc.
MacBook   Mac OS X (10.4.7)   1G Ram

Answer 1

Daimon,
I would say it's a subjective answer based on use. Be glad that you have a machine that supports target mode. My B&W is a nightmare for transfers. The only irritating crashes I've had are the same as with any of my machines (Safari), which is probably due to a plugin.
I have had the experience of force quitting not quitting an application. A kill -9 doing the same thing. It looks like force quitting does quit the problem applications (processor usage drops back down), but they stay active in the dock. A restart functioned normally for me and that went away. The only applications this happens with were popcorn 2 and toast 7.1. Both of those are PPC apps that just made the intel transition and basically device drivers..so I would almost expect them to have been problematic. Everything else has been basically fine.
As to what's better. Security wise, there might be some concern about the Out-of-order execution distribution system of the PPC vs x86. PPC could be considered slightly more secure as it is difficult to gain data from the stack w/o being able to accurately predict the position. However, this is trivial first and is probably remedied a lot by the dual core setup....and it requires a level of access that Mac OS X doesn't just give up to anyone. When you get to performance...to me it's night and day.
I like to put a lot of my video content on my machine in a highly compressed state. It makes it convenient to watch movies or a series and you don't need to have a loud optical drive spinning around. If I was to use something like Handbrake or Instant Handbrake: http://handbrake.m0k.org/ to encode to h.264 on a G5 it would take long enough that I would have to go do something else. On the dual core chips it's almost unbelievable. It's not that the 950 chipset does hardware h.264 encoding (I know some ATI 1xxx cards have this capability, but the only intel data http://www.intel.com/products/chipsets/gma950/ I've seen indicate MPEG-2 playback is the highest video optimization ), it's that SSE(1,2,3) on a dual core processor with an application designed for multiple cores/processors (not the same physically, but application wise it's close enough), flies. We're talking something going from 7 fps to 48 fps (better than real time).
There is definitely a Wow factor to these machines. Maybe you just need to try something like that to find it.
I think the instability is due to transitional software. Another thing you may want to consider is that many included applications and parts of Mac OS X aren't pushing the chips anywhere near the limit. Many things just use 100 of 200% . Wait a while and more things will be introduced or updated that make your new machine fly.
I haven't had a finder crash that I recall. Nor a beach ball I couldn't get out of. If it is just limited to the dock (as it appears to be for me), then it's a minor issue. There have been comments about the Rosetta process translated quitting (IIRC), and I will add that twice I have experienced a situation where PPC apps bounced w/o launching. A restart fixed that.
Windows isn't that bad. Even on a core duo (not a centrino duo Tiger is still easier to stabilize/ 'more stable'.
I think a lot of the issues you are having are just growing pains and transfer of apps or files that, while they may have been updated to 'universal binary', aren't designed for the chips in these machines from the ground up.
Give it some time and try some of the things that make these machines better, because subjectively...I think these machines are better.
Another idea...running PPC apps takes a LOT of memory for speed (otherwise you're paging like a maniac) so either up your machines memory or run one PPC app at a time.
Good Luck,
-j