Gosh that Hertz!

Gosh that Hertz!
Mac Tip #121/01-Oct-2003

How fast is your Mac? Well, that depends on many factors, but one of them is the speed of the chip which runs the computer.

Way back in 1984 the Macintosh 128K was one of the very first popular Macs. this ground-breaking machine had a chip which could run at a whopping 8 Megahertz (Mhz).

Some 10 years later the second generation of Macs included the Power Macintosh 5200 which used a different and more powerful chip and ran at 75 Mhz — nine times as fast.

Now, another 10 years on, Apple has just introduced the fifth generation G5 to take over from the G4 and the G3. The newest machines can run at 2 Gigahertz (2000 Mhz).

While raw chip speed isn’t the only thing which determines the speed of the computer it’s easy to see that the newest Mac, with a chip at least 250 times as fast as that old, original Mac, is immensely more powerful.

If you’re thinking of buying a Mac you’ll see specifications like this: iMac 1GHz PowerPC G4. Now you know that means it has a fourth generation G4 chip which runs at a speed of 1 Gigahertz (1000 Megahertz).

If you want to find out about a recent Mac you already have call up the Apple System Profiler. See Your Mac’s Serial Number, Mac Tip #104/04-June-2003, for help with that.