I should add to my original, I suppose, that all this assumes that the piece on LEM is correct. However, I recognize the name of the author, who generally seems to know what he is on about. One also assumes that the LEM policy would be to exclude total crap from the archive....

I took a special interest in the following statements, illustrating the point about the ability of the 604e to handle many processes at once (from the LEM piece, though admittedly not specifically referring to the 604e and G3 question):

I've had the opportunity to work on a 603 and 604 of the same speed and on the same bus. . . here's the example of Photoshop and Netscape. When a filter is running on Photoshop - arbitrary rotation of a 109 MB color RGB photo scan, I cannot browse the internet with Netscape while Photoshop does the work in the background. With a 604, I can, and there is very little interference.
Similarly, the RC5 DES challenge is running on my PowerCenter 150 all the time, and the number of keys calculated rarely changes, even when I'm running several programs. I have never seen a delay in processing, since the OS handles multitasking and priority properly. In effect, the RC5 challenge seems completely transparent on my machine, while on another 603/180 you can definitely tell that the RC5 program is running. It's just a difference in how many simultaneous things the processor is designed to handle.

Click to expand...

Nobody doubts that a 604e is slower than a G3, as this is something evident from a comparison of the two running at roughly the same clock speed (say, 200MHz versus 233MHz): all you have to do to confirm that is to stick an upgrade card in a PCI Mac and watch it boot. I also own an 8600/300 604ev, which I have run as a server for some years, and I know that this is a powerful chip (and one that is in significant respects as much like a G3 as it is like the earlier 604e), but it is no match for a 300MHz G3 with equivalent cache for running something like a photoshop filter. I have even installed X on such a machine via XPostFacto, and X actually runs tolerably well on it.

But what about those simultaneous processes in the 604e architecture, and does anybody know how it might be possible to test this properly and come up with some real numbers? (I am interested in numbers under classic MacOS, not OSX - and yes, I did notice its appearance, which came, however, well after the introduction of the G3.)

My reason for asking is that I have just stuck a dual 200MHz 604e in what was originally a single 604e 8600/200, and I would like to know a little more about the potential capabilities of the machine. I am not sure that the usual things one reads about these machines (always and in every respect inferior to a G3) are exactly right.