A year later I was doing bonkers (for the time) photoshop work on very large compressed tiff files and my G4 laptop running at 400Mhz was more than 2x as fast as PIIIs on my bench.
Was it faster all around? I don't know how to tell. Was Apple as honest as I am in this commentary about how it mattered what you were doing? No. Was it a CPU that was able to do some things very fast vs others? I know it was.
Funny you mention that machine I still have one of those laying around.
It was a very cool machine indeed with a very capable graphics card but that's about it.
It did some things better/faster than a Pentium III PC but only if you went for the bottom of the barrel unit and crippled the software support (MMX just like another reply mentioned).
On top of that Intel increased frequency faster than Apple could handle. And after the release of the Pentium 4, the G4s became very noncompetitive so fast that one would question what could save Apple (later, down the road, Intel it turns out).
They tried to salvage it with the G5s but those came with so many issues that even their bi-proc water-cooled were just not keeping up. I briefly owned of those after repairing it for "free" using 3 of them, supposedly dead; the only thing worth a dam in that was the GPU. Extremely good hardware in many ways but also very weak for so many things that it had to be used only for very specific tasks, otherwise a cheap Intel PC was much better.
Which is precisely why right after they went with Intel. After years of subpar performance on laptops because they were stuck at G4 (not even high frequency).
Now I know from your other comments that you are a very strong believer and I'll admit that there were many reasons to use a Mac (software related) but please stop pretending they were performance competitive because that's just bonkers. If they were, the Intel switch would never have happend in the first place...
It's just amazing that this kind of nonsense persists. There were no significant benchmarks, "scientific" or otherwise, at the time or since showing that kind of behavior. The G4 was a dud. Apple rushed out some apples/oranges comparisons at launch (the one you link appears to be the bit where they compared a SIMD-optimized tool on PPC to generic compiled C on x86, though I'm too lazy to try to dig out the specifics from stale links), and the reality distortion field did the rest.
Confirmed here: https://computer.howstuffworks.com/question299.htm (and elsewhere.)
A year later I was doing bonkers (for the time) photoshop work on very large compressed tiff files and my G4 laptop running at 400Mhz was more than 2x as fast as PIIIs on my bench.
Was it faster all around? I don't know how to tell. Was Apple as honest as I am in this commentary about how it mattered what you were doing? No. Was it a CPU that was able to do some things very fast vs others? I know it was.