The G4 had a hardware bit rotate function, and a 128 bit bus, meaning it could do 4 32-bit bit rotates per clock cycle. the Intel Pentium 4 needed to emulate that one instruction over 4 CPU cycles, and had a 32-bit bus. This made the G4 up to 64x faster than the top Intel chip at the time at certain tasks, like cracking rc5 on distributed.net, where G4 clusters absolutely dominated the top ranks.
That’s really, really out of character for Apple.
But then, so was releasing seriously powerful computers.
The G4 had a hardware bit rotate function, and a 128 bit bus, meaning it could do 4 32-bit bit rotates per clock cycle. the Intel Pentium 4 needed to emulate that one instruction over 4 CPU cycles, and had a 32-bit bus. This made the G4 up to 64x faster than the top Intel chip at the time at certain tasks, like cracking rc5 on distributed.net, where G4 clusters absolutely dominated the top ranks.
Apple has been known to release powerful hardware.