Tom Thompson
On November 7, Apple announced its latest Power Mac system, the 8100/110. A look at the numbers in the name indicates that this new computer uses the existing system 8100 minitower design and that its PowerPC 601+ processor is clocked at 110 MHz, making it one of the fastest desktop systems on the market.
In addition, the 8100/110 has a nice base hardware configuration going for it: 16 MB of 80-nanosecond RAM and a fast 2-GB hard drive. At press time, the price for the system (without monitor or keyboard) was tentatively set at $5700. The existing 8100/80 configuration remains available as a lower-priced alternative.
As the preliminary BYTE benchmarks shown in the table indicate, in many situations the 8100/110's 68LC040 emulator runs 680x0 applications faster than a Quadr
a 840AV, a 40-MHz 68040-based Mac. The Graphics, Scientific, and Spreadsheet application indexes are lower because these programs do their own floating-point computations, which bog down in the emulator. This makes the 8100/110 practically faster than any 680x0-based Mac on the market, and that's only its emulator.
Native PowerPC applications run much faster, of course. When we used the native version of Microsoft Excel 5.0 in the tests, we observed an eightfold increase in the performance of spreadsheet computations, and desktop publishing performance (using the native version of PageMaker 5.0) nearly doubled. The overall application index also nearly doubled when we used these two native applications out of a test suite of seven.
Preliminary Application Indexes
QUADRA POWER MAC POWER MAC POWER MAC
840AV 8100/80 8100/110 8100/110 (NATIVE)
Word Processing 2.61 3.67 4.35 4.35
DTP
4.50 2.52 4.90 9.47*
Database 6.28 5.93 6.86 6.86
Development 4.25 3.40 4.86 4.86
Graphics 4.57 3.13 3.63 3.63
Scientific 14.25 9.01 11.35 11.35
Spreadsheet 13.23 3.65 4.73 38.17*
Overall 49.69 31.31 40.68 78.69
*The native version of the application was used for this test.
A 110-MHz PowerPC Speed Demon
