DIGITAL L.A. APPLE QUICKLY REACHING G4 SUMMIT?

Byline: David Bloom 

The folks at Apple had a merry time last winter touting the speed of their G4 computers compared to then state-of-the-art PCs, with ads showing toasted ``bunny'' suits a la Intel and scorched snails.

The Cupertino cowboys hushed up a bit this spring, though, when both Intel and its main competitor, AMD, rolled out 1-gigahertz processors for Windows-based machines. To the uneducated eye, those chips looked to be twice as fast as top-end 500-megahertz G4s. Well, yes and no.

The Intel and AMD chips do have clock speeds double that of the top-end G4, which means they do what they do twice as many times per second as the G4. But, as Apple CEO Steve Jobs likes to point out, that doesn't mean they work faster.

For one thing, Apple's chip uses a radically different internal architecture. The G4s also are turbocharged by a ``Velocity Engine'' that speeds many actions in software tweaked to take advantage of it.

But the unique Velocity Engine is only part of what makes it difficult to compare chip speeds. A chip's cache (or lack of one), data bus, memory, hard drive and graphics card all affect performance, too.

That all said, Jobs couldn't resist gunning his computers' engines past the houses of Intel and AMD during the recent MacWorld Expo in New York while presenting several new models of computers.

Jobs raced a new G4 and a 1-gigahertz Pentium III on stage through a test using Adobe Photoshop, with the G4 finishing about 20 percent sooner. (A recent MacAddict magazine test put earlier G4s between 17 percent slower and about even with a top-end AMD 1-gigahertz Athlon chip, depending on whether the Mac Photoshop functions had been optimized for the Velocity Engine.)

Then Jobs really laid down a patch with new G4s that have not one, but two processors under the hood. To put it bluntly, the two-on-one competition wasn't close, with the dual-processor G4 nearly lapping the PC in the Photoshop race.

``These machines are wicked fast, leaving Pentiums in the dust, and we think our customers are going to love them,'' Jobs said. In a release, Apple boasted that the dual-processor machines are ``as fast as a 2-gigahertz Pentium III is expected to be upon its release a year or more from now.''

An impressive demonstration, but do you need this much speed to tool around the Internet or write a letter to Grandma? Nah.

But if you're going to be editing home movies for Grandma (Apple is betting a lot of people will, even releasing a new version of its terrific iMovie editing software at the show), you'll appreciate having this kind of power in your hands, especially at prices starting well below $2,000.

The company also is continuing to create extraordinarily stylish machines, showing an $1,800 G-4 cube encased in a clear enclosure. It will look fabulous on the desks of executives who prize stylish, powerful computers that don't take up a lot of room (it's 8 inches on a side).

For people whose budgets don't take up a lot of room, Apple introduced an even cheaper iMac, at $799, while adding new colors and more power to other iMac models. Buyers will be driving with a much better keyboard and optical mouse that never needs cleaning, works with either hand and is elliptically shaped. So gentlemen, start your Velocity Engines. The speed race has resumed.

A big, red fish

One of the best technology and entertainment conferences of the past couple of years, Herring on Hollywood, rolls back into town Tuesday and Wednesday at the Century Plaza Hotel in Century City.

Conference sponsor Red Herring, an Internet business magazine, will also hold a separate entrepreneur's workshop at the hotel on Monday, and release results of a survey it co-sponsored with the Hollywood Reporter on technology's impacts on the entertainment business.

Keynote speakers are MTVi Group president Nicholas Butterworth and Lorenzo di Bonoventura, president of Warner Bros.' worldwide theatrical production. Discussion panels will feature rapper Ice-T, a representative of Napster and director Doug Liman (``Swingers'' and ``Go''). For more info, go to www.redherring.com.

SITE OF THE WEEK

-Hits Daily Double: The vibrant, Flash-y Web site for Hits magazine, a trade publication for music industry insiders.

-Where: www.hitsdailydouble.com

-What's cool: Lots of breaking news, like the latest multimillion payment deal by MP3.com to a Big 5 record company, or an interview with imprisoned rap impresario Marion ``Suge'' Knight, written in a breezy, accessible style that's frequently funny and irreverent.

-Features: Win $1,000 for guessing closest to the number of units sold by the week's top artists; top 10 sales lists from big retailers; new videos on the major TV outlets; breaking artists, as selected by the staff, complete with song and video (if you have broadband) samples and links to fan and band sites; the ``rumor mill'' of gossip; the ``doubletalk'' interview of notables such as Ice Cube.

-You'll like this if: You're a music insider, or want to be, and want to know what, and who, is happening.

CAPTION(S):

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Box: Site of the week (see text)