LinuxInsider has published an interesting editorial from Paul Murphy who asks which is faster, Macs or PCs? In answer to that question, he says: "The short answer can be based entirely on raw hardware capabilities, and that answer is pretty simple: the Mac wins hands down." He goes on to say:

For example, the NCSA "Tungsten" cluster computer built last year was recently upgraded to include 2,500 dual Xeon Dell Poweredge 1750 servers at 3.2 GHz. According to NCSA public affairs, this thing has a theoretical peak capacity of about 32 Tereflops and yields about 15.36 teraflops in operation -- meaning that each CPU contributes about 3.1 Gigaflops to actual throughput.

In contrast, the cluster built last year at Virginia Tech using 1,100 Mac desktops has a theoretical peak of about 18.2 Teraflops and initially benchmarked at 8.1 Teraflops to deliver a contribution of 3.7 Gigaflops per CPU.

Although that was 19 percent better than the most recent Dell Xeon's, later machines built with Apple's X-Serves do much better because they have fewer I/O bottlenecks. Thus the Mach5 cluster built by Colsa Corp. and the U.S. Army, uses 1,566 dual CPU X-serves to deliver an expected 15 Teraflops in sustained throughput. That's 4.8 Gigaflops per CPU -- more than 50 percent faster than the Xeon -- and that's with last year's 2.0 GHz G5.

It can be argued, of course, that this comparison isn't fair because the Xeon is an older 32 bit processor and not generationally comparable to the G5. It might be better, therefore, to compare the X-serve cluster to machines built using a more modern 64 bit processor like AMD's (NYSE: AMD) Opteron's. "Lightning," at Los Alamos National Laboratory , uses 2,816 Opterons to produce a peak of 11,264 or 4.0 Gigaflops per CPU -- 30 percent better than the Xeons, but still 20 percent less than the G5s.

The article in its entirety goes on to address many of the issues on what makes such comparisons difficult, as well as other related issues. Included in those issues is that despite his quantitative answers, many questions regarding which platform is better simply can not be unresolved. We recommend the full article as a good read.

The Mac Observer Spin:
That it comes from a Linux-focused publication just makes it that much more interesting. While we will continue to point out that Linux and Mac platforms face the same enemy, Windows, what's important is that this piece wasn't pumped out by a Mac fan site, but rather a site aimed at the Linux community. That said, it's a corporate-owned site, part of the E-Commerce Times network, and not a fan-driven site, so some of the impact is certainly lost.

Additionally, E-Commerce Times aims its publications more at the IT world than community-oriented sites like The Mac Observer, but that means that the article is raising issues of speed in front of an audience that could conceivably produce Switchers.

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i can't believe there are still extremely STUPID AND FUCKED UP people who refuse to believe that mac are better. i am not even expecting them to change. i mean like 10 of my friends have seen the mac and converted and absolutely loving it. not a single day of crash. no frustration, EVER. and then there are still people who just conveniently "i am sick of the mac vs pc argument" i mean what argument. even linux and windows producers admit the MAC WINS HANDS DOWN i quote. silly pc users.