There is a wide discrepency between the clock speeds of the G4 processors in Macs, and the P4’s and Athlon’s in the PC’s.
No pun intended, but are we discussing apples and oranges, or are the Intel and AMD chips THAT far advanced over the G4?
This is sort of like asking, “So, is Christianity or Islam better?” 
It sort of depends on the apps you will be using. Photoshop benchmarks a bit faster (3%) on a 867mhz Mac then a 2000mhz Intel, but as we see here, the Intel won most of the indivdual tests, but the Mac was excellent on one of them.
But then again, Mac’s suck rather heftily when it comes to Quake2/3. Maybe it has something to do with optimizations.
It is nearly impossible to give a definitive answer. While the Intel is obviously ‘faster’, it does not neccesarily perform more work in a given amount of time.
Of course, rank amateurs quibble about Mac vs. PC, where as the pros debate Sun vs. IBM
Moving to great debates in 3…,2…
Short answer: MHz does matter, more than Apple says it does, but not as much as Intel says it does.
These days, a lot deponds on RAM and the various caches. If you had a 10 GHz processor today, it would be faster than a 2GHz processor, but not 5x as fast, because it would probably spend a significant amount of time waiting for the RAM.
It also depends a lot on the application. I beleive the consensus is that the AltiVec/Velocity engine vector processor in the G4 is better than the Intel/AMD equivalent. But a lot of programs don’t need/use vector processing.
Brian
We had this discussion not long ago. (http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=108720)
Short answer – comparing clock speed in chips with different architectures isn’t particularly meaningful. Comparing clock speed in chips with similar architectures may not be particularly meaningful.
There are several problems here:
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There is no reliable way to measure performance between processors of different architectures. RISC processors (Motorola’s) and CISC processors (Intel’s) work in significantly different ways, and using one yardstick for both is as meaningful as using a yardstick to decide whether Coca-Cola or sirloin steak taste better.
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Processor speed alone is not a good measure of performance. Computers are not just a CPU attached to a keyboard, but an entire system of components – and a weakness in one area can be the bottleneck that hamstrings everything else. Even within the same processor “family,” a more efficient processor can outperform a less efficient one at a greater speed (Intel vs. AMD, for instance).
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Processor performance will vary according to the type of application you are using. The Motorola G4 processor that Apple uses, for instance, is great for large-scale vector operations – which is why applications which rely on vector-based math (Photoshop filters, genetic matching, digital encoding, etc.) run better on Macs. But if you’re not running those types of applications, then you won’t be playing to the G4’s strengths, and a comparable Intel processor might appear faster as a result.
Bottom line: forget about megahertz and marketing buzz. Figure out what you want to do with your computer, then try out various computers and see which one will satisfy your needs. In this day and age, having the “latest and greatest” CPU is no longer a necessity – if all you’re doing is writing letters in Microsoft Word, a dual-1 GHz PowerMac just means your computer is wasting more time twiddling its digital thumbs while it’s waiting for your next keystroke.
With luck, mentioning this thread will prevent, or at least delay, the otherwise inevitable “is so!” “is not!” debate this type of question almost invariably engenders.