When you start comparing modern tablets/cell phones to an elderly computer the difference in performance for things like video playing is often actually even more in favor of the ARM device than the benchmarks would imply because such devices usually have embedded hardware acceleration specifically for tasks like video decoding. Sure, some PC video cards have similar hardware, but in the case of an old system it might not help with modern codecs or be well supported by newer drivers... etc.
In the case of a G3/G4 verses the Raspberry Pi I suppose the *optimistic* way of looking at it is that if you were strictly comparing core-to-core and mhz-for-mhz the old Motorola chips don't come off that terrible; the iBook SE's PPC750 only runs at 466mhz while the Pi Zero is running at 1ghz, and with Powerbook G4 that's a 1.67ghz single-core machine verses a quad 1.2ghz so... sure, the ARM cores have measurably worse IPC (IE, each core in the Pi 3 is about half as fast as the G4). But then you flip it back around and see that the four cores in a Pi 3 running flat out together pull at max about 3.5 watts, verses over 20 watts for the *one* G4 and, yeah, you have to admit defeat. Moore's Law gets you every time.
In the case of a G3/G4 verses the Raspberry Pi I suppose the *optimistic* way of looking at it is that if you were strictly comparing core-to-core and mhz-for-mhz the old Motorola chips don't come off that terrible; the iBook SE's PPC750 only runs at 466mhz while the Pi Zero is running at 1ghz, and with Powerbook G4 that's a 1.67ghz single-core machine verses a quad 1.2ghz so... sure, the ARM cores have measurably worse IPC (IE, each core in the Pi 3 is about half as fast as the G4). But then you flip it back around and see that the four cores in a Pi 3 running flat out together pull at max about 3.5 watts, verses over 20 watts for the *one* G4 and, yeah, you have to admit defeat. Moore's Law gets you every time.
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