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Rumors Of MP PowerMac G4 Flying!
Maktoo writes: "Well, this has been a favorite rumour in the Mac world for quite some time, but with the approach of WWDC (next Monday) things are starting to heat up.
MacOSRumors, AppleInsider, and Go2Mac are all predicting MP G4s soon ... with Go2Mac actually claiming that CompUSA has SKUs for the systems. The keynote on Monday should be interesting. I don't see why Apple would release MP machines before MacOS X ... but we might get a demo at least. I'm excited enough that I'll be getting a copy of MacOS X Beta when I walk in the door ... but an MP G4 would be nice too."
So why not see if the product exists in the CompUSA database?
n fo.asp?prodzip=&product_code={SKU}
http://www.compusastores.com/products/product_i
where {SKU} is a six digit number. I'm guessing it will be in the 270000 to 280000 range. That's only 10K.
Of course, they could have added it to the system but flagged it such that it wouldn't get displayed on their web page.
Anyone care to check?
How developed is SMP in the PPC world?
There hasn't really been such a thing as SMP PPC Mac until now. Yeah, there were some early dual proc Macs, and IBM makes a slew of SMP PPC based systems, but you really can't make any comparison whatsoever to the hypothetical SMP G4 running the prototype OS/X. That said, you can rest assured it will prolly kill anything consumer market short of a quad Xeon.
.sig: Now legally binding!
actually, i am. im using a dual 604e running in a powercomputing power-tower-pro. its got yellowdog champion server 1.1 and the uptime is going on 165 days.
i have never had a problem with my this box since i configured it.
das
The MP in Darwin is in the mk (Mach). Mach in Darwin is under Apple licensing. Can you say "dirty code"? Also, I really dont know how easy it is to convert MP code for the Mach microkernel to the beast we all know and love as Linux. (Though, it would be easier to go to linux than some monster like MacOS).
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Though I use a Macintosh, I am not a mac-bigot. I just hate Windoze.
Actually, though, ALL modern processors can execute multiple operations per cycle. Pentiums can hit 3-6 ops/cycle and IA-64 will support 6-12. Most often, though, you only get a number closer to 2 ops/cycle (or slightly less) due to the state of today's compilers and the the difficulty of the scheduling problem.
The real difficulty in benchmarking two different architectures, IMHO, is that the processor is just one of dozens of crucial variables. Ok, so Photoshop or Netscape run slower on a Mac with a processor a than on a PC with processor b. So what? Maybe Adobe and Netscape don't work as hard on the Mac versions of their products to optimize them (true, esp for Netscape). Maybe the MacOS is just slow and outdated (true, esp for OS 8). Maybe the PC compilers are better (certainly possible, though hard to tell). See what I mean?
That said, I think the best way to compare is to look at price/performance and other benchmarks on EXACTLY the applications you use. So, the Photoshop test is meaningless to me, because I don't particularly do graphics. But it's not meaningless to a graphic artist, who could care less what specific components cause the machine to run PS well.
--JRZ
--- ... Isn't that when marketshare is very very high, causing that company to have an unnaturally strong command over the market?
FYI, marketshare is not the defining factor in a monopoly. A monopoly is made when a company has a command over the market, no substitutes exist, and entry by other firms is barred.
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No substitutes exist
Apple has no more than 10% of the market. Many people are daily faced with the prospect of buying either a Mac or a PC, both of which perform more or less the same functionality. When the competition receives 90% of the business, you can't be a monopoly.
Really, all you've done is defined monopoly. It's still the same thing.
- Jeff A. Campbell
- VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com)
- Jeff
What Apple was illustrating with that ad, is that the G4's altivec unit can process data in 128 bit chunks (or 2 64 bit chunks at a time, or 4 32 bit chunks...). It can do vector permute ops as well, integer or FP. It's basically a far, far better SIMD than Intel's MMX stuff.
-- "Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything." -Joseph Stalin
I know a few people who had PowerComputing mac clones, and they were fine. The nice thing was, you could get a machine that fit in a niche Apple wasn't pursuing - say, more than three PCI slots. :)
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
Of course, it goes without saying that this idiot isn't posting a link to my site - it's a link to the http://www.natalieportman.com/ site... Another bad link. Expect this idiot to keep doing this.
Hey Rob, Thanks for that tarball!
"Going to war without France is like going deer hunting without your accordion." - Jed Babbin
I believe it's Multi-Processor.
Since WWDC is just a week away, why not resist and wait a week?
About the only thing I can get my dual-604e processor card to do (with an SMP kernel) in my 7500 is crash. There aren't enough Linux developers who even know anything about PPC, let alone SMP PPC. I think that there's one guy who used to work on it.
Other people have gotten other kinds of SMP macs to boot, some even have no problems. But there's probably only about 5 people in the world running SMP linux on macs.
In short, don't expect any linux to work on this architecture for years. 2004 would be a reasonable guess for full support, iff people actually care enough to try to get linux to work at all. Which is still doubtful, esp. considering that you can run MacOS X on these by the time you will be able to buy them. Who would invest time in porting yet another unix clone to a system that only a few thousand people will be able to buy? LinuxPPC.org hasn't gotten any support from Apple in about 2 years, why should they change anything now?
Actually, no it didn't get a 2 - my karma is high enough that I can post with a 2. The nice thing about a karma of 30 is that I can get away with that every once in a while. Of course, at one point, my karma was 36... Not that karma is all that important to me, but I do hate stupid idiot moderators who moderate things down for no good reason - like the warning about that link. This isn't the only time one of the stupid moderators has done this. I really thought meta moderation whould do something about these idiots. Guess I was wrong.
Hey Rob, Thanks for that tarball!
"Going to war without France is like going deer hunting without your accordion." - Jed Babbin
* They won't let anyone else build Mac-compatible machines anymore.
Nothing's really stopping you. They don't license their designs anymore, but that doesn't mean you couldn't build a compatible machine. No guarantees that future releases of MacOS would work on it, but the same goes for any OS running on hardware that the OS creators don't specifically say will be supported in the future.
* They won't let anyone else sell Macs online unlessthe store arranges for customers who already own a Mac to setup a password/account/etc
Ok, I don't quite understand what you're saying here. I see lots of places selling Macs online, and they just have the normal sign-in-so-we-can-ship-the-thing-to-you system.
* If they had their way, nobody but Apple owners would have been able to use a graphical interface. (Bogus lawsuits, copyrights, patents on GUIs)
Conceded.
* Quicktime, all under Apple's control.
QuickTime itself is a completely open specification. You are confusing the format with the codec, like I see all over the place. QuickTime is just a format for mixing various time-dependent media. The thing everyone really should complain about is the Sorenson Video codec and the QDesign audio codecs, neither of which were created by Apple. Now Apple may have entered into some exclusive agreement with them in exchange for shipping the codecs standard with QuickTime, I don't know.
* FireWire® - registering a trademarked name for an IEEE standard. Only they can use the name if they so choose!
Sony has its own name for it too. I don't know if it's trademarked or not, though. Apple did invent the whole 1394 thing, so I think they deserve to call it whatever they want.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
On Mac I count:
:)
Linux
MacOS
*BSD
You forgot:
WinNT (discontinued also, count as half)
MacOS X/MacOS X Server/Darwin/whatever -- should really count as separate from the traditional MacOS, even if they are made by the same company.
BeOS -- doesn't work on newer machines, pretty much discontinued, but it ought to count for something.
Alright, I'm sure we're forgetting some on both ends, I just wanted to even it out a little.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
You have seemed to have forgotten that Darwin is the core of Mac OS X. Seeing as the source is going to be (fairly) freely available, I don't see why developer's cant simply look at the Darwin source and figure out how to get Linux working on SMP machines.
This is presuming that the SMP libraries are to be included in Darwin...
Photoshop is one of the few applications I know of that really challenges today's computers, and where extra computer power can really do a lot of good.
:-).
It may not be a fair test for the PC platform as a whole, but it's a great test for Photoshop users
D
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Yes, that's correct. Current MP support in MacOS is a lot like the way most operating systems don't support MP -- they require the application to be written to access the other processors.
And to think they were bragging about it when they added that feature . . .
This is just like television, only you can see much further.
I don't know the extent to which it's implemented, but MP is already in the traditional MacOS NanoKernel. What's that, you didn't know the macos was on top of a kernel? That's been the case for over a year, and people were wondering "why" for just as long. Well, now we have our answer, in case people want to run that os on upcoming MP macs.
h tml#mpapi
Still believe the MacOS doesn't have system level preemptive multiprocessing support? go here:
http://developer.apple.com/technotes/tn/tn1176.
"Let him go, Ralph. He knows what he's doing." --Otto Mann (simpsons)
They won't let anyone else build Mac-compatible machines anymore
did you ever _use_ a Mac clone? amalgamations of piles of commodity parts loosely patched together into something resembling something that looked like a functional computer. they _sucked_, badly, and because they were associated with Apple because of the OS, they contributed to much of Apple's bad press and consumer appeal of the mid-1990's.
They won't let anyone else sell Macs online unlessthe store arranges for customers who already own a Mac to setup a password/account/etc
Poorly reported, misread, misrepeated, misunderstood and complete _myth_. Well, either that, or no one's paying attention to the "rule" or whatever. Take a moment to look at a few Mac online stores.
If they had their way, nobody but Apple owners would have been able to use a graphical interface. (Bogus lawsuits, copyrights, patents on GUIs)
What lawsuits are still around? Apple hasn't pushed a lawsuit since they sued Microsoft, which Apple pursued only in the same vane that Sony persued Connectix and Bleem! for PSX emulators... not because they could win. They sued to keep anyone from getting any ideas about doing anything that would _seriously_ infringe on their turf.
Quicktime, all under Apple's control.
Someone else pointed out before me that QuickTime is a suite of codecs and bundling technologies that are largely open. Unfortunately, the Sorenson Codec is the one everyone is hot to trot for... and that one is not Apple's intellectual property.
FireWire® - registering a trademarked name for an IEEE standard. Only they can use the name if they so choose!
Well gee, they only _invented_ the damned thing. It was "FireWire" long before it was IEEE 1394, and the global Digital Multimedia saw what it was and what it could do, so Apple submitted it to the IEEE with Sony (who calls it "iLink"), and got it approved. Anyone can make an "IEEE 1394" card w/o paying royalties. If you want to call it "FireWire," you have to pay for the brand recognition.
Pray tell... you can download Red Hat Linux and modify it and sell it as your own distributions. It's Linux, jah, but can you market it as "Red Hat"?
woof!
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Why should they? They are a monopoly in every sense of the word except marketshare.
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Am I the only one who sees the inherant discord in this statement?
The independant bookstore on the corner is a monopoly in every sense of the word except marketshare as well. Somehow I don't think Amazon or Barnes & Noble care very much.
Marketshare is the single defining factor of a monopoly. By definition a company cannot be a monopoly if they have low marketshare.
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I've always hated Apples, and when they cut out the clones why that just justified my hatred of them.
---
By chance did you own a clone? So did I (PowerTower Pro 225 - a kick ass machine for its time). I was pissed too, but at the time their company was leaking 700+ million a quarter with no end in sight. In the end, it's hard to argue against Jobs' turnaround.
I too feel that clones are essential to the growth of the Mac platform. But, Apple should make sure they've taken up as far as they can before they open the floodgates again, and next time be more careful about it. If you haven't noticed, recent technological changes in the OS and hardware have made it much easier for cloners to exist.
- Jeff A. Campbell
- VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com)
- Jeff
Whether you got a motherboard with two CPU slots, or a motherboard with one slot holding two CPUs, or a motherboard with one single-CPU slot was quite another matter, of course.
The same system logic was used in all of the Apples shipped, whether high- or low-end, desktop or laptop. Have a look under the hood and check out the part number on the north bridge to see for yourself.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
For those of you who are asking the inevitable question, "What about linux support"? I think you should have some faith in the good people of the world out there. You might want to see some of the stuff that TerraSoft Solutions is doing with YellowDog Linux and BlackLab Linux. I'm not sure how much a lot of this applies, but they've gotten it to run on some of CSP's Quad G4 boards and other nifty configurations.
My Slashdot account is old enough to drink...
Are you listening, Apple?
The wheel is turning but the hamster is dead.
The wheel is turning, but the hamster is dead.
Geez. There's a lot of anti-Mac fud and humor here. Sorta like some giant smacktalk from a legion of Ford Escort owners toward a small group of guys who drive Lexus cars. Anyways, if the hardware and OS will support SMP, then we're talking about a VERY formidable machine, and noone really should be laughing about its performance. Take,for instance, the stats coming in from Distributed.Net. G4 Macs, in all their SlashDot-assumed-patheticness, are among the fastest single-cpu crunching boxes in the entire RC5-64 contest. Compare a 500 MHz G4's performance vs. a 1 GHz Athlon or a Xeon.. The "slower" G4 is almost 30% faster (approximately 4.8 Mkeys/sec) than the fastest PC. Imagine what kind of number cruncher a double/quad Altivec would be. As for ignorant people who assume that nerds would never use a Mac.. well, you people are just perfect for a Think Ignorant(TM) ad. People find the most suitable machine for the tasks they do. I happen to enjoy working on a Mac for web development, HTML programming, and multimedia design. It works fine for me and doesn't get in the way of my creative process. I can find a generous amount of Mac software/hardware at retailers, thank you very much. You may enjoy Windoze or Linux because its "behavior" suits your own creative process. Fine. So quit flaming other people's platform preferences as long as they don't end up stepping on your toes. Do your work and refrain from bothering others.. they're getting ready for their MP Macs =)
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Linux user: if (nt == unstable) { switchTo.linux() }
Those who laugh at you for you having a Mac.. are the people who constantly call you to fix their PC.
That said, the G4 is still far ahead of twice-as-'fast' Pentium IIIs - several reviews have shown that, with Altivec-native programs like Photoshop, a G4 at 450MHz creams a Pentium III at 1GHz, by 30% in some instances. With Mac OS X on dual or quad G4s, and with much better G4s (dual altivec units, and deeper pipelining to allow higher clock speeds) coming this fall, the Mac platform's about to get a massive boost.
I've heard of this before. Are you referring to the "vector processing unit" or Velocity Engine? For those of you who haven't seen the benchmarks, here is a link to an article with a few benchmarks.
The only thing I don't like about this is the fact that in order to beat the PIII's, a special Photoshop plugin is required to make use of the Velocity Engine.
What does this mean? Quite simply, an application must specifically be written (or re-written) to take advantage of the Velocity Engine. I'm not saying this is unfair, or lying or a half truth or anything like that since Intel has MMX, but I feel it's a somewhat skewed view of things.
Many video cards are like this as well. I remember reading an interview with one of the programmers at iD (Gremme I beleive) where he stated the largest problem with game performance is having to write code that works with all sorts of video cards. Many individual cards such as 3Dfx have propritary APIs such as Glide that gives a great performance boost, but obviously Glide apps will only run on 3Dfx cards (wrappers non-withstanding).
Thus, I have nothing against Macs (hey, progress is progress, and people everyone likes or hates things for his or her own reasons), however I don't think that just Photoshop benchmarks with a plugin which makes use of a Mac specific co-processor tell the whole story.
A SKU is a stock keeping unit , a numeric code for inventory control usually in an electronic database.
This is similar to a Universal Product Code, which is the barcode found on virtually everything these days.
Both refer to a number. A UPC has a standard barcode and numbering system. A SKU isn't universal, and can be different no matter where you are.
SKUs sometimes include letters, too, whereas UPCs are strictly numeric.
I think.
Please refer to Mac-on-Linux. It's a virtual machine that runs MacOS hosted inside Linux running on some PPC machine. It does not have to be a Mac, although it helps. It does require the MacOS ROM file in order to boot, but that file ships with every copy of MacOS. Obviously it's copyrighted and so forth, but so is the OS, and you get both. The user can supply it easily.
Clearly this could be used to build a Mac-compatible machine. At worst, just make it run a PPC linux and then get this program working, although that would fairly suck. The problems are that there would be no guarantee of compatibility with future OS releases, and Apple handles the current demand for Macintosh computers plenty well.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
Here's a handy template you can use to start your own Mac rumor site:
At the upcoming Macworld|Seybold|WWDC, Apple will announce:
new Powerbooks (or not)
new 17" iMacs (or not)
MP PowerMacs (or not)
an Apple PDA (or not)
MacOS X is shipping (or not)
In other words, these guys predict anything that could possibly happen, so some of it is bound be true.
Uh...I doubt Netscape will be the most used app on the Mac. The only people who install Netscape are the people upgrading from older Macs that don't mind the instability. If you've used Mac OS 8 or 9 you'd notice that IE 4 (and 4.5) are the default browser with Netscape residing on the CD. People buying their first computer and choosing an iMac are most likely sticking with IE. I doubt Netscape will make it to carbonization unless AOL decides to make the DNS registry Netscape-only.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
This is what I have been wating for... Apple has really dragged its feet with dual cpu machines. From what I have read, 2 G4's work VERY well together. Apartently you get near 100 boost once you add the second CPU, when using MaxBus.
Has anyone seen any good benchmarks for G4's vs Sparc, Alpha, etc... I have done a but of altivec programming, and golly, that vector unit is sweet. You just can't beat the RISC architechure.
I wonder what version of LinuxPPC will support it. How developed is SMP in the PPC world?
In closing, man these rummors better be true, hmmm.... maybe I will use my free WWDC pass after all...
Peace out.
Ryan
--"Yup."
Slashdot has always been whay Hemos CmdrTaco and crew have wanted to post, methinks you've been reading slashdot for a month rather than two years. I don't give a shit about what Stallman is boycotting. Just because I like GPL software doesn't make anyone my Messiah. Most if not all of your comments are merely trolling for bunnies. Go back under the bridge dude.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
the sake of completeness, there have been MP Macs before. The 9600 series had an MP box and so did the 7200 IIRC. They had dual PPC 604e and 603 chips rather than 7400s but were indeed multi-processor boxes. Right now the problem with SMP on any platform is the lack of SMP support in apps. I can build an 8 processor Xeon box running Linux but if none of my apps are multi-threaded it isn't going to speed anything up. This is an advantage Be has which I hope other people get a handle on soon, all of their apps are multi-threaded and they treat SMP as a de facto thing rather than something only crazy power hungry people use. Even in single processor systems multithreading boosts performance especially when you've got a good superscalar chip under the hood. Lets hear it for SMP!
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
The solution to the branch-prediction problem is actually in IA-64: predication, the ability to "skip over" a given instruction without branching around it. It's like a real, general pupose, instruction-level verion of the C-language "if" construct that doesn't use branches (and thus doesn't create a separate execution path to screw up multi-op fetches). But, I agree, this is all off-topic.
My big worry for Macs is that these things will be RIDICULOUSLY expensive. A nice G4-450 (not the fastest G4 out there) will run you noticeably over $2500. Remember how expensive multi-processor PCs were a few years ago before they started cranking 'em out in bulk? Plus, even OS-X won't be particularly well optimized for multiple processors, considering this is the first release and the developers had a lot of more important issues than SMP to consider (like getting it to run). I'd expect the price/performance for these machines to be pretty unimpressive, especially when compared with other, more mature SMP-solutions.
Now, I wish they could just boot some next-generation, 64-bit MacOS on RS6000 PPC hardware. I mean, come on, if you REALLY want to run photoshop fast, and price isn't an object, why not shell out for a $100,000 IBM workstation? Mmmm... 8 GB of RAM... 32 MB of L2 cache. . .
--JRZ
Macintosh Performa
Mutha Phucka
Military Police
Maybe Purple
Multiple Processors
Medium Power
of course it really is...
Metallica Pirates
Apple's sold multi processor systems (dual; Daystar sold quads) before, but the Mac OS at present has very poor MP support. Mac OS 9 is somewhat improved; some Finder operations will take advantage of a second processor, as will all Quicktime operations; applications that are explicitly parallel get a big boost (Photoshop, for example). However, you don't get what you get in Linux, where a given single-threaded process runs on the lowest-loaded processor at the time.
However, I don't think Apple's going to be SELLING these machines in May or June. I think Apple's going to be demonstrating them to developers, showing what a boost Mac OS X gets with a dual or quad G4 machine - and what a boost a dual or quad machine gets under OS X. Since OS X is slated for release sometime this summer (probably Macworld Expo New York in July), that will likely tie the two together. I'm sure these machines will run Mac OS 9 as well, but don't expect too much.
That said, the G4 is still far ahead of twice-as-'fast' Pentium IIIs - several reviews have shown that, with Altivec-native programs like Photoshop, a G4 at 450MHz creams a Pentium III at 1GHz, by 30% in some instances. With Mac OS X on dual or quad G4s, and with much better G4s (dual altivec units, and deeper pipelining to allow higher clock speeds) coming this fall, the Mac platform's about to get a massive boost.
That said, I fear that Apple will price these dual or quad machines way out of reach. An additional processor doesn't add that much to the price - maybe $500 reasonably. The smart approach with MP is not to double up on the very fastest chips; they just cost too much. Rather, it's better to step down the clock speed a little bit to allow for more processors at a reasonable price point. Thus, I think dual G4s at only 400 or 450MHz would make a lot of sense, and could be reasonably priced. I say could be; I have little faith in Apple to do this, though Apple's been much better about price-performance lately than they used to be.
-- "Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything." -Joseph Stalin
Got a IBM ppc 750 running here on my embedded project running mklinux. bus clock is 33Mhz
(internally multiplied to 450-ish)
it does about 1.2 Mkeys/sec for rc5.
Well, if you are biased towards Macs then you want to compare Photoshop. Since it is one of the few apps that was completely written and optimized for the Mac, it performs much better than on a PC. If it wasn't for Photoshop, in my opinion, Macs wouldn't still be using Motorola chips.
If you want to see an unbiased comparison of Macs, PCs, Alphas, etc., look at the published SPEC performance at spec.org. (Although Apple will not publish official SPEC numbers since they are so low; you can find the Motorola G4 scores at the Motorola website.)
All modern processors are superscalar ("perform multiple operations per clock"), not just Macs.
Who ever the TOTAL moron was who moderated me down for doing a comunity service - FUCK YOU!!! FUCK YOU AND THE HORSE YOU RODE IN ON!
Hey Rob, Thanks for that tarball!
"Going to war without France is like going deer hunting without your accordion." - Jed Babbin
Looks like this rumor got it's start from a fake advertisement made by some wannabe advertising people.
macnn.com feature on 'espionage' ad
Well,
I imagine if anything it's because half of the OS X equation has already been released...OS X Server, which I believe supports multiple processors. Since it seems to make quite a bit of sense to me to have MP server boxes, I see this as a great thing (if/when it happens).
-fp