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New G4s Coming Our Way

Posted by Hemos on from the more-power-to-shake-a-stick-at dept.

MasterOfDisaster writes "According to c|net, and this article on maccentral.com, Apple will release "four new, single-processor Power Mac G4 models, all using a 133MHz system bus, and ranging in speed from 466MHz to 733MHz" as well as MacOS 9.1 and several other things, next Tuesday at MacWorld Expo in San Francisco."

11 of 259 comments (clear)

  1. Still losing the speed race by sheckard · · Score: 3

    Face it, speed sells. If the average consumer was to pick between a (top-of-the-line) 733Mhz G4 and a even middle-of-the-road 1Ghz Athlon, guess which one they're going to pick. Now, don't give me the crap about how Macs aren't for the average consumer or whatever, but face it, this is a problem for Apple. It's a shame that they're being held back by Motorola when their Mac OS X is so wonderful. But boy does it need it's CPU cycles.

    1. Re:Still losing the speed race by Rombuu · · Score: 3

      It's a shame that they're being held back by Motorola when their Mac OS X is so wonderful.

      Apple, as usual, is being held back by Apple. They've switched processor families before and there is no technical reason they couldn't again. For some reason, everyone else in the world knows that selling PC hardware is a low margin game and that Apple's forte is their OS and some of their applications, but they keep stumbling around trying to convince themselves that making cool looking boxes is going to recapture their past and short lived glory years.

      --

      DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
    2. Re:Still losing the speed race by cowscows · · Score: 4

      Maybe with all the negative press that intel has been getting over it's P4, with the empty clock speed, at least a little more consumer awareness about the fact that clockspeed is just one of many numbers determining computer speed. Apple certainly is in a sucky spot with this whole motorola thing. I wonder if/when the computer world is going to end up more like the car world, where most any machine you buy will have plenty of power/speed, and other things can become a deciding factor in purchases. Apple would certainly like it that way.

      --

      One time I threw a brick at a duck.

    3. Re:Still losing the speed race by BWJones · · Score: 4

      What is with people equating speed with clock cycles? There is more than clock cycles at work here folks. (As the latest Pentium 4 debacle will demonstrate). I am sure that the enlightened ones here will agree with me when I say that there is more than one way to get performance out of a chip just as there is more than one way to get a car to go fast.

      If you are assuming that more Mhz means faster chips, then you might be mistaken to say that the 400 Mhz SGI Octane is slower than the 500 Mhz Macintosh, or the Pentium system running at 750 Mhz. The reality is that the SGI will easily outpace both systems at most tasks just as a Porsche 911 will outrun a Dodge Viper that has a much larger engine than the Porsche. Its all about balance, and code optimizations and memory tasking and wait states etc etc etc....

      Please lets not let Intel brainwash us all into thinking that CPU cycles are all that. There is more to chip design than making pipes deeper and cranking up the clock crystals. For instance, the R10k MIPS chip in my SGI will never be able to work in a laptop design as the G4 chip can. The MIPS chip would start a fireball in anything without a heat sink the size of a VCR cassette and big fans, whereas I expect to be working with the G4 in a Powerbook some time next month without using clock pacing tricks like Intel has had to implement in the Pentium portables. (a trick by the way implemented by Apple sometime back in 1991 for their powerbooks at the time). The chips are obviously designed for different purposes, but it is pretty cool that the G4 chip has the legs to run in a workstation, while at the same time having low enough power consumption/heat production to be used in a portable configuration.

      Companies like Transmeta, Motorola, IBM, and ARM will show the way to more elegant chip designs and somehow they will have to compete with Intels marketing juggernaut. (I know, I know, Intel now owns a part of ARM. Perhaps this is a good thing?)

      My point is simply that we should not buy in to Intels marketing thus making it harder for better/more efficient chip designs to come to market. So lets not let this misconception last much longer O.K.?

      --
      Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
  2. Oh.. and MHz is everything? by GauteL · · Score: 3

    I'm sorry, but clock-rating is not everything when it comes to CPUs, and the G4's are very fast clock for clock compared to Intel CPUs, and the P4 is the opposite, sacrificing performance per clock for a high clockspeed.
    It doesn't mean that the P4 is bad compared to the G4, it just means that you can't compare them by looking at the MHz/GHz-rating.

    They have taken different routes to high performance, but people seem to automatically assume that higher MHz == higher speed. It is often speculated that _this_ is the reason for Intels sacrifice on the Pentium 4 (something I find rather believable).

  3. counting macos bits by hawk · · Score: 3

    err, not quite.

    Macos had 24 bit addressing from the start, although I think the early systems or hardware decoded anything with the high bit high as the roms (but it's been a while, and my little brother has my copies of inside mac).

    At system 6.0.something (i don't hink it was .0), apple started going "32 bit clean"

    This comes from the nature of the early 68xxx processors. The original design had a 16 bit data path, 16 bit ALU (wait, it was 32, wasn't it? it could do 32 bit operations, but did it do that by using the same alu on each half? it's been too long . . .) , and 32 bit registers (usable as high and low 16 bit registers). Motorola clearly labeled which registers/paths/whathave you would grow to 32 bits in future expansion.

    Given that a 32 bit register was addressing a 24 bit address space (there were only 24 pins for addresses; this was still DIP packaging for the processor), it left 8 bits which were tempting to use.

    Apple told developers not to use those bits, as they were reserved. Programs that followed the directive were generally executable on later machines, while those that weren't needed to be rewritten. The two biggest violators, in order? Apple and Microsoft . . .

    Sometime around the IIX and SE/30, the ROM's became "32 bit clean" and other
    software was similarly designated. Such machines could generally (but not always, iirc) go past 16M of memory. Roms could be retrofitted to some models
    to allow such software.

    I want to say that it was system 7 that required 32 bit clean roms, but it's
    been a while, and I'm not certain. There were certainly significant
    differences between systems 1-6 and 7, but it really wasn't a 16/32 transition. The original 68k was a 16 bit chip in the same sense that the 8088 was an 8 bit--data path, and not much more. For most intents & purposes, the macos was a 32 bit os with a bit of 24 bit crippling from the start.

    hawk, dusting off old memory cells.

  4. Damn! We want dual processor G4s! by ericdano · · Score: 3
    What a STUPID proposal. Dropping Dual G4s! In the face of Mac OS X being around the corner, you'd think they'd WANT to show off the fact that a dual G4 running OS X would kick ass......but no!

    Being an owner of a couple of macs, including a 9600 (old multiprocessor 604 computer) and a pc owner (1 dual pentium 166, 1 dual pentium pro, 2 dual pentium II 333 a single processor athlon and a partridge in a pear tree ;-) ), I'd say that my experience with multiprocessor computers is very favorable. Running Linux/FreeBSD or Windows 2000/NT, it really makes the machine more useable. Like if I encode a MP3 on my single processor computer, it will chew up all the processor time and make other programs running deadly slow (on my windows 2000 machine), but on the dual processor machine (windows 2000 or freebsd/linux) the machine can easily encode a mp3 and it will only chew up 50% resources.

    I think Apple jumped the gun with dual G4s, but NOW IS NOT THE TIME to stop making them. OS X will take advantage of the extra CPU and make the thing fly!
    --

    --
    It's either on the beat or off the beat, it's that easy.
    I moderate therefore I rule!
    --
  5. Re:Confessions of a former Mac User by RealTypeR · · Score: 5

    "First of all, Apple is falling farther and farther behind on the performance race. "

    Have you compared the speeds of say a G4/500 dual processor system and one using a high end AMD or Intel chip? The systems are very comparable. The Mac will easily hold its own, and in certain tasks, like in photoshop etc, it is much much faster. they are not "falling farther and farther behind."

    "Second, software: I'm sure I won't have too much trouble convincing the die-hard command line users that MacOS is inefficient and hard to use, but even in terms of GUI, the once-proud Apple has been overtaken by BeOS and Windows ME, and has GNOME and KDE hot on its heels. Much like hardware, Apple is handicapped by its users' insistence that changes be minor and easy to adapt to. "

    MacOS is inefficient? Hard to use? I believe most people will acknowledge that MacOS is one of the easiet OSes to use. It is criticized sometimes for not being "sophisticated" enough for the power user. This does not make it inefficient. Though it lacks features like protected memory, etc, is it a very efficient OS, in the sense that Mac users are very very productive. Ask a graphic artist or desktop publisher. the mac OS is not hard to use, nor is it inefficient. Compared to Windows ME and the various Linux GUIs available, the average new computer user will find the Mac OS the easier to use.

    You also comment on Apple's lack of "innovation.". Lets see, I'll name a few. These are not necessarily all apple inventions, but Apple was the first to actually bring these to the masses:
    1. Firewire.
    2. USB as the main I/O interface.
    3. Get rid of legacy ports
    4. iMovie - video editing for the masses
    5. iMac - an easy to setup, all in one unit that appeals to the "average joe" who doesnt always care about technical specs
    6. Optical mouse standard on all systems
    7. OS X
    8. Innovative Industrial design
    9. Colorsync technology

    --
    My dog ate my sig...
  6. Hopefully? by DLG · · Score: 4

    Been watching these boxes for a while, and I think there are a few things to note.

    1. The dual processors... Apple can go back to dual processors again when OS X is on them mainstream. Right now with 9.04 multiprocessing is barely useful for most users (photoshop users being perennial exception. Meanwhile a 733mhz G4 at 133mhz is pretty big news since what it will do is make everything faster in the short term.

    2. MacOs X is not gonna be truly ready until September (a year late but hey, Win95 was supposed to come in 93 and we know NT 5 was supposed to come out in 95.:)) At that point I hope to see Dual 733's at 133mhz bus.What will the Win world have? WinME running Pentium III's?

    3. It would be great if MacOS ran on more boxes than just Apples but they didn't do so well with that. Asking them to move to cheap commodity hardware is not really rational.The real deal here is that folks don't recognize true cost of ownership with computers until they have owned a few. The real shame is that Apple HAS reduced costs by using crappier equipment and it bit them.
    4. The biggest problem Apple had was that no one wants to buy a new machine until OS X comes out. Apple was ready with a whole new set of boxes that would have looked really perty with the perty new OS but instead they are running same old OS 9. If Apple really wanted to get new models sold and empty it's inventory, finish the OS in the 1Q...

    I am a longtime Apple user and Linux user and I hope to use both for a long time to come. As long as Apple makes machines that last me 5+ years I am not gonna bitch much. Since I am still using a 7600 with a g3 upgrade card I am definately waiting. I like the idea of a dual processing 733mhz, but in truth there is a sweet spot right now with dual 450....1999...No matter what anyone says about comparing 300 dollar pc's with this, the G4 is a better chip than anything Intel makes. Athlon might manage to screw that up if they keep raising the mhz but sheerly for media related stuff, the G4 rocks.Just RIP a few CD's...

    dlg

  7. Funny, I'm a new fan of Apple, myself. by 2nd+Post! · · Score: 3

    Still deciding what to get; the iBook, all cute and cuddly like, the PowerBook, all serious and stoic, or the G4 Cube, suave and classy.

    In terms of performance, PCs seem to be fast enough that faster just doesn't matter. Why would I need a 1.5GHz system? I'm running on a 500MHz system, and plan to be running it for another few years yet. Heck, even 800MHz would seem to last for at least 5 years, given my track record with my last computer.

    Still, I'll probably think a 500MHz Apple sucks, right? I dunno, I don't have enough experience with the G3/G4 to say; do they age particularly better than a x86?

    On the other hand, I am enamored with Apple's drive for innovation.

    The USB IO adoption
    The Firewire IO adoption
    The use of Airport and wireless networking
    Mac OSX (in the near future), and Unix stability, without the ugliness of Linux!

    Well, Linux isn't quite ugly, it's damn functional, but sorta a pain to set up. Win2k is such a breeze to use.

    Then there's the quiet fanless iMacs and G4 cubes.
    There's the firewireness of the iBooks and Powerbooks.
    Optical Mice. Everywhere
    *Really* nice LCD screens.

    Other hardware coolness I'm looking forward to; More snazzy designs!
    A Newton2!
    Wireless PCs; at least, as much as possible...
    OS X!
    Pervasive computing!
    Inclusion of mic and USB cam with *all* computers!
    Instant Messaging type usability in the OS

    Other random cool stuff...
    Still, they aren't dead yet, and they're still doing okay...

    Maybe I'll regret writing this post in a few months, when I have my Apple. I'll post and let everyone know!

    Geek dating!

    --

    GPL Deconstructed
  8. Apples, Oranges, Grapes, Pears.... by Cinematique · · Score: 3
    Why is it that every time a /. article mentions Apple Computer, a giant war starts as to which is more powerful, a PC or Mac? False facts fly like "Apple's lowest priced comptuer is still over $1000" when in fact they sell an iMac for $799.

    Obviously I'm going to be taking a little shit for the fact that my email is from mac.com... so I must be *clearly* Apple baised :p BAH. My very first comptuer was a 286 laptop, followed by a 386 desktop, and a Pentium 120. It wasn't until I left for college that I got my own Mac. Why? Because it fits my computing needs and desires.

    Now you are probably wondering... "Gee thats great, get to the fucking point." My point is that regardless of what you like, what you know, and whom you support, a little research is clearly in order. I'm really growing tired of watching people spew misinformed posts on to the boards and positioning them as fact.

    funkdat.