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PPC G5 On The Way -- And Fast
Sulka writes: "The Register has a report claiming the PPC G5 CPU is ready for production and will be launched by Apple in January. Initial batch would include a 1.6GHz version with 2GHz to follow. 64 bit architecture, 10 stage pipeline, Silicon-On-Insulator and other buzzwords are mentioned." Maybe this will mean cheaper G4s for those of us who buy computers somewhat lower on the food chain, too.
Hell yeah!!! I need linux on that please!!!
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
Hmmm, maybe these new b0xen will actually be able to run OS X and all its interface dandies without feeling like you're on a an old 386. The windows transparency, although sexy, is really rough on the machines; I have yet to see an Apple machine that can run OS X smoothly.
If you celebrate Xmas, befriend me (538
Imagine a Beowulf... ah never mind.
;)
I'd like to get my hands on a (hopefully cheaper) G4, and put Yellow Dog on it. I love YD on my G3, it flies...
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Random, useless fact: I type in startx entirely with my left hand.
2 Ghz of PPC goodness. Ahhh. Now, to start figuring out how to convince my wife why I need one...
Hmmmm. This might actually represent a problem for Apple. Consider:
1. Their fastest processor is an 867 MHz G4.
2. Their fastest machine is a dual-800 MHz G4.
3. When the G5 is available, the slowest speed going to the desktop market according to the article is 1.2 GHz.
4. The rumor (unlikely as it sounds) is that there'll be an announcement at MacWorld Expo San Francisco of a G5-powered Mac.
Now, if you knew a machine that was 50% faster in clockspeed than the current model was just a month or two away, wouldn't you want to wait? I would. And that's pretty much the last thing Apple really needs at the mement.
Perhaps they should start with the slower speed models? Even an 800 MHz G5 should be faster than the current G4s, if coupled with a better-performing chipset/bus.
I use Macs for work, Linux for education, and Windows for cardplaying.
OS X (10.0.4) runs pretty stealthy on my 867MHz G4 with half a gig of RAM. True, it's not as crisp as plain-old MacOS, but it's not as crufty as the public beta was, that's for sure.
Combined with the speed improvements that are supposedly coming with the 10.1 upgrade, I think any of the current model G4's should be able to run the Aqua UI at a completely usable speed. I'll agree with you, however, that it really pounds any G3-class machine. The iMacs won't be suitable OS X boxen until they have a G4.
-A.
What did the walrus say to the penguin? "No soap, radio."
And there WILL BE much rejoicing if Mot can pull it off. If Mot botches this one.... well, then they suck.
Assuming Mot won't botch this.... then Apple needs to not botch the memory controller.
I'm hoping for 4 channel, 64 bits per channel DDR, running at 133mhz (PC2100 spec DIMM's). Possibly put 4 DIMM slots per channel on the high end. Allow users to install ram in singles.... but note that it wont be as fast as installing in pairs... possibly have all configs ship with at least 2x128mb DIMMs.... (Heck, on the high end config, they should ship 4x256)
Hopefully my dual 533 will become Hideously obsolete this winter.....
I hope this brings down the price on that dual-G4 desktop with superdrive in it. Damn those are fine peices of computing power, i need one with OSX on it. First I must get that, attach my tablet to it and off i go into the picture editing craze i went into when i got my 1.1 Ghz PC that I have now. Also, does anyone know of software on either PC or Mac that will let me use the tablet to replace my keyboard (thus making my desk look super-spiff and empty)?
On a side note: If anyone is looking at tablets out there, yes it is worth the extra money to get a Wacom tablet instead of the other ones that compUSA et al seem to have. AFAIK, Wacom is the only good brand I have seen in the computer stores around here for such devices.
PPC at 2 GHz, I'd love to see a comparison test with one of those and a 2Ghz P4, it would be laughable. Looks like I'm going to be getting back into the world of apple when my present comp goes obsolete. Anybody know any good links to some info about using OS X (for the regular stuff, email, web browsing, HTML editing, playing games, text editing, etc)?
~ now you know
If the G4 is 128 bit, that means the G5 is one step down. Can't we get a faster processor without dropping to 64 bits and extending the pipeline?
-- If it aint broke, fix it till it is. --
Has anyone out there actually managed to read the web page? I know that as this is Slashdot, it's hardly liklely
Tom.
--
Oh arse
Wow, with 1.6 Ghz ready in a few months and a possible version at 2.0 Ghz Apple might be able to drop the PPC Mhz is not a Intel Mhz campaign that they were doing a while ago. They could drop Mhz numbers left and right and even compete with AMD's numbers. This might be what the PPC and Apple Marketing needed to increase Apple market share and ensure that Apple survives. I'm drooling over the possibility that prices of the G4 will fall to "affordable" levels. These OSX boxes seem to make a nice unix web development box where you can do your flash and movie stuff too.
Also, if the RISC architecture lives up to itself, the 2 Ghz should be a LOT faster than the Intel 2Ghz. Hopefully the FPU is a lot better too.
I love the PowerPC, I really do. Very, very nice from a programmer's point of view, and very low power consumption--a major win--compared to anything from Intel (and AMD, of course, as AMD is higher power than Intel). But G4-based machines are still outrageously priced. The cheapest G4, with the lowest clock speed, is $1700. Bump up the clock speed a bit and we're at $2500. That's _crazy_, considering that you can get a roughly equivalent Pentium III or Athlon system for under $800. (The G4 is a better CPU than the Pentium III or Athlon, but not _that_ much better, and the better memory systems on the PC balance out the difference in most cases.)
The question is _Why_? Apple's machines require much less cooling hardware, plus the PowerPC chips have fewer transistors and should be easier to produce in quantity. Most likely this is where Apple is making most of its money.
Wearing my 'we-all-want-competition' hat [i aslo have a I'd have to say that I'm very glad the the PPC is offering a serious desktop alternative to Intel.
Given its power-consumption yumminess this is going to potentially be going against the Xscale as well as i386 and IA-64 lines.
On the other hand, serious Mac fans aside, whose going to buy? Are they going to compete on price. Can they get IBM to use these rather than POWER3 in the RS/6000? [Because i always liked the idea that one, unified chip arch could be used across the computing field from phones to supercomps].
Anouther useful market for them might be Qube style boxes, would be cheap to run.
Motorola taped out the PowerPC 8500 - aka the G5 - last week and is set to go into volume production real soon now at speeds of up to 1.6GHz - a higher clock speed than AMD's latest-generation, 'Palomino' Athlon is expected to ship at - The Register has learned.
So claim sources said to be close to Apple, at any rate. The new CPU will be offered at 800MHz, 1GHz, 1.2GHz, 1.4GHz and 1.6GHz, and while the first two are nominally aimed at the embedded space - the others are aimed straight at the desktop, we hear - we can see Apple using them as to transition over from the top end G4, the PowerPC 7450.
Getting to those clock speeds involved increasing the G5's pipeline from the 7450's seven stages to ten. The part is capable of exceeding 2GHz, we're told, but the initial batch of shipping clock speeds suggests that the either the yield or the stability of 2GHz parts isn't high enough to ship chips at that speed.
High clock speeds also mean high power dissipation, but Motorola has nicely countered it by fabbing the G5 using silicon-on-insulator technology, leading to a power dissipation of 26W at 1.4GHz, our source tells us. By comparison, the 7450 draws 14W at 533MHz. Our source had no word on what process Motorola will use for the part, but we reckon 0.13 micron with copper interconnects. The transistor count will be 58 million gates.
That's said to be twice the 7450's transistor count, which makes us wonder what Motorola will do with the extra gates. The longer pipeline and additional instruction units will account for a lot of it, but we also wonder if the chip will feature a built-in memory manager, something Motorola has been talking about of late.
Beyond far higher clock speeds, the G5 will be a full 64-bit chip, but will support 32-bit addressing at full speed. The part will also support multi-processor configurations.
The G5 will sport a 400MHz frontside bus - like Intel's Pentium 4, though its performance could be limited by whatever memory technology Apple connects to it across the system bus.
Speaking of which, we hear work is progressing on a new chipset, designed for the G5, which will support up to 16GB of DDR SDRAM. What type of DDR, we don't yet know. The chipset's south-bridge part - ie. the chip that primarily handles I/O - will support USB 2.0 and the Bluetooth wireless connectivity standard, in addition to the familiar 1394 - up to 800MBps? - and 802.11 (aka AirPort).
Incidentally, given Apple's recent statement of support for AMD's HyperTransport bus technology, and its presence on the HyperTransport Consortium's founder member list, we reckon that the new chipset may also use HT for chip-to-chip communications, but as yet this is unconfirmed.
We don't know the ship date either, though we've been told that Apple is shooting to get boxes out for a January launch. If Motorola is sampling the G5 now or is about to, then we'd estimate that volume won't begin until early to mid Q1 2002, which would enable Apple to launch at Macworld Expo San Francisco and ship the higher end boxes in, say, February, as it's done before.
Apple will launch Mac OS X 10.2 around the same time, we're told, and offer it as a 64-bit version. To do so would surely limit users of older hardware to 10.1 and its updates, but that hasn't stopped the company making such moves in the past. The G5's 32-bit support will allow apps to be carried forward, and developers have been told they will be able to make '64-bit clean' apps with a simple recompile.
If our source's claims are accurate, the timing would be right for Motorola to unveil the new chip at this autumn's Microprocessor Forum, on 15 October. ®
The current G4 is a 32-bit CPU with 128-bit SIMD extensions called AltiVec (or Velocity Engine, depending on whether you talk to Motorola or Apple). Now, if the G5 is going to be a 64-bit CPU, I wonder if they've kept the "width ratio" the same, and extended the AltiVec registers to a massive 256 bits... If so, then a single register would be able to hold 8 single-precision (32-bit) floating point numbers, which is half a 4x4 matrix. Could be a real speed king if coded right, I'm guessing... Too bad they'll probably only be available in preboxed form from Apple, and all that. The chipset sounded sweet too, by the way. ;^)
main(O){10<putchar(4^--O?77-(15&5128 >>4*O):10)&&main(2+O);}
macosxhints.com, macosx.com, macobserver.com ... check out the forums on any of these for about anything you might need to know
But unfortunately, I don't have the huge amounts of money needed to buy an Apple G4, let alone a G5. The ideal thing, for me, would be for some motherboard manufacturer to produce a G5 board compatible with ATX form factor and supporting all the PC usuals (ATA100, lots of PCI slots, AGP, etc). If this happens, it could be a very good thing for those of us looking to dump the x86 architecture.
It would also bring about the possibility of MacOS X on a PC (well, 90% PC...), which is an appealing prospect.
When was the last time Motorola delivered on Mhz claims? May I remind everyone that the PPC architecture was supposed to be over 1 Ghz a long time ago. Take everything Motorola claims with a salt lick till products are actually shipping. Don't get me wrong, I like the PPC. I like Apple and OS X. I even spend my days with AIX and like it. But this isn't the first time that speed has been over-promised and under-delivered by the folks at Motorola.
"The avalanch has already started, it is too late for the pebbles to vote." -Kosh
Of course it is. How many people do you know that actually paid for copies of the Mac OS? The first time I ever paid for an OS CD from Apple was when Mac OS X 10.0 was released.
One of the reasons I will always be a loyal Apple customer is they don't try to pull any licensing bullsh*t like Microsoft does.
I live in NYC, and in the last few months there have been advertisements on the subways about the BSA - Business Software Alliance, and how bidness in NYC had better make sure they have all their licenses, 'else MS is gunna break their foot off in yo ass!
Anyway... I have no problem coughing up the dough for Mac hardware. 3 years ago I would have spoken differently, but recently Apple has really started kicking some boo-tay.
I predict the G5 will be announced at MWSF2002, then actually appear on the shelf a few months later. When it does, I will be the first in line to buy one.
I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
Come on, your SID is low enough to see the mindless Mac zealots posting here. Even if your threshold is set higher, their fellow nuts mod them up, and nobody seems to complain. I guess it's the "enemy of my enemy" syndrome for the Linux users here.
That's not to say Mac users are all zealots or anything stupid like that, but there is a decent chunk of them that is fairly vocal and will spend silly amounts of money on the latest and greatest from Mac. It's like American cars in the late 70s - you have a large bunch of people that will buy anything these companies put out, and that produces a bad situation for consumers. Macs quality is generally good, so instead of the poor quality of US cars we had, you just have over-inflated prices.
Their portables are competative, but the desktops are waaaaay overpriced.
It would be nice to see them eat their words on the MHz myth.
Buy the new lightning fast G5!
Why?
It's faster!
You mean more MHz?
Yes!
But I thought MHz didn't matter?
Well, sorta.
Whaddaya mean sorta? I've been trolling on message boards for the last year or so telling everyone that MHz don't matter, and now you go and pull THIS on me?
Well, it's an Apple.
*Drool* You've said enough. I'll just change my alias. I'll take 2 of them, and the latest marketing brochure to copy information off of to post to PC message boards.
Oh, that's the good news.
What?
We've included a PDF on the hard drive that has all of our marketing information, and suggested trolling techniques.
WHOOOOOOOPEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I have an iBook 500 (new version), and OSX just isn't that bad at all. 128MB of RAM, and it's pretty usable. The only time I have problems is wnen the sucker runs out of memory, and goes to the page file for more space. I'm going to stick another 512 in it (soon, hopefully), and I'm sure that it will rock. The only problem I have with OSX now is the fact that I cannot watch DVDs in it yet, and that there are relativly few native apps that are not extreme beta available for it. IE just likes to lock up left and right, sometimes bringing the whole system down.
On the PC side, I've had the same machine for over 3 years, and I just keep upgrading 1 or 2 parts at a time. It used to be a 300 celery, now it's a AMD T-bird 900 w/Geforce2. The initial cost was about $1,200-, well under $2,000. Upgrades have run about $1,000, and from the leftover parts I put together another computer that I have connected to my T.V.
With PPC, however, the initial cost would be $1,800+, and I know nothing about upgrades for PPC hardware. Would I be able to continually upgrade parts cheaply with a PPC based machine.
I am interested because I would like to start developing for Linux/MacOSX/Win within the next couple years, with the main focus on Linux/MacOSX, and only on Win if it is profitable for me.
Anyone care to explain how the PPC world works? ; )
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
Oh wait, that's about all they post.
/. I don't know how anyone can consider the Register a reliable news source.
Baseless rumors and absolute bullshit.
Sorry, but it's just not going to happen. Suprised this even got onto
Casual Games/Downloads
Har Har Har, U are a l05er for making fun 0f 1337.
A 10-stage pipeline doesn't necessarily sound like a good thing. Maybe this allows more sophisticated microcode. In that case, they seem to be going backward as far as RISC goes. And if there is a branch mispredict will the processor have to refill the WHOLE pipeline before executing instructions again? Now if there were 4 separate pairable 5-stage pipelines, then I think we'd have something. :)
When the G5 is available, the slowest speed going to the desktop market according to the article is 1.2 GHz.
MHz != performance. Nothing else matters but the time you spend waiting for an operation to complete.
Apple advertises the PowerPC G4 as being 100% faster than P6-core (Celeron/PIII) processors at a given clock rate, which is about right for digital signal processing applications such as Photoshop filters. In actual use, this figure is closer to 50% faster, making Apple's fastest processor (867 MHz G4) equivalent to a 1.3 GHz PIII. Yes, Apple's offerings are a bit slow right now, but it's not as bad as is commonly thought, and the G5 will easily beat P4.
Will I retire or break 10K?
My 25mhz 68040-based NeXTstation Color does alpha channel transparency just fine, thank you. There is something else about Mac OSX that makes it so slow. fwiw, the current release is very much still beta quality and X.1 is supposed to be quite a bit more optimized.
burris
It's nice to see a RISC chip with a future but it begs the question that people always have with the Macs which is the software, OS and apps. I use OSX on a G3 iMac and it's pretty poor however on the G4 it's considerably better. When I looked for a solution to the iMac problem I came across Yellow Dog Linux which runs like a top on the G3. Imagine what it'll do on the G5.
Can anyone contrast their experiences running a database server (Linux/Oracle/10-20 TPS) based on intel and PPC chips?
*Condense fact from the vapor of nuance*
I have 3 boxen, two are x86 boxen, and the third is an alpha boxen. All of my boxen run linux. my boxen rule! Anyone who dosen't say "boxen" constantly is a loser whos boxen probably suck.
Hate to dissappoint, but the whole RISC/CISC arguement is pretty much dead as PPC and Sun's Ultra are no longer RISC and haven't been anywhere near RISC for a while. Everyone in the home PC arena is working with CISC processors (if you want to even consider Sun Ultra Sparcs as home pcs). They can also compete as much as they want MHz for MHz but I doubt it will make any difference in terms of someone buying a G5 vs a P4. It is all about the software at this point unless you are a *nix person, but there are still limits in terms of NetBSD vs. FreeBSD etc... Plus, I would like to see a comparison of frame rates for Q3 or benchmarks for Office rather than the tired old photoshop benchmarks. The G4 is definitely fast, but Jobs is playing games with the MHz myth stuff and then looking at Photoshop. I want to see how it compares to a 1.4 GHz Athlon in compilation tests for some nasty c++ program (as kernel compilation probably won't be too good a benchmark with the different Linux/BSD OS's available).
I have an 867 with 768 RAM and a Geforce3. Runs just fine here. I can't find anything that I consider slow, aside from app launch times sometimes. Sure, 9.x is a little faster, but I can't complain with OS X.
Christina
Keep in mind that Wintel vendors don't do any real R&D -- they take Intel's motherboards and chipsets, put them in cases from Taiwan, slap on whatever OS Microsoft provides, and ships them. Some of them do "R&D" but it's mainly basic product development, like QAing a particular HW/SW configuration, vendor selection, and so on.
Apple invests heavily in real research. They build the OS, custom chips, custom industrial design, etc., as well as investing in creating and/or advancing various standards (e.g. PCMCIA, USB, FireWire, OpenFirmware, DVI) and pushing advanced technologies into their products (e.g. the above list, plus DVD-R, flat panel displays). And a much higher percentage of the retail price of Apple hardware goes for R&D than for any other PC vendor.
I'd also point out that while Apple hardware costs more than no-name PC hardware, their products cost about the same as comparable PC's from brand-name Wintel vendors (aside from recent price cutting due to the PC market sucking), and in some cases (e.g. the iBook and PowerBook G4) their prices are quite good.
There are some exceptions: you see some real R&D at Sony and Compaq, for example. But I think that it would be hard to argue that Dell or Gateway do anything interesting from a technology perspective (as oppposed to marketing or manufacturing)...
Let's just pretend about a scenario in the future, early next year when the PPC G5 comes out. Maybe Apple can get these G5s produced in high quantities at low cost.
Now lets also pretend that a new iMac comes out early next year. It has a G5, LCD, kick-ass design, OS X, etc etc. Can you image the waves such a product would make?
This might sound crazy, but if any company would do such a thing, it would be Apple.
Theregister says the G5 has trice as many transistors as the G4, they wonder what motorola will do with all the new ones. Wouldn't moving from 32bit addressing to 64bit account for a majority of those new transistors?
WikiAfterDark.com It's a sex wiki, go now!
The reason no one calls it the apple tax is because they tax the box so fuckin much no one notices the minute charge for the O/S (129 retail)
much as i enjoy using Macs, Moto is unreliable, they have had trouble ramping up in the past and i expect nothing to be different now... a trail of broken promises
Apple will only be charging $20 for the CD's if you want it shipped to you, and that stores will have free 10.1 CD's to distribute. That is, 10.1 is too large for a reasonable download (2 CD's with over 500MB with all of the bundled app's, plus another 400MB+ for the developer tools).
I don't see how anyone can complain about getting a major OS upgrade (I'm running 10.1, and it's wonderful) for the media cost, or free if you're not too lazy to drive to a store.
Motorola isn't fabin this one.. this is all IBM..
ChiefArcher
I just don't see this as a troll. If someone slams windows' window drawing speeds, they may be on crack, but they get mod points. Remember, you're only supposed to waste your points modding down things which are really and truly lame and have no basis in fact.
While Apple has come a long way since their origins, and they now have graphics acceleration (unlike the original systems, running a graphic-only OS with no acceleration, which is why the amigas kicked their asses so horribly) many aspects of the systems are still behind. Oh, sure, they got GEforce3-based display cards before the rest of us, but since games are developed for the lowest common denominator, and thusly will not take advantage of altivec, macs are still in the "turd" category when you think about what 3d accelerators are used for most these days... Blowing things up.
OS X is a hog, plain and simple - Not that XP isn't, but you can run pretty much anything under Windows 98 Second Edition, except for a few apps like SoftImage, which most people don't care about. You can get quite a bit done under Win98SE on a P2-class system with only 64MB of ram, as long as you don't want to play current games or anything. I had to install 512MB of ram before Mechwarrior IV would stop memory leaking all over my OS.
Eew.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
But wacom is still unable to publish drivers for os-x...
Let's get it on, igloo boy!
I haven't really looked at the cost of upgrades, as I don't use Macs personally, but I know the above from friends who are Mac users.
.technomancer
.technomancer
This might not be the best clue-in, but it does come from personal experience.
:). Add-on expansion devices for pre-Tibooks are pricey (averaging 200-800 $) - CDRW, Floppy, Zip, expansion module hard drives, etc.
First, I've been a Mac user for the last four years, and own nothing but Apple hardware (unless you count the Sparc that's serving as a shelf for my video game systems). I am personally of the opinion that cost is really irrelvant here- Quality is what matters, and one of the major things I've found lacking in the PC world. Yeah- Apple gear isn't cheap. But if, for exampel, Dell were the ONLY PC maker, do you think prices would be as cut-rate? No.
Upgrading a Mac, if it's even possible, is usually an expensive undertaking- fortunately, depending on the model series, the parts you're replacing can easily hop over to the next machine down the food chain. I'll give a couple of examples here, from my personal collection.
The iMac- the only thing you can upgrade on these beasties is the RAM and the hard drive, though there are options available for the older models with mezzanine slots (SCSI cards, ADB/Serial cards, Firewire, etc.). Since the components in question are standard, upgrades are reasonably cheap. Anyone that fires off a bitch about the monitor had better try one first, and pull up the same graphics file on bothe the iMac and the PC. Trust me, the monitor does NOT need to be upped!
Powerbooks- again, RAM and hard drive are pretty much it. Likewise, standard options (in fact, my Pismo and bondi iMac use the same RAM
Where it really gets interesting is if you happen to have, like I do, a couple of x500 or x600 towers sitting around. My 9500 is the most expandable system apple ever produced- the only one ever put on the market with SIX PCI slots. You could count the 9600, but it's the same mobo in a different case.
RAM for any pre-G3 powermac is insanely expensive. As in, you are LUCKY if you can get 128 meg chips for less than 140$ apiece. Compare this to the 40$ I paid for 128 stick for my Pismo. If you want to actually USE one of these machines for anything, you want at least 48 megs of RAM (just for OS 9 and iTunes)- more to do anything serious. My 9500 has 320- a hoard of 16s, some 32s, and a 128.
You could buy a new PC for the price of a decent capacity SCSI HD. Since the 604s are SCSI-only, the best workaround is a Sonnet Tempo ATA/66 IDE Host adapter. 100$, though the older systems puke when you try to play MP3s. Do some price shopping and you can jam a 40 gig IDE drive into an older system and boot off of it for 200$- whereas a 36 gig SCSI drive would cost you at LEAST 250$ + In either case, don't swallow the bullshit about "Mac formatted!" - if a drive is Open Firmware Compliant (like IBM drives, for example), it doesn't matter WHAT was on it. In fact, the IDE drives I put in my 9500 still had data on them from their prior owners- and the MacOS read them.
USB cards are cheap, and do the job. Video cards are slightly more expensive for the Mac- most of what you're paying for is the flashed ROM and the extra I/O interface (both video cards in my 9500 support PC or Mac monitors). Add maybe 5% to the cost of an equivalent PC video card.
You're going to eat it on the processor upgrade, unfortunately. The big thing I've noticed about these is that they unilaterally decrease system stability. And cost you out the ass- typically running between 170 and 500 $ for a G3 upgrade in the 400-500 mhz range. The newer systems are cheaper to upgrade, but you won't see nearly as much of a boost.
My 9500 has an Xlr8 G3/300 board in it and hard hangs every time I try to mount a disk image, no matter the cache settings. Aside from that, it runs well in Photoshop, and more or less everything else. Mileage WILL vary with processor upgrades... I'll be using nex years tax refund to test out some Sonnet products.
Base system [including g3 board, 4 gig Barracuda, ATI video and 216 RAM] - free. I built a web site and was paid with the system.
128 megs of RAM - 60 $ on ebay (by sheer luck)
IDE card - 75$ on ebay
Video card - 40$ (cheapo model) on ebay
Two IDE drives - pull from work and loaner from roommate
10/100 ethernet card (mobo has 10 only) - 15$ (ebay again)
Pioneer SCSI CD drive [external] - 15$ from local goodwill computer store
Monitors: Already had 'em.
===
total cost: 205 $
cost for average user [stock 9500 would come w/ 32 ram, 604 120mhz, 1 gig HD, shitty or no video] : around 600-800$.
The big thing is that while you can walk into Wal * Mart and walk out with everything you need to upgrade your PC, you're shit out of luck on upgrading a Mac unless you use Ebay, buy direct, or happen to be lucky enough to live near an Apple Store. And if you're upgrading and older system, Ebay is almost your ONLY bet for reasonably priced hardware (discounting hard drives- I wouldn't buy them used under any conditions).
d00d. im using an imac w OSX and it runs fine. i added another 128M to what came in the box but its not that bad. i have a 500MHz G3. I may notice some slowdowns but its not as bad as running E on a K6. Or Win 95 on a 486. I think its compleetly usable. And it hasnt crashed yet. Something i wish i could say about my 1.2GHz Athalon Win2K boxen.
I've got one of the first generation of machines that will handle OS-X. Not only can it take a lot of standard PC parts, Apple's emphasis on easy-access designs make installing new parts a snap.
It uses PC66 SDRAM, so i can install whatever's cheapest (PC100 or PC133) - i'm currently somewhere around 450MB. I've got a Radeon card for video, a 10/100 ethernet card to speed up the backups for my family's laptops, i dropped about $100 for a USB/Firewire combo card, the hard drive was upgraded to a Quantum Fireball a while back, etc. Oh yeah, and when Apple switched its high end over to G4's, i picked up a $200 G3/500 ZIF card. None of these have taken more than 10 minutes to put in.
"Maybe this will mean cheaper G4s for those of us who buy computers somewhat lower on the food chain, too."
You know you are heavily involved with computers when you call them "food".
What Should be the Response to Violence?
Bush's education improvements were
The Osborne Effect cuts both ways. If you like Macs but were thinking of buying an Intel-based machine in the near future, you might now be tempted to wait a few months for a G5-based Mac.
We don't know the ship date either, though we've been told that Apple is shooting to get boxes out for a January launch. This is to avoid that annoying crush of products that all come out before xmas.
Foof, you've got balls to criticise Apple zealotry around a place like this. Either that, or absolutely no sense of vision.
OK... I'm sorry... but I couldn't resist :D
:)
640 megs should be enough for anyone!
Talez
AS far as I know, Oracle doesn't compile for LinuxPPC. I have a StarMax that I have not been able to get anything running on as of yet. The best you would probably be able to do is use some AIX 32bit Oracle items (IBM RS6000's use PPC chips, sorta) and hope they work under Linux...
If anyone has even had success here, please let me know
I can tell you Oracle runs fairly well under Linux-Intel. I have a dev copy of 8.1.7.0.1 that ran smoothly as long as I used the distro & version Oracle said the product was compiled under. Otherwise there were issues during install or runtime.
- Sig
Where do I download that for free?
I know, they charged for that one, and it was a quantum leap from OS9.
Soooo, now where do I download 10.1 for free? Wait, they're not going to let you download the free update? Why, of course, again it's a free update, it just costs $20 S&H to get the "free" CD.
Well, now they ARE charging for updates. And for some reason, they're still charging for their hardware. Imagine that....
I seem to recall that Intel was having trouble getting the Itanium up much past 800 MhZ, and Microsoft performance with 64 bit Windows ports has traditionally been less than stellar. So in trundles Apple with a 2GhZ 64 bit processor and an OS that I and my PHB might even have a chance of agreeing upon. Hmm...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
The problem is that Apple never lowered prices even back when they had much larger than 5% market share. They seem to have long ago decided on a pricing structure that has settled them into a 5% market of loyal users, and they must figure this maximizes profits for them. Increasing market share by lowering prices doesn't seem to be (and never has been) an attractive strategy for Apple, and, as you mention, the more they let their market share slide, the harder it is to do.
They may have been on the right track with the i-Mac, but they didn't keep up the push by upgrading rapidly and continuing to reduce prices, and that one too has languished. It's really a shame--at one point i-Macs were flying off the shelves nearly as fast as Wintel hardware. I had a lot of hope for Apple at that moment.
As someone else mentioned, G4/G5 PPC machines may be a bit better than Intel PCs, but will most people perceive them as being worth nearly _twice_ as much? Whenever I've been in the market for a new PC, I've always checked out the current crop of Mac hardware. Each time, I have liked what I've seen, but simply could not justify paying almost twice as much for similar or at most slightly better performance.
Take that, Intel! 2.0 GHz with a measly 10 stage pipeline. You need, what, 20 stages to get that kind of performance?
HAHAHAHAHAHA...
Oh well, finally there might be a reason to buy a Mac after all!
P.S. It amazes me how much I say about this site, I still come crawling back again and again...
Glückwünsche, haben Sie Slashdot ermordet, indem Sie zum korporativen Druck beugten und Subskriptionen einlei
this is pretty much what happened to informix. they bought illustra and rolled illustra ordmbs tech into informix to create informix 9. they did an amazing job prepping their sales force for the release. so when the release slipped, they'd already convinced their users that version 9 was _so_ much better than version 7. naturally sales of the informix 7 slipped.
the story ends with a buyout by ibm. pretty much for market share, since db2 had most of the same features as informix 9.
so, customers do actually hold out for "so much better" product you've primed them for. and it certainly doesn't help your bottom line in the short term.
- mark
AFAIK:
MMX means multi media extensions
MMC means Microsoft Management Console unless it means other things on a chip.
I'm not a chip guy, so I don't really know much about this stuff.
Just wonderin'
I don't see how anyone can complain about getting a major OS upgrade (I'm running 10.1, and it's wonderful) for the media cost,
$20 for just the media?
Damn dude, you've been buying Apple products for too long....
With all the talk about the "Mhz Myth" lately, I was wondering if there has been any effort to standardize an industry benchmark for CPUs, the result of which would be publicly visible as part of the model #. Instead of "Pentium IV 2.0Ghz", we could have Pentium IV ISR100, where ISR could mean industry standard rating, and 100 a normalized score.
Anytime you're ready, biznitchio! Igloo Boy... It's got a nice ring to it.
Come on!
/Register/ wants us to think.
Apple/Mot tops out at 867 Mhz today (perhaps 1 Ghz in die samples). Are we supposed to believe, that the SNAIL Motorola is, his magically pulled off a Mhz DOUBLE in 6 months. After their foot-dragging for 2 years??
Seriously, as much as I'd love ths to be true, I think we're in for a longer wait that
My 2 cents.
It is hard to disagree. However i think last time around they were more costly because they were doing things like using SCSI across the line. Maybe next time around (if there is one!) they will try harder. Or maybe not.
You are right about the iMac, but I think it is less that they have failed to follow through, as Intel and the mobo makers have rushed to fill in the new niche Apple "discovered", and Apple has a hard time fighting that. I mean today's iMac really is nicer then the original by a fair margin, but the prices haven't fallen (they have gone up a little even), so now they are way behind the $500 Wintel box, the box that didn't really exist when iMac first came out (not $500 with a monitor at least).
Yep. The only machines I see that are price competitive are their laptops, which are selling very well at the moment. It may not be long until PC laptops pull ahead again though.
As an owner of one of the older iBooks, who has been running nothing but OS X on it since march:
Ditch IE and use OmniWeb. It's faster, nicer looking, and you don't have to stare at the spinning beach ball so much. You'll still have to us IE for some things, but not most.
More memory will help greatly. I upped my iBook (366 Mhz G3) from 128 MB to 320 MB and the difference is like night and day. Memory is cheap, too, so there's no reason not to upgrade.
10.1 will be out this month, and will allow you to run DVDs, if you're into that sort of thing.
You couldn't save any money by not having Mac OS bundled, because Apple doesn't have to pay a licensing fee to anybody for including Mac OS; thus no cost is being passed on to you.
If that's true, then why don't they offer OS upgrades for free as well (in fact, why can't I just download it)? In that case, the software would truly be zero cost and your argument would make sense.
The fact of the matter is you can't buy an Apple machine without MacOS even if you want to only run Linux on the box. MacOS has a value (go to Apple's web store and you'll see it), so you are paying money for a product you may not want.
This isn't about Apple's cost structure, it's about paying for software you don't want and won't use.
Fear: When you see B8 00 4C CD 21 and know what it means
Never seen a machine that runs OS X well? How about my brand-spankin' new dual-800 G4 tower? That runs it pretty smoothly!
I've been milking my Tsunami mobo [9500] for a damned good long time. The thing will take any PCI card with Mac drivers, has two SCSI busses built in, serial, adb, audio i/o [still need to snag an RCA and s-board from ebay], and with a few upgrades, it easily has all of the functionality of my iMac and then some.
The only downside is that the mobo has a 40 mhz bus, which sucks an amazing amount of ass for a lot of applications. If you're not using a Mac as a game platform, there's no reason at all to ditch the old hardware- hell, this thing can hold up to a gig of RAM (two, in theory- though I'm not about to spend the money on a 256 meg stick of EDO ram just to see if it'll work or not), I could theoretically slot a G4 processor into it... and my little beast of niftinees is the only hybrid system on my lan- SCSI with and IDE card for drives.
Some signal processing code running with altivec could run a tad faster, but they were always slower across the board for the rest.
... if you are on a limited budget and want the fastest linux box for your money you go x86, was that way and will probably stay that way.
Let alone price performance ratio of course, but this new processor is unlikely to change that
So, uhm, what happened to the "Megahertz myth"?
I have a Apple B&W g3 400 which I bought for $1999... its been a solid performer for 3 years now. If you consider the fact that apple provides me with all the software I need (iMovie, iTunes, etc), its easy to see that I have spent less on computers over the last 3 years than most pc users (including you). My question for you is this: Why did you upgrade in the first place? Maybe because pc's just dont last... they are garbage and constantly need upgrading, the new software never works with old hardware, and you have to download about 6 drivers just to get the thing to work! Face it... Macs are cheaper, easier to use, and dont require a CPU refit every year to keep up.
"Smokey, this isn't Nam, there are rules." -Walter
Yes, the G3 and G4 towers use AGP video cards- but one thing I've noticed is that the AGP slots on Macs are in a different position than PC AGP slots. Same number of pins, but you need either some wackass piggyback rig or a completely different card. The hardware is effectively the same, but the implementation is incompatible.
many thanks in advance.
eat shit and die, Bambi!
Right... just like all those $699 G3 towers Apple has marketed. Sorry - not going to happen. Apple has proven time and time again that they don't care about competing on price. (No, the iMac, with dinky integrated monitor and no slots does not count).
A $700 expandable tower computer is exactly the kind of machine I would buy from Apple. They could easily hit this price point. However, they refuse to sell it to me.
More importantly, is she intelligent? Think she'd like my cooking?
Best Slashdot Co
Since Jobs claims an 800mhz g4 runs twice as fast as a 1.6ghz p4, that means a 1.6ghz g5 should run the only two killer apps available for Mac, Photoshop and Eudora, really REALLY fast! Wow!
Does enyone know if these processors will go into RS/6000 boxen, or those cute TeraSoft Briq's? If so there's the market boys and girls. It would just be too sweet to have an RS/6000 S80 full (24 proc's) of G5's running a some mad speed. Or imagine a Rack Full of TeraSoft Briq's running Beowulf on these....
What if it is just turtles all the way down?
Let's look at it this way:
If time is money, then your PC is going to cost you a HELL of a lot more than a Mac.
Macintosh: no IRQ conflicts. No driver conflicts - in fact, all most drivers do is fine tune the hardware and add some features you probably won't use anyway. Sound, mobo ethernet, video, and your modem (if it's built in) are all supported by the OS. No upgrade nightmares, no endless search for drivers, and the best part- NO MESSING WITH A BIOS!
Seriously. To replace the HD on my roommate's PC box, I had to enter the sectors, heads, etc. into the BIOS so it would read it (auto detect was a joke), then format the blasted thing in DOS using an archaic utility.
To replace the HD on a mac: open the case, plug the new one in. Boot. If it wa a PC drive, format it. Install the OS [or pull an install over the network- all modern install CDs boot w/ network support]
And don't even get me STARTED on what a bitch it is to adjust monitor bit depth and resolution - let ALONE color coordination and gamma- on anything else. (particularly *nix)
If the idea was Steve's, implement it and allocate another $100Million to the marketing department. If it wasn't, well, back to the drawing board.
Wasn't that what was slowing down the G4? Since Motorolla have much faster non-altivec chips out for quite a while now. Has the descision just been made to dump it entirely and get a move on with the MHz? Or did they actually find a way to run the altivec engine at 2-3x suddenly? Since it was actually the altivec engine that was able to produce the specialized photoshop filters, one or two of which were 3-4x what they ran on unoptomized intel machines at the same clock speed (And gave Stevie his 4x faster than a pentium claims). They could end up with a chip that is twice as fast MHz wise but even slower using those same photoshop filters.
Contrary to popular belief, coding is not all free blow-jobs and beer. Those things cost MONEY!
While your example works well in theory, the costs of a computer is more than the non-recoverable expenses of development. The cost also includes hard costs, or rather, the actual hardware costs of building the machine, which can in general be a lot more than the hardware development costs. Further, as Apple completely controls the hardware in the box, it is possible for Apple to reduce the total cost of the computer significantly by getting rid of legacy hardware. This is how Apple has been able to quite effectively compete in the low end of the market with the iBook and iMac models and yet make a fair profit instead of dying a slow death a'la Gateway or Compaq.
read the article next time
what is this application 'fucktard' that you speak of? I want my Apple to use fucktard.
Mhz == Performance in the mind of consumers. Just try to explain clock cycles to a customer at CompUSA who barely knows about computers and who was told by an equally unsaavy friend "look at Mhz". Good luck. I used to sell computers in the retail world, so I know what I'm talking about. I'm happy that apple finally stuck Motorola's feet in the fire and got them to put out a chip whose specs look better to the average consumer.
One thing I have noticed is that their is like 10 UID's between us. I wonder if Slashdot had that many new users in that period of time, or if it's just some stupid script kiddie playing around with the system.
Is it just market forces that keep Asus, Tyan, and ABit from producing a PPC MB? I suppose a standard BIOS is lacking (other than Apples)... surely someone could come up with a non-Apple hardware solution, though.
All about me
I wrote a journal entry! Check it out!
It's a little, a little a little too late
Dan Dare, Pilot of the future
i need a copy of your intel distro of OS X . . .
I don't think Intel will be standing still. I read something about a 3.5 GHz pentium 4 somewhere. I think the G5 will be fast enough to do whatever I want to do. Fast video editing. Fast 3-d rendering.
However what's next? Why do we want this speed? I think there will have to be some radical interface change to take advantage of the extra power on a daily basis.
1. the case
2. nic
3. sound card(about to be replaced)
So yes, an axe with 2 new blades and 3 new handles is a good comparison. ;-)
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
Apple has cancelled Paris Expo 2001 in light of last week's terrorism.
So when will they release the revised PBG4? Will there be an Apple Event lauding the completing of OS X 10.1? Perhaps an internet 'be-in' broadcast presentation?
As for a January G5 release: Does this mean the much-anticipated flat-screen iMacs will be launched in January with G4 processors?
Kevin Fox
None of the applications I use require much processing power, but the games I play certainly do.
If I were to have had a Mac and always kept it up to par for the latest gaming goodnesses, I'd have probably spent 2 or 3 times as much as with a PC.
No, Macs are most definately not cheaper, and I find Linux to be extremely easy to use, being a programmer/network administrator and all, so none of that is an issue for me. Kernels sure do compile nice and quick though, but that doesn't need to be done often.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
check this out, motorola announced cisco will use the g4 in their routers... check it here. also, here is the motorola powerpc roadmap.
"The chief enemy of creativity is 'good taste'" -Pablo Picasso
I think that there are a lot of trolls out there. Anytime I see a newer UID, I automatically suspect that person is a troll. Wrong, perhaps. But that is the state of /.
Well, Linux is already supported on much more expensive PPC64 (and probably better) hardware than the G5, so it shouldn't take any time at all to be able to run a 64bit native kernel on a G5 once apple releases them. Go to http://linuxppc64.org for more info.
I've seen 10.0.4 on faster machines than that and it still sucks. You are a lying pig. Wait for 10.1 - I'm using 5G40 on a G4/400 and it actually is pretty fast, not OS 9 speed though. And the Finder still can't multitask.
toggled them all on? have you even used OS X? ever?
John Carmack said that Altivec could speed things up if it has bandwidth, which DDR-SDRAM could give it. Unfortunately, Apple has always paired G4s with SDR-SDRAM, which negates Altivec's potential. But with DDR in G5 systems, maybe Altivec will finally shine.
The article says in part:
Apple will launch Mac OS X 10.2 around the same time, we're told, and offer it as a 64-bit version. To do so would surely limit users of older hardware to 10.1 and its updates, but that hasn't stopped the company making such moves in the past. The G5's 32-bit support will allow apps to be carried forward, and developers have been told they will be able to make '64-bit clean' apps with a simple recompile.
What does this mean? Are they suggesting that people who own G4's are going to be stuck with 10.1.x?
One unique thing about the PowerPC architecture is that it has eight sets of condition code flags. So you can pipeline condition codes just like you can pipeline the general purpose registers. By the time you need to decide the branch, the condition can already be known, resulting in a zero-cycle branch. Meanwhile, another condition or three can be computed without disturbing the one you've got pipelined.
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
The guy that overclocked his iBook noted higher temperatures (of course) but they were well within CPU specs. However, because he also lowered the power-saving speed to 300MHz he found that battery life actually increased. Sounds very cool..
Willy
The PPC architecture is fundementally better then the x86. At these clock speed (and with *halve* the pipline!), the PPC 8500 will blaze anything Intel will throw at it for a long while. Get ready for another side-by-side-with-Photoshop. [grin type="exited" /]
Yes, Apples are not just supercomputers, they are superDUPERcomputers. Doped-up marketingesque hand-selected photoshop-like price comparisons put together by marketing people to compare a brand-new processor that will soon be a tiny fraction of its current price (prices actually FALL on x86 stuff) make the mac look super duper! It's PENTIUM TOASTING(TM).
Look, high end macs are pretty darned fast and well suited for big-time still image processing, but their busses are still choked, their memory is still slow, and they don't compete with high end worksatations. They are not all things to all people. Never have been, never will be.
boxen comes from an old background- those of us that used multiple Vax systems sometimes referred to them as "Vaxen". from this came several other (sometimes tedious) phrases, like "boxen".
:P
just because you equate it with 13 year old kids who've had too mountain dew doesn't mean it's not a perfectly valid term for us adults to use
EOM
It is hard to disagree. However i think last time around they were more costly because they were doing things like using SCSI across the line. Maybe next time around (if there is one!) they will try harder. Or maybe not.
If we wanted to time-travel back to a time when Apple had a chance to be the majority system, we'd be back in the late 1980s. A few thoughts on the issue:
+ Apple was making a ridiculous 60% margin on their machines back in the 80s. They did save up a bunch of cash for the rough times, but this "BMW marketing" hurt them in the long run.
+ They purpously segmented their market in the 80s by refusing to produce cheap color Macs. Instead they lied with "Apple II Forever!" and pawned a bunch of dead-end IIgs machines onto educational and home customers. (There was also the significant wasted engineering work done on the IIgs -- it had a better GUI than Windows 3, for example.)
+ Apple has always used a bunch of custom chips. The production of these chips has limited their total production capacity. They've never been able supply more than a fraction of the market (by themselves). Even internally, they never got a standard motherboard until the Return of Steve Jobs days.
+ They turned down many offers to licence their OS in the 80s (Bill Gates, Andy Grove, HP, IBM...)
+ It took far too long to get their shit together with a 'real' OS. This goes back to an aborted merger with Sun in the 80s.
+ They refused to play nice on corporate networks - wouldn't support any protocol but AppleTalk, and so on.
+ Jean-Louis Gassee, later of Be, was the prime architect of their 1980s exclusionary strategy. Maybe thats why they weren't too keen on having him back.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
G4 is not 128bit. nuff said... though it was kind of stupid to mention that the G5 is 64 bit, considering that even G3's are. Truth is, even with the processor being 64bits, it can't compeat with a lower clocked athlon 32 bit.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
"Apple will launch Mac OS X 10.2 around the same time, we're told, and offer it as a 64-bit version. To do so would surely limit users of older hardware to 10.1 and its updates, but that hasn't stopped the company making such moves in the past. The G5's 32-bit support will allow apps to be carried forward, and developers have been told they will be able to make '64-bit clean' apps with a simple recompile."
First, i beleive this is is partly an incorrect statement. If the processor(G5) can run 32-bit apps nativly, there would be no reson to leave all the G4's and newer g3's out of the picture in future updates, thats just too much market segmentation, especially for Apple.
What i think well see, well, what i hope, is 2 product lines for the G5 this spring:
Professional, Server
Shared Traits:
1-4 G5 CPUs
HyperTransport to feed these monsters data
Support for tons of ram
Updated Firewire(800, or *1600*)
Pro Traits:
GeForce3 as standard equip
new enclosure
Server Traits:
A box as good as apples Network Server Line but, rack mountable.
Hot swap HDs, Fans, Power Suplies, and PCI cards.
GeForce2(i say this because of OSX's graphical overhead, and while you wont be in it a lot after setup, might as well have an enjoyable time while there)
Thats all i can think of off the top of my head, but i think this is the direction they need to go. If they release a server box with 4 cpus, rack mount, everything hot swapable, built in RAID, etc, etc, sign me up for 4 =)
"Stuff... In my home!? NEVER!" - Zim on Invader Zim
"I want the toilet seat!" - Little Dog on Two Stupid Dogs
Now filling ramndom stuff here to get past the l4m3ne55 pHi1+3rrz
--
The Cap is nigh. Time to get a fresh new account.
I realize all we are working off of here is unsubstantiated rumors, but i am still curious: can anyone tell me how the work is going along on the PPC multiple-core processor technology?
Are the PPC people still even exploring that direction, or it been abandoned on the logic that Mac OS X's efficient usage of MP makes multi-core chips unecessary? (does it?)
I do not know anything about the technical issues at stake here; i merely heard vague things about this technology a long time ago, and neat as it sounded, because of the extreme secrecy surrounding anything even remotely close to apple's product line it was never made quite clear to me if this technology was feasable or desirable..
Anyone care to enlighten me on, like, stuff?
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Please show your work. Most Mac vs. PeeCee price comparisons are full of guesstimates, and therefore worthless. This goes for both sides.
The truth is, Intel isn't that much slower than the G4's for content creation (if at all), it's mostly just a matter of lack of optimization. But 1.4ghz athlons REALLY smoke a P4 2.2ghz on raw FPU performance (nearly twice the speed). In my figures Motorolla still has some catching up to do to compete with a AMD processor released in march. (not to mention AMD's upcoming ~2ghz models, or the x86-64).
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
Pretty good post for the most part, but a few corrections and observations:
- Yes, memory for the older PCI (pre-G3) PowerMacs is more expensive than PC66/100/133, but it's not nearly as dear as you suggest. 128 meg 5.5v FPM DIMMs are about $42 now, not $140.
- Older Powerbooks (such as the Wallstreet and Lombard) have plenty of options for CPU upgrades. I believe Sonnet and PowerLogix are both in that space. You can add Firewire and/or USB through the Cardbus slots for fairly cheap.
- NewerTech (formerly the best manufacturer of Mac CPU upgrades, now sadly defunct) made some nice upgrades for the older iMacs, including a 466MHz G3 for the Rev A-B iMacs, IIRC. They can still be purchased here and there, and don't require any additional software to function. Someone also made a Voodoo 2 video card for the Rev A iMac's Mezzanine slot.
- There are slight differences in the mobos on the 9500 and 9600; I think the bus speed is increased slightly from the older to the newer. Also, the 9600's case is light years better than the 9500 -- Apple went from its most difficult case to open up and work on to one of its easiest.
- 9500s and 9600s are a royal pain WRT adding G3 upgrades because the Level 2 cache is soldered to the mobo and can't be removed. If your software allows you to turn off L3 cache (which is what the mobo cache becomes after installing a G3 card), turn it off. XLR8 software lets you do this. In fact, XLR8's software lets me disable the L3 cache on a client's 9500 running a Sonnet G3 card, thus making it 100% stable.
- I would agree that anyone buying a used Mac should get at least a Beige G3 so they can take advantage of cheaper RAM and IDE drives right out of the box, and won't have to worry about "unsupported" installs of OS X. If you really need 6 PCI slots, track down a 9600. Current G4s ship with 4 PCI slots and an AGP4x slot.
- I bought a G4/400 last year, hoping that CPU upgrades would come down the pike soon enough. The only one available is a fairly overpriced dual 500MHz G4 for $800 or so IIRC. It would be nice to get a single 800MHz G4 upgrade, but I'm going to save my money for January or whenever the new boxen come out.
- A stock used 9500 should only fetch ~ $200 these days; nowhere near the $600-800 you state. You could get a well-equipped Blue & White G3/450 for that kind of money.
- http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/ is essential reading for any potential Mac upgrader. You can also find plenty of suggestions there for troubleshooting your G3 upgrade on your 9500... Good luck!
Guns don't kill people - bullets do!
Because January is the month of Macworld Expo San Francisco. Apple usually announces its big hardware changes at MWSF (January) or MWNY (July). Besides, the G4/G5 models are targetted at professionals, not consumers. For Xmas, ask Santa for a new LCD-based iMac, if the economics make sense for Apple to roll it out.
Guns don't kill people - bullets do!
Sir:
As most of us know, Apple has astounding amounts of cash on hand -- enough to carry itself through short- (and even medium-) term sales slumps/R&D efforts.
Also, the next season in the business cycle for Apple is the holidays -- a season marked by consumer purchases, not professional ones. As well, with a new iMac probably around the corner, Apple's marketing will probably be focused on the holiday season purchasers.
Mac OS X is Apple's focus right now, and beefed up hardware to support the resource-hungry GUI is definitely needed to get the push for OS X really going -- an effort that will pick up in the coming months following the release of 10.1. Knowing these sorts of machines are coming will keep demand for OS X strong.
Apple's current professional hardware offerings are simply repackaged versions of an older design with speed-bumped processors (read: not a lot of money spent to develop them).
I think Apple couldn't ask for better timing from Motorola. The "MHz Myth" ad campaign just isn't flying. Apple needs a GHz processor to at least *appear* to be keeping up with it's PC rivals.
- Michael
$4000 is only the totally decked out systems, a PC as decked out as a $4000 Mac is just about as expensive once you add in all the stuff that you get in the mac that most PC's do not come with (Gigabit ethernet, firewire, wireless).
You also get a damn nice machine for your money which will last you a long long time. My 4 year old G3/266 still runs the latest OS (slow only at the GUI end but 10.1 should fix that nicely) and the latest games and software for the Mac OS. Your average mac will often have a much long useful life than a PC bought at the same time. My 3 year old PC will no longer run the latest games and WinXP will probably crawl on it if it even worked at all. Hell, Win98 barely works right on it...
--Won't that be grand? Computers and the programs will start thinking and the people will stop. - Dr. Walter Gibbs
How might silicon on insulator affect performance cycle for cycle (ie, will it push performance above what a G4 gets per Mhz?)
All PowerPCs are capable of 64-bit. You just need to toggle some bit in some special purpose register. It's just that no OS runs them in 64-bit mode that I know of :)
There was some talk of the Linux kernel being modified to run 64-bit on PPC, but eventually they determined that it would be more trouble than it's worth.
--
- It ain't easy, being green.
Go down to your local Mac store (not an electronics store that sells macs, but a genuine Apple retailer, like Macstation), and try out the computers. I was in the Macstation in Maple Ridge playing Oni (insanely smooth), fooling with iTunes and some other software (didn't know how to make OS X boot though). My stepdad got them to let him install a game (which he brought in) onto one of the iMac DVs there to test out a joystick to see if he liked it.
In general these stores are usually fairly small, and while the salespeople are salespeople, they're still people. You should be able to try out a significant amount of software that they have pre-installed (the macs may not come with this software, but people always install new software to help 'sell' the computers), and maybe even install some new software.
Try it, it worked for us.
--Dan
Man .. now *that's* funny!
Pete C (ex. Apple Engineering, BTW)
Alison
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." - Albert Einstein
nt!
Sonnet (www.sonnettech.com) is preparing to release a motherboard replacement for the first few generations of iMacs, they add a faster CPU and FireWire. Nifty.
Let's not forget Apple is a monopoly -- basic economics suggests that above and beyond the market share issue discussed above, Apple would charge more for a PPC running MacOS than would a licensed third party manufacturer.
Incidentally, third party manufacturing has long been an issue in Apple's history, as Carelton's "Apple" describes in some detail. Under the Scully administration, Apple repeatedly opted for the "high-right" strategy of targetting the high-profit, small-market share, since they believed they could charge a premium for their systems. After a brief foray into third-party manufacturing under Amelio, Apple has returned to being the sole manufacturer with Jobs. Apple would like to be the BMW of the computing industry. Just as BMW has carved out a very successful business from the "high-right" portion of the automobile market, so Apple hopes to do so with computers.
Incidentally, Apple also began a project (dubbed "Star Trek" -- to boldly go where no Apple had gone before) in the early 1990s which sought to port the MacOS to Intel hardware, which would also have cut down the cost of using the MacOS. Star Trek was killed internally before being brought to market, for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was that Apple would risk losing sales on their own hardware.
Bob
Science, like Nature, must also be tamed, with a view turned towards its preservation.
Imagine a Beowolf Cluster of THESE!!!
Considering intel's time to move to 64bit, exactly how much ass kicking does this signify over at motorola? I'll tell you, I'm going to have a really tough time justifying forking over any money to the wintel world now.
Weird how I was just reading up on the G5 last night and figuring Mot could probably roll it out soon if they really wanted to. I'm hoping maybe Apple will stick the 64-bit G5 in their high end machines and load the G4 with its 64-bit instructions for use on the low end while phasing out (or scaling down) the use of the G3 though the 750CXe might make a nice little chip for IBM to stick in Netvistas and Thinkpads. The most important part of decisions Apple makes in terms of chip upgrades are the opinions of their development base. They'd have to make sure none of their big OS10 supports would jump ship if they asked them to recompile yet again so their apps would run 64-bit native. That though is part of the reason for such a push to get everyone spitting out Carbon and Cocoa apps, Apple can easily add 64-bit framework components to the existing frameworks so as little reworking has to be done on Mac apps.
If Apple goes entirely 64-bit with all of their systems they'd put serious strain on the Wintel workstation world. The transition to 64-bit is going to be much slower going for Wintel due to the sheer size of the Wintel market. It would take all of the PC manufacturers and developers a while to get all of their stuff up and running on XP64 because there's so much of it. Apple can easily just transition all of their boxes to a new ISA in one swoop. One day they're selling 32-bit G3 and G4s and the next they've got 64-bit G4 and G5s.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
NYSE 3000.
No one will be interested in purchasing anything.
some schmuck always has to say it, just like the schmuck who has to always moderate him up.
I wonder if anyone of these critics have played Games on a G4? My dual 450 runs just fine with OSX or OS 9.x. I've just recently upgraded it to a GeForce 2MX and it Screams with AvP [and other games] under OSX, and it will even run Rune in OS 9 compatibility layer under OSX, though performance could be better (but hey, it's emulation).
OS10.1 is supposed to bring optimized Nvidia drivers and GL performance of up to +20% and thats literally days away.
http://www.omnigroup.com are currently finishing the port of Giants from a DirectX PC game to an OpenGL version for the Mac. They are claiming that their MP ready, GL version gets the same frame rates on a dual G4 500mhz with a GeForce 2mx as they see on their PC (Athlon 1.3 GHz with GeForce 3). Doesn't sound too bad to me.
Just because mac users have a crappy selection, doesn't automatically mean that the processor can't run current games. Also doesn't mean that Altivec (or vector math in general) can't be useful in games.
Now, this gets me round to something that I've told Apple in the past (which they've certainly ignored).
If Apple want's to really make a dent in PC market share, they need to not only support Game developers from an intellectual standpoint... they need to support the game developers in a very real sense.
Here is my proposal:
*Apple tends to pull a profit of 100-250 Million in profit per quarter over the last few years. Take a relatively small investment, say 20 Million dollars, and set up a Game task force.
*The agenda of the task force would be to increase cross platform development of cutting edge games, and to provide for releases on the Mac ahead of PC versions.
*Step one is to hire and train talented programmers, let's assume that at ~$100,000 per year they can get 30 quality programmers for about 3 mill. Tack on $500,000 for contacts, managers...
*Train these programmers with the inside knowledge available from Apple, turn a few around to train game developer employees at Apple (free of charge of course).
*offer the rest out as hired guns. If Id is short handed, or if they need inside knowledge about OSX, assign 4 programmers to work exclusively with Id (for free!!!) on the next big thing.
*For other vendors, like activision, that often don't release Mac versions of thier software you offer developers to work on the port. The best offer would be give us a few programmers to train, and we'll provide you with some for free... and you get access to free hardware, sneak peaks, and insider info on the OS internals. Plus, you get a port that you can sell with very little or no expense.
*any money not spent on staff, should be spent to ensure that the 'development partners' get equipment grants, training... etc. Smaller developers could demonstrate working demos or proof of concept and apply for training or machine grants, but maybe not free staff.
*Mac Faithful developers should ABSOLUTELY be treated very well also, including development hardware, access to upcomming boxes, and free training and code consultation.
*Finally, a portion of that money should be kept in reserve for bribery. Find a legal way to offer release insentives. If Quake 4 will be ready July 1 of 2002 for cross platform release, offer Id $200,000 to release the Mac version 2 weeks early. It won't hurt their sales overall, and they get an immediate $200,000 at launch... even better, give them 4 checks of $50,000 as they meet development goals. This may not mean much for Id, but for a smaller, promising game house it means that a long development cycle would get VC during production and they wouldn't have to wait till it was done.
A program like this a year ago might have keep Bungee out of Microsoft's hands and we might have gotten the Mac version of Halo before the xbox version. At the very least, if Apple could add the next 10 or even 20 best of class games (in addition to what they normally get developed) over the next year it would make a huge difference in their market acceptance. Getting key games early, even if only by a few weeks would only help more. [when Q3 test came out for Mac first, my G3 lab was packed every night... some students even said they used a Mac for the first time to play that game and they really liked it]
Once it started, the movement would hopefully gain momentium... game companies with staff trained on OSX porting would be more likely to release Mac versions since the staff is there already (and Apple would help...). More games would spurn more Home purchases of Apple hardware which would in turn urge even more game manufacturers to look at mac versions of their games.
Apple should also note that the 'geek factor' can be swung over to them. Geeks play games, geeks use linux, geeks keep a win98se partition only to play games and run Word on the ocassions that they really need it. Unfortunately the Linux game market does not look good, especially with the exit of Loki. Make the games, release the G5, open OSX even more and the geeks will come... and they will tell their families and friends that OSX is the place to be (because then they won't waste their time fixing the family windoze boxes like I do).
Just my humble ideas, what cha think? Steven.
I'm not feeling witty so bite me
Screw you guys... do you realize how fast I will be able to compile kernels on a dual-G5 machine???
That is all.
This is just what I need. I'll write a custom MC68000 emulator for the chip, and design a replacement cpu board for my Apple Lisa. (FYI the cpu sits on its own card fitting into a somewhat passive backplane). On a more serious note, I may have to try and finagle Motorola into sending a sample, not that I'm up to designing PCB's clocked at 2ghz, but maybe they can underclock quite a bit? Would kick ass to be able to make my own Amiga 2000 accelerator, and still cheaper than the '020 cards I see on eBay. If not, 603/604's are getting dirt cheap.
As for more info on what a muti-core setup would look like, check out IBMs Power4. More info on the Power4 multi-core design here.
From what i can gather, in a multi(multi-core) setup, N-way would set each processor a task, and each processor(with, say 4 cores) does SMP on the task. Or, it may even do N-way type scedualing in the multi-core CPU. However it ends up working, i cant imagine a 4 processor system with 16 cores that wont cost 30,000 bucks barebones =)
"Stuff... In my home!? NEVER!" - Zim on Invader Zim
"I want the toilet seat!" - Little Dog on Two Stupid Dogs
Intel is only doing a mixed RISC/CISC chip for their next generation.
P3 & P4 have 132 CISC instructions.
- Kaos games and encryption systems developer
It has a G5, LCD, kick-ass design, OS X, etc etc. Can you image the waves such a product would make? Make the screen 17" and throw in a GeForce3 GPU, and I'll but 10 :)
You can get all of this (sans the G5) today. Just buy a PowerMac instead of an iMac. You can't expect a top-of-the-line processor, top-of-the-line NVIDIA card and 17" LCD in the $799-$1500 iMac price range.
A good 17" LCD alone would run you $800-$1000. Apple simply does not skip when it comes to display quality. They're all about the visuals.
- Scott
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
lameness filter evasion goes here.
> They may have been on the right track with the
... it's silent, all the ports are easy to access, it can act as an 802.11 base station for 10 notebooks, RAM is installed in a special RAM-only door, the optical drive is slot-loading, it has FireWire and iMovie and a high-quality software bundle. Incredible stability in Mac OS X, too. So, they are really a great solution to a lot of problems for many people, in spite of perceived flaws such as a smallish display, and a misconception that a 500-700MHz G3 is not fast.
> i-Mac, but they didn't keep up the push by
> upgrading rapidly and continuing to reduce
> prices, and that one too has languished.
Apple is selling over 300,000 iMacs every quarter. They shipped more iMacs in summer 2001 than in any other quarter. It is a cash cow. That's why there is no flat panel version yet. They'll probably go to a complete redesign with flat panel when they can also do something else special with it, like go to G4 and booting Mac OS X as default.
> at one point i-Macs were flying off the shelves
> nearly as fast as Wintel hardware
The iMac is actually the best-selling PC model ever. If you're not familiar with them, there are a lot of features that you don't expect, or even think about. It's not a regular old computer stuck in a cute box
The cheapest G4, with the lowest clock speed, is $1700. Bump up the clock speed a bit and we're at $2500.
The additional $800 gets you quite a bit more than a faster CPU. You get a DVD-R drive, which is -- what -- $1000 on its own? You also get a 2MB L3 cache and a bigger hard drive. And all Macs have gigabit ethernet, wireless antenneas, and firewire. The PowerMacs also have cases that meet or beat anything else in the industry in terms of convenience.
That's _crazy_, considering that you can get a roughly equivalent Pentium III or Athlon system for under $800. (The G4 is a better CPU than the Pentium III or Athlon, but not _that_ much better, and the better memory systems on the PC balance out the difference in most cases.)
I won't even get into the MHz issue, but why do people feel that the CPU is only way to assess value in a computer? That's just one factor, and an increasingly irrelevant one. The top two PowerMacs come with DVD-R drives, for example. And the $3500 one is a dual 800. Look at the *whole* computer. You can have a great CPU and memory system and still have a shitty computer.
What's needed here is an explanation of Apple's business model.
Unlike a huge majority of bare bones wintel manufactuers, Apple actually develops unique products and a separate platform, which means we're dangerously close to having real mainstream choice in computing (based on a unix-like core, no less!). But developing these products, creating a mainstream platform, and providing all sorts of free software and internet services (banner-free) to users costs money.
Last quarter, Apple brought in gross revenues of $1.475 billion. Their gross margins were 30%. But they only reported a $61 million profit. Where does all the money go? Back into the products. They can afford to do this because they have $4 billion in the bank. They are building up for the long term.
Most companies that will sell you a cheap workstation are working on razor thin margins. That's great in the short term if you're buying a machine. But it also means very little product development is happening. It's just a numbers game. How different are all the wintel PCs really? Hundreds of manufactures all using the same basic components and same OS does not provide choice. They're almost identitical in terms of the end result.
Selling lots of machines at razor thin margins does not necessarily put you in a good position. You just need to look at tech news from the last four months to see that. Thousands of layoffs, mergers, outright bankruptcy. Meanwhile, Apple has sustained its business, and has had laid off a total about 50 people this summer. Of course, things have changed recently, so Apple may encounter difficulties. But selling cheap boxes is in no way a guarantees for your business.
- Scott
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
An Ingeneer from Apple told me before last summer that the newest G4s are already a different generation from the first ones. They call them G4 too because Motorola didn't allow Apple to call them G5 for legal reasons that he couldn't explain...
So the should the next one be called G5 or G6 ?
-- "Life is easier since I have excluded JonKatz stories from my homepage"
that people BITCH and WHINE and COMPLAIN and CRITICIZE about Windows being too much for even fast processors, and then fold their hands and smile and say, "Ah, now we just have to wait for the processors to catch up with OS X"?
Hypofuckingcrites.
Everybody selling $800 PC's is deep into the red. Dell, Gateway, Compaq, HP - keep going. You can't take a loss on every unit and make it up in volume. Apple charges what it needs to to write an OS and build the boxes. They make good money, but not all that much - there are no obscene profits being shown. So, the amount they charge must be pretty close to what it takes to turn out the product. That's just the economics of a niche product market.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
You can often turn a single-processor mac into a multi-processor Mac!
RAM and HD upgrades are of course, also cheap and easy. Adding or expanding USB, FireWire, and ethernet ports is cheap and easy.
And one underappreciated thing about the Mac is the teriffic support for multiple monitors when you add one or more video cards to supplement the built-in video. (And many Mac flight sims support multiple monitors, for simultaneous front and side views! : )
http://www.xlr8.com/ http://www.sonnettech.com/product/default.html http://www.powerlogix.com/products/products.html http://eshop.macsales.com/ http://www2.warehouse.com/dept_find.asp?dept%5Fid= 2618&cat=mac&sel=MacUPG
http://www.formac.com/html/shopformac.html
http://www.sonnettech.com/product/harmoni_g3.html
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
The cheapest G4 tower you can get these days is only to the education market -- $1150 for a G4 533Mhz, while they use up the old style cases. [Which I think look better]
There may be other vendors looking to unload older machines, however.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.