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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.
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.
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.
The G4 is a 32-bit chip with a 128-bit vector co-processing unit.
The really cool thing about the G5 is that it will be a 64-bit chip with complete backwards compatibility with 32-bit applications.
Pooty tweet
E-Mail: There's a bundled application called Mail that handles email tasks well. It does POP, IMAP, and Unix accounts easily. I've actually been happy with the application.
Web browsing: IE 5.1 is bundled (final version as of 10.1, shipping later this month) but OmniWeb and iCab are two great alternatives that certainly hold their own. Opera is also being developed natively and is currently at beta 3, afaik.
I use BBEdit for my HTML editing, and you can't go wrong with it. It's one of the best text editors available for coders, with syntax coloring for any language, as well as built-in support for grep in the search/replace functions.
Games have always been a Macintosh weak spot, but with id doing near parallel development with Windows counterparts, and other game developers starting to see Macs as a real gaming platform, look for more and more games to be released in the coming months. I know Black + White and Max Payne are on the way, best sellers like The Sims, Unreal Tournament, Q3:A and Alice are all available now.
Everything you'd really need to know you can find here. There is a surprisingly large number of apps out there for OS X. VersionTracker has a really large and up to date database of apps coming over to OS X.
Pooty tweet
macosxhints.com, macosx.com, macobserver.com ... check out the forums on any of these for about anything you might need to know
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
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?
how come no one ever calls it the "Apple Tax"
Simple. When you buy an Apple, you're choosing to buy the entire kit & kaboodle. Apple has never forced anyone else to use their OS.
MS has. Gateway, Compaq, HP, et al couldn't sell a consumer PC w/o Windows if they tried.
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
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
They don't? Perhaps not as often, but I've gotten burned twice by being an early adopter
I bought one of the very first PPC Macs off the line. 7.1.2 was the OS shipped and it was a true abortion- unstable and slow. Wanted to upgrade to 7.5 three months later? Too bad: cough up the dough, since anyone who bought a x100 PowerMac within the 1st month didn't get the upgrade free. (7.5 sucked too, but not as bad.)
Now Apple's telling me I have to pay for 10.1, despite the fact that 10.0.x is clearly a public beta and not the real OS- it too is unstable and slow. Yeah, yeah, Unix, blah blah. I've locked up OSX badly enough to require pulling the battery out of my TiBook a number of times. By the standards I'm used to (AIX) it's not stable. At least it's not as bad as 7.1.2 was, but then again a house of cards was more stable. We won't even discuss Aqua's speed: I've got the best laptop made today and plenty of RAM and it feels like my old 6100.
Eric
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
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*
Nobody calls it the apple tax because Apple isn't charging licensing fees to another company that they pass off to you. Apple's per-unit cost for bundling Mac OS with a computer is zero, because they develop the OS and the hardware.
It'd be like trying to get a Palm without PalmOS.
Or it'd be like complaining that a Microsoft-brand PC came with Windows, if Microsoft sold its own brand of PCs.
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.
On the other hand, Apple also doesn't make you type in annoying 25-character license keys to use the OS that came with your computer.
-- "Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything." -Joseph Stalin
Now Apple's telling me I have to pay for 10.1 or not. It looks like it could be free (or just shipping and handling costs). Look here.
www.lucernesys.comHorizon: Calendar-based personal finance
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).
"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.
Look at it this way: Motorola traded a 40% increase in pipeline length for a nearly 100% increase in clock speed (the fastest current Mac is at 867Mhz). Sounds pretty good to me...
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
No. The registesr file and ALU make up a relatively small part of a modern CPU. Quite a bit of room is taken up by on-chip caches and assorted bits of scheduling/dependancy logic. I'd bet that the lion share of the extra trasistors goes first to extra on-chip cache, then to logic supporting the extra pipeline stages.
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?
Yes, I used to get burned by early-adoption, but Apple has been doing some very generous things, such as giving everybody who pre-ordered OS X free overnight shipping, as well as $30 off if you purchased the beta.
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.
It's not possible to keep making a CPU faster without extending the pipeline. It just isn't. That's why there are no 7-stage, 2GHz CPUs and probably never will be.
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.
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.
"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."
WinXP is a hog, plain and simple - Not that OSX isn't, but you can run pretty much anything under MacOS9, except for a few apps like SoftImage, which most people don't care about. You can get quite a bit done under MacOS9 on a 603 class system with only 64MB of ram, as long as you don't want to play current games or anything.
I'm sure I will get modded down, but it is no more of a troll than the parent, and just as accurate.
Time for some tasty Shiner Bock!
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
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.
Really? When Intel did the same thing with the P4, everybody laughed and sniggered at them.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
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.
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
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)
Yo! Remember CAPITAL LETTERS? itmakesthingsmucheasiertoread,yaknow?
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.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
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.
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
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).
What you would come up with is... a Mac! The Macintosh already uses ATA 100, PCI, AGP, etc. Theoretically you could take ANY PCI card and have it work on a Mac, if you just had the right drivers. The only real difference between Macs and PCs is the processor and chipset.
This
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
One of two places:
1) Buy used, and tell 'em to keep their OEM license.
2) Buy parts directly, build what you don't have, and sell the extra 999 you're not going to use.
Apple's an OS maker--but they're their *own* OEM. No one complains about their preinstalled OS, just like no one complains that Palm sells Palm OS equipped handhelds, no one complains about the X-Box having MS software on it, and no one complains when their VCR works.
"no one," of course, exempts the Open Source Zealots who do complain about this, and every other faucet of bundled hardware.
That's because Intel went from 12 in the PIII to 20 in the P4 (a 66% increase). At the same time, they went from 1GHz to 1.4GHz (a 40% increase.) So Intel increases the pipeline by 66% and only increases the MHz by 40% - that's why people laughed. Motorola, if they pull it off, will lengthen the pipeline by 43% and the MHz by 100%. See the difference?
Willy
Ridiculous by who's standards? Seven years ago, I was thought 'ridiculous' for actually blowing several thousands of dollars to get (gasp) 64 megabytes of RAM for (bigger gasp) a desktop machine! Nowadays, 256 meg sticks are going for, what, 60 bucks?
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
For the two which rock, I suggest you check that the feet underneath the box are all the same height.
For the one which sucks, check the fan wiring - it should BLOW.
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?
Correction: The 74x0 CPUs are 32-bit.
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
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
Not good enough IMHO.
I either have to go to an Apple reseller (None within 150 miles of me) or pony up $20 in S&H. Given that pressing the CD and mailing it costs all of about $2 and that I'm already in the database as an OSX owner, $20 is about 80% profit.
Apple's selling the upgrade, just like the makers of the "Free Herbal Viagra" that is advertised endlessly late at night[1] are selling it- the price is all in the S&H.
[1] When you have a 2-month old you watch a lot of late night TV while holding a bottle...
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
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.
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
I'm sure I will get modded down, but...
This has to be the first post containing this phrase that hasn't been modded up! (yet Of course, I'm sure I'll get modded down for this for making fun of the moderators! That's pretty much the one thing that will get you modded down every time...
OtakuBooty.com: Smart, funny, sexy nerds.
That is not so, as you will discover if you try to document it. Apple's "free" upgrade is going to cost me $20, and won't be available for download at all.
Ben "You have your mind on computers, it seems."
Ship with at least 2x256. RAM is dirt cheap these days, even poor broke me is thinking of buying some more.
my old sig used to be funny, but then slashcode ate it and now it's not funny anymore
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.
> The iMacs won't be suitable OS X boxen until
... like real life. There aren't any bells and whistles to turn on or off ... that guy is a troll. Even with a third-party tool, the adjustments that you can make are cosmetic, and not performance-based (except maybe choosing scale instead of genie or suck as the minimize effect, which saves you a few milliseconds when you minimze a window ... scale is supposed to be the new default because of that). It's when you create a new window that you get a short wait cursor, or try to make the very unfinished Finder do two things at once that you get a long wait cursor and start to feel like you are wading in quicksand. It feels unoptimized, and with the reported speed improvements in 10.1 (3.5x on everything), I would guess that 10.0.x really is unoptimized.
> they have a G4.
That just isn't true (maybe for 10.0.x, but not 10.1). I'm running 10.0.4 on a G3 PowerBook ("Pismo") with 512MB of cheap, cheap RAM (half its capacity) right now, and there is nothing wrong with the graphic or app speed. Most iMacs are faster than this box, since iMacs have full-speed desktop hard drives, and 16MB graphics RAM (instead of 8 in a Pismo).
In fact, graphics are wickedly fast, even with only an 8MB graphics adapter, and they're also fully 32-bit and crisp as anything
Go figure that the first PDF-based window server, on a heavily rewritten consumer and pro OS that now has five applications environments (Carbon, Classic, Cocoa, Java, and BSD Unix) instead of maybe 2.5 in Mac OS 9 (Carbon, Classic, and almost-Java) would need six months of shakedown in the hands of users in order for Apple to see what needs tuning and where.
This PowerBook has only crashed once since Mac OS X was installed in April 2001, and that bug has already been fixed. It's a rock.
People who pick on a supposed lack of apps conveniently forget that Mac OS X runs about 90% of all Mac apps every written, and that the Carbon API is on both Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X. Photoshop is not running in Carbon yet, but it's running fine in Classic. The next rev will run in Carbon. When your shipping app is running fine on Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X, it takes some of the pressure off a port. Most developers seem to be wanting to make a big splash with really fine-tuned Carbon apps that take advantage of some Mac OS X-only features, such as what Microsoft is doing with Office, rather than rush out their native versions.
Nice that the transition to 64-bit G5 looks like it will be as easy on the user as the transition from G3 to G4. Even easier on the developer than supporting Altivec (which isn't hard). I can't wait to see what a 1.6GHZ G5 with 10 pipelines performs like (P4 is 2GHZ but has a huge 20 pipelines). I love the performance of my G4/733 workstation already, software encoding high-quality MPEG-2 at 2x, running ridiculous numbers of real-time audio plug-ins, etc. A dual-800 G4 does MPEG-2 encoding at 1x, so these new G5's will open up whole new areas of performance. (Note: "encoding", not "decoding".)
> The point remains though, a GUI that uses more
> resources than most of the programs you want to
> run is pretty worthless.
That's true.
Has nothing to do with Mac OS X, though, since that is plainly not the case with Mac OS X.
Even if it was, taking a performance hit is acceptable when you move to a new generation of technology that has many new advantages (eg. bitmap printers to PostScript printers). Apps are already taking great advantage of OS X's buffered windows so that your document window doesn't have to be redrawn when you drag another window or a panel over it. There are lots of other advantages that will be realized over time.
Ha ha ha ... games are not written to the lowest common denominator ... games often push hardware to its limits. Macs have "fat binaries", though, so it is easy for a developer to ship a single app that actually has multiple versions, each one optimized for a different processor or OS version, and the OS sorts that out. The user doesn't have to know or care. Any app that is CPU-intensive has long since supported Altivec.
... it makes sense that current 3D hardware is missing one or two things that you would ideally like to have. The next generation of 3D hardware now has some new problems to solve. This is called "moving forward". Still, Mac OS 9.1 and Mac OS X 10.1 have similar GUI speed on the same hardware.
Current 3D hardware perfectly solves yesterday's problems. Apple is building really new stuff
First of all the large pipeline is needed for fast chips without tons of cache memory because there's such a lag between the memory clock and processor clock (the processor is finished computing data bafore it can store it memory so has to wait a long time before it can write it back). The G5 is planned to have a good deal more cache then the P4 has, comparable to the Xeon version of the P4 which makes it more effective even at very high processor clock speeds. And secondly the G5 will be a MPPC 7500 series.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
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.
Well the transition from the G3 to the G4 was relativly minor, say like from PII to PIII. Software will run equally well (except for performance) on the G4 or G3. This will probably me more like the switch from the 68K chips to the modern PPCs...
Not all PowerPCs are 64-bit; in fact most of them are 32-bit. AIX, K42, and Linux are all available for PPC64.
Screw you guys... do you realize how fast I will be able to compile kernels on a dual-G5 machine???
> 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
The IBM Power chips ARE the same architecture. That's where the "Power" in "PowerPC" comes from. IBM and Motorola both make PowerPC's (IBM makes all the iMac CPU's).
Altivec is shining plenty already. Look at the speed of MPEG-2 encoding on a G4. I am also able to run a very large number of realtime audio plug-ins on a G4/733 ... really amazing performance. High-quality MP3 encoding at 8x on a PowerBook G4 500 owes something to Altivec. Altivec is fucking great.
... they've had time to tune it for each system. It runs really fast on old iBooks with a RAM upgrade. Their software knows what their hardware is doing and vice versa, it's all one system. Drivers and updates can be set to download automatically from Apple, for everything that came installed on the box. A 20MB online WebDAV disk is also included, and free IMAP email. Integrated. DVD burning Mac has all the stuff you need to go from camcorder to your own DVD, and it's easy enough that little kids can use it.
CPU's are such a cock thing. Integration and connectivity are what's usually lacking in a personal computer.
Apple can tune a system from stem to stern, which is why 10.1 is so ridiculously much faster than 10.0
All Macs have AirPort (802.11), FireWire (1394), modem, VGA, USB, Ethernet. PowerMacs also have gigabit Ethernet, DVI, PCI, AGP. Stuff goes in and out very fast and in lots of ways. Mac OS X also seamlessly switches between different networks, so you can plug a PowerBook into Ethernet and it will get the Internet like that, and unplug the Ethernet and it will automatically switch to AirPort if it's available, if not it will look at the modem, etc. until it finds a connection. If it doesn't find one, it doesn't complain to you, and it's easy to set your preferences for how this works. USB and FireWire storage, MP3 players, printers, and other hardware don't need additonal drivers beyond what comes with the OS. Mac OS X speaks NFS, SMB, and AppleTalk file sharing. That kind of stuff saves you so much more time than a 75 watt monster CPU that is slower for many tasks than a 14 watt G4.
While I agree that most people buying Apple hardware are glad to have the Mac OS pre-installed (and even most of us zealots are going to expect them to include it), they do too charge for the OS. Otherwise, all upgrades would be free. They spend money developing the software and you can bet your ass they include this expense in their pricing models for hardware.
I do not have a signature
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.