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Dual G4 Mac Cube
ijx writes: "Those of you with a hardware-hacking bent should enjoy this - a Mac Cube modded to accomodate dual processors, courtesy of AccelerateYourMac. It seems that it uses the same dual-proc module as a Sawtooth G4 Tower. My question: will it melt?"
Now you can set how brown you want your CD/DVDs betfore it pops them out the top!
But seriously, a nice hack. Sounds blazingly fast. Maybe it would have sold better in this configuration?
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No, it's RISC-based. You ought to try one. No heat problems that a small fan can't handle. Unlike x86/CISC machines, there's not a huge chip with (around) 100 million transistors generating heat.
CISC chip do put off heat, but it's VERY easy to control, and the wattage is lower than CISC. That's why RISC technology is used in many hand helds.
Modifying a machine to be dual processor without swapping out the motherboard? Anyone have any more info on this? The article was kinda skimpy on the details, it assumed we knew already.
RISC and CISC aren't technologies, they're design ideologies. And like political ideologies, they have been strayed from in the interests of practicality. Intel/AMD chips all use RISC-ish designs with instruction translation stages. And the PPC architecture has some very complex instructions (alti-vec?)
The reason risc is more common nowadays is because it's easier to design and write optimizing compilers for. Software issues, not hardware ones.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I use a G4 cube as my primary development workstation, and I love the silence. If I can upgrade it to dual G4's, I'm there!
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
..."The peak power consumption of the UltraSPARC IIe is 13W at 500 MHz, which minimizes cooling requirements for the chip and in turn a potential threat to server stability should the datacenter cooling/environmental equipment malfunction.
In fact, one of the primary barriers to broad acceptance of the Itanium by OEMs is its large 130W power appetite -- literally 10 times that of our own UltraSPARC IIe."
I am aware that cisc vs risc is a flamebait in alot of areas but risc was specifically designed to have less complexity in the chip in exchange for higher clock speeds. In many ( not all ) situations risc is usually %25-%40 faster on equilivant megahertz basis or can run at a slower megahertz and consume less power for a similar speed. X86 has alot of baggage in it and consumes alot more power then powerpc's, sparcs, and even alpha's and offers less performance or the same if its clocked ridiculously high. This would make it less hot then x86 cpu's running. I think the pentium4 and the athlon are almost an embarrassment to the electrical engineering community.
http://saveie6.com/
The G4/450's that are in this Cube only use 7-11 watts each. Compare to 50-70 watt Athlons and Pentiums, and you can get an idea of why this works without a fan. Standard Cubes run cool, so there was some room there. He plainly states that he is monitoring the CPU temperature with a utility app and it's cool enough. It may not work in Florida if you don't have air conditioning, but that's why he checked with the CPU temperature utility.
The G4 towers have a fan, but they are there at least partially because the box has room for three more hard drives, one more removable drive, and four PCI cards in addition to the stock stuff, so you have to leave a big margin for error. The fan switches off when the machine sleeps, though, and the boxes don't run hot. Also, the power supply is inside a G4 tower, but it is outside on the Cube.
Would this be a potential solution for the cracks that were supposed to be in the Cube cases? Get it just warm enough to meld them together again...
Ok, enough of the boring stuff. Here are some links to keep you guys semi-entertained. The Cube goes into the Museum of Modern Art. For those without a NYTimes subscription, MacObserver summarizes the article.
Now for the fun stuff. Case mods! Check out the Kleenex Cube and the Blue Smoke Cube. Also, here's an All American Cube.
Apple stopped using ZIF a few years ago.
In the tower machines, pre-cube, it went like this:
G3 Yosemite - zif G3 processor, Blue and White minitower.
G4 Yikes! - Zif G4 processor, Graphite and clear, PCI graphics.
G4 Sawtooth - no zif, Apple used a large D shaped white connector and used screws to stabilise the board that carries the processor. AGP graphics.
G4 Mystic - same processor interface as Sawtooth, first of the DP series, with 450DP and 500DP. Also known as Gigabit ethernet.
G4 V'Ger - 466, 533DP, 667, 733. Same as gigabit ethernet, with 133mhz system bus.
G4 - Quicksilver - 733, 800DP, 867. Same as gigabit ethernet model with 133mhz system bus.
G4's from Mystic or newer won't work on Yikes!.
G4's from V-Ger and newer won't work on Mystic (133mhz bus versus the 100mhz bus...other differences..)
XLr8.com sells a dual G4 upgrade card, but it only works on Yikes! and Yosemite (ZIF).
I wish I had better details on where the modifier of the Cube got the extra processor card from a Mystic, and how he added the extra pad to match the dual processors. Was it just held in place with thermal goo and pressure from the retention of the heatsink?
You did know-
That's a stock heatsink modified to make contact with the two G4's instead of the single one that was stock.
So he's not doing anything other than going with Apple's design decision. It could probably run with a cooler heatsink, but since it's not aided by a fan, and you want it to work in rooms that don't have air-conditioning (thinking of consumers who buy computers and then use them in stuffy offices) there's probably some tolerance designed in so that it doesn't overheat.
Underperformers need not be relics. Whereas many of the embedded chips I work with aren't even in the same playing field as the G4s being discussed here (though G4s *are* among the chips we support), quite a few of the systems we support *are* built for speed -- just with that not foremost in mind.
Compare Intel's "mobile" chips used in laptops with those for the desktop market; the performance difference isn't all that great, while the difference in power consumption is large. These are still quite a bit more power-hungry than most embedded chips, but they illustrate that not all new development is done with performance as the primary goal. There's a lot more than underclocking which can be done to cool down a chip (don't look here for details, though -- I'm software, not EE).
This has been an easy thing to do with Macs for years.
Unlike PCs, which are instaled in ZIF sockets, Macs have had a few diferent ways of connecting the processors, but with one unique, and very advantageous difference.
Since the PCI powermacs came out, the PPC processors have been on daughtercards (except a rare few consumer class machines which had it soldered onto the mobo, but thats a different story).
These daughtercards can have several proicessors on it, and can easily be interchanged.
Unlike PCs, which have the entire processor bus on teh mobo itself, with separate traces for each possible CPU, powemacs usually have the processor bus itself as a daughtercard connector, so there is no difference between a mobo for a 1 cpu machine and a 4-way machine (Such as the Daystar Digital mac clones, which used the same mobo as the PowerMac 9500 of the time, just a 4-way 604e CPU)
These daughtercards have seen a few different formats over the past few generations. The original PCI powermacs had a slotted daughtercard which was simply inserted like any expansion card, and could be used to upgrade any of those machines with up to a G4 cpu, made by some upgrade manufacturers. Then with the Beige G3 machines, came the Zif socket, but which also supported multiple CPUs if necessary, although not many upgrade companies made them.
Then, with the Sawtooth G4 machine (the one which finally brought AGP to the mac) the CPU went onto a daughtercard which was connected via a 423(?) pin rectangular socket, which can accomodate several CPUs.
This socket is what was used in the MP G4 machines, making it possible to use the same Motherboard in all their desktop G4s, simplifying the product line.
The iMacs also use a similar, but incompatible socket, which could theoretically support multiple CPUs.
-=-=-=-
Also, for information on how to Overclock these daughtercards, and several different Macs in general, visit http://violet.berkeley.edu/~schrier/mhz.html
for instructions and some interesting reading.
And for those wanting to overclock a Mac....
beware: you need to make motherboard/daughtercard modifications to do so.
Stop over-analyzing your analizations
If it does get hot, will it self-repair the cracks and bubbles in the Cube's casing?
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello