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Dual 1Ghz G4 PowerMac With Extra Yummy
A huge number of readers submitted the new
Dual Ghz Power Mac that
Apple has announced. Includes a Geforce 4 and assorted other bells and
whistles that will ring and blow for the Mac Junkie. They start
at $3k and seriously make me want a Mac.
I just bought a dual 500 G4 PowerMac about 1 1/2 years ago for $3,000 w/ an ATI Rage Pro 128. Now I can get a dual 1Ghz PowerMac w/ a GeForce4 for $3,000. Awesome!
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
CmdrTaco wants a mac?! Good lordy, they must be doing something right.
I predict that the first thing people will do is to benchmark this against other dual systems, such as Dual Athlons, or Dual Xeons, or something like that.. with all of the hardware components being the same as much as possible (with the exception of the motherboard and the chip itself)..
I guess the question is... how much of a performance will we see on the different systems?
The high end is 3k, the low end starts at 1,600. But that's without a superdrive or the GeForce4
And they come with the Geforce 4! I'm getting me one.
Darn, Mac missed a chance to start off a new line of hyper-cute with some quality components.
Where are the crazy features? How about four little feet that walk around to amuse the user? Or a spout that collects humidity to make a wicked glass of iced tea every few hours?
------
Today's Top Deals
For some reason they hold resale like a fucking BMW.
It can be a few years old and almost cost what it did, fucking new.
There's 604's going on eBay for $800+
Intel hardware retains value about as well as lunch meat.
with the exception of all the BSD/linux source that'll compile without too much hassle..
Adobe will have Photoshop on OSX 'any day now'
the iApps that come with OSX..
etc etc..
I will now remove the Ring of Power from my "new" dual G4 800...
[tear runs down cheek, falls to floor]
blakespot
As far as I know, the biggest NVIDIA graphics card is the GeForce3. What's this model n.4?
Apple Press Release http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2002/jan/28pmg4.ht ml
Its got a geforce 4 in it!
:(
Cant stop progress eh
no sig.
Well, it differentiates the Pro Macs from the iMac, for the short term. The price has nudged down, and the features have gotten boosted. All this is good.
However, the chipset hasn't been updated yet (ergo no ATA100 or DDR support yet), it's the same FireWire (meaning the newer high-speed FireWire isn't ready for Prime Time yet), and the top-end speed isn't quite as fast as I had hoped/expected. I was thinking the speeds would be more like 933/1000/dual 1133 this time out.
But all in all, it's a good short-term move assuming the G5 is available in the next couple of months. But despite the specs, it reminds me of the original "Yikes!" G4 towers, which were just Yosemite towers tweaked for a G4 to hold the line while Apple got more of the high-speed chips that their real G4 was designed for. Yikes only lasted a few months before the Sawtooth version took over.
This is, I hope, pretty much the same thing.
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
Malda.
Seriously, are you ok, man?
This 'makes you want a mac'?
Three years of nothing more than misinformation and poor characterizations and understandings of each and every one of Apple's products and now this?
We in the Mac community worry for your health.
In all honesty, why would you WANT to run linux on a machine rather than Darwin/Aqua ?
the only people that would, as far as I can tell, are the diehard open source zealots.. (I'm sure to get modded down for this.. ah well)
seriously make me want a Mac.
:)
My friend started saying things like this after he got a girlfriend too. We had to set up an intervention session. I propose we do the same before Taco starts posting reviews of "A Walk to Remember".
Ughh... couldn't they be happy that the apple //gs at a blistering 2.7mhz was fast enough? :)
"Just tell him ya did it! That's what he wants to hear anyway..."
The lowest priced PowerMac model is $1599 (US, no display). That's with the single-800 MHz processor.
The *top of the line* model with the dual-GHz is $2999.
I know that this article is specifically about the dual-GHz model, but don't give the impression that PowerMacs start at $3k. They're not all that expensive.
Several major PC manufacturers including Dell Gateway and Compaq, today acknowledged that they are extremely concerned about their future prospects. This concern as generated by Apple's recent announcement of yet another $3000+ Mac.
Michael Dell, of Dell Corporation, stated that "this new Mac scares the shit out of me. My sales are going to tank." Dell continued that "I putting out my resume to all the local carwashes, the PC is dead."
Other leaders of PC manufacuturing companies also expressed similar concerns but, refused to comment on the record for fear of further damaging their sales.
Carly Fiorina (HP)however, was overheard in a local San Francisco restaurant pleading with the management to let her start waiting tables next week.
The blurb at http://www.apple.com/powermac/ has a section entitled "Cache Advance" that should be good for a smirk, or at least a raised eyebrow.
It says, and I am not making this up, "In the 933MHz and dual 1GHz Power Mac G4 models, faster-than-light processor speed gets an additional boost with [now here comes the technical stuff--DPBS] advanced cache memory architecture that provides ultrafast, dedicated memory with massively enhanced throughput."
You know, as opposed to lesser machines that have only fast, dedicated memory with enchanced throughput.
But, wait, there's more... in this remarkable machine, "Accessing data from main memory is significantly faster than accessing data from the hard drive..."
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
"the new twin-engined G4 runs professional applications like Adobe Photoshop up to 72 percent faster"
Uuuuhh... a 3d card runs a 2d app 72 percent faster? No I don't think so.
Anyways, aside from that.. this is a great machine. I actually run many of my linux servers at work off of "older" Mac G3 hardware. Yellowdog linux is a god-sent!
Would Yellowgod automatically take advantage of the dual-cpu mac hardware? I'm not well versed in Multi cpu OS behavior.
And of course it's a shame that I can get a dual ghz PC system for like half the price... but hey 1.5k for the pretty colors!!! mmmmm pretty colors.
In addition, the PowerPC G4 can perform four (in some cases eight) 32-bit floating-point calculations in a single cycle -- two to four times faster than processors found in PCs.
That's fast. I just love the details behind the facts: Pentiums suck, I'll take 1 G4 over a P4 at ANY speed. Anyway, enough trolling, if you click on the processors link in the article, apple gives a pretty nice overview of why their dual processor G4's are really, really nice.
~ now you know
Even if there is going to be a *cough* G5 in the next few months, this is still a nice, FAST machine.
TANSTAAFI: There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free iPod.
neat considering that Nvidia won't own up to it's existance on their website, or the fact that you cant buy one. So is Apple going to delay release until the Geforce 4 is an actual product and not something that is in the development stages?
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Please. My beige G3 from 1998 is still a very powerful graphics machine. One of the reasons people buy macs is becasue the have much greater staying power than any intel or amd product.
"The Apple Pro Keyboard also comes with full-sized keys for Page Up and Down, Home and End, Insert and forward Delete.."
Oh wow!
Nice to see apple finally backed down from having stupid irregular key sizes. I think using the idiotic small arrow keys (along with the small F keys) along with the stupid puck mouse on a G3 scarred me for life . Now for the mouse button thing...
No more. I've got friends with Macs and knowing a thing or two about operating systems I'd pick Mac OS X over Windows any day - and thus I'm now also going to convert from PC/Windows to Apple computers. I seriously hope more and more people will do this, not just those with a techie background that can see through the MS commercials and understand that for what they use their computer for, they really really should go Apple.
Price? Umm. Let's not go there. I'm going for the iMac instead
it's in my head
Under MacOS 9 you needed specially tuned apps to take advantage of that second CPU... Like Photoshop.
Under MacOS X, it's no longer required, and EVERY app now benefits from that second CPU. Just like Linux or Solaris would.
"...the new twin-engined G4 runs professional applications like Adobe Photoshop up to 72 percent faster -- and crunches digital video over 300 percent faster -- than a 2GHz Pentium 4-based PC."
Hmm.
So will it play all my DIVX movies 3 times faster???
Is it sounds a little stupid?
I've been using mostly PCs and Sun workstations, but these new Macs with OS X actually make me reconsider... the pricetag is ok I guess, the OS is solid (unix-based), PPC is a clean architecture, and it could be used by my mom while I can run all the GNU goodies I want.
Now if they have standard connectors for the display etc. (unlike some older models), it's definitely an option. That "superdrive" starts making DVDs interesting, even though 'til now I boycott them on principle (region code, CSS) - CDs are getting a bit limiting in size...
Oh well before I get serious about replacing my current setup, the G5 will be available...
a 733 mhz at about 1250$.
Your mind is squeezed by a blast of pain!
your kidding right? Darwin/Aqua is just terrible. You'll find way more software out there for linux, and much less bloat. Aqua is pretty looking... that's about it.
Here is to hopeing that the new G4 towers Provide enough product placement seperation from the imac so they can uncripple the imac's 100mhz fsb. There was no reason to take a perfectly good computer and run it slow except marketing. Now Apple has some faster models, they can give the imac some breathing room.
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
What NV number is the GeForce 4 MX? The NV17? If so, it's not that impressive, just marketing renaming a card. Apple has rarley had the top of the line graphics ship as default. And right now, it's not even an option (No 8500 or GF3Ti500)
For those in a hurry, here is the editted summary ...
A quantum ... revolutionary ... and ... Mac ... floating ... fearsomely fast ... through the ... barrier ... runs ... and crunches ... Pentium 4-based ... super models.
Off the charts, with hot ... fluid motion and ... phenomenal ... overdrive ...snap ... three brilliant ... creative professionals.
Faster-than-light ... ultrafast ... massively enhanced throughput ... significantly faster... even faster ... boosting ... for shooting large ... Keyboard features.
What more do you need to know?
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
Mac servers tend to work fairly well in the educational market. 3-d and video production folks like them too. Web serving? maybe not, but we leave the chepa stuff for that.
and no one can imagine a Beowulf Cluster of These??
I'm disappointed.
disagree with there bud. Apple is making a big comeback. New operating system, new sleek styled computers. The stuff that has come out so far have been really cool....
If you disagree with me, thats your opinion, but the numbers do not lie Apple beat market expectations and has signed an agreement with sony enterianment online to port its games to apple! Take that loki and VA LINUX
It looks like they are trying to make up for have their system memory just PC-133 SDRAM, instead of DDR SDRAM...
Looking for any old 8-bit Heathkit/Zenith software/hardware - http://heathkit.garlanger.com
hrmph. As both a Mac and windows user, I can't say that I was particularly impressed at first by these new machines.
Apple really needs to ramp up their speed--and since most people were expecting 1.2 Ghz G5 machines, this upgrade will come as a dissapointment to many.
The new machines also use PC-133 SDRAM, which is, to say the least, sad.
There are some nice points about the new macs, though. Apple seems to have greatly improved the interior architecture of the machines, enabling the PCI bus to run at 215MBps instead of 133MBps, and giving more dedicated bandwidth to hard drives et ect. The new machines also feature an AGP 4x slot, whereas (to the best of my recollection) the older PowerMacs only had AGP 2x. The GeForce 4 MX is nice, of course, though until I see some real benchmarks comparing it to Radeon 8500 and the high-end older GeForce 3 cards, I won't be impressed.
Well, here are the total specs of the new machines.
My overall impression is "Nice, but not nice enough."
I, for one, will wait for the G5 to buy a new mac. MacWorld New York, anyone?
It's a pity that even in a dual configuration it will get spanked by a dual Athlon. Or perhaps it isn't a pity if you've got Athlons ;-).
The article notes that the PPC chip can perform more operations per cycle than it's PC counterparts. They are comparing themselves to the P4, which specifically DOES NOT try to do a lot per clock cycle (deep pipelining prevents this). If they were to compare it with an Athlon, things would be different.
And let's not forget the staggering (for PC's anyway) power of the Athlon FPU, which spanks the P4 quite cleanly. Even though I'm sure Apple will again claim their system performs a Photoshop blur 500 billion times faster than any computer ever made, real-world testing will probably end up showing this dual system to be marginally better than its predecessor. Software that can take advantage of dual CPU's isn't found everywhere. Even Photoshop doesn't use dual CPU's (although some of the plugins do).
You can get better system responsiveness with a dual system even if your app does not support duals, but it does not necessarily translate into faster programs.
I've got 5 dual Athlon's right now in a rendering farm, and they absolutely stomp any system I've ever seen in 12 years of being in the 3D industry.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
At least Apple has done well in the last few months. Although I don't think I would purchase an Apple desktop computer, their Powerbooks running OSX would make me reconsider buying an x86 compatible laptop.
/.'s archnemesis (no name required,) the amount of options people have, especially in the day-to-day tasks of word processing, spreadsheets, collecting SPAM etc., are much better now that Apple is putting out products everyone wants to use.
Unfortanately for us, the mainstay of application toolkit consists of programs designed exclusively for Windows. On the background side, we have confugured our network services exlcusively around linux servers. Sure, maybe OSX is capable of handling such things in the near future, maybe even now; I really don't need a (reasonably) expensive Apple computer to the work an old PII can.
On a more positive side, I have seen the grass on the other side of the fence. My first subject revolves around a family, who for several years used windows. First 95, then 98 then ME. This family had so many issues with their computer system, and no idea how to correct them that they just went out and bought an iMac because "everything worked." Now they want iPod's, iBooks, and the likes because Apple products work both for those without an inkling of knowledge as well as those who know exactly what they're doing.
It is also my opinion that the best applications for sound recording (please read audio, not MIDI sequncing, not waveform generation ala Max/MSP,) but straight recording are available only for the PC (Samplitude 2496 and Sequoia.) As always you are free to disagree. Our studio uses such software exclusively, but a young woman asked us for advice on buying her first computer. We suggested an Athlon-based PC and an inexpensive but high quality recording card (M-Audio, Echoaudio, Terratek etc.) So she buys a Socket 423 P4, with a SoundBlaster live. Needless to say things didn't work right from the start. The system came preloaded with ME, and when we helped her switch to 2K for stabilitie's sake, Dell informed us the warranty was void without the original OS supplied with the system. On top of that this woman's knowledge of computers was non-existent (not necessarily a bad thing, just a drawback.) She is the type of demographic for which the Macintosh is perfect, and it was silly of us to recommned otherwise because we've been back there setting up the computer on many occasions.
Apple's current efforts to provide not just an alternative but a viable one should be applauded. Though Apple is, in business models, equaly monopolistic as
Most graphic design and video programs use both. Those are two of Apple's biggest markets.
I hate this misconception. There are other ways to take advantage of a dual proc machine than to run programs optimized for dual proc. Like, how about running two programs at once without them stepping on each other's toes.
It's was the IIGS, not //gs!
There's a new tab on the PowerMac page, labeled Architecture. It wasn't there before, as confirmed by the Google cache.
Unfortunately, the page is slanted more towards marketing than geekspeak. I couldn't see anything significantly different than the previous Quicksilver models. Could someone provide a more ArsTechnica-style overview of this little gray box labeled "System Controller" and say whether it really is any better than before?
"...In the 933MHz and dual 1GHz Power Mac G4 models, faster-than-light processor speed gets an additional boost with an advanced cache memory architecture that provides ultrafast, dedicated memory with massively enhanced throughput" :)
Wow! That's an achivement.
Say "hello" to mr. Einstein.
Are the student discounts just 50$ per computer (as it states on the Apple.com site , or is there anything greater to be found for individual college students?
Thanks,
Chao
115 Frames per second.... Must... Have...Now... Powerbook... too... sloww...
http://www.apple.com/powermac/graphics.html
--------========+++Dont Feed The Lab Techs+++========--------
TI? What, the 99/4A?? I don't think there's been a port. Now the TI Professional, that might have had a port sometime, but there'd be no memory protection, etc. Can Linux run w/out an MMU? Hmm...
blakespot
you couldn't be more wrong. in terms of quality apps os x still outnumbers linux in commercial applications, and apple is doing a very good job at reducing the bloat through the os x updates considering what they've taken on and can do. have you checked out gnome/kde lately? i use to claim linux ran faster than windows...not so much anymore. i attempted at putting linux on my 867mhz g4, then realized there was no point: os x gives me the ultimate desktop os.
While semantically this is a GForce 4, technically the real GForce 4 (non-MX) is based on the NV25 core (dual vertex shaders and improved pixel shader).
The GForce 4 MX used by Apple usese the NV17 core (one vertex shader and no pixel shader). This might still be a nice chipset, but it is not anywhere near XBox or real GForce 4 performance.
well it sure is nice to look at, and im sure that most of its sales are going to be based on the purdy case (as most mac sales are and have been since the imac), but isnt this all going to be out and 10x better in the PC world in a matter of months? i dont even think that you could get that much out of having dual cpus, and i wouldnt want to touch that.... cpu drivers and the cooling situation.... ick. macs have always been bringing out the latest and greatest, sure, but PC manufactuors bring stuff like this into the mainstream (and lower prices) if you want one of these so bad go buy one, take the case, replace the power supply, put in motherboard+cpu+ram and voila! a 2.2 intel P4 a nice purdy case for all those out there that love purdy cases.
We /.'ed apple... I think legoman's DSL lasted longer. And he had big pictures of his lego mural.
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
Motorola semiconductor doesn't make its money (when it is making money) selling chips to apple, they make it selling them to cisco, 3com, and other vendors where a high performance, low power, embedded processor is required. Apple is a second tier customer, seeing as they don't buy nearly as many PPCs as these other companies.
I just don't quite understand who Apple is going after with this. One would think that they need to expand more into the desktop arena since they have no chance in the server or production world.
Graphic designers, video editors, other creative types. 98% of the graphic designers and video people I know use Macs. Most of the wanna-be filmmaker types do too... Or always talk about how they want one.
well, what, in your opinion.. IS a friendly OS?
It sure as hell isn't linux+KDE (as much as certain people would like to claim it is, it's just nowhere near polished enough)
AmigaOS?
Actually there are environments using Macs as high-load web servers. Why not? Running OSX they're faster and more secure than a windows box - and the hardware cost is approximately the same. Yeah, you can throw together an el-cheapo system but build a quality PIII or P4 system and see what it costs.
A nice doorstop. Although a 486SX would probably be a faster way to browse the web.
You ever see any cross platform benchmarks for mac's vs windows. A 400MHz celeron running windows will cream This dual 1GHz(welcome to 2 years ago) in any way except for using photoshop filters.
So in conclusion, unless you spend your entire day in photoshop using filters stick with the cheap faster solution using X86.
psxndc
The emacs religion: to be saved, control excess.
Now compare these speeds:
New Mac Quake III
PC Quake III Speed
You can notice that an AMD Athlon XP1800+ with a generation 3 card (Radeon or GeForce 3) is about twice as fast a the new dual 1Ghz Mac with the GeForce4MX.
The only possible explanation is the relative low memory bandwidth of the card, that cripples the performance.
You realize that Apple has this new OS called OS X, right? It's built around the mach kernel and BSD. It's fast, it's stable, and you can compile tons of *NIX goodies to run on it. You can also deploy WebObjects apps, and the GUI admin tools make things easier for those who are new to operating a server. It might not rule the server world, but OS X Server has been well reviewed, and will certainly steal back marketshare in K-12, university, and creative environments where NT and its derivatives had made inroads.
The Mac is now finally a serious Java development platform. You can use all manner of GNU tools on the Mac. As for production, in the worlds of video production, audio production, web production, and print production, the Mac has always been very strong. With OS X, Apple will be able to regain a firm lead in these areas.
As more and more apps are ported to OS X, and as more brand-new Cocoa apps are written, the platform will become even more attractive to creative industries. Dual-processor machines running OS X are a godsend to people using memory-intensive apps like Illustrator and Final Cut Pro.
Macs have always been labeled as "cute", particularly after the release of the initial iMac four years ago. But Apple has changed its ways to a large degree. Sure, they make eye-catching products that are easy to use, but they're also now transitioning to a truly powerful OS that plays very well with UNIX, Linux, and even Windows.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
While apple likes to appeal to as many as possible, they really are attempting at stealing SGi's niche for the high-end academic markets with high-end video cards, good fpu performance, and fast opengl performance.
I've been looking at getting a Mac for sometime, but unfortunately my funds are rather limited, and the high price of Macintosh computers only makes that even more profound. So I've been looking at iMacs... I know the original iMac was near impossible to upgrade, so what about the new ones? Can the CPU/memory/video/etc be easily upgraded, as with Power Mac machines? Or is it like before, where you get stuck with whatever you buy initially?
Video editing groups. There is a serious following of apple in the multimedia area. Final Cut Pro has dragged in tons more video editing people. Guess what? Apple still has the attention of tons of desktop publishers, a lot of smaller, independent editing houses, and graphics departments inside larger corporations. They are apple's market. My college would be buying them for a digital editing lab, a highschool doing video editing may get a bunch of iMacs and a few G4s to do the high end rendering, for the kids who want to do work that iMovie can't. And the machines are also possible servers for all of the above people.
And these machines are just something to keep the iMac from undermining the Power Mac G4 sales, supposedly the G5's will be out soon.
Seriously, you know you want one. It's the killer BSD box that you've wanted now! Just go out and get one!
Finally, dual-GHz. This is a big psychological barrier that Apple has crossed. I couldn't be happier.
--Bernie
Just get an iMac. Same processor etc plus comes with a 15" display. The only thing that doesnt quite measure up is the system bus but 100 vs 133 is pathetic anyway. They should be double pumping to 266 at least.
You have one CPU dedicated solely to the app you're using, say - while the other is free for system functions, I/O and other background tasks.
So yes, a specially tuned app would work better, but it still works better than a single CPU machine would.
You may mode this as Troll or Famebit -- but seriously, since OS X came out every time a topic gets posted on /. regarding Mac, I keep seeing post on how wonderful the Mac is and that /. readers are ready to buy one. The driving force for doing so has been the underlying Darwin kernel with the Max UI support as the key factor.
/. readers. If this trend continues, are we seeing the end of Linux as a desktop OS? Is OS X the "next" Linux desktop going head on against Windows?
Now here is the bigger question for the
In my view, this is a real possibility once Apple ports OS X to the Intel platform or comes up with some sort of OpenSource license to OS X.
Karma stuck at 50? Add 2-5 inches.. err.. 2-5x Karmas Count to your pen1es.. err.. Karma all naturally and private
I use it mostly for development and as a unix admin workstation. I hack around with python and objective-c and even play Retrun-to-cstl-wolfenstein on it.. I imagine that I will be using it for another 8-12 months before it gets retired as a server or nat box (Which would replace my wifes old nappy-iBook (think toilet seat)). The cool thing about the iBook is , with exception of a huge hard disk
I find myself upgrading my PC about once every 12-14 months, I expect to get at least 2-3 years out of my G4 (as I almost have done with my iBook)
Cheers
Hi, Does anyone know anything about this chip ?, www.nvidia.com has nothing about it & nothing usefull fell out of google either, sounds like Apple stole a real march getting being first to release this one :).
Nigel
Welcome to supercomputing.
I administrate a small cluster of the G4s, and real-time interactive graphics works great over the gigabit network.
Regards,
proclus
GNU-Darwin.org
...because its sexy enough on its own.
Macs are coming back!
War in the Middle Ease!
The Amiga isn't dead!
BeOS is... oh...
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"
- Charles Darwin
It says that it "supports" up to three SCSI drives, whatever that means, but it comes with Ultra ATA drive stock. For a machine of this performance potential, there is no substitute for a really good scsi drive, like the Fujitsu MAN series.
For those that believe that IDE has caught up, I have done a comparison on a Sun Ultra 5, which comes with internal IDE drives, and an optional SCSI interface. We had the stock IDE, and a Sun labeled external SCSI drive, and the SCSI drive kicked old school at about 1.6 times faster.
Considering Apple is marketing this to graphics/music/multimedia pros, who really use bandwidth, this box needs SCSI.
The audience initially is the high end users in creative shops. Up till recently I ran a 100seat creative installation, all Mac. My IT manager used to keep our three or four power users on the latest kit and trickle the older product down through the company.
You'd be amazed how much power high end applications use when used professionaly, even photoshop for print work, let alone video edit/compress.
$3K (or even £3K here in UK) is chicken feed for the productivity improvement these users get.
Second audience will eventually be scientific users. I used to sell Silicon Graphics kit in the old MIPS/Irix days and custom internal architectures to maximise system performance like the new level 3 cache can make a big improvement!
STY
are all g4 motherboards dual processor by default? Meaning, can I buy a single 800 processor, then add another 800 processor, or does the m/b only have slots for the one?
Upgrade your grey matter, cause one day it may matter
Uhhhh... no. Are you a pro-Linux troll? When you can talk about Microsoft Office for Linux and Adobe Photoshop for Linux and Insert-your-favorite-commercial-software-company-n otice-I-didn't-say-Open-Source-GPL-here software, then maybe you'll start to catch my ear. Until then, you can't be more wrong.
-cscx (posting as an AC with no thanks to Fuck-O The Wonder Moderator, who decided to slaughter my karma... thanks for the communist IP ban, guys!)
Now I only regret having got a new PowerMac last August. I swear, this G4 867 just *crawls*...
Anatole.
I don't think these systems are geared towards a gamer. They are really ideal for doing high end graphics, like non-linear editing. Perhaps now PC's will catch up with Mac for high end graphics. Avid now has a version of win2K and XP, though I don't know anyone that uses it on windows.
I just don't quite understand who Apple is going after with this. One would think that they need to expand more into the desktop arena since they have no chance in the server or production world.
It has been my experience that there are two kinds of people in the world.* Those who shop at Wal-Mart for everything in order to save money. The other kind is those who shop at Wal-Mart for stuff they don't care about, and go elsewhere for quality items.
Apple is targeting the latter. I bought a Mac because it is a high quality machine. I use it to work on. Whereas a few years ago I considered Mac to be almost exclusively used by designers, I can emphatically say this is no longer the case. I can use Emacs, Vi/Vim, Netbeans, Ant or just about whatever dev/build tool I used to use on Linux.
I will not speculate as to the future success of Macs as a development machine. But I can at least give you anecdotal evidence that it is quite possible (and even pleasant.) I am ecstatic to no longer have to fight with Gnome or KDE, however infrequently those problems arose.
Anyway, I have gushed enough. Moral of the story is that Macs make quite a nice development box.
- Rev.You mean like this?
-cscx (posting as an AC with no thanks to Fuck-O The Wonder Moderator, who decided to slaughter my karma... thanks for the communist IP ban, guys!)
While Display PDF and the use of a microkernel are great ideas, in theory, the fact is that making Aqua happen takes a lot of horsepower, and Mach is a fairly poor design that helps add to the bloat.
The ideas embodied in OS X- a microkernel with a next-gen display layer- will hopefully become 'standard' computing features soon (we should've had them in ~1995), but the fact is that OS X is a Big Honkin' Implementation of them. If you're comfortable with one of the lither macrokernel systems, and the already-bloated X Windowing System as a display layer, why waste cycles and disk space?
Frankly, I'm looking forward to the upcoming Pegasos (www.bplan-gmbh.de) or AmigaOne (www.eyetech.co.uk) boards. At Euro 650 with a G4 400MHz, the Pegasos may not be the most cost-efficient motherboard on the planet, but when the price has a chance to decay a bit, it'll run NetBSD as fast as a G4 runs OS X... and both of those manufacturers are more likely to support open development, unlike Apple.
(for the lazy, the G4 is slower than the Athlon in all the tests, except the RC5 benchmark)
What is the difference between "production" and "desktop"? Macs already have a very high penetration in some areas of production, so I suspect you're using that word in an unconventional manner. Might wanna re-rephrase. :-)
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
With the combonation of OSX and Dual 1ghz processors, Apple now is staged to show the world what it is made of. For all you nay-sayers that think Macs are only for Photoshop filters, I got news for you.
First of all, Macs cost less. SHUT UP! They do. If you compare an iMac to an equally equiped Dell, the iMac is 400$ less than the CD-RW version of the Dell and 400$ less than the DVD-R version. Dell 8200 vs. iMac, I tried the slower versions of the PCs on their website as well, but first off the speed comparison isn't fair to the PC, but the iMac still beat it in value until you go to the 1.1ghz Celeron version, which doesn't have graphics acceloration or a hard drive larger than 40 gigs. I haven't started with the new PowerMacs, but eventually I will have a website proving that a Mac costs less than any of the competition. Feel free to verify the numbers: iMac CD-RW 1299, dell, 1663
iMac DVD-R 1699, dell 2032
Now, past that, Mac is currently getting all the advantages of the BSD and open source software community since the Developers Tools, which look strikingly like Visual C++, come FREE when you buy OSX. They nativly compile OS 9, OS X, and BSD/Linux applictions, I currently develop a Mud server in Project Builder, which runs on BSD and Linux.
As far as graphics and video are concerened, it's OBVOIUS to anyone who KNOWS anything about processors that a 7 step G4 with the FPU unit used is going to be over twice as fast as a 20 step P4 using an FPU unit. Games, being an unfair arena to a superior processor which runs cooler at a lower voltage and clock speed, the Mac still matches the PC in most arenas. http://www.barefeats.com So speed isn't an issue.
Resale value is also better on a Mac. And if you haven't noticed, most new Mac software runs on hardware 3 years old! The staying power of a PowerMac is obvious. There's no need to upgrade at all till processor speeds almost tripple. (I upgraded from a G3 233 to a G4 733, with no problems)
SO, a special note to all you PC idiots. If you want to spend more money on slower computers, with hot running parts, bad operating systems, Microsofts invasion of privacy, and oh, let's not forget all those WONDERFUL games on PCs, that's fine. The best day of my life was when I left the 4000$ game system market and got a Mac. I much prefer GTA3 and FFX on PS2. Not to mention with OSX I have one click webserving, all the advantages of BSD, including the fastest SMP of any OS, and a huge open source community that is only growing with each Unix nut converted. What I don't get are you Unix/BSD/Linux junkies who don't see the joy in a Mac. It's BSD with the arguably the greatest User Interface made! There is an easy way to boot to console only ( click Other as login, ">console" as username, no password ), and everything made in Project Builder is easily portable to any other flavor of Unix or Linux, even MS-DOS for the sheep.
So PC people, get a clue, get a life, and get a Mac. Maybe then you can appreciate style, user interface, and speed, and if not, I'm sure you guys will never run out of reasons why you don't have a Mac. You have plenty of time to think about it while you wait for your PC to finish crashing and reboot.
Dokujaryu
Aqua is a little slow, yes, but "terrible"? Compared to what, X Windows?
"oohhh... I didn't know Schopenhauer was a philosopher!"
According to Apple, the new dual 1ghz system with a Geforce 4 MX (64MB) gets 115 frames per second. This is pathetic. On a single processor Athlon 1.34 ghz with a Geforce 2 GTS (32 MB) I get 140 at 1024 / 32bit.
Apple has a ways to go before they impress the gaming crowd.
niche. Motorola just aren't up to the job of making competitive silicon or support hardware like motherboards for a mainstream market.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
ya - the computer I just built for aroung $600 can do 145fps (32bit, 1024, etc.(timedemo)).
Food for thought.
Epox 8k7v+, 1.4t-bird, GeForce2 Ti-450, 512MB crucial.
Eh? Any application that uses fork() will benefit.
;-).
Multithreading offers finer-grained parallelism, to be sure, but I guaran-damn-tee you that Apache will run almost twice as fast (all other conditions unbounded) and handle about twice the number of simultaneous clients on a two-processor Linux or Solaris system.
And Apache is NOT multithreaded (well, 1.x isn't, and 2.x is not what I would want to run on my production servers yet).
Similarly, my gnarly Perl and shell scripts that do lots of simultaneous-dispatch work benefit enormously from a second processor. Again this is in the absence of other bounding conditions, ie. network pooping out, etc.
Single-process single-thread applications probably won't benefit much. I don't know if Photoshop is multithreaded, but that's probably the only application that most high-end Mac users care about anyways
Remember that what's inside of you doesn't matter because nobody can see it.
If you BTO one of the dual 1GHz machines and select an ATI Radeon 7500 (better chance of working in Linux) and don't get a 56k modem, you can get it for just $2870.
Wow, you can't even read can you? Again, the megahertz myth strikes. Doesn't matter when you process more per clock cycle. Software, you keep the 90% of crap that's out there all to yourself. Doesn't have DDR, they all have 2 firewire ports, firewire is their invention after all. Who cares about OEM? The GeForce4 is already in these machines and they ship in 5 days so does it matter that you might be able to buy it earlier OEM? There's nothing worse than uneducated windows users.
I wonder if I can take out the card and put it in my PC?
Don't answer me. Moderate. Slashdot is about moderation, not discussion.
Part of the reason Motorol continues to suppor these customers is for brand recognition. "I heared the Motorola Power PC processor blows away the Pentium." Those consumers will then view Motorola consumer products in a favorable way. And hopefully, they some of those consumers will also be influential in the design of someone's next embedded project, and might select a Motorol chip for that project. So the reasoning goes anyway.
Apple sucks? Well, no... But recent reports indicate that *you* do. I believe DONKEY DICKS were mentioned as being your favorite. Hmm!
ya. the computer you built has its own sound processor, whereas the G4 processors have to handle sound themselves. so while you're getting 145fps, that powermac with an actual sound card will probably be cranking out 150-160. crank it up to 1600x1200 and you'll watch your computer lose, and big time. i know, because i have a dual g4 with a geforce3 and a dual athlon with a gf3 ti500. the athlon is faster, but the g4 will still smoke yours when you add a real soundcard.
Food for thought.
Every once in a while I like to masturbate a new word into my vocabulary, even if I don't know what it means.
Look at the tech specs on this unit and you'll notice that they're still shipping with old PC-133 SDRAM. When are they going to support DDR?
the reason why I don't have a Macintosh is because I
can't build one.
I wish that I could go to the store, buy the components, and put one together myself, just like
I can with a PC. I know I can't as a result of
Apple owning much of the hardware.
I read this article and I agree with the author. It'd be nice if apple sold barebones G4s. That would make owning a Macintosh cheaper and more fun since you could easily customize by yourself.
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
The GeForce 4 MX is really an enhanced GeForce 2 core. I know you will want a reference on this, but you'll have to take my word for it.
I yearn for you tragically
AT Tappman,
Chaplain, US Army
All bow to the high and mighty. Oh I am so special because I don't shop a Walmart. The millions of people who shop there are lowly scum who use Windows and drive Kia's. I must lock myself away so I can read my books and look at my pretty new imac. Oh woe is me. I wish Al Gore had won so that him and his nutcase, sensorship wife could ban all stores that poor people shop in so that they can build another Pier 1.
Just for fun, try to build a comparable brand name PC for $3000.
I tried with Dell and ended up with a $5,071 quote. I'm sure my specs can be debated, but I got:
--Dual Xeon 2.2Ghz (Hard to tell if this is a good comparison)
--512 MB RAM
--80GB HD
--ATI Fire GL2, 64MB,VGA/DVI (Best I could find on their site, besides high-end)
--Sound Blaster Live! Value
--Windows XP Pro
Anyone have any idea whether the Xeon 2.2Ghz is fair to compare with at all?
a multi-billion dollar processor fabrication division is an expensive marketing tool for their consumer electronics. :)
I do agree that OS X is a pig, but disagree that it is the underlying design. Something went terribly wrong in the transition from NextStep to OS X.
My Turbo-Color Slab from NeXT (33Mhz 68030 (040?) IIRC with 32MB of RAM) seems just as zippy as my 400Mhz G4 with 1.5GB of RAM.
Somewhere, Apple/NeXT took a lesson from MicroSoft and I don't like it!
lemme get this straight - you are saying that if I install a real sound card, the performance will decrease? Ok, so now, I have the onboard sound. I am planning on getting a SoundBlaster Platinum. You are saying that if I do, my gaming performance will suffer? I don't get it.
Seems to me, that my onboard sound would use the processor. If I add a sound card, it would be processed on the sound card. Kinda like a SCSI controller.
Score! I'll have to go get a SB Live Mac soon then, I wanted the EAX anyway. Wait... I don't play games. Damn it!
Dokujaryu
The G4/DP 1 gig is a very appealing option, except:
THEREFORE Your system can only work with one Apple display, because only one card slot has this power connection.
What I'm getting at here is that Apple boasts that all the new Power Macs have support for dual monitors built in, but for a company who puts so much work into beautiful designs, they expect me to use two different, cosmetically mismatched displays! I don't believe that a VGA connector belongs on a flat panel due to inherent flickering issues, so that means a flat display on the ADC and a CRT on the VGA port. Ugly!
If I want two displays that look the same, I have to enter into an imposing combination of needlessly wasted PCI slots, buying redundant cable adaptors, and spending a lot of money!
I would love to have a DP 1 GHz with dual Apple 17" Studio displays. I really would. But the premium is too high.
Apple should bury ADC now and issue an admission of stupidity.
Apple did a great job of embracing standards with USB, and is arguably responsible for its success. Why they chose to suddenly abandon the DVI connector on Yosemite and original Sawtooth computers is a mytery to me. DVI was just catching on as a standard way of connecting flat panel displays. If Apple hadn't moved to ADC, we would have seen more Wintel video cards with DVI conectors on them now, because there would be more DVI-connected monitors on the market.
Apologies for the rambling post... ADC has bothered me right from the start and now these new dual cards seem like the ultimate inconvenience.
I just don't quite understand who Apple is going after with this. One would think that they need to expand more into the desktop arena since they have no chance in the server or production world.
Um... I guess it depends on what you mean by the "production world" They absolutely dominate the graphic design, photography, and print production markets which are all reasonably processor intensive. And they also do very well in the video production market which is VERY processor intensive. Even in the high end shops the less processor intensive stuff is done on macs and then moved over to the SGI machines. Notice how many macs you see when watching a documentary on the "making of" the latest hot movie. From ILM to your local TV station or commercial video production company it is a reasonably big and very high margin market that Apple is moving to dominate (with fast machines, DVDStudio Pro, FinalCut Pro & some of the best 3rd party software) the same way they dominate desktop publishing.
From the Apple HW website pictures, it appears that the CPUs still only need a heat sink (rather than a fan strapped on top). At 1 GHz, I'd like to see any Intel variant touch that...
"Accessing data from main memory is significantly faster than accessing data from the hard drive..."
You flamebaiting punkassbitch, you posted that out of context and you know it. Apple is explaining to the less-than-completely-fucking-geeked-out that accessing data from RAM is faster than accessing data from a hard drive. So FUCK YOU, ok? And watch out for the piano that is about to fall on your bloated ass.
P.S. Please don't respond "but you can plug things in via FireWire!". YOU don't get to decide if I need PCI, I do.
moderators continue to click the wrong button.
There was no reason to take a perfectly good computer and run it slow except marketing.
the iMac is aimed at a user who does not want to deal with the hardware very much. including a
100MHz FSB instead of a 133MHz bus allows the clueless User to purchase the cheapest memory possible.
Now Apple has some faster models, they can give the imac some breathing room.
as the announcements of the iMac and the G4/2x1GHz were less than a month apart, and the new iMacs are not even shipping yet, don't you think that maybe Apple had them in mind as in-the-market-together already?
But to be honest I'm not all that thrilled. Some of the numbers are pretty nice, but 115fps in QIII? My single processor athlon gets to around 160 with the same settings, and that cost me under 1000. Don't get me wrong, I'm not a mac hater, but I fail to see why apple is showing such a meagre result as one of the most impressive benchmarks. Also, it's just too damn expensive. $3000 is way too much, particularly when you consider that the graphics card is in fact the gf4 MX, rather than the full version. If it was the full version I would start saving right now ;) Apple has been relatively price competitive in recent times against x86 based systems, but consider what SMP athlon systems cost. I can guarantee that an athlon system costing $3000 would absolutely mash the dual G$ 1ghz.
Unfortunately, with a dual athlon I couldnt experience the joy of OS X.... ;)
It'd make a nice computer... especially for surfing /., or something else resource-intensive :)
s /A ppleStore.woa/42/wo/XuAwo1gEZNBHN7G7sk1/2.7.0.3.30 .1
http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPLE/WebObject
This past summer, I sold my 2.5 year old "Blue & White" G3 400 tower for $1100. That is astounding. (No monitor, 512MB RAM, 15GB storage.) How much do you think a P II 450 would've gone for 2.5 years later?
blakespot
Are you talking about OSX or MacOS 9.x and previous versions?
(the GUI's are VERY VERY VERY VERY different)
No.
On PowerMacs, the G4 processors themselves handle the pretty big task of doing all the audio. On other machines, one has a sound card (or built in sound). This takes the burden off the processor, so it is capable of pumping out more frames every second.
I'm not sure about numbers in terms of on-board vs a SoundBlaster Platinum, but you definitely won't see a decrease. On a Macintosh, if you add a 3rd party sound card, you will see a significant increase in speed.
Every once in a while I like to masturbate a new word into my vocabulary, even if I don't know what it means.
Where do you get this? Are you just making this up?
It's pretty clear that you don't know the facts and haven't used a recent Mac. I don't have usability test results to support my assertion that the UI is better, but I think they would. But there _are_ benchmarks, parallel features, and apps on both sides enough to make it very clear to anyone who's used both platforms that the Mac can easily hold its own.
My suggestion: Learn the facts before you post such negative comments. Then maybe people will take you seriously.
Apple is just repeating what brought them success in the first place. They are pushing the killer app. Years ago, desktop publishing was Apple's killer app. If you wanted to do DTP back then, you had to have a mac. The people who were serious about doing DTP bought Apple machines just to run these apps. The fact that there were other things you could do with the machine was just a side bonus!
Final Cut Pro is Apple's new killer app. A lot of people out there (most of them professionals) are touting FCP as the premeire app for doing digital video at a very reasonable price. People will buy Apple hardware just to run Final Cut Pro. Comparisions with PC hardware are moot since Final Cut Pro only runs on Macs.
I'm more of an audio guy myself. Yes, there has been a lot of progress made with audio stuff for Windows, but I'll still buy a Mac to run my digital audio apps.
which in my case would have a good 21", Pentium 2.2GHz (yes it's in my dream system, but my two last CPUs are Athlon because I don't live in dreamworld :p), 1gb RDRAM, WD1200JB hdd, Geforce3 Ti500 (if I couldn't wait for GF4)+++ I think it'll still add up to about 5k. Particularly if I could get a free 10mbit+ internet connection with that, instead of 6 months of AOhell... Realisticly, my next machine will be in the 1k segment I think... But I'd really really like to lose: Serial ports, parallell ports, PS/2 ports (USB is more generic), ribbon cables (FDD, HDD)....
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
If Apple is making the high end G4 Machines dual-processor G4s, it sounds like they are trying to "catch-up" in Mhz war.
It's widely known that Mhz for Mhz, CISC and RISC (G4 and X86) are completely different beasts, but I think Apple is trying to play the game by sporting two 1.0 Ghz G4s.
If this is the case, and maybe even if it isn't, why not bill the high end as "2.0 Ghz G4 - Dual Processor." I know it is somewhat misleading, but then again, so is the Mhz rating between a Pentium and a G4. I think someone looking for a new computer that isn't as aware of the difference, would see a 2.0 Ghz Mac as a very comparable alternative to a 2.0 Ghz Pentium machine.
It's only when we've lost everything, that we are free to do anything...
So long as these machines are making people "seriously want to buy a Mac", and not causing them to actually "buy a Mac", Apple's not gonna grow. So go buy a Mac already!
ok, that makes sense. I wasn't aware that the macs worked in this way. Cool. (or, not cool for gamers)
What if apple started selling dual systems with a choice of OS on them? then! i might buy a mac ;)
Seany
"Where ever you go, there you are"
The Radeon has been smoking the equivalent (pricewise) Nvidia card on the Mac line. Nvidia's name sells however, not ATi. PC Converts that know something about hardware respect Nvidia in a way they don't respect ATi. As a result, Nvidia is default, ATI is the built to order option.
The Mac benchmarks were showing the Radeon line in a very good light. Also, the Geforce4 MX supports dual monitors (VERY important if you do Photoshop editting) on a single card, and other niceties.
It's a good default graphics option. If you are a gamer, save the $100 and get the Radeon card, then upgrade to a faster gaming card in the future.
For professionals, this is a great video card.
Ah, but you are not a creature of our Glorious Multimedia Age! There are plenty of people who are busy creating ingenious ways to use all your CPU capacity - and then some. Such as video editing, for instance.
I run Final Cut Pro 3.0 on my Macintosh G4/450 dual processor (which I'm thinking of replacing with one of the new machines).
When I tried FCP 3.0 in the store on a G4/867, the system came to a screeching halt when I rendered.
With my 450 dual processor, I was able to do other things while rendering, albiet at somewhat reduced speed. In my view, the dual processor is a big win for this type of thing.
Fortunately for Apple, a lot of people have bought Final Cut Pro, and those of us who do a lot of rendering (changing the speed of video clips, for instance), really need this new system. Why do you think they built in second monitor support? It was for video editors for sure.
D
(If you're not a video editing junkie, rendering is the process of saving copies of modified video information, such as transitions, superimpositions and conversions from one video format to another. If you consider that there are 29.97 frames for each second of video, and each has to be painstakingly redrawn, you can get a feel for how CPU intense this process is).
Why do they use 133 SDRAM instead of the Double Data Rate everyone else is using these days? (well, except for you know who)
He didn't say he didn't shop at Walmart. He said he didn't shop there for things that are important to him.
Illiterate git.
Every time someone posts a new Mac product announcement, we get these two ridiculous comments:
(1) "I could build a comparable Athlon box for way less money."
Yes, you probably could. But Apple is a premium brand. Think Sony. You do pay extra for an integrated software-hardware package, good industrial design, 90 days free tech support, etc. You may not need or want these things but some people do. In particular, Apple's ease of use is somewhat predicated on the OS knowing exactly what hardware configuration to expect, so the user doesn't have to mess around with device drivers and kernel extensions.
(2) "I can't believe Macs still have only a one-button mouse. What a bunch of morons. When will they get with the program?"
Buy a Mac. Then spend $15 and buy a 2-button scroll-wheel mouse. You won't have to install anything because OS X already supports it, context menus and all. My Mac's mouse has 4 buttons and a wheel. Macs come with a 1-button mouse for good reasons, like ease of use for first-time or novice users and purity of the original mouse metaphor (point at things and click on them). There are actually users out there (including PC users) who find the second button confusing and may not know what to do with it.
Sorry for the lengthy rant. But I just keep seeing these comments over and over again, and they miss the point.
Taco, why do you want one? I mean, do you have $3k just burning a hole in your pocket? Personally, I'm underwhelmed. For $3k, I could build a pretty damn nice Athlon-based system, and have enough left over to head down to the Caribbean for a week-long vacation.
Explicitly, Apple's OpenGL doesn't include support for:
Obviously, Carmack was able to get needed programming info to make these things work, why not the rest of us? Is it that game developers now need to beg Apple to work on cutting edge technology on their machines? In my opinion this is killing any reason to use OpenGL over DX8/DX9 for future game development. Even if OpenGL itself supports advanced features that rival DX, I can't use them to build a cross-platform game. If that's true, what's the point of using OpenGL? (I actually like the DX8 programming model better.)
Dan
The solution to the age old Mac vs. PC question:
http://www.cray.com/products/systems/sx6/
Of course, with prices "starting well under $1M" it's a little different.
No, it's
"Is Apple On Its Last Legs?"
and (hopeful journalists)
"Peace Talks Fail In Middle East."
;)
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Perhaps Classic is not installed? You might try running Classic manually and then see if those applications spring to life.
If they work in MacOS 9, there's no reason that I know of they wouldn't work in Classic.
D
You must have sold it to a retarded blind kid then huh?
Okay, okay...here are some better specs...still trying to build comparable features from Dell:
--1 x 2.2Ghz Pentium 4 (note that I didn't build a dual machine)
--512 MB RAM
--80GB HD
--ATI Fire GL2, 64MB,VGA/DVI
--Basic sound card
--DVD-RW/CD-RW
--Modem (remember, I'm trying to compare)
So, summary: A single proc sys with close as possible specs from Dell is....
$3,778
Bottom line, as a PC-User, I've got something to think about.
Imagine a Beowolf Cluster of THESE!!!
I personally get along fine using the control key for all right-click-equivalent shortcuts in OS X. The rest of the time I enjoy running my fingers over a very simple, nicely finished, slickly designed titanium powerbook track pad with *one* mouse button.
Face it. Apple makes cool shit. Anyone who bitches them out for doing so is 1) too poor to afford one, 2) jealous. Well. sux 2 b u guys >:D
Extraordinary Vacations. Exceptional Prices
Shoot, while you're at it, maybe encourage an OS X version.
I doubt I'll be running it though...the moose grates on my nerves after a few minutes.
At several places right now you can get a new 733 for just under $1300, as well as on Apple's edu website. It's not an $800 Athlon, and it's not a dual 1-Gig, but then you did say bottom end Mac...
That way you can trick it out with all kinds of peripherals and get a CPU upgrade at a later date from Sonnet or one of those guys.
According to Apple's site, the dual 1GHz G4 w/ a GeForce 4 MX gets 115 fps @ 1024*768*32. Are we supposed to be impressed? If you look at the latest set of benchmarks from Tom's Hardware here, you'll see that a GeForce 3 Ti500 on an Athlon 1.2GHz gets 190.1 fps in the same resolution and colour depth. Are we supposed to be impressed by these results? I for one, am not.
My other sig is funny!
This what you get apart from the hardware when you buy the new Power Mac G4:
Ambrosia Software Snapz Pro X
Caffeine Software PixelNhance 1.5
Code Line Communications Art Directors Toolkit for X
Lemke Software GraphicConverter 4.1
Omni Group's OmniGraffle & OmniOutliner
James Thompson PCalc
FileMaker Pro Trial 5.5
Adobe Acrobat Reader 5.0
Earthlink 2.5
Microsoft's Internet Explorer 5.1
Smith Micro FAXstf X Preview
and finally
Apple Developer Tools X
Not bad, eh? FREE dev tools!
i think you were just trolled ;-)
don't take it too hard, it happens to the best of us.
The Win32 API, in contrast, is so poorly designed and useless that applications tend to avoid it, going around the API to do things their own way
What are you smoking? If I were to do, say socket programming, you can sure as hell garauntee that I'll be using Win32 sockets, instead of some third party stack, or even the MFC sockets, because the Win32 apis for sockets is pretty much a berkely sockets implementation. Why would you want to reinvent the wheel? That's why that I don't really like Java too much, because they abstract too much away, and the socket classes are really crappy. Not that I'm pro MS, but C# has much better design than Java in many ways. Especially in regards to its Threading classes, which kicks butt over Java's threading implementation, but that's a different thread... (no pun intended)
Anyways, most apps behave so differently, because the authors are so different. Give two people the same tools, and they will develop different apps. In my experience, I have seen some people write the crappiest code I've ever seen. That's why many people don't like VB programmers, because they usually don't have CS degrees, and don't undertand anything about theory or design or architecture. So usually, they get an app running in short order, but then the "real" engineers end up fixing the problems left behind, becuase their half-a$$ed implementation wasn't designed with flexibility,change,etc in mind. So when a new requirement pops up, or a bug is found, the thing ends up being re-written. That is not to say all VB programmers are this way... I've seen crappy C++ code as well...
If you think the Win32 way of doing things is so crappy, that people need to develop their own ways, then you obviously never did any DirectX coding. Granted, I was an OpenGL guy, but still. The quality of games have skyrocketed since then, because developers can concentrate on the games now, instead of building the primitives.
I have almost the same profile as you, right down to the ST and period of PC's (though some have been running Linux and I've also worked on a lot of other UNIX systems). Though personally I loathed resolving problems in Windows (which was often).
I made the switch late last year and bought a Powerbook G4 after they upgraded to the higher speeds. I'll still use the PC as a Linux server, but even there I'm thinking about replacing it with a G4 tower. OS X has been great and is just the right mixture of UNIX and a powerful GUI.
I mostly use NT at work and have worked on Win2K here and there, but the more I use OS X the more Windows just pisses me off (Win2K worse even than NT with helpful "features" that aren't).
I think my attitude stems from this - Windows trys to do everything it can for you, and makes it very difficult if you decided something else is in fact better. If it doesn't think something is broken, you are going to have a hell of a time fixing it.
A macintosh helps you where it can but STEPS THE HELL OUT OF YOUR WAY when you need it to. Like being able to edit XML files directly to alter app/system behaviour instead of peering through 4000 badly thought out locations in a monolithic registry. I was able to look right in some config files and fix a problem that I was having switching between different external monitors, just the kind of problem that would have initiated a system reinstall on a PC (or simply just living with it for years on end which is more likley).
.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Steve Jobs:
"Taco, I am your father."
Interestingly enough, Apple seems to have extended their rebate plans for the LCD monitors, at least in the Education store. They had been running this since late last year, allowing a rebate if you bought both a G4 and one of Apple's LCD displays. It is a pretty nice deal, knocking off $300 off of a G4+17" LCD, meaning you could get the 17" for under $700.
Most people were expecting the rebates to end shortly before the introduction of the new machines.
In all I am glad to see the speed bumbs, if for no other reason than it will allow me to pick up a refurb 867 mHz pretty cheap.
- (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman
seriously make me want a Mac.
/. : Apple introduces new hardware/software X !
I'll assume Taco doesn't have a mac from this comment...
Why? You see these posts all the time:
Poster: Wow, now that Apple has X I really/finally want one!
Why do people do this?
Do you yap all morning about how you want a cup of hot coffee, and never get one? Then repeat the process tomorrow when there is a fresh pot?
I wanted my Apple (now outdated) and so I invested my $3500k 4-5yrs ago, and it was/is awesome. Now with some of the new stuff they are coming out with I'm PLANNING on getting another... not just talking about it...
If you think Apple's stuff is worthy, buy it.
Just my gripe...
I spend a lot of time in recording studios. I would estimate over 80 percent of them are using protools with macs for their audio needs. Just an observation.
Apple has shipped a full-size keyboard with its PowerMacs and iMacs since MacWorld NY (July 2000.)
One's $500, the other is $3K. Good thinking, jackass.
I'd agree with much of what you said, but I think the Dell representative you spoke with was misinformed.
Our company has been using Dell PCs (Optiplex models) for over 6 years now - and we often bought them with Windows '95/'98 on them, only to immediately wipe the hard drive and install a "Ghost" drive image of a Windows NT 4.0 installation on them instead. That's never once affected our warranty on the hardware.
I can see where Dell might not provide software/OS assistance if you change it from the pre-installed OS, but the warranty on the system itself is still good no matter what you install on it.
THese are indeed awesome machines, but there's even more good things in store - I believe the G5 will be launched at New York '02, about July time, MW Tokyo in March is a little too soon, especially looking at these specs of the new machines.
Still if you want an Apple, the time has NEVER been better.
Better still - if you want a kickass computer the time has never been better to buy Apple.
-Nex
This sig has been deprecated.
Wow, don't get me wrong this machine looks shit hot but from many a dodgily translated german websites I figured that the GeForce 4 needed the new (not built yet?) AGP 8x or PRO to utilise all of its capabilities? Am I wrong? I'm confused now.
In reply to post 61 or there abouts - Imagine a beowolf cluster of these.
Mmmmm, looks better than that pissy desk lamp anyway.
Mod me down, fine with me, it's my real karma I try to keep up.
Speak truth to power.
190 frames a sec? why do you need that when most monitors only refresh half the screen 75-100 times a second?
Just wondering?
I'm curious how a 2cpus @ 1Ghz can achieve 15GFLOPS.
Wouldn't 2 GFLOPS be the theoretical max on a RISC chip??
Anyone know PPC architecture??
Thanks.
-B
I do agree that OS X is a pig, but disagree that it is the underlying design. Something went terribly wrong in the transition from NextStep to OS X.
My Turbo-Color Slab from NeXT (33Mhz 68030 (040?) IIRC with 32MB of RAM) seems just as zippy as my 400Mhz G4 with 1.5GB of RAM.
okay. you're lying. either that or exaggerating. i know this because, believe i am typing this response in OmniWeb 2, running on NeXTSTEP 3.3, running on a TurboColor. it's a good exercise in patience, bringing me back to my old days.
www.nytimes.com, for example, takes about a minute and a half to render. this may have been "zippy" then but no one can say the same now. what is more admirable, i think, is that i can use this as the only head in my room (i have a NetBSD/x86 box, but it's running headless) and i have something that is both beautiful and functional. but not zippy.
I agree - HP tried the same thing a few years ago with me that this Dell rep did with the original poster. No warranty unless the original OS was on the machine. I bitched long enough to get them to clarify that they wouldn't do any tech support for any other OS (fair enough), but they'd still always honor the warranty for any hardware failures.
ABSURDITY, n.: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.
Actually, the proc. speed does not have to be a whole multiple of the cache clock, as demonstrated by the recently discontinued 733 and 867 models (133 MHz memory bus clock) and the current 1 GHz model. They can do fractions of multiplier speeds, and can go all the way to 12X, I believe, with the Motorola MaxBus controller. So this is not a 'quantum upgrade' outside of marketing speak, but rather another incrimental upgrade of 66 - 200 MHz depending on the model.
"I like systems, their application excepted", George Sand (French)
Don't get me wrong, I'm a Mac Lover, I'm writing this on a Mac G3, and I'll buy a G4 (or G5) this summer, but this is really dumb:
Shorter data pipeline The performance advantage of the PowerPC G4 starts with its data pipeline. The term "processor pipeline" refers to the number of processing steps, or stages, it takes to accomplish a task. The fewer the steps, the shorter -- and more efficient -- the pipeline. Thanks to its efficient 7-stage design (versus 20 stages for the Pentium 4 processor) the G4 processor can accomplish a task with 13 fewer steps than the PC. You do the math.
That's really FUD, a longer pipeline is better, the Pentium4 can start 20 instructions before the first one is finished, while the G4 can only do 7. The G4 is faster than the P4 for other reasons.
GFK's
It all depends on what you use them for. If you are doing much multimedia work using tools like Photoshop, or if you are playing state of the art video games, you will quickly appreciate the advantage that you get from higher speed CPUs.
If you are doing multimedia work, the Altivec unit on the G4 makes Megahertz comparisons with x86 irrelevant.
Also wanted to point out that G4 towers start at $1250 for students.
Lies about crimes
Actually you can, not with the current generation Mac (I think) but places like Macresq will sell you the older G4 tower logic boards (i.e. motherboards) and other parts. It's not a very effective use of money though since they are not all that cheap.
It also makes support harder since Apple can no longer be sure what kind of machine you are calling about (or at least if it is put together right). One of hte nice things about Apple owning the whole process is they are on the hook for much more support. They don't get to point their finger at the hardware maker or OS maker because they are both, they frequently don't even get to point their finger at the app maker because they make (or at least brand) a lot of software for their own machines. As a result you can normally actually get them to help which is rather unlike my experiences with Wintel boxes.
Is it a good trade off? I donno, Jobs thinks it is, so there isn't a lot we can do to change it :-)
Even with a GeForce4, there wont be any GPU enabled applications outside of the design type of stuff that currently exists for the Mac..
WHY? Answer is simple.. there are no GPU interfaces that work for the Mac..
Ever wonder why all these neato 3d games come a dime a dozen on PC's? Blame Microsoft for not porting DX to the mac..
Remember, a Geforce4 is useless without a REALLY good GPU interface.
The fab division makes the embedded parts that are their cash cows.
I think I need to change my pants...
My sausage tree didn't grow, does that make me a bad mommy?
What's with the 59 fps on a Dual 800Mhz with a geforce 2 MX?? I can get that kinda speed on my Duron 800 with a Geforce 2 MX...I thought these PowerMacs were supposed to be "Supercomputers"...
A Mac by any other name is still just a Mac.
---- "Excuse me. Where's the children's gun section?"
This is a throwback the old "supercomputer" ads. They were touting the fact that one CPU cycle executed faster than the amount of time it took for the light from the monitor to get to your eyes. STILL a pretty cool factoid...
Yes but will it publish images from your digital camera to the web with one click? I buy computers to accomplish tasks, not run operating systems. Yep, they're using more CPU cycles for the GUI than they used to. So what?
Will Pegasos run Photoshop and MSIE? Will the AmigaOne have onboard FireWire so I can hook up my Camcorder, unplug it, then plug in a CDRW without having to reboot?
750Mhz Pentium III: 1.9Mkey/sec
1.33G AMD: 4.7Mkey/sec
8x250Mhz SunSparc Ultra: 3.2Mkey/sec
2x800Mhz G4: 16.5Mkey/sec
Sorry to say it, but Apple doesn't care about your market (the build-it-yourselfers). They cater to the computer-as-a-device consumers. And if they did move into another market, it would probably be the server-as-a-device market and never you, because you can't give them the margins they want.
Lies about crimes
The only trick now is convincing the boss that getting this machine would benefit the company (as well as adding 12kkeys/sec to your RC5 score) ;-)
I'll take counter-strike.
15 gigaflops is overkill for me anyway.
Not to mention the one-button mouse *Cringe*
From the Apple website (emphasis mine):
Behind the PowerPC G4's phenomenal performance is its aptly named Velocity Engine. The Velocity Engine processes data in huge 128-bit chunks, instead of the smaller 32-bit or 64-bit chunks used in traditional processors (it's the 128-bit vector processing technology used in scientific supercomputers -- except that we've added 162 new instructions to speed up computations). In addition, the PowerPC G4 can perform four (in some cases eight) 32-bit floating-point calculations in a single cycle -- two to four times faster than processors found in PCs.
Uhhhhh, guys - does this still qualify as a RISC microprocessor? I guess it depends if we're talking microcode or machine instructions...
You tell me. Readers?
I'm a 2000 man.
You stick that card on your supercomputer and you put yourself up crap creek. Heh. You just might get better scores than that if you ran a software GL driver. ;)
/ Per
Ding ding ding---we have a winner! My 24x Plextor CDRW averages 31.5x (rated at 40x).
Could someone tell me how it is "Flamebait" to compare the price of a computer being discussed to an alternative system?
Or does "flamebait" mean that the moderator simply disagrees with the opinion expressed?
I'm guessing cost versus performance here. It's been shown in tests such as running actual application-like benchmarks rather than theoretical tests, that a low memory fetch latency is more important to memory performance than max burst transfer rate. That's why RDRAM suffers in many cases, since it still runs at a latency compared to 100MHz SDRAM. Most applications just favor short-latency fetches to high-speed large-block transfers in order to run the best. But it is odd. There's no real latency difference between PC133 and DDR2100, and there IS a difference in sustained transfer rate, so I suppose they just didn't think the sustained transfer rate increase was worth the extra cost (as well as design time).
/ Per
It is also my opinion that the best applications for sound recording (please read audio, not MIDI sequncing, not waveform generation ala Max/MSP,) but straight recording are available only for the PC
Um.... Pro Tools? Pretty much considered the industry standard for digital audio workstations?
And if you want, Cubasis, Digital Performer, PEAK's apps, and a whole host of others. To be fair, I've never used Sequoia or Samplitude. But there are plenty of quite serviceable audio recording solutions for the Mac.
Libertarianism is rich wolves and poor sheep playing gambler's ruin for dinner.
The new Apples are unquestionably good deals.
The problem is, it's pretty much impossible to compare them on any reasonable level to PCs.
1. In order to get dual processors from a mainstream PC maker, you have to get a workstation-class machine, which just plain cost far more than pretty-much equivalent non-workstations. Pentium 4 Xeons, for example, are pretty much identical to Pentium 4 - they don't even have more cache or anything.
2. At this point, it's pretty much impossible to compare performance. Macs can kick ass for specific tasks that are optimized for them; however, they're bottlenecked for others. I read a comparison of 500MHz machines (ie. same clock speed Pentium II and G3 or G4) several years ago that found them equivalent. It totally depends on what you intent to with them - especially since many apps aren't optimized for Macs. (For instance, compare Mac Quake III framerates to PCs; PCs are much higher, even with the "GeForce 4 MX", whatever that turns out to be.)
Conclusion? You can't just pick a horse for any situation. If you're a gamer, you're going to be happier with a PC, probably. If you do Photoshop stuff and DTP, you're going to be happier with a Mac, probably (although I'd like to compare overall photoshop performace, not limited to Apple's selected benchmarks). For Unix server functions, I'm not sure what the relative performances are comparing i386/Linux with OS/X or PPC/Linux - I'm sure someone will come up with tests. Etc, etc.
But the systems are just *so* different that straight comparisons are pretty hard. I mean, look at all the contraversy surrounding Athlon XP and Pentium 4 benchmarks, and they run the exact same stuff...
Uh-oh...
:-)
Do you really mean that you think a "pipeline" of length X means that the computer performs one instruction and then waits for X cycles?
In that case it would be absolutely pointless to ever have a pipleline with X>1. Why is Apple using X=7, then?
The reason is of course that by increasing the pipeline you can get a higher frequency while a good compiler will still be able to "hide" the latency to a good extent. The last 20 years in the industry has been revolved about instruction scheduling and out-of-order executing...
Is X=20 too much? Well, that depends on the speed increase you can get from it, but in many cases the P4 really shines.
You can of course claim that X=7 is the god-given universal constant known to be perfect.... Although a year or two ago Mac users used to claim that X=5 was perfect (before Motorola increased it).
So, your argument is essentially "If Apple/Motorola are increasing the pipeline it is a good thing (TM), but if anyone else does it it's cheating."
Get a life...
I'm a game dev. I'll get a Mac whenever I feel like shooting myself in a foot. I'm also a gamer, so I suppose that'd mean both feet.
But heck those specs are sexy.
/ Per
...as in Bill Machrone of PC Magazine and other fine Ziff-Davis publications. And I believe that he did update it a few years back to $3000US.
And, no, it wasn't just for the CPU box, or CPU box plus monitor, but for the entire setup: scanner, speakers (with sub-woofer), steering wheel joystick, every little gimcrack item that you might hook up to your PC to make your PC experience more enjoyable (except software). So those of you bragging on how you didn't have to break the $4.95US barrier on your system: how much did you really spend?
PowerMac Have 64bit PCI and Gigabit ethernet. IS there any cheap PC have the same?
It's possible but not likely. I remember in the summer of 2000, hearing on NPR that scientists at NEC had shot a laser beam through some sort of gas at (I believe) 401 times the speed of light, proving that EM waves do travel at variable speeds, and thusly the variable c in Einstein's equation was misidentified, although it was the best that he could do with the knowledge available at the time. However, I doubt that you can shoot DC pulses of electrons down copper at speeds even approaching light.
Karma: Ran over your dogma.
Exactly. I'm having a really hard time restraining myself from picking up a 733 with the educational discount. My current Mac is over 5 years old now and it's just now getting to be time to upgrade (contrast that with my various PCs, which have been upgraded once every year or two). This looks like about the best deal that's come out of Apple for quite some time now - I'm just wondering if I should wait for the G5s to come out. Will the 933 or 1000 get bumped down to this price range then? Darn money and cool hardware, always burning a hole in my pocket! ;-)
Say hello to zMac.
I guess the Athlon is not "competitive silicon" either... I mean they trail Intel like what, 300-500Mhz? They must be much slower than the P4, right? No? Well lay off the G4.
nVidia only makes the Geforce3 and Geforce2MX for the Apple. Check out their products page. The dude probably got confused between G4 and Geforce. There's probably a Geforce2 in that thing. And everybody knows that the Geforce2MX are pretty shit. And 1.1 billion textured pixels, as Apple claims in their add, is about par for the Geforce2MX.
I don't have hard proof, you just have to look at the specs and do some deductive reasoning. But, and I had this confirmed by a tech at one of the apple stores, the super drive actualy has the ability to rewrite DVDs at 1x. The reason apple does not promote this fact is because their software does not yet support it, but you should be able to work it with toast.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
That Moore postulated that performance would double every 18 months is a myth perpetuated ad infinitum by the clueless newsmedia. And certainly no one is claiming that clock frequency adheres to that law; as Intel has proven with the P4 it's rather easy to shamelessly inflate your MHz for marketing purposes without providing much of a performance boost at all.
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
Anyone know PPC architecture??
From: http://www.apple.com/powermac/processor.html
"In addition, the PowerPC G4 can perform four (in some cases eight) 32-bit floating-point calculations in a single cycle -- two to four times faster than processors found in PCs."
2,000*8=16,000Flops. They probably left one off to allow for a more real-world figure and account for processes that don't do much multithreading.
Doing complex calculations, I can easily get 2.6 GFlops out of my 466MHz G4, so I would expect to get at least 10 or 12 GFlops out of one of these in real world calculations.
"Reality is just a convenient measure of complexity" -Alvy Ray Smith
I see a lot of price comparisons going on here, and while that's all well and good, people are tending to glaze over a few important facts.
.. $999.00
..$999.00
...$7995.00
... $3995.00
1- These are workstation class machines (as far as Macs go). 2mb L3 cache per proc, 64-bit pci, 1000/100/10 NICs, superdrive, etc. Apple knows its target audience and delivers what they need.
2- Once you're up in this price range, the price is usually moot for the buyer. The people buying these machines will drop 10k for one box (for CPU, software, monitor, etc) and don't bat an eye. I mean, do you think the average consumer would shell out 600+ bucks JUST for Photoshop if they had no viable means for a Return on Investment? That's what a Mac is to the people who buy their high end machines - a way to get work done NOW. Any downtime means they don't get their RoI, and that's why these people don't usually build their own boxen, and why they will pay a premium for a Mac.
3- To respond to a few earlier posts.
--Macs are the deFacto standard for professional audio, and will only become more so. Id say 80% + market share for this. I've been to many recording studios, and without fail, they have a Mac or 2 hooked up.
--64bit pci.. Well, there are only a few kinds of cards you'll find in the average Mac. High end video, ultra160 SCSI, high end audio and special purpose accelerators (encoding, graphics effects, etc). All of these are high bandwidth tasks.
Yes, you COULD build a PC that has faster specs for less. But you'd be missing the point. Computers are tools. If you're making money with your computer, and you're in one of the businesses where Apple products excel, you're shooting yourself in the foot to go with anything else. And I imagine with OSX, that the sector where Apple products excel will only be getting bigger.
Here's a Pro Mac purchase for Graphic Design / ProSumer Video/ audio. Feel free to make up a comparable PC.
Right from the apple store... I know I could save money buying HD and ram elsewhere, but I am shooting for convenience. Make sure PC has - sound card, 64bit pci, firewire, case, motherboard, dual head support, and an OS (that has all the comparable apps)
(1 GHz PPC G4) x 2
1.5 GB dram
22" cinema display
iPod
SuperDrive
GeForce4 MX
56k modem
10/100/1000 NIC
keyboard/optical mouse
AirPort card
OSX.1
Dual channel ultra160 card
(72 GB ultra160 HD) x 2
AppleCare plan (3yr hardware replacement)
TOTAL............. $8,845.00
Now, the software....this is usually full retail, not going to look for deals.(mostly right from apple store)
DVD Studio Pro
FinalCut Pro3
MS Office..$459.95
FileMaker Pro...$249.00
AfterEffects Pro..$1499.95
Illustrator...$399.00
InDesign...$699.95
Photoshop...$649.95
GoLive...$399.95
BBEdit...$119.95
Flash5...$399.95
That's enough to do most tasks......not going to look for pro audio equip or a pro video capture card (add about $3-6k for that at least)
TOTAL.........$6875.65
Time for the pro Audio and video cards
ProTools HD 1
Protools 192 IO
Can't think of a video card Mfg ATM, ill go with
Media100 for ~ 4,000
Add in some accessories
Graphics tablet..$400
Speakers...$600 (reference monitors)
17" studio display...$999 (definitely need a second display)
TOTAL....... $17,989
I'm sure im missing a few things, and this hasn't even included the supporting equipment that I would need (cameras, sound recording equip, scanners, etc, etc.)
So, for pretty much what you would have stuck inside the box, or hanging directly off of it, you have a grand total of..........
GRAND TOTAL......$33709.65
Can most people personally afford 7k+ for software alone? No. So now you see the market Macs are often used in, and the money generally tied in to them, and why people choose Macs to get work done. Fast. Efficiently. It has to be easy; it has to work, because they need to make back such a huge amount of money.
"Stuff... In my home!? NEVER!" - Zim on Invader Zim
"I want the toilet seat!" - Little Dog on Two Stupid Dogs
Motorola is dragging its ass wrt the PowerPC at the moment, in part because it sells far more embedded PPCs than PPCs designed to be put in Apple computers, and in part because it's currently going through some very bad times economically, laying off a lot of the staff that would have otherwise have been churning out vital chips like the G5s.
Keep in mind that IBM is another manufacturer of PPCs, and although Motorola has been sitting on its duff recently in advancing the PPC platform, IBM hasn't. AFAIK, Apple is currently locked in a contract with Motorola that prohibits them from obtaining their chips from IBM, but I know this is not indefinite and I'm not sure when the contract expires. If/when Apple starts using IBM's superior PPCs, their computers' speed lag, whether real or perceived or mythical, is sure to diminish.
It's not that Apple doesn't want to put higher-clocked and superior chips in their machines.
When are you people going to realize that Intel and AMD are still turning out the age-old technology from the early 1970's because it makes them a ton of money. They make crap chips that burn hotter than the sun because they are so painfully inefficent; but they make money by reselling the design w/little to no r&d. They just keep upclocking the same damn design with minor modifications so people can keep buying the same chip over and over. The pure effciency and design, even art, of the G4 make it a powerful chip that produces minimal heat output, has a long lifespan, and tackle tasks faster and lower clock speeds. Go ahead, pop open a Cisco router, you sure as hell won't find an Intel or AMD processor, but you'd better believe your going to find MPC74xx and MPC85xx (G4 and unoffically "G5") chips under the hood. Clean, fast, efficent. This is why my now year old Dual G4 533mhz will still slap the crap out of any P4 (or athlon) system you can compare it to under real world stresses and workloads, even if not these phony, x86-biased architecture benchmarks.
FPS for graphics cards today is worse than MHz for CPUs as far as being a sane measurement of power goes.
Someone set us up the bomb, so shine we are!
That's not true....
You are not placed in a worse condition by having a pipeline with a mis-predict, than no pipeline at all... You don't lose performance because you have to flush instructions... After all how can you lose something you never had? The instruction didn't complete yet, so you are not losing squat. You lose "potential" performance, but not actual performance. so in the end, a branch mispredict may slow you down, but only compared to what could've happened. It is still faster than having no pipeline, or shorter pipeline.
Besides, if shorter pipelines are better, then why not implement the shortest pipeline possible... ie, no pipeline....
While you ponder that, you should go enroll in an architecture class....
the new fab'd processors use server-chip technology, as described in this cnet article:
http://news.com.com/2100-1040-824621.html
they say (in short) that it uses silicon insulating to help prevent "silicon drift" even more, so less power is used. what was immediatly brought to my attention was that this new fabrication uses only 10 watts, 15 watts @ peak power consumption. I have a lava lamp w/a 40 watt light bulb....i'm curious, does a 15 watt processor (using 100% of it's computing power, all the time), produce as much heat as a 15 watt light bulb?
moox. for a new generation.
You talk like you dont like misconception BUT! Program has no toes!! NO TOES on PROGRAM!!! Program not physical thing, so can't have toes to step on. Now you see *YOU* have misconception. That mean dual proc machine is *only* for multi-threaded machine! We must think first, huh?!
The graph here shows the dual GHz G4 with GeForce4 MX scoring 115fps at 1024x768 on Quake 3. How on earth did they get such dreadful performance?? The first benchmark I turned up on AnandTech has a 1.2GHz Athlon (way, way behind current top of the line) with a GeForce3 (not even a GeForce3 Ti) pulling 168fps. Could this be related to djohnsto's comment about the parlous state of Apple's OpenGL implementation?
What the hell is a Geforce4 MX? They havent even announced its existence on the NVidia site.
1- Pentiun4 is crippled: http://www.emulators.com/pentium4.htms /polywell_133f.htm l
2-Single Athlon 1.3Ghz smokes dual P4Xeons 1.7Ghz http://www.animationartist.com/2001/08_aug/review
3- G5: 'Motorola has announced two G5 processors, but both are aimed squarely at embedded applications and are unsuitable for desktop Macs - or portables, for that matter.'and that 'the company is pursuing a two-strand strategy: G5 becomes the company's high-end embedded family, while an evolving G4 continues to be targeted at desktop customers.'
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/39/23192.htm
Apple should compare PC's with Macs by taking the best of Macs (Dual 1Ghz G4) with the best of PC's (Dual 1.6Ghz AthlonMP)
I'm sorry to say this but Apple is misleading the whole world by comparing a Dual 1Ghz G4 with a single crippled 2Ghz P4, I wish they go bankrupt for this. >:(
tada!
"Reality is just a convenient measure of complexity" -Alvy Ray Smith
I saw a couple listings the other day on Dice for Mac driver QA testers. NVidia seems to be increasing their support for the Mac. ATI is rumored to be stepping up support for older Mac's with ATI chips and their announcement of Mac Radeon 7500 and 8500 cards is encouraging.
That's fast. I just love the details behind the facts: Pentiums suck, I'll take 1 G4 over a P4 at ANY speed. Anyway, enough trolling, if you click on the processors link [apple.com] in the article, apple gives a pretty nice overview of why their dual processor G4's are really, really nice.
;)
;)
You actually admit to buying into Apple.com rants?
Pentium 3s and Pentium 4s can both perform four 32-bit floating point operations in a single cycle via SSE/SSE2, like the G4 does theirs with Altivec. What's more, the Pentium 4 can ALSO do 2 64-bit floating point operations per cycle, while the G4 can't. Pentium 4s can do double-precision SIMD, Altivec cannot, to put pt bluntly. The '8' figure for 32-bit fp calculations comes from having dual processors. Maybe Intel should start advertising the Pentium 3s as doing up to 128 fp ops per second, because you can get ones that work in groups of 32 CPUs?
It really bugs me how Apple makes blanket statements like that, comparing Altivec on the G4 to non-SSE/SSE2 Pentium systems, then claiming it's an advantage. It's blatantly false advertising, why hasn't anyone busted them?
The G4 isn't fast at all compared to the modern PC processors, honestly. The G5 may indeed turn the table...but the G4 can't keep ramping up like the P4/Athlon have.
My favorite part on their site is the Quake 3 Benchmarks. A Dual 1GHz G4 system with a GeForce 4 MX gets 115fps in 1024x768. Compare that to PC performance: A 2.0GHz P4 (one CPU, and this isn't even a Northwood) gets 127.3 fps with a GeForce 2 Pro, and 233.7 fps with a GeForce 3 Ti500.
That's pretty pathetic, given how much you're paying for it. I guess most Mac users aren't gamers anyway, but it's still fascinating when the Mac users brag their systems are faster these days.
if Apple wasn't so anti-competitive there would be lots of nice cheap apples floating around
Anti-compeitive?
They make their own software for their own hardware so they're anti-competive? They have to compete with each and every computer maker in the industry. You aren't forced to buy a Mac. In fact, if anything, most people are forced to buy a Windows machine.
Apple brings in 30% gross margins on average on hardware sales, but it's not like they just toss all of the money in a big pile. Apple reported a fiscal Q1 revenue of $1.38 billion. Do you know how much was profit? $38 million.
See, Apple actually creates and maintains products. They give away things like iDVD, iMovie, iPhoto and iTunes for free with every machine they sell. They also give every Mac owner free email, free web space -- all without ads.
A company like Dell doesn't really compete by coming up with new products per say. They take the newest intel processor and the newest rev of Windows, stick it in a box, and sell it to you on a razor thin margin. They compete primarily on the sale, secondarily on the product.
This is great if all you care about is a cheap PC that does the same stuff your old one did, but faster. Unfortunately, this thinking has contributed to a huge downturn in the PC industry. At some point, PC makers decided cheap and fast was all that mattered. Somebody forgot about inventiveness and experience. Cheap and fast is good in some situations, but you cannot rely on that entirely. You have to move forward on fronts besides clock rate.
So the fact that you pay more for a Mac means Apple can afford to create things like Mac OS X, iTools, iDVD, iPhoto, etc. It also contributes to the support of things like Darwin. Thank goodness they're doing this kind of stuff, because few others are.
- Scott
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
If anything, your test proves just this: PS7 has been rewritten to take advantage of dual CPU's, where PS6 is not. OS X has nothing to do with it other than perhaps providing a more (or less?) efficient environment for the app to work in.
But getting back to the original point, general usage will benefit from OS X's MP agility because one can give iDVD one processor to encode its data while the other processor is used for email, iTunes, web browser, etc.
Some people compile large projects with one processor, and use the others to play a game.
- Scott
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
Mac threads themselves are Flamebait. Most comments are ill founded, and no one who posts seems to see both sides of the coin anyhow.
Yes, I've had PC's in the past and I've had numerous harware problems with them. Yes, I've had macs in the past and have never had a hardware issue. Yes I think that the PC's were a better deal, since I saved 50 percent or more up front. Yes having a computer that lasts forever is pointless because it'll be obsolete anyhow in a year.
Even this posting will get replied to by one of the 300 people worldwide who have had hardware issues with Apple computers. And by the jerk off that tries to tell me that I don't know how to use a computer. And by the 13 year old who TyPeS EvEryThIng LiKe ThiS and says "pC'z ROXX" or some other nonsense.
This open forum shit is fine and all, but goddamn, would some people have the decency to at least know something about what they're saying?
If you're a mac person, it's a cool deal. If you're a PC person, then it's not. Big deal... why is there even a thread on the topic?
It's sad knowing full well that not everyone using a PC is a moron, but 99 percent of those posting on their behalf are. Same goes to the mac folks. But at least Apple tries to target imbeciles, so moronic pro-mac posts should be expected.
Some of this is just absurd, and nearly all of it is laughable.
Smaller supply of used macs, smaller target audience. Without more data here, there is absolutely no reason to believe that any supply and demand difference would exist.
I may just copy and paste this every time some moron touts the G4. Not that I have anything against apple, but facts are facts.
try iTunes and tell me that. i have never used a better program for managing and playing a huge playlist with custom views and playlists and when you plug in your iPod, it pops up with your playlists inside it listed in a clean hierarchy. it's truly sweet. Final Cut Pro is a great app as well. iPhoto is nice, albeit slow.
On Apple.com where they talk about the cache memory, they say that the L3 cache run at 4 GB per second. I don't know if there is anything to do with Hyper-Transport they licenced from AMD?
Try Connectix' Virtual PC 5! You can run AS MANY OS's AS YOU WISH! You're only limited by how much RAM you've got on the box, and since these things max out at 1.5 GB, you can run just about anything. So, your Mac can, at once, run OSX, your favorite flavor of LINUX, WinXP, Win2000, heck, Win 3.1 if you're feeling perverse, all at once. That's the genius of these machines and OSX.
i have a g4 450 dual powermac. i bought it for school in the summer of 2000. while i should be drooling over these new boxen, i'm not. why? because the box i have now can already edit movies in realtime with final cut pro 3. this is on a two-year old computer. hell, even the SINGLE cpu tibooks can do this.
am i the only one who thinks *that* is very cool?
Not just the content creators but the content viewers as well. I know alot of places buy iMacs specifically because it is very very very simple to administer them and with OS9/10 it is pretty foolproof to keep them up and running. You can set up a lab of fifty Macs and VERY easily keep them up and running without needing some form of certification to do so. Even if you're only buying a single Mac for your home it is still pretty damn easy to keep it up and running. Installing software is rarely harder than dragging an icon from a mounted disk to your Applications folder. I'd also say Apple's support services are the best in the industry (for consumer systems at least). It is rare to hear of complaints about their support services. Shit sometimes AppleCare contracts sell for more money than the machines they're attached to sell for.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
YAWN. Both of the cores took on enough characteristics of CISC and RISC that the distinctions vanished a long time ago and I these simplistic labels are rarely used anymore. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
Unless this has changed recently, Apple DOES get PPCs from IBM, just not the G4s (which are very similar to the G3 with the exception of Altivec). The faster G3s in the CRT iMacs were from IBM.
One of the biggest reasons Jobs was so pissed at Motorola was that the iMacs were at one time about to be running faster (Mhz-wise) than the flagship G4s in the Pro line. No good for marketing, of course. The problem is that IBM won't (or maybe legally can't) embrace Altivec. Believe me, if IBM would make a G4, Jobs would drop Motorola so fast it would happen before he did it.
There is a thin line between genius and insanity. I have erased that line. -- Oscar Levant
I was trying to score an old-gen iBook for a boy from a low-income family. I could have sucked it up and bought a new one for $1100, or an old one for... $1100. WTF is up with that?
My main problem was: $1100 computer + 5 exuberant young boys (the boy + all his brothers) + 24 hours = $1100 piece of broken equipment.
I ended up assembling a PC out of scrap parts just because everyone seems to have pieces of old PCs that they'd love to dump on anyone who will haul them away.
LOL Guess that shows the difference in how people feel about their Macs vs. how people feel about PCs.
Clear, Dark Skies
You should get into quantum mechanics.. Then you'd know speeds above the speed of light are possible.. but rare.. :-)
Only Macs cost $3000. A high-powered PC is $2000, so there!
Oh, and the article on Slashdot reminded me of this.
Zodiac Survey
c is not misidentified. c is the speed of light in vacuum. It can and does vary in gas/liquid/solids.
$HOME is where the
-- silver_p
One of the nifty features being pushed by Apple right now is real-time fades, wipes, and transitions, all done _in software_. $2-3K gets you this capability, without requiring an additional hardware support. So you may pay more for the box, but you don't have to add an expensive RT card.
Can this be done with an x86 box of comparable price? (This is not a troll; it's a legitimate question).
Never refuse a breath mint.
Damn I wish it worked on Linux.
Let me first say I too believe the PowerPC is a better design than the P4. My issue is with Apple (once again), as they will have to change some of their propaganda once the G5 comes out.
(quote from processors link):
The performance advantage of the PowerPC G4 starts with its data pipeline. The term "processor pipeline" refers to the number of processing steps, or stages, it takes to accomplish a task. The fewer the steps, the shorter -- and more efficient -- the pipeline. Thanks to its efficient 7-stage design (versus 20 stages for the Pentium 4 processor) the G4 processor can accomplish a task with 13 fewer steps than the PC. You do the math.
Um, doesn't the G5 have a 10 stage pipeline?
I would take Apple more seriously if they didn't keep posting BS like this (it's as bad as the 'mhz myth', or Intel saying the PIII makes the internet go faster). Watch this page dissapear when the G5 comes out. As a matter of fact, I'd be willing to bet they completely contradict themselves and say how the G5's 10 stage pipeline gives it a speed advantage over the G4. Any takers?
The "tiny key" syndrome was introduced when they started using this layout with the introduction of the B&W G3 and the iMac.
For comparison here's the current layout, which they are shipping with the current model G4 towers and the flat-panel iMac.
Very true.
And that again is the same reason those content creators will go out and buy the dual G4 system instead of a dual athlon system. They will probably bump down the 500mp or 800mp system to the next highest person in their 10 person firm, and take the 1,000mp system for themselves. Or possibly by an lab a new set of them. Because they are tools, and they get their work done faster, even better. Or to summarize, the audience is "not us" or "us" when we want to get the fastest machines on the earth for under a grand, built from spare parts and duct tape. Because the times when I start seeing people to do amazing things with computers (creating some of the coolest short movies / documentaries) they really don't get envious over specs. They get envious when they sit down in front of the machine and realize that they can spend more timing doing things, less time waiting for the machine to catch up with them. Hence real time video effects on a powerbook G4.
The NBC crew in Afganistan kept a Powerbook as part of their equipment because they could do in field editing of footage shot with the Sony VX2000 they were carrying. More interesting than that (which I find damn cool) is a lot of editing was done with iMovie. I think it is an NBC policy now that PBs are given to crews using DV cameras. How many companies offer a full video editing suite that can run off of a battery?
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Depends on the size of the battery.
I'm in the exact same boat... 5 yr old Power Computing clone, upgraded to 256MB, second HD, 400 MHz G3 upgrade, but one day I will boot it and it will not start--and while I can play Quake III semi-adequately and UT decently, I would really really like a better machine.
Pity the graphics options on the new beasts are worse for gamers--and you can't buy a GeForce 3 apart from Apple. Sigh.
BTW, were you aware that you're a total jerk? Probably not.
Except that only covers multi-threading apps specifically written for OS X. Older apps -- well, I don't know MacOS well enough to have an opinion, but I'm skeptical.
There's also the issue of threading models. I seem to recall that Sun's Java VM has something called "green threads." In effect you have multithreading, but your runtime does it on its own, without bothering the OS. Such a threading model is limited to one processor, even on OSs that support cross-processor multi-threading. The tradeoff is a higher degree of compatibility and portability.