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New Power Mac G4s Announced
benh57 writes "Apple today announced the new Power Mac G4 towers with new faces, running at dual-867MHz (US$1,699), dual-1GHz ($2,499), and dual-1.25GHz ($3,299). All are running DDR, the two higher end models at 166MHz FSB with Radeon 9000, the low end at 133 w/GF4MX." Check it out at The Apple Store, and keep your eyes peeled for an appearance on the Power Mac G4 site.
Thats front page news - apple becomes the first PC maker to go totaly to dual processor in it's pro desktops.
The other shoe that dropped today was that they've now gone full-tilt with the eMac, adding a Superdrive and running it at 800 MHz for the same price ($1499) as the 15" Combo drive iMac.
Meaning that unless you really like the cool look of the iMac, you can save a couple of hundred dollars by getting an eMac instead, without giving anything else up (I believe they're based on the same motherboard spec) besides the cool screen. And the eMac has a pretty decent screen.
I've been leaning towards getting an iMac in the fall to replace my wife's old iMac DV 450 (we could use the DVD burner to make movies of the baby), but assuming no other drastic changes I'd be inclined to go with the eMac now instead. And Apple is steadily returning the CRT to it's place as the lower-end anchor even though LCD prices are starting to drop again (they also reduced the prices of all the other iMac configs). That's interesting.
Basically, I'm going to be watching the early fall with great interest - once these new configs are well-established there'll probably be some speedbumping of the whole line around October or so. My guess is that the iMac and eMac could hit 1 GHz, the PowerMac towers will start at 1 GHz and go to either 1.4 or maybe as high as 1.6 (Moto is supposedly sampling the 1.6 part now), and the PowerBook will probably get a speedbump to, say, 933 MHz at that point, too. They may not all be at once, but those are the next logical steps, and I'd expect to see them all before years' end (and before Christmas season, in particular).
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
Why would you NEED a Zip drive as a built-in option when you can burn a CD that holds over 6 times as much?
You can still buy a USB or FireWire Zip drive and connect it externally, but now Apple doesn't dedicate a place in the case that is a waste of space for anything other than a Zip drive.
Vos teneo officium eram periculosus ut vos recipero is.
It's very likely that apple are pumping out dual g4 systems to simply get rid of the remaining g4 chips...
No, I don't think so. I think they're moving entirely to multiple processors in the towers for two reasons. First, they're more clearly distinguishing between the iMac and the tower. Yesterday, a low-end G4 seriously overlapped the top-of-the-line iMac. Today, the line is clearer.
The other thing is that Apple's proud of the degree to which Jaguar is threaded at low levels of the OS. Dual-processor machines really will be faster, even for just basic surfing and email and whatnot, than otherwise equivalent single-processor machines.
Incidentally, was anybody else slightly surprised that Apple didn't just double the whole product line, introducing "small" and "medium" dual-proc machines and a "large" quad-processor system at the $4,000 price point?
(Not to mention the fact that when Apple quotes gigaflop figures they are talking about all-in-registers zero-pipeline-stall vectorized operation, not actually doing anything useful -- like reading from memory.)
Um. I'm no expert, but to me that sounds like any cache-resident vector function, like a 5x5 convolve or something. You take a small performance hit when you have to load the next cache line, but if you're lucky your pipeline is deep enough to keep the processor units going while that fetch happens.
I mean, how else are they supposed to quote processor performance if it's not this way? If you want them to talk about performance of the whole system, taking things like memory and busses into account, they're going to have to pick a real-world application to test with. They do that already, using Photoshop as their benchmark the same way the graphics board companies are using Quake as theirs. Apple's test shows the dual 1.2 GHz machine to be about 90% faster (or almost twice as fast) as a single-processor 2.5 GHz P4. And yet Apple still gets hell for using Photoshop as their metric.
Seems like you can never satisfy everybody.