Slashdot Mirror
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.
This is an excellent move for Apple. Solid UNIX high-end workstations making use of multiple processors, as a robust, pre-emptive multitasking system should. Let's hope Apple finds some what to make the public aware of this singificant spec of their tower machines.
Sadly...my dual G4 800 may be getting grey hair...
blakespot
-- Heisenberg may have slept here.
iPod Hacks.com
As an FYI:
These machines do have DDR memory and a DDR system bus but the G4's themselves are running at 133 or 167MHz (depending upon model). The system controller and memory are running full tilt though (266 or 333 depending).
blakespot
-- Heisenberg may have slept here.
iPod Hacks.com
I just bought a new Power Mac G4 (933). Yesterday!!! 12 f*cking hours ago!!!
Noooooooooooo!!!!
This space intentionally left blank.
I never knew that I could be sexually attracted to a computer!
they do sorta show it in the VR of the innards.....
2 002_480.html
http://www.apple.com/hardware/gallery/pmg4_august
yes it is huge, and notice the holes in front of case venting through to the back plate that is all speed holes. i wonder if it is these dual processors that are that hot, or if Apple is just planning for the future speed bumps? also, look in the open case... there is a fan right about in the middle of the case blowing right across (or sucking air over) the heatsinks. they moved the hard drives out of the air path and use an Xserve-like (or the actual Xserve) low profile power supply strapped up to the inside top of the case. interesting layout changes inside.
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?
It's all about the software though. 10.1 is superb - 10.2 is alleged to be a big improvement.
Who cares how fast your G4 is clocked? It won't run OS X.
Uh... is there some joke in here that I haven't gotten?
Incidentally, 10.2 is a big improvement. I've been running 6C106 (the release was 6C115) for about 10 days now. It's heaven, really peppy even on 400-500 MHz G3 systems.
(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.
The lack of Zip isn't the end of the world for me by any means, I'll just need to get an external Zip so that my workflow won't change.
I suppose in the grand scheme, Zip is going the way of the floppy anyway, at least in Apple's view, and if these machines are the speed demons I expect them to be I can certainly forgive Apple for making my Zip external :)
My favourite thing here is that while they have nudged the top end up about 20% in speed, the bottom and mid-range towers have gotten a massive boost.
The Achilles heel in all this is backup, especially for Mac OS X Server. Every other version of UNIX out there has a built-in backup solution (except, unaccountably, Linux, which has no dump/restore, last I checked). Mac OS X has dump/restore too, but they only understand the UFS file system. Apple rewrote 'fsck' to understand about HFS+ file systems, but not dump/restore.
That leaves Retrospect as the only sensible solution for backup: a third party product. And the regular Retrospect Mac OS X client won't dump a Mac OS X Server system! Instead you have to spend $800 (!!!) for the Server backup software. That software will also dump Windows 2000 and NT workstations, whoop-de-do.
Whatever happened to UNIX as a self-hosting, self-supporting system? Gaaaah. I'm thinking hard about wiping our Mac OS X Server machine and just installing the regular Mac OS X, where at least we can afford the backup software.
Or maybe just dumping Macs entirely and going to FreeBSD on a dual-processor Xeon box. All hail Amanda! At least I could back up a box like that.
About a year ago we had dual 800 MHz systems with 100MHz FSB, PC133 RAM (133 MHz), 2MB of L3 via a 200 MHz bus and single channel ATA/66. Just over one year later we have 1250 MHz systems with 166 MHz FSB, PC2700 RAM (166 MHz double pumped or 333 MHz data rate), 2MB of L3 via a 294 MHz[1] bus double pumped, and dual channel ATA (one ATA/100 and the other ATA/66).
So in a year...
1.56x increase in CPU clock speed (ignoring other CPU enhancements).
2.5x increase in RAM throughput.
1.66x increase in FSB throughput.
2.94x increase in L3 throughput (possibly only 2.5x).
over a doubling in internal disk storage support (not counting SCSI options).
Looking over things on the Intel/AMD side...
AMD had about a year ago 1.53GHz chips (1800+ Athlon XP) today 1.8Ghz (2200+ Athlon XP) (FSB speeds did not changed). Intel had about a year ago 2Ghz P4s with FSB of 266MHz (133Mhz dual pumped) and today 2.53GHz P4s with FSB of 533MHz (133MHz quad pumped, AFAIK).
So in a year...
AMD...
1.18x increase in CPU clock speed.
no change in FSB (from what I see).
Intel...
1.27x increase in CPU clock speed.
2.01x increase in FSB throughput.
AMD/Intel system have been using PC2100 for a while and are now starting to use PC2700 (some are starting to use DDR400 and/or going dual channel to RAM). This is side stepping the issue of RDRAM.
Again just as a frame of reference...
[1] Apple's current specs don't add up fully on this, one states that it stops at 500MHz DDR but the throughput numbers lead me to believe it is running faster then 500MHz DDR for the top end system.
p.s. I am doing the above math with a fever of 102+ so I may have messed up someplace... just don't tell the pink elephant sitting next me.
Don't you know anything?!?!? Blue motherboards are faster! ;)
-- if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic - Lewis Carrol
Did you just make this up or something?? Nowhere on Apple's page does it say it has more than one speaker. And it does say it has a "Built-in speaker"
They are air vents. It has ONE speaker. Same HK speaker as the Quicksilver, but near the top now. Why in hell would it have 5 speakers anyway? Mono at that!
-- if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic - Lewis Carrol
But what the $&#*@ is up with that case??
The case is a continuation of an award-winning design, that has proven very popular. It maintains the carry handles (believe me, if you've ever dropped a computer, you appreciate the handles), and the ability to open the case easily.
Speaking as one who had to dismantle and reassemble PC's on a daily basis in my misspent youth, I'd be pretty annoyed if Apple had changed the "put most of the guts on the door" design.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
What were you hoping for? An iMac-style dome?
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.