Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

New Power Macs Have Crippled DDR Memory?

Posted by pudge on from the back-in-my-day-we-had-1-mb-simms-and-we-liked-it dept.

eggboard writes "According to Rob Art Morgan, who has tested this, the new Power Macs from Apple that use DDR (double data rate) memory -- like the Xserve rank-mount unit -- cannot access the memory any faster than the cheaper and slower SDRAM found in the previous system arch. A controller limits the data rate to 1 GB/s, while DDR could work more than twice as fast. Unfortunately, this makes mincemeat of the architecture, as it bus-/memory-bounds 2D and 3D graphics and rendering."

3 of 82 comments (clear)

  1. Meet the new boss... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Flamebait
    ... Same as the old boss. Why does this strike me as so typically Apple? Machines are crippled with slow cpus, slow memory busses for years. Then they finally try to catch up and put DDR, only to find it's crippled such that it doesn't run any faster.

    The only thing that's really changed is that now all my PC133 SDRAM's are no good in the new machines, and I have to start buying PC2700 DDR stuff. This is depressing. No wonder the machines didn't actually go up in price. If they had, then I'd have to pay more to get the *same* performance as before.

  2. Misinformation, Lies and Statistics. by BitGeek · · Score: 0, Flamebait


    I wrote a lenghty debunking of this, but deleted it.

    What's the point?

    It doesn't matter how stupid, incorrect or subtly falsified the sophistry is-- if it bashes Macs, it gets posted to slashdot.

    Its a dick thing-- nobody wants to think their dick is small, so everyone will gather around and argue about whether Macs are inferior or not.

    And of course, slashdot likes controversy these days.

    So, I'm going to stop taking these bashing articles on their merits -- it gets tiresome explaining computer technology to people who should know this stuff, but apparently graduated high school, read a perl book, and decided they are nerds.

    Oh, and Ars Technica is the Weekly World News of computer technology. They wouldn't know a microprocessors feature size from a Martian! Baby! Attacks!

    Slashdot is quickly going that way as well.

    --
    Yeah, and you guys panned the ipod too: http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23/ 1816257
  3. Re:Can someone please explain by g4dget · · Score: 1, Flamebait
    They still produce the "G3" chips, at ever higher and higher clock speeds. Apple can't use them though because of the MHz. myth.

    By "MHz myth", you must be referring to the fact that G4's are not performing much faster than a Pentium of similar clock speed.

    Apple makes nice machines and software, but they really do need to get their act together on performance.