Apple and IBM Working Together on 64-bit CPUs

Currawong writes "eWeek reports that IBM Microelectronics is working with Apple on a 64-bit PowerPC processor called the GigaProcessor Ultralite (GPUL). Unlike previous reports, eWeek now reports that Apple is testing the chip for use with future hardware. IBM apparently also plans to use the processor in linux-based servers. It's believed IBM will disclose some details of the processor in October at the upcoming Microprocessor Forum in San Jose, California. While this story is similar to recent stories about Apple using Power4-based IBM chips in future Macs, the GPUL, unlike the Power4, is smaller, runs cooler and consumes far less power, making it suitable for desktop machines and small servers. The processor is described as having the same 8-way superscalar design fully supporting Symmetric MultiProcessing." We had a previous story about these new chips.

Comments

Cooler?

[greenhide]

the GPUL, unlike the Power4, is smaller, runs cooler and consumes far less power, making it suitable for desktop machines and small servers

Does anyone know if the chip would actually be cool enough so that it would not require a fan? One of my favorite features of the G4 is that it requires no fan whatsoever. My PowerMac G4 makes so little noise that sometimes it's hard to tell if its running or not without looking at the little glowing power button on the front.

I think this is one of the nicest features of Macintosh computers and if they need to add a fan I think that will be a real shame. On the other hand, Motorolla really hasn't gotten their act together, so Apple may not have a choice.

Re:Cooler?

[danamania]

It would be nice, but perhaps we won't be that lucky. The current g4 duals are horrifically loud, compared to their predecessors.

a grrl & her server

Re:Cooler?

[Beatbyte]

It would not only not require a fan but will keep the laptop offerings from Apple from being lap burning machines.

Plus this could yield higher speeds by not needing the cooling, but adding cooling and cranking the speed up.

Either way, their major focus should be getting the speed up higher.

Re:Cooler?

[GatorMarc]

Except for some of the CRT iMacs which used convection to cool themselves, every G3 and G4 Mac has at least one fan.

I have a feeling that although this chip runs cooler, it will still be hotter compared to the G3, maybe the current G4.

Re:Cooler?

[Lumpy]

BAH! the requirement of a fan on the processor is based on very poor heatsink design. remember a small plastic fan is cheaper than a large block of copper and aluminum. and ANY processor including the cook-your-egg AMD's can use a fanless heatsink IF the heatsink is properly designed and sized, AND your case has a poper heat chimney and vents in it's design so that convection will promote cooling.

Using fans is the cheaters way out or the cheap way out.

Re:Cooler?

[cosmo7]

i have a new G4 dual under my desk and i can't hear it unless i put my ear within about three inches of it.

on the other hand, the thing weighs a ton. closing the side panel feels like slamming a car door.

Re:Cooler?

[happystink]

That is the point, a fan is cheaper, but not needing a fan is BETTER, and only apple really design it that well.

Re:Cooler?

[Oculus Habent]

The original PowerBook G4 has no Velocity Engine on it, (PowerPC 7410) which meant it consumed less power and produced less heat. The newer TiBooks have the Velocity Engine (PowerPC 7450) which is the same processor used in the PowerMac G4.

Hence, "non laptop"

Re:Cooler?

[Lars T.]

All G4 chips have AltiVec. There is no special "notebook version", only L3-cache-interface-less versions.

Re:Cooler?

[Oculus Habent]

I would have sworn, but then swearing isn't a fact-based activity.

I should read the tech specs more carefully.

Re:Cooler?

[Toraz Chryx]

In short, a G4 without Altivec is.. uh.. a G3?

Re:Cooler?

[jcr]

Sorry, you're mistaken. All G4 processors have Altivec.

-jcr

Re:Cooler?

[Triv]

just so you know, I have an LCD iMac (which DOES have a fan built into the top of the dome) but it's virtually silent. I usually can't tell it's on at all (apart from the power light :P) without holding my hand up to the vents to feel the airflow.

My external 80gb firewire harddrive sounds like a jet engine in comparison.

The point being that just because it has a fan doesn't mean it has to be loud - a good part of it is design.

If I want silence, I'm lucky enough for my external drive to only house my mp3's and it's got a power switch for when I'm not listening to tunes. :)

Triv

Will it have DRM built-in?

[sphealey]

A key question: will this chip have DRM (aka Digital Rights Reduction) features built-in? If NOT, there could be a good market here for IBM as the free alternative to Intel.

sPh

Re:Will it have DRM built-in?

[hndrcks]

Without DRM, will Office XI (or whatever the next version of Office for the Mac is called) run on it? Is Microsoft intending to take the 'Palladium' concept to all its products?

Re:Will it have DRM built-in?

[ZigMonty]

Yes, but they're one of the largest companies on the planet. If they want to capture the non-DRM market, all they have to do is lobby the government to *not* pass compulsory DRM laws.

Re:Will it have DRM built-in?

[SmittyTheBold]

If Apple sticks to their old game, there will be no DRM whatsoever.

After all, iTunes rips audio into MP3 formats instead of some "protected" format. QuickTime does not (IIRC) support DRM, except for (weak) protections on streamed movies to prevent a person from saving the movie.

Apple has made a market by keeping a user's options open. Closing that up is not a priority for them. The infrastructure to do such things is not only not there, it would take a lot of time to implement. I am sure Apple is more interested in getting a new processor to market than they are in restricting the rights of their target market - content creators.

Re:Will it have DRM built-in?

[gclef]

I was at a talk recently given by one of the security guys from Apple. He was asked about the whole TCPA thing, and his response was that Apple wasn't participating in it at present, and didn't really see what they could offer to it. Unless some sort of TCPA-like thing became law, or unless someone came up with some way for Apple to contribute, they were going to stay out of it.

So, at least for now, they're staying out of the DRM wars. Of course, this is all subject to management whims, but that's the state as of now.

Re:Will it have DRM built-in?

[jbolden]

The next version of Office will run fine on non Palladium computers and Palladium computers running in insecure mode. Microsoft doesn't care if you want to distribute you word docs, powerpoint presentations, and excel spread sheets freely and openly.

Re:Will it have DRM built-in?

[jbolden]

it'd never reach above 20% penetration into the home PC market.

First off there is pretty good support for games under Mac far better than most platforms. No its nowhere near as strong as the support on PCs but if you like to play the occasional game Mac isn't a bad choice. Its really the hardcore gamer that would be unsatisified with Mac.

But the bigger issue is I'd tend to believe that well over 75% of the home market would be satisfied with no-lousy game support. I see no evidence that game support is anywhere near that important for home PC sales. If it were, you'd see all sorts of game / computer bundles selling standard with most systems (yes I know there are some bundles like this). Instead you see office productivity / computer bundles primarily. If the OS and office suites are what ship standard with PCs then that is a pretty good indication that these are the core software needs of the users.

Re:Will it have DRM built-in?

[dbrutus]

I would imagine that DRM is *not* going to end up mandated by law. We would end up having to wreck too much of the US economy to do so.

Re:Will it have DRM built-in?

[BitGeek]

Firewire SUPPORTS copy protection.

Its not "built in". It doesnt' stop me from ripping the matrix (every day, over an over, actually) or copying MS Office to an external drive, etc.

For DRM to work over Firewire the FW device would have to support it.

An example is one of the DV bridges I'm working wiht will give me funky colors when I rip the matrix-- it detects the Macrovision encoding and then mucks with the chroma in the *digital* version.

Re:Will it have DRM built-in?

[BitGeek]

Microsoft clears a billion dollars a year in profits from their mac division. At least that was the case way back in 1997. I assume that its only gone up, not down, since then.

Re:Will it have DRM built-in?

[be-fan]

Could you identify yourself as a prick in a more obvious way than using the term PeeCee? Seriously. I hate that term. What's the rationale? Micro$oft is okay because, like them or not, its clear that they are only interested in money. But why PeeCee?

Okay boys, mod me down, I've got karma to spare!

I'll believe it when it's on the shelf at CompUSA

[BoomerSooner]

or in an Apple Store. I've heard about the G5's for years and I know they are the next best thing. However, seeing is believing.

Big News for the Whole Industry

[Spencerian]

I'm not a processor expert or anything, but this can't spell anything but good competition with Intel (not that they're evil or anything, but they haven't had a reason to make their chips better performers, and no, increasing clock cycles doesn't count). Won't hurt Apple either unless it requires their developers to rewrite stuff (haven't they done this enough already with the Mac OS X transition?)

Multiple processors in a chip? Good. AltiVec or similar number-crunching in combination? Great. If Apple pursues this, their boxes might--might achieve a performance that easily blows away the still-powerful SGI workstations and their slow-clocks-but-very-powerful processors (MIPS? Alpha? Can't remember right now).

I hope that some other enterprising company works up a PC mobo that can handle it for those not inclined to Apple products. That would light a file under Wintel's corporate ass to build something better.

Re:Big News for the Whole Industry

[larien]

SGI make MIPS processors. Alpha's are/were made by HPaq, formerly Compaq, formerly DEC/Digital.

Re:Big News for the Whole Industry

[Jobe_br]

I'm not a processor expert or anything, but this can't spell anything but good competition with Intel (not that they're evil or anything, but they haven't had a reason to make their chips better performers, and no, increasing clock cycles doesn't count). Won't hurt Apple either unless it requires their developers to rewrite stuff (haven't they done this enough already with the Mac OS X transition?)

I think Intel has had one big reason to make their chips better performers: AMD. I don't knock IBM, but the fact of the matter is that IBM hasn't been at the top of the microprocessor curve for a few years, in my opinion. While many systems still use IBM's mainframes, quite a few systems have converted to n-way multi-processing Intel-based architectures. As far as Apple's developers having to rewrite stuff, I believe that most if not all of Jaguar (OS X 10.2) is compiled with gcc3.1 - so, for Apple it would be as simple as ensuring a decent backend to gcc3.x for this new processor (chances are that this is already 'in the works' by IBM).

Multiple processors in a chip? Good. AltiVec or similar number-crunching in combination? Great. If Apple pursues this, their boxes might--might achieve a performance that easily blows away the still-powerful SGI workstations and their slow-clocks-but-very-powerful processors (MIPS? Alpha? Can't remember right now).

I'm not sure that SGI has any particular headway any longer. Maybe against certain machines in Apple's lineup, but I know here at my current employer, we've been using SGI Octanes and Octane IIs for heavy duty image processing in our products and we're getting ready to deploy a new architecture based on a dual-Xeon HP box running Linux (to replace Irix which we use on the SGIs). Performance of the image processing applications is unchanged or better and the cost savings to the company are very decent. Incidentally, the SGIs that I know of all use MIPS processors - only machines from Digital (DEC), now Compaq, use Alpha processors, to my knowledge.

I hope that some other enterprising company works up a PC mobo that can handle it for those not inclined to Apple products. That would light a file under Wintel's corporate ass to build something better.

The motherboards used in current Apple products are, for all intents and purposes, 'PC' mobos. They have standard AGP & PCI slots, use PC RAM (DDR at 133MHz or more) and provide connectivity through a number of PC compatible technologies (Intel's USB bus, IEEE 1394/Firewire, Ethernet, etc.) Its not really a matter of the processor/mobo combo being PC or not, its a matter of what OS you want to run. You can get a Mac and run most of the popular flavors of Linux on it (notable exception: RedHat). No problem. I'm not sure that much of anything will light a fire under the Wintel monopoly. Just my opinion, though.

Re:Big News for the Whole Industry

[be-fan]

Um, Quartz Extreme is something else entirely. Basically, it uses the hardware on your graphics card to accelerate window transparency and stuff like the genie effect. That's directly from Apple's docs. Anything else (especially crap about "accelerated Quartz") is just exaggeration of the above features.

Re:Big News for the Whole Industry

[Spencerian]

And, you, sir, are certainly not involved in any publishing circles, if your typing's any indication. Be that as it may...

I'm surrounded by SGIs at my current location. I agree with previous posts in that better PC boxes can be built now, and thanks to everyone for clarification. Right--my understanding, something that posts confirm and I've witnessed daily, was that SGIs have dramatically strong bandwidth. It's probably due in part to the great integration that IRIX has with those boxes. How long that advantage will hold between other competitors, especially since SGIs are very expensive--well, I'm not holding my breath for SGI.

Re:Big News for the Whole Industry

[be-fan]

::sigh:: Apple has really done a number on people, haven't they. Quartz extreme is a software mechanism that uses OpenGL (which is almost always hardware accelerated these days) to accelerate window compositing. What this guy is talking about is the hardware design of SGI's graphics chips. SGI builds graphics chips with large amounts of bandwidth (which measures how quickly data can be sent to the graphics chip) and that accelerate more of the OpenGL pipeline. For example, current 3D cards has no notion of multiple clients. The operating system has to manually save and restore resources to switch between graphical applications. SGI's hardware has hardware support for defining and switching between the rendering states of different programs. Quartz Extreme wouldn't even really benefit from SGI's extra hardware because only the window server uses the OpenGL pipeline while doing the compositing. Quartz Extreme has no bearing on the actual design of Apple's 3D hardware (which is EXACTLY the same as that of PC hardware).

Re:Big News for the Whole Industry

[be-fan]

Sigh... isn't it wonderful to start a post being as judgemental and condescending as possible... without having any idea who you are talking to?
>>>>>>>
Sorry for being rude, but I'm sick of Apple's marketing department and all their lies. I'm equally sick of all the Apple fanatics that their whatever Apple Marketing says as Holy Writ.

Uh right... and accellerated "window compositing" is exactly what I would expect in a system that was good at "visualization." (Partridge's post).
>>>>>
No. Accelerated window compositing is just an eye-candy trick that makes all the fancy drop-shadowed translucent gidgets in MacOS X run at a bearable speed. Partridge was referring to "real work" visualization. He meant that SGI systems had good graphics processing units, which allows animators and CAD users to edit very complex models while still getting real-time previews of how their changes affect the final image.

As I have no experience with SGI's systems, I would have to wonder at this point if this is something like AGP or how this is different from AGP (being as how 'Intel has really done a number' on me).
>>>>>>>
Kinda. In current systems (including Macs) AGP connects the NorthBridge chip and the GPU (graphics processor). (For reference, the CPU bus connects the NorthBridge to the CPU and the memory bus connects the north-bridge to memory). This layout allows the CPU to directly access graphics memory, and allows the GPU to directly access main memory. In SGI systems, this link is either beefed up (meaning its like AGP except faster with fewer limitations) or non-existant. The second case happens in some SGI machines that use something called UMA (uniform memory architecture). In this model, the GPU has no local memory of its own, but instead uses system memory. This way, textures and other data doesn't have to be copied over a bus; the GPU can access it directly.

All right. I think I follow you so far: the 3D-card isn't controlling the shots as far as windowing and window-management or application-graphics-management. So, on to how SGI's graphics are different...
>>>>>>
Right. The GPU has no idea of windows or anything. It simply has some registers that specify output buffers, depth buffers, and other state, and the OS saves and restores these registers as different programs use the GPU.

SGI's hardware has hardware support for defining and switching between the rendering states of different programs.
>>>>>>>
Yep.

application level management on the Mac will be impossible because Quartz is the only part of the window-management/rendering that actually can access the hardware.
>>>>>
I never said that. Quartz and Quartz Extreme are actually two entirely different things, and the because of Apple's marketing department, people have no clue what either of them do. In OS X Jaguar Quartz (the PDF software renderer) draws each window to a buffer. Then Quartz Extreme (which SHOULD be called "the window compositor" note the lack of caps or other flourishes) takes all the window buffers, sets the graphics card to treat the whole screen as an output buffer, textures the window buffers to polygons, and draws the polygons onscreen with the appropriate translucency. This mechanism allows the 3D card to do the translucent window calculations, which used to be done in software before. None of this precludes hardware level context switching. In this case, the window server is simply just another program, with the special case that its output buffer is the whole screen. In an SGI-style hardware context switching situation, the other programs would simply have output buffers that were offscreen (and thus not visible until Quartz Extreme composited them to the main screen buffer). Also, the window server is *not* the only program that directly does drawing. Each seperate program can (and does) get to draw, using hardware, into its own offscreen buffer.

Oh, and by the way, adding a level of abstraction to the Window Manager/compositor and integrating it as an Open-GL system-level application is a great idea given the state of today's 3-D cards, regardless of their ability to do hardware-level applications-graphics management. Bravo Apple!
>>>>>>> ::sigh:: This is what I'm talking about. Apple's design sucks. Yes, it allows for fancy translucent windows, but it puts a significant burden on 3D hardware that is already memory-bandwidth limited to begin with. Second, because PDF is used as an internal representation, OS X can't easily use OpenGL for the "real work" case of accelerating all Quartz 2D drawing commands rather than just window-compositing. Other designs like Longhorn, EVAS, and Berlin, do not have this limitation.

I don't see the landscape changing too much...

[xidix]

Yes, a new 64-bit PPC processor would be great, because the G4 is really showing its age. But I don't think this will be something to drive Wintel users over to Apple. If anything, it will just help Apple hang on to its existing marketshare.

The thing to remember is that "switching" is expensive, and not just for the new hardware. When a longtime PC user switches to Apple, they have to replace all of their software with Mac versions (and in a lot of cases, say goodbye to certain titles altogether). A new PPC processor isn't going to make that any less of a reality (unless of course, it allows VirtualPC to run fast enough that it's actually usable).

A 64-bit PPC would almost assuredly be backwards compatible with 32-bit PPC applications so for current Apple users, it will be a big boost in speed without having to reinvest in all of their software immediately (although, if you want the most speed, you'll eventually need to upgrade to the 64-bit versions of your apps).

Great news for Apple, but it's not a "Windows killer".

Re:I don't see the landscape changing too much...

[krugdm]

Yeah, but to keep some of those titles, imagine how fast VirtualPC could run under this processor!

Re:I don't see the landscape changing too much...

[Matthias Wiesmann]

(although, if you want the most speed, you'll eventually need to upgrade to the 64-bit versions of your apps).

Why would code that uses 32 bit pointers be slower than code that uses 64 bit pointers?
Having 64 bits pointers is needed to address more than 4 gigabytes, but why would there be a performance gain? I would think that longer pointers imply moving more data into the CPU, and therefore would consome more memory bandwidth. Am I missing something?

Re:I don't see the landscape changing too much...

[Jaysyn]

I'm one.

Yeah, thank God I can still play Master of Magic on Win2k. I haven't tried DosEMU under linux yet, does anyone know if it works?

Jaysyn

Re:I don't see the landscape changing too much...

[Graymalkin]

There's little to worry about with porting of apps. Unless you've got some seriously processor dependent assembly in your PPC binary there's little that will stop it from running on a POWER chip. The PowerPC instruction set is a subset of the POWER one meaning POWER ostensibily has more instructions besides the ones PowerPC has. It is trivial to compile an app for generic PPC code that will run on every PPC chip you can find.

I don't get what you mean by the G4 "showing its age", it isn't some ancient chip pulled out of a tar pit. It's performance problems come from the low clock speed and the lack of multiple floating point pipelines. That is more of an implementation issue than an overall design issue. The Athlon has 3 FP pipelines, the G4 has one. AltiVec is fine if you can fine the parallelism it is good at in your code. Most people for go that effort and stick to simple floating point operations. Hence the Athlon's high floating point performance.

Please people, 64-bits does not equal performance, instructions per second is the important factor. With 8 way superscalar goodness the POWER4 design gets stuff done not with its 64-bit GPRs but the fact it can suck down multiple integer and floating point operations at once and out of order. You've got the potential of 4 FLOPs per cycle in the POWER4, at just 1.25GHz that's 5 GFLOPS of plain old floating point performance. That is twice the Athlon's performance at the same clock speed. A second core would effectively double that rate since the cores on a POWER4 share their L2 cache making them look like a single chip.

Re:I don't see the landscape changing too much...

[roman_mir]

You are missing this: random access memory is named that way for a good reason - no matter what memory address the system is accessing the time to access that memory will be the same - there is no seek time in RAM (or ROM for that matter.) The size of the pointer does not matter since the access is not serial - it is parallel. That is first point. Second point - yes, for some applications there will be gain in performance if 64 bit addressing is used, namely - more addressable memory will become available to the application and the OS will have to do less paging. As simple as that.

Re:I don't see the landscape changing too much...

[Matthias Wiesmann]

I believe there are factors other than the pointer size. For instance, a 64-bit CPU should be able to perform operations on two 32-bit values at once by simply placing operands side-by-side in one 64-bit register...

Indeed, but using Altivec, a current G4 can already handle 4 32-bit values in one cycle (all altivec instructions work on 128 bit blocks).

Also, 64-bit registers should allow high-precision floating point operations to be handled natively, rather than tying up multiple registers for one value.

In current PPC architectures, the FP registers are already 64 bits wide.

Re:I don't see the landscape changing too much...

[Courageous]

Um. No. Larger pointers does not mean less paging. It simply means more memory. If your computer has 4GB of real memory, there's nothing to page, as nothing more can be addressed.

C//

Re:I don't see the landscape changing too much...

[Spyky]

The PowerPC instruction set is a subset of the POWER one meaning POWER ostensibily has more instructions besides the ones PowerPC has.

Sorry, not true. The POWER4 *is* the PowerPC instruction set (with 64-bit registers). In fact the PowerPC instruction set does not include Altivec used in Motorola G4 processors, so actually the POWER4 chip has *fewer* instructions than the current Apple PowerPC processors.

That said, yes the POWER4s performance does come from the fact that it has multiple FP pipelines. Actually the real performance comes from the massive memory bandwidth. However, that will be scaled down for a consumer-level processor for cost reasons, the 8 way superscaler architecture is a lot more likely to remain intact.

-Spyky

Re:I don't see the landscape changing too much...

[lingqi]

right but you will move data in 64-bit chunks. so even if you have less than 4Gbits -- if you properly write / optimize your code you can get double throuput from a 64-bit CPU (okay not double, but a significant increase)

I think some (can't remember which) allows you to break a 64-bit register into two 32-bit ones. -- similar idea here: more bandwidth.

Re:I don't see the landscape changing too much...

[Sentry21]

Unless you've got some seriously processor dependent assembly in your PPC binary there's little that will stop it from running on a POWER chip. The PowerPC instruction set is a subset of the POWER one meaning POWER ostensibily has more instructions besides the ones PowerPC has. It is trivial to compile an app for generic PPC code that will run on every PPC chip you can find.

This is almost true, but not quite. The Power4 has instructions that the PPC does not, and the PPC has instructions the Power4 does not. Neither is a subset of the other.

That being said, you are correct in every other manner. The processors are similar enough that the binaries would end up similar. Would the one run on the other? I doubt it. Would it be close to running if not? Definitely.

--Dan

Hmmm...

[rgoer]

So what is Apple's plan for all this horsepower? It seems that the current 7450/7455 G4 chips have more than enough "under the hood" to comfortable kick the likes of Photoshop and Illustrator around, not to mention the iApps, and everybody's favorite Final Cut Pro. So this news begs the question: where does the GPUL fit in to Apple's master plan?

Perhaps, just perhaps, has Apple something up their sleeve? Like a purchase of Alias|Wavefront to go along with their other recent acquisitions, and fully stack the high-end graphics deck? Or maybe pro-E has finally gotten their act together and is releasing a Mac client? Or are there going to be some new Xserves based on this chip, and maybe we'll actually see some type of installed base start to grow in the Apple-branded server market.

Who knows... but as big as this news is (for Apple-heads, at least), the upcoming developements this GPUL (potentially) foreshadows loom much larger.

Re:Hmmm...

[banky]

> So what is Apple's plan for all this horsepower?
Are you kidding? I guess you haven't used OSX. Just THINK of all the new minimization effects we'll get! Imagine playing a dozen minimized Quicktime movies, all at once, with no dropped frames! Imagine Chimera loading quickly!

Re:Hmmm...

[Graymalkin]

You've never worked with print quality media in Photoshop have you? Never rendered a movie with any amount of special effects in FCP or After Effects? Apply a filter to an image meant to be stuck on an 8 foot tall poster. The G4 even at its fastest (previously the fastest) is not going to finish this process very quickly. Very few filters take advantage of AltiVec so you're basically stuck with the G4s single FP pipeline. Next time use the apps in a real environment before saying the G4 is the fastest chip ever made.

While I'd rather get stuff done on a Mac as I like the environment ten times better than Windows, if you were going on a raw speed comparison a Athlon MP Windows system is going to mop the floor with even the fastest G4. A lot of software on MacOS is really great in my opinion, the systems running said software have a lot of room for improvement.

Re:Hmmm...

[blakespot]

Within the past year, Pixar switched over to mainly Mac hardware.

blakespot

Re:Hmmm...

[overunderunderdone]

t seems that the current 7450/7455 G4 chips have more than enough "under the hood" to comfortable kick the likes of Photoshop... and everybody's favorite Final Cut Pro.

Sure you can use them but they could sure benefit from more power. Doing digital video even with iMovie is still processor intensive. Sure iMovie is workable with a relatively slow G4 but it would be better if it was faster, had more complex transitions and filters etc. Apple wants every joe to be editing video of his kids, and they want him using a Mac to do it. So even on the low end they want more power under the hood.

Professional users really need more power. FinalCut Pro, Cinama Tools etc. (is Shake available for OSX yet?) are certainly very nice running on a G4, but they would be *much* nicer running on a more powerful chip. Digital video's appetite for processor power (even at the amateur level) is almost insatiable it is certainly nowhere nearly satisfied yet.

Re:Hmmm...

[Knobby]

The current G4 has pretty miserable double precision floating point performance. The POWER4 chips on the other hand, absolutely rock. I can assure you that every scientist who's spent 5 minutes in front of OS X has dreamed of POWER4 FP performance driving the codes they develop on their OS X machine..

Re:Actually the new Dual Systems have a fan it's

[balloonhead]

It's no big deal that it require cooling from a technological point of view, but it just makes a lot of noise. My computer is at my desk, in the next room to my bedroom. I have to close the door so that I can sleep as the fan is annoying (Athlon XP 1500+, in case you are wondering).

I like to leave it on all the time so that I can acess my files from elsewhere without having carry any form of media (e.g. floppy / CD-R / ZIPdisk), but if either myself of my girlfriend want to work (old-fashioned pen and paper) at the desk, we really have to turn it off.

This is why people have a problem with fans - they are just too loud, even when they are quiet. A silent computer is a much more attractive idea. Obvioulsy different peole havedifferent thresholds, but in a small apartment, your threshold is often lower.

itanium in commodity hardware?

[turgid]

So, does this mean that to compete, intel will have to migrate itanium down to commodity hardware in a hurry? What about recouping their R&D costs, and what about the cooling issues and prduction costs?

Re:itanium in commodity hardware?

[timeOday]

I can't see that working out either. There's so much development effort (compilers) needed to get Itanium working well, yet nobody is adopting it. They can't sell such a huge chip cheaply (as you say, "production costs.")

So maybe Itanium will be a massive abortion. Oh, well. They made a ton of money back when they had no competition and charged whatever they wanted.

Re:itanium in commodity hardware?

[jbolden]

If you look at Intel's price sheet and subtract off the cost of the high amount of cache the Itanium2 is not any more expensive than the P4. I think Intel may be making a killing on the markup on the cache, but we could reasonably priced Itanium2's today if there was any demand.

Re:More...

[Jugalator]

Well, it's GPUL at least...

The interesting thing to me

[afidel]

is the 2 or 4 cores per die. AFAIK this is the first time a multiple core die has been used for a consumer level ship. It is really cool that OSX with its unix underpinnings combined with the great design of the Power ISA will be able to handle the transition to 64bits and the additional thread handling etc needed for the 2-8cores per system (assuming apple will use the 4way core chips in smp mode).

Re:Shades of PowerPC

[xidix]

1) That "state-o-the-art" Powerbook you just bought won't run the next version of the OS.

Maybe, but then again it might just be a different version (like Windows XP has both a 32-bit version and a 64-bit version).

2) All of your current software will still work but in some sort of wierd "Compatibility Mode" that is ten times slower than it runs today.

Not likely. Just as the forthcoming AMD Hammer will have 32-bit backwards compatibility, I expect the IBM/Apple proc would do the same. You won't have to boot to "32-bit mode" it will just run 32-bit apps. And while it won't run them as fast as the 64-bit apps, it should run them at least as fast as a native 32-bit processor.

3) Developers will get screwed (again).

Only in the sense that they may have to decide whether to program only in 32-bit (for the widest compatibility with the least effort) or expend the extra effort to support two versions.

Re:I'll believe it when it's on the shelf at CompU

[soapvox]

Again thank you Motorola for screwing us! I have a small feeling that IBM can be counted on a little more that motorola, because IBM sells its power pc based chips to more that just apple, where if I am not mistaken motorola only sells to Apple so when times gets tough for Motorola like they have for the past few years the R&D for power PC chips drop.

Funny...

[zerofoo]

that there is an AMD add right smack in the middle of the page.

-ted

Targeted advertising at its best.

[autojive]

So I click on the story's link and this is what I see. Interesting, indeed. :-P

Targeted advertising at its best

This story was broken in the Naked Mole Rat Report

[GPS Pilot]

See macedition.com/nmr/nmr_20020914.php

(Disclaimer: Naked Mole Rat Reports are usually hilarious. But for the first time, on Sept. 14 there was a "guest columnist," who wrote a lame parody of those Nigerian spam messages.)

Come'on, dude

[sphealey]

I am generally not a big fan of Richard Stallman's whole "libre" schtick, but I think it should be clear that I mean free as in civil rights, not free as in price!

sPh

I can see why Apple hates rumors

[Anonymous Coward]

I can really see why Apple hates rumor-mongering like this. They go through a lot of trouble to get a machine design done and out in the marketplace, and two weeks later someone posts a rumor somewhere saying "G5 systems will be announced in three months!" so the user goes "well, I was going to buy a new machine, but I don't want to get screwed so I'll wait for the G5".

This chips' project doesn't even complete until summer 2003, that doesn't even imply it'll be ready to fabricate or be in any kind of production then, even if it DOES pan out to be a useful design. I imagine by tomorrow Macosrumors will be touting it to be in the new uber-G4 to be released next month.

How long has the G5 been 'almost ready' as far as rumor sites go? Two years now? It's great to spin up your readership with crap like that, but it really does a disservice when it's untrue.

Re:I can see why Apple hates rumors

[Hadlock]

well of COURSE any retail-ish company hates rumors.

that's one of the many reasons intel's itanium1 processor sold i think a grand total of 500 systems w/processor in it. the only reason anyone'd buy an itanium1 system was for the collector's value. rumors/plans of itanium2 came out and preorders for itanium1 dried up.

if you can't beat em', join em'. apple should market their hardware (As alot of hardcore appleites already do) in the fact that "this hardware should last you X years before you want an upgrade, and y years before you NEED an upgrade, according to fairly legitimate sources. instill trust and loyalty, rather than try to ward off fear and doubt.

Re:I can see why Apple hates rumors

[Graymalkin]

It's called the Osborne effect. Look up the history of Osborne computer corporation. Apple is onhe of the two companies that completely ate up their market. Coincidentally IBM is the other.

Re:I can see why Apple hates rumors

[timeOday]

Sure, there's money to be made manipulating the flow of information to influence buying decisions. Just don't expect consumers to thank you for it afterwards.

Re:I can see why Apple hates rumors

[jbolden]

There is an easy solution to that. Openness. If Apple openly discussed the direction they were taking, what future plans were going to be, what products they intended to ship and when.... rummor sites would become rather pointless. If apple doesn't like rummors they can kill them instantly.

Take Intel for example, the public knows pretty clearly where Intel is headed and when they change directions they announce it publically. Microsoft is actually another good example of this, perhaps they go a bit overboard and talk about vaporware as if it were a shipping product but at least you can't claim you don't know what they are thinking about.

Re:I can see why Apple hates rumors

[tim_maroney]

There is an easy solution to that. Openness. If Apple openly discussed the direction they were taking, what future plans were going to be, what products they intended to ship and when.... rummor sites would become rather pointless.

Idealistically I share your view, but pragmatically that's not how competition or marketing work. Apple already can't announce a single move without Microsoft immediately saying "oh yeah, we'll have that too" and stealing their thunder. And too much information about improved future systems can only hurt demand for the current offerings. I would love it if we lived in a world where this kind of openness was possible, but we don't.

(Heck, even in open source projects, a lot of plans are held close to the chest just because there's already too much kibitzing.)

Re:I can see why Apple hates rumors

[MoneyT]

Ne, how do you figure?

Re:I can see why Apple hates rumors

[Lars T.]

Does Intel suffer so? No, because their chips are on a regular run up the clock cycle ramp and nobody really cares about the very-top end product anyway. Intel does suffer (and so does AMD) because nobody really cares about the very-top end product anyway - and simply doesn't buy it. It's not fast enough. Intel is losing the Megahertz Race (TM), because they are too far ahead.

Re:I can see why Apple hates rumors

[jbolden]

Apple already can't announce a single move without Microsoft immediately saying "oh yeah, we'll have that too" and stealing their thunder.

I think Microsoft has lost credibility on this issue, they are well known for their vaporware and misleading advertising. I don't see it as stealing their thunder, 8 years ago maybe, today...

And too much information about improved future systems can only hurt demand for the current offerings

Look at the PC world. Everybody knows that whatever computer you buy will be worth 15% less every 6 months; its part of the deal. Apple users know the same thing, they just don't know what specific improvements will result in the 15% drop.

Re:I can see why Apple hates rumors

[Elwood P Dowd]

Well. MOSR is the only site that's both constantly incorrect and constantly paid attention to. There are other sites that are just as full of crap, but MOSR gets attention... well... because they act like they get attention.

The frustrating thing with MOSR is that they seem to never fucking learn. They might always have well placed sources for their info, but... those sources are so overly optimistic that they consistently make MOSR look like idiots.

ThinkSecret and MacRumors are both much better rumor sites, and I don't believe that they detract from Apple's sales in the slightest. Nick DePlume of Thinksecret seems to care enough about accuracy that he doesn't make many long-distance predictions. I've never seen him be very incorrect. His steadfast accuracy has made me reconsider purchase of a PC desktop, lately, because he says ATI is working on an all-in-wonder card for the mac. I believe him completely.

MacRumors has a much higher volume of information, so sometimes they come up with crap, but they never make it sound more authoritative than it is. They don't act like you can bet the farm on their information.

At this point, MOSR needs to curl up and die. Back in the day, they had enough viewers and sources that they could have been the premier rumor site indefinitely. Even with Jobs' crackdown on leaks. But their BS predictions (and crappy management) probably alienated as many sources as it did readers. So now those sources go to Thinksecret.

Re:I can see why Apple hates rumors

[MoneyT]

I still have a choice. I can run the old OS on my current system. My current system won't boot into OS 3, too fucking bad, I have an emulator which works just fine if I want to run OS 3. At some point you have to change in order to move forward. And if people won't change with you, you force them to change or leave them behind.

People went apeshit when Apple started doing only USB on their computers. Now look at it, there's hundreds of USB devices where before there were so few I could count them on my hands. Sometimes change is a good thing, PC users have yet to realize this.

Re:I can see why Apple hates rumors

[Sloppy]

"well, I was going to buy a new machine, but I don't want to get screwed so I'll wait for the G5".

Does the Osbourne Effect really still exist? I mean, surely by now everybody has come to terms with this fact: no matter how cool the machine you buy next month is, it will be second-generation a few months after that. Everybody knows this by now. The only people who have ever bought a computer that didn't get quickly obsoleted, were people who bought into lines that completely died (e.g. Amiga 4000T or something like that).

If I had to choose between customers that thought I was going to release newer products as time went on, and customers that thought I was about to go out of business, I'd take the first.

1984?

[macdaddy357]

Apple is working with IBM? I guess Steve Jobs doesn't think IBM is "Big Brother" any more, or maybe he has joined them, and we can now call him "little brother."

Re:1984?

[jamesoutlaw]

umm... Apple has been working with IBM for over 10 years now. Apple, IBM, and Motorola jointly developed the PowerPC processor. IBM manufactures most (if not all) of the G3 processors currently being used by Apple.

Re:1984?

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

Umm, PowerPC was the AIM group, Apple IBM Motorola. Anybody remember Taligent and Pink? No? Apple and IBM actually would probably prefer it that way. IBM also bought what is now StarOffice (and OpenOffice) as a MS Office competitor. Apple was one of the first ports after OS/2.

My impression is that early Apple saw IBM as too big and slow to hurt "cool" Apple. Later years they saw IBM as an ally, kind of the Big Elephant that can take the imcoming shots while Aplle scurries behind its protection. I can't recall any animosity between them

You're kidding, right?

[bill_mcgonigle]

"New processor Z has just been released. Sources say the processor is so fast typical users won't have a need for it, but is expected to be popular among engineering and CAD users."

I first started reading this line when the 386/25 came out. Replace CAD with 3D Graphics for this decade. Every time a new processor comes around, they say almost exactly the same thing - watch for it in the press. So far the prediction hasn't shown to be true.

Re:You're kidding, right?

[starseeker]

Actually, I'd argue for most users the Pentium II was the point where things got fast enough to be usable. For paper writing, email and web, a Pentium II will do just fine. I know because I've been able to do all of these on a Pentium 200, which is significantly slower. (granted I was using Linux, but still.)

Where processor speed helps in my experience is a) heavy duty mathematical software and b) compiling software. For graphics, acceleration cards do far more than a processor upgrade, and memory is also a common bottleneck (or was - with the really cheap memory we have now I suspect it's less of a problem.) A fast processor can help if you have lots of excess toys running, but for doing your job the Pentium II was when that task was effectively solved.

There is a reason the computer market is saturating. People don't feel the need to upgrade so much. If they upgrade their software, it may demand more resources, but people don't feel the need to use Office XP or whatever if 97 does the job. And despite what we all think of Microsoft, it does do the job. Hence Microsoft's consideration of subscription licenses - their revenue stream is likely falling off somewhat, or at least not growing as fast.

Don't confuse Want with Need. From a marketing standpoint they may look the same, but they actually aren't. In a recession we notice that fact more.

Re:You're kidding, right?

[bill_mcgonigle]

A fast processor can help if you have lots of excess toys running, but for doing your job the Pentium II was when that task was effectively solved.

But not everybody's job is the same as yours.

Don't confuse Want with Need. From a marketing standpoint they may look the same, but they actually aren't. In a recession we notice that fact more.

Yes, but wants become needs, at least perceived, and it's not just swallowing marketing. Why is the Pentium II the high water mark for you? Why not 68030/25 that was in the Mac IIci? What do you really need that you couldn't do on a Mac IIci running System 7.1? You could browse the web, send e-mail, use MS Office, use Photoshop, etc.

Maybe you wanted memory protection, or preemptive multitasking. You wanted sub-2 minute boots? Maybe you weren't willing to wait 10 seconds for a web page to render. Maybe you weren't willing to wait 45 minutes for the pre-press sized photoshop document to render. Most pro-graphics people always buy the newest, fastest machines they can, because they're always waiting and time is much more money than the cost of a new machine.

My only point is that your bar is set at an arbitrary level. Just because you think that it's OK to wait 32.5 seconds to boot a computer doesn't mean that I don't think that computers should be instant-on to be pervasive. Just because you think it's OK to wait 30 minutes for my DV to render to MPEG2 for my DVD doesn't mean that I don't think the CPU needs to be able to compress MPEG2 as fast as the burner can put it on disc. On my G4/400, I've waited 4 hours for FCP to gamma-correct a 30-minute video.

If you start to say, "well, thing x should be instant but thing y is just going to take a long time because it's CPU intensive", then you're admitting that the CPU is the bottleneck of productivity. My philosophy is that a tool isn't good enough if it gets in the way of the creative process. If the CPU is that tool, and it doesn't get in the way of your creative process, then that's awesome. But it's quite a leap to then assume that it doesn't get in the way of other people's creative processes.

Re:You're kidding, right?

[starseeker]

OK, I should have been clearer. For the vast majority of what computers are used for by the general business and home user, the Pentium II will do the job with little to no waiting, at least with Windows 98 and Office 97. This includes:

Word Processing
Spreadsheet
Web Browsing
Email
Instant Messaging

In all my experience, these are the most popular uses for home computers, and also cover much of the spectrum for any non technical and non graphics use. Hence this is where I set my bar, perhaps inaccurately, but I tried to pick the processor at which the above tasks with Windows 98 era software could do with very little visible waiting by the user. Maybe it isn't the Pentium II, but I'd be surprised if much more was needed. There are without question tasks that need mucho power - I listed a few myself. But for the MAJORITY, which is what drives bulk sales and thus the market, there is no such need. Hence the market slowdown, relative to a couple years ago.

And you make a valid point about the Mac. For basic functionality in the tasks above, it is probably sufficiently capable to do the work, if a bit slowly. However, most people use Windows, which eats more resources than it should. I am working from the basis of Windows 98 being the most common installed OS. That may not be as valid with Me and XP out now, I don't know. But as you point out, much could be done on the original Macs. Heck, we did a lot with 386 machines. It's amazing what you can do with limited resources at need. Eye candy is nice, and I'd hate to use a computer without it, but if you strip the interface down to the mid eighties concepts you can get a lot of milage and functionality out of the system without too much trouble. It might be less fun, though.

Re:You're kidding, right?

[overunderunderdone]

For graphics, acceleration cards do far more than a processor upgrade

For LOOKING at graphics. For Apples core market of people CREATING graphics the CPU is important.

Re:I'll believe it when it's on the shelf at CompU

[sphealey]

Again thank you Motorola for screwing us! I have a small feeling that IBM can be counted on a little more that motorola, because IBM sells its power pc based chips to more that just apple, where if I am not mistaken motorola only sells to Apple

The whole PowerPC thing was one of the most amazing displays of corporate loyalty I have ever heard of. Apple needed a new chip but was unwilling to abandon their historical supplier, so they forced IBM and Motorola to the table and knocked heads until they got a joint production agreement.

Most companies would have said: "sorry Motorola - you are out of gas. We just signed with Digital (Alpha) [or IBM or Intel]. Thanks for the memories". Instead Apple force-fed the entire PowerPC thing.

I wonder what their motivation was? And did Apple truely benefit in the long run?

sPh

OS X only handles dual processors

[d3xt3r]

Currently, OS X's SMP abilities scale only to two processors. If they want to employ a 4-way chip, the OS is going to need some work. Is this a limitation imposed by Mach or BSD? Does BSD scale up to more than 2 chips?

Re:OS X only handles dual processors

[Graymalkin]

What are you smoking? The Darwin kernel can scale up to 32 processors. The 2 processor limit is definitely not in the kernel itself. It is actually a probably with the design of the G4. Instead of a point to point link to the memory controller the G4s are on a shared bus. Stick more than two processors on a shared bus topology like that and your overhead is going to eat any extra performance you can manage to get.

Re:OS X only handles dual processors

[d3xt3r]

Ah, so the limit is in the chip, not the OS. Cool, that's good to know. Thanks!

Re:OS X only handles dual processors

[turgid]

That's the same as the pentium architecture, but it's never stopped intel from making 4-way Xeons. All serious SMP machines have cross-bar switches, such as MIPS, SPARC, Alpha, IBM POWER and Athlon.

Re:OS X only handles dual processors

[Graymalkin]

The four way Xeons IIRC had two buses with point to point links to the memory controller. A pair of chips was on a bus but there were two busses for the chips to sit on. Even at the relatively low speeds of the Xeons four processors on a single bus is far too much overhead. There are a few systems kicking around with up to 32 Xeon chips all linked together with custom hack crossbar switches and other engineerery.

Re:Shades of PowerPC

[ZigMonty]

This being Apple, one can infer the following future events:

1) That "state-o-the-art" Powerbook you just bought won't run the next version of the OS.

2) All of your current software will still work but in some sort of wierd "Compatibility Mode" that is ten times slower than it runs today.

3) Developers will get screwed (again).

Look, I'm sorry but I'm sick of these posts. The PPC instruction set was designed to be a 64bit architecture. There is a 32bit subset that all current mac programs use and Mac CPUs understand. Theoretically, running 32bit code on a 64bit PPC should be as simple as setting a bit in a special register in the CPU, putting it in 32bit mode.

In fact it might make sense to make 64bit mode an option to the developer. If they don't need very large integers or 4+GB of address space, they could use 32bit mode. This would mean that you don't waste RAM and memory bandwidth using 64bit pointers when you don't need them. The OS would still be 64bit of course.

All applications should run flawlessly (if they did before :-). There is no emulation. And even if there was, how would that hurt the developers? The only time Apple has switched processor architectures before was 68k->PPC. I can still run a 1984 68k copy of MacPaint in Mac OS X's Classic environment. Hell, their 68k emulator was so good that they didn't update all of the OS to PPC straight away! Yes, the jump from OS9 to OSX was difficult for developers but this wont be, even if Apple had to use some sort of emulator (which they wont).

Re:Shades of PowerPC

[Codex The Sloth]

Um, no. It would mean that your "state-o-the-art" PowerBook wouldn't run the previous version of the OS.

Clearly your sarcasm detector is set too high. When I said "the one you just bought" that means today (as in just, as in not 64 bit). So when Steve Jobs gets up and says "32 bits is dead" your screwed. Just ask all the people who bought quadras so they would be able to run OS X. Then it didn't appear for a few years and ... yes, they got "Steved".

Doubtful, if a 1GHz GPUL processor runs 2x faster than a 1GHz G4 processor

Clearly you have a short memory. The "emulated" 68k mode of PowerPCs (which were also supposed to be waaay faster) weren't because the emulator didn't fit in the cache. And for christ sakes, who the hell believes what chip companies say about speed anymore?

Yea, right. Since Apple has done such a poor job of allowing old apps to continue to function with a new their new OS, NOT!

I hope your fucking kidding. Clearly your not a Mac developer if you haven't been repeatedly screwed by Apple.

Go back to sleep, you clearly need it

So what's your excuse?

Re:Shades of PowerPC

[hey!]

I think he's alluding, not to the OS9->OSX upgrade, but the 68K -> PPC conversion. The compatibility mode was, in my opinion, a tour de force, but they screwed developers by the Lisa Pascal to C switch. It wasn't just that C became the preferred development enviornment, it was because they decided not to support Pascal at all. This was a horrible miscalculation, because it put developers using what up to then was the preferred development environment at a huge disadvantage. They had to retrain their programmers and port their applications. This left some applications stranded in emulation land for two years or more.

I think he may also be referring to the death of OpenDoc, which badly burned many developers and for which I too still have not forgiven them. OpenDoc was brilliant and so, so close to being ready for prime time when it was killed. This was a one-two punch for many small developers -- once they spent perhaps eighteen months in their C conversion, they then spent another eighteen months or two years redesigning their application for an architecture that simply went up in smoke. I knew some small innovative software developers that had, perhaps, a two or three year lead over similar applications on the Windows end, who ended up behind, a place you simply can't afford to be if you are on a niche platform like the Mac. This experience soured many developers on Apple, and prepared many of them to be well disposed to open source.

Bitterness for past misdeeds aside, I expect a 32 bit to 64 bit conversion to go more smoothly than the 68K to PPC conversion, or the equivalent conversion on the Windows side.

paradigm shift

[bill_mcgonigle]

Yeah. Another Processor. Cool. Even more Mhz and stuff. Ye-haw. Now I can run poorly written, crappy software even faster.

Systems exist for automatically marshalling software into behaving, or for helping developers write better software. The problem is they tend to be exceedingly slow. So, faster processors are a necessary step in reducing crappy software. It won't help with useless software or ugly software, but at least it helps with crashing and having l33t hackers 0wn your machine.

Re:paradigm shift

[gig]

> Yeah. Another Processor. Cool. Even more Mhz and
> stuff. Ye-haw. Now I can run poorly written, crappy
> software even faster.

It's sad that you think the software you use is poorly written. I love my software. I hardly ever have an application crash, and never have a system crash. Check out the Mac platform. There is a lot of really great stuff going on here. I'm using Emagic Logic and Ableton Live on Mac OS X 10.2 and it is fucking GREAT. Amazing software. All three have yet to crash on me at all, and I've been using Live for over six months, daily, all day.

Not quite the next best thing.

[Phoukka]

Except that the GPUL is not the next best thing. If you read the eWeek article, you'll find that the projected time-line reads, basically, the G5 first and then the next best thing after that. And it is very much up in the air what that next best thing will be. I know that Apple has had a long history of working with IBM and Motorola, and that adds a certain amount of probability to the conjecture that the GPUL will be the next best thing, but the existence of Apple's Marklar project shows that we cannot discount the possibility of a switch to x86 architecture. I think the most likely candidate within the x86 world is AMD's Hammer -- it will be available at desktop-processor-level prices, and will also be available in versions more suitable for servers. Since both markets are areas Apple has targeted, this makes the Hammer more appropriate than, say, a combination of Intel's Pentium4 on desktop and Itanium for servers.

Again, though, let me reiterate that this is all just conjecture until "The Steve" makes some sort of formal announcement.

ummm...

[bill_mcgonigle]

how much address space do you need exactly? If you're just talking about register size, the Altivec core in the G4 already does operations on 128-bits at a time, and this new chip will have that.

I don't think that means what you think it means..

[Rui del-Negro]

I think you've been playing with consoles a bit too much. 64-bit here refers to the size of general-purpose registers and memory addressing.

With 64-bit you can address over 4 terabytes. Do you feel the need for more than that?

You can also work with integers up to 18.446.744.073.709.551.615, and floating-point numbers up to 1.7976931348623158 E+308. Feel the need for more than that?

There are wider registers in the CPU (such as the dedicated SSE2 or Altivec registers), but for normal operation I think 64-bit should keep us going for quite a few years.

RMN
~~~

The funny thing is I'm going to wait for a G5

[BoomerSooner]

So it may be a long wait! I got my G4 Tower a few months ago to see if I even would like Apple OSes. To my delight I love OS X (hell even OS 9) and OS X is everything X-Windows/Linux should have been striving for. I was going to sell my G4 and get a dual 1.25 but the one I have is more than enough for now and 1 to 1 1/2 years isn't too long to wait for the next Mac (besides I've still got to save for the 22" display!).

I've tried to use Linux on the desktop since 0.98 (Slackware in '96) and never found it to my liking. I don't like to tweak and read man pages for hours, I just want the damn thing to work. That being said all my companies servers run Linux (killed the SPARC the other day) and being able to sftp/ssh to my servers from a terminal in OS X was great. Plus using Dreamweaver to do my JSP development makes a great environment.

Hopefully 1 to 1 1/2 years is all I'll have to wait. I'm patient so I'll start saving now.

Don't use FCP, do you?

[edremy]

G4 chips have more than enough "under the hood" to comfortable kick the likes of Photoshop and Illustrator around, not to mention the iApps, and everybody's favorite Final Cut Pro.

You have *got* to be kidding. Enough power for FCP? Dude, I routinely run 30+ minute renders for a 3 minute chunk of video on a 933MHz G4, and I'm not even doing all that much. A few filters, some text generation, a mask or two and it's walk away from the machine time.

Apple could be shipping 8-way 2GHz G4s and it still wouldn't be enough.

Re:Don't use FCP, do you?

[thatguywhoiam]

You do realize that this sort of thing took hours and hours on a $100,000 Avid previously. And now you're doing it on (approx.) $5k worth of Apple hardware with no special boards or drives.

I feel your pain, but let's get some real perspective. Video is almost always going to need some sort of rendering, especially when dealing with uncompressed (or nearly) video. That's upwards of 600K per frame, times 30 per second. Just for the data.

I used to have all these stats for explaining to clients why 'video rendering' always takes so long. My favourite: one minute of Cinepak (old-school!) video requires more math than the Apollo missions did. Sure, it's a whack stat, but it get's the point across, eh?

The G4 is no slouch. Realtime Video Everything requires a massive bank of DSPs, or a CPU that does not yet live.

Re:Don't use FCP, do you?

[jbolden]

If you are spending all day waiting on your computer then it sounds like its time to move to an SGI.

Re:Don't use FCP, do you?

[edremy]

You do realize that this sort of thing took hours and hours on a $100,000 Avid previously. And now you're doing it on (approx.) $5k worth of Apple hardware with no special boards or drives.

Of course I do. I'm amazed I can do it at all. I'm just responding to the claim that the current G4s are fast enough to do everything one might want. They aren't even close.

And when the 8-way 1THz G9s finally make FCP totally realtime no matter how many effects you do, I'll go back to my old life as a quantum chemist. I don't care what processor you care to name, it's not fast enough for Spartan, and it's never going to be fast enough.

new bus is the interesting part

[smagoun]

The really important part here is that Apple would be using a new bus with these machines. What the bus is doesn't matter so much as the fact that it's not the Maxbus, which is what the G4 and its ilk use. Maxbus is designed for routers + other embedded apps, not high-performance desktop computers. Currently Maxbus runs at 167Mhz, which is about as far as Motorola is willing to push it (167Mhz single-pumped, mind you). As a result, even a single G4 can more than saturate the bus, and the dualies spend a *lot* of time idling (they share one memory bus). Big caches help the problem, but there's still a fundamental issue.

Even if the new chips are clock-for-clock identical to the current G4, the mere fact that they're running on a newer bus will make the machines much more powerful.

For more info about this, head over to Ars and check out the posts in the Mac Achaia by BadAndy from earlier this summer ("Altivec, anyone?" I think it was titled). He knows a hell of a lot more about this stuff than I do; it makes for fascinating reading, and you can really understand why faster CPUs alone won't cut it for Apple.

Re:new bus is the interesting part

[Lars T.]

Well, if you look at tests comparing DDR vs. "SDR" on the PC, you will see that DDR (or RAMBUS) alone won't cut it either.

Re:Apple working on a CPU? Not likely...

[overunderunderdone]

Since when does Apple have any hardware engineers?

Umm... Since Woz started working in Steve Jobs garage? One of their divisions is the "Hardware Engineering Division"

Even their boards are outsourced

I'm pretty sure that the design is done in-house. some manufacturing may be outsourced.

let alone the actual chips.

I don't know if they STILL have any chip designers (I sort of doubt it) but when AIM first got started the Somerset chip design facility was a joint venture between all three partners including Apple. I believe some of the chip designers at the facility were technically on the books as Apple employees. At the very least the chip designers at Somerset worked closely with Apple.

If Apple had any ability to develop their own CPUs they wouldn't still be stuck with the pre-historic G4, they would simply ditch IBM and use their own chips.

Despite the fact that they DO have hardware engineers, and may even have a few that specialise in chip design to evaluate & work with the other two AIM partners it is obvious that they are not themselves, and are unlikely to become, a chip designers. Though because of the way patent and license agreements between the AIM partners they probably could get into it. But that would be a nightmare, they would bear all the costs and still be stuck with a single supplier (themselves) that would likely fall behind the competition.

Re:Shades of PowerPC

[mttlg]

Just ask all the people who bought quadras so they would be able to run OS X.

Who bought a Quadra to run Mac OS X, and are they interested in upgrading to a slightly used state-of-the-art PowerBook 3400? The last Quadra was discontinued in 1995, long before there was ever any speculation about X. The official minimum requirement for X is a beige G3, introduced in 1997, but there are hacks to get it installed on earlier PCI-based Macs, which date back to 1995. How far back should Apple have gone? Should Mac OS X be able to run on my 15.9 MHz SE/30?

Re:I'll believe it when it's on the shelf at CompU

[sphealey]

Actually, I think that Motorola sells far more processors in the embedded market than they do to Apple

I agree, but the price and profit per unit are a lot higher on a consumer-level PC CPU than an embedded chip. Motorla is a big supplier to the automakers, but GM et. al. don't like anything to cost more that $5 and want the price to decrease every year. Whereas people will pay big buck-aroos for the "hottest" CPU.

sPh

Re:This could be good.

[jweatherley]

i'd be happy to use a ppc box as my desktop while not paying apple prices.

After you've checked out IBM's prices for PPC boxes you might not mind Apple's pricing so much...

Re:Computer noise, it's not so bad

[N Monkey]

honestly have grown to love the steady white-noise of a running computer... I find it difficult to sleep if my computer is shut off

A bit off topic perhaps, but some people I know find they can get their young babies to go back to sleep by playing a recording of, say, a vacuum cleaner. Apparently the white noise is supposed to be similar to the sound of the womb.

I'm not at all sure what this says about you. Perhaps you want to go back... :-).

To return to the topic, I find that I don't notice the "jet engine like" whine of my PC until I turn it off. It's then that I appreciate the peace and quiet. Frankly I'm all for more efficient CPUs.

Simon

Re:Shades of PowerPC

[ZigMonty]

Good point, I had forgotten about that. However, the specs (IIRC) clearly state that cache line size isn't fixed. Any code that is relying on 32-byte lines should have a big /* XXX */ next to it. dcbz (Data Cache Block Clear to Zero) will probably break stuff. This is bad. Apple will probably have to put in a function that you can call to get the cache line size.

I've never fiddled with anything that requires me to know cache line sizes. Anyone more knowledgeable have any info?

That's one of the really nice things about Linux..

[mmol_6453]

..It can easily adapt and grow with new hardware and new architectures.

Microsoft has been dependant on Intel for a long time. Their one foray into another architecture (WinNT for the Alpha) was just a proof-of-concept, and didn't go anywhere, IIRC.

The Linux kernel covers several architectures. SGI, x86, Alpha, PPC, and StrongARM are just a few.

It's really nice to finally see a real, immediate threat to Microsoft's dominance. Apple and IBM have enough revenue to run a massive advertising campaign. Even if it just involves OS-X, it'll still produce a large shift away from Microsoft's domain.

Nice hot air, could be good IBM strategy...

[0x69]

Speaking as a luke-warm Apple fan & potential switcher, this sounds cool...but so have most of the daily "ray of hope" rumors that serious Apple fans have been kicking around for years.

IBM has known for many years that an Intel/MS monopoly ain't good for IBM. (Anyone recall OS/2 for PowerPC?) Pumping up Apple with better CPU's would be good strategy, even if they make no money on the chips. But what's taken them so long?

My impression is that Motorola's attitude & situation are so bad that Apple couldn't get much out of 'em with "we'll switch to IBM" threats.

Now if someone can actually SHIP substantial quantities of non-defective chips BEFORE Intel is cranking out Pentium 6's & Itanium 4's at 10GHz...

OS X exists for x86

[mmol_6453]

Just remember that OS X has been in concurrent development for use under x86.

Re:OS X exists for x86

[MoneyT]

So? What does that have to do with anything (assuming for a second it's even real). How does that change that for at least the next 2 or 3 years, Apple is going to be continuing with the PPC design.

Re:OS X exists for x86

[alfredo]

In my eyes, it would make sense to make a version for X86 servers only. The Darwin core plus some GUI tools for grins. it would be like the Xserve, cheap, powerful, and no DRM.

Re:Apple working on a CPU? Not likely...

[Leimy]

Ever see the copyrights when you boot an RS/6000 from IBM? Apple is in there. I don't see any Apple software... must be hardware :)

Wahoo. Kudos to apple and goodbye palladium

[Billly Gates]

My next computer will be a mac. I never would of thought I would say this. The problem is my previous used pentium III 700 from June 2000 is almost as powerfull as the current low end powermacs. Very pathetic.

Motorrola has no one to blame but themeselves for this. If they innovated and tried to keep up with the industry like everyone else, they would of not had this problem. They figured mac users are suckers and will always buy anyway so who cares. They guessed wrong.

Believe it or not, consumers do look at the mhz rating as an indicator of performance and value for what they are paying for. Even some look at the mhz rating for internet speed! If they see an expensive box that has a low mhz rating, they will just shake their heads and move on to another pc. Consumers aren't real bright and apple needs to boost the mhz peed on these new chips and not just have them perform fast. Palladium scares the hell out of me and I want no part in it.

Kudos to apple. As soon as palladium is out and when these babies find their way into powerbooks, I will be one of your first customers.

ALso MacOSX is one of the easiest versions of unix out there! No rpm hell, no spending hours configurating text files, no waiting for gentoo to compile everything, and all of the binaries like Windows include the dependancies. I will still keep a copy of linux around for the hell of it but I would love MacOSX!

Re:Wahoo. Kudos to apple and goodbye palladium

[Billly Gates]

Mhz to mhz, powerpc's are about %20 faster according to linux benchmarks. Please do not use the risc vs cisc arguments because today's intel chips are risc chips wrapped around cisc registers. This means apple's 800mhz powermacs may be barely %25 faster on what I have! Very pathetic. Comparing their 1 ghz chips to todays to todays pentium IV's that are 2.8ghz are only half the performance.

Yes my close to 3 year old machine can kick your 500mhz g4. ITs sad but true. I haven't seen an apple sponsored risc vs cisc arguement since the mid 1990's when intel began to overtake them.

Also don't bother to tell me that photoshop 7 is faster. Their was a bug in it that did not make mmx or caching work properly in the intel platform. With photoshop 7.01 or higher intel's cream macs now 2:1 and sometimes 3:1 with the 2.8 ghz pentium IV's. Apple always uses version 7.00 in their benchmarks. I am not bashing apple but rather motorolla. I will not buy an apple machine untill they include IBM chips period.

I know alot mac users like yourself are pissed at my comment and you should be. But you should not be pissed at me but rather motorrola. I only speak the truth.

Re:Wahoo. Kudos to apple and goodbye palladium

[jbolden]

Two comments:

A 700mhz P3 ~ 560 mhz G4.

Dualing up gives you about a 50% increase in real speed so for example the dual 1ghz g4 runs about 3x as fast as your current system. But in addition to the 50% increase you also get a much pleasant environment. Most heavy processes are single threaded so instead of your machine locking up and becoming unresponsive when you are doing something heavy one CPU goes off to la la land and you still have a other chip paying attention to whatever else you want to work on.

If you are planning on upgrading to a powermac you'll see a real speed increase from the PIII 700mhz.

Re:That's one of the really nice things about Linu

[NighthawkFoo]

Actually, WinNT also ran on the NEC MIPS and Motorola PowerPC platforms.

Re:Actually the new Dual Systems have a fan it'sOT

[Oculus Habent]

Fans aren't that bad until you realize you can't hear as well as you used to. I work in the server closet alot (moving offices right now) and I sometimes grab a pair of earplugs.

The whine isn't bad until you realize you used to watch TV on 12, and now it's got to be 15.

In fact, our whole world (mine, anyway) is like this - far more noise than we were intended to hear regularly, and it slowly causes us to lose frequencies and ranges...

Do you find yourself trying to figure out what people said?

Re:I'll believe it when it's on the shelf at CompU

[Jobe_br]

True, to some extent. But keep in mind that Motorola sells to Apple - and Apple will certainly attempt to keep Motorola's prices down to a minimum as well (not anything like $5/cpu, but you get the idea).

What's most important here, I think, is that Intel/Windows has created a culture that believes that when Intel releases a new CPU, everyone needs to upgrade. This is great for Intel, as it guarantees an ROI for their research.

The Mac crowd, however, is not like this. Mac owners will typically keep their Macs for 3-5 yrs w/o upgrading. OS X isn't doing much to change that, as every release of OS X is progressively faster than the previous release on the same hardware. While people may need to upgrade now to take advantage of OS X's best features, an upgrade now will mean no more upgrades for the next few years.

I think Motorola was aware of this and realized that for the amount of R&D they needed to compete effectively with Intel/AMD, they weren't able to sell enough CPUs to make up for the cost of bringing a new chip to market.

Just my thoughts, though .. :)

Re:That's one of the really nice things about Linu

[Amazing Quantum Man]

Actually, besides x86 and Alpha, NT4 was also available for PPC and MIPS.

Now let's see if I can get a few more acronyms in there :-)

Convection only

[Oculus Habent]

The G4 Cube Apple made was a good start in that direction, as was the iMac.

With a central "convection column" we could put the processor low in the box (it would need a stand like the G4 Cube to allow airflow underneath) and position components around the column, we might be able to do it.

Of course, if you just want to leave out fans, and don't want to explore liquid cooling, you could use Peltier effect (Ars Technica has some details) coolers with heat sinks and the "convection column" or a heat distribution "tree" that spread heat out along sinks until it could be expelled along the case sides...

It's possible, it would just take more effort than many are interested in.

Of course, you could always pipe Central Air into your case...

Re:I'll believe it when it's on the shelf at CompU

[Bishop]

Motorola's market is the embeded market. This is why Apple is bottom of the list. Profit per unit is meaningless when Motorola ships so many more embebed cpus then desktop cpus.

Re:Is that the only way you can tell?

[MoneyT]

But when you're using the screen as a second monitor for your powerbook, you can't well use the screen to see if the G4 is on now can you?

Re:Shades of PowerPC

[cosmo7]

> Should Mac OS X be able to run on my 15.9 MHz SE/30?

Luxury. Back in my day we published magazines on a 8MHz Mac 512k and if we didn't like it we could lump it. But if you told young people today that that computer would become a multiprocessor RISC-based unix workstations made of translucent plastic they wouldn't have believed you.

Today's winner of "That's an Understatement!"...

[King Babar]

With 64-bit you can address over 4 terabytes. Do you feel the need for more than that?

OK, folks, a 64-bit address goes up to 2^64, which is 2^4 * 2^60. Crudely, that's about 16 * (2^10)^6, or 16 * (10^3)^6. Now let's review our metric prefixes, shall we?

1. kilo = (10^3)^1
2. mega = (10^3)^2
3. giga = (10^3)^3
4. tera = (10^3)^4
5. peta = (10^3)^5
6. exa = (10^3)^6

So, yes, a 64 bit processor can address more than 4 terabytes. Roughly 4 million times as much as that, actually. That could be of some importance. :-)

More seriously, I can foresee within 5 years the certainty that addressing 4 terabytes would not be enough. Indeed, you could predict somebody would whine about gnu tar's 4 terabyte limit, and how they now can't back up their RAID full of pr0n. :-)

Re:First mover advantage

[mikefoley]

Using that logic, we'd all be running on Alpha's.

Re:Apple working on a CPU? Not likely...

[Doktor Memory]

I believe (although I am not 100% certain, so take this with a grain of salt) that the reason Apple is credited in the RS6k boot screen is that Apple did the port of OpenBoot/OpenFirmware to the PowerPC/POWER platform.

Re:Computer noise, it's not so bad

[GregWebb]

Fans I barely notice but then I've got an ancient PII so it's not that noisy :-) I never found sleeping with it on pleasant but I can.

What really irritates me, though, is that the speakers have a terrible power supply that hums constantly. _That_ is a real problem, because of the totally different type of buzz.

(Actually, even more annoying when I'm trying to sleep is that alarm clock! Wakes me up every morning. ;-)

Magnitude

[Rui del-Negro]

The jump from 640 KB (which was an OS limit, not a limit on the memory controller itself) to the amount of memory found on most computers today (128MB to 1 GB) was about an 800-fold increase. And that took well over ten years.

Going from 32-bit to 64-bit addressing raises the memory limit four thousand million times (that's four billion if you're american). That's eighteen petabytes (although early models of AMD's "Sledgehammer" will be limited to 40- and 48-bit addressing, which is still a lot, especially when you consider that, on SMP systems, each CPU can have its own addressing space).

It's highly unlikely home computers will even need to go beyond 4 GB in the next couple of years. I think it's pretty safe to say they won't need more than 1 terabyte (40-bit addressing) within the next ten.

I mean, there's a limit even to how bloated MS Windows can get...

RMN
~~~

Re:"Why 1984 won't be like 1984"

[MoneyT]

Not quite, so far nothing about Apple joining the DRM brigade. I still hear the 1984 not like 1984 chant in the background

surfing the web

[jbolden]

This would have happened years earlier were it not for "surfing the web". Complex real time rendering systems (browsers) required much more power than the office productivity apps and this is what drove the last round of upgrades.

IMHO two things are out there which could drive the next round:

a) Java becoming popular. If most binary apps are running inside of virtual machines this could do it.

b) We move to 3D desktop environments. Everything is always available but the things you are thinking about are "more there" then the ones you aren't a 3D finder Apple and SGI have led the way here.

Incidentally...

[artemis67]

I don't have a DVD player at home, but I just got the new Monster's Inc. DVD (yes, I know I need to buy a player, but I'm cheap...). I happened to bring a brand-new ThinkPad home from the office to do some work. No RCA out, just S-Video. Cool, I can work with that.

So I pull out my S-Video cable, my computer speakers, and subwoofer, and get it all hooked up. Pop in the DVD and play it. Hmm... the TV is mirroring the laptop screen, but the video doesn't show up. After playing around with it for half an hour (and trying two different software players), I finally notice this little warning that says that "Copy protected DVD's will not output to the S-Video port" (or something like that).

WTF? Why even have a DVD drive and an S-Video port if I can't combine them? Note to everyone: Don't buy a ThinkPad if you think that there's EVER a chance you'll want to play a DVD through the S-Video port. If IBM is so damned concerned about DRM, they need to put a big sticker on the laptop that this is a DRM-enabled system. I guarantee that I will never buy another ThinkPad.

Anyway, next night, I bring home the Apple PowerBook. Hook everything up, pop in the DVD, hit play. No problemo.

Re:Incidentally...

[RAMMS EIN]

``Anyway, next night, I bring home the Apple PowerBook. Hook everything up, pop in the DVD, hit play. No problemo.''
See? Macs are easier then PCs. You should email that one to the folks running the Sitch campaign.
BTW I wonder if that also affects DVDs played on Linux (i.e. through DeCSS). I have a HP Pavilion laptop, which is almost identical to certain IBM Thinkpads. So far I haven't gotten RV-Out to work at all, but it would be nice to actually watch videos with it...

Re:First mover advantage

[MoneyT]

Follow microsoft? Oh yeah, god OS X was such a blatent Windows clone, I can't imagine why M$ hasn't sued the living crap out of Apple for it. Apple has been looking into true 64 bit chips for a long long time now, they aren't following Intel here at all. Apple is doing what apple does, making their computers and selling them to mac users.

Apple, IBM and Microsoft

[tim_maroney]

The three IBM/Apple projects were PowerPC, Taligent, and Kaleida. The two software projects failed. The chip project was well on its way to outstripping Intel when IBM lost its nerve, decided Apple was going to go out of business almost immediately, and handed off the PowerPC to Motorola. Motorola was not capable of handling such an advanced chip design and the PowerPC fell way behind Intel. The IBM execs who had blinked later moved on to other companies, and IBM got reinvolved in the PowerPC, but they're still suffering from the Motorola handoff.

As for Apple's early attitude to IBM, they saw IBM as The Enemy due to the IBM PC. Remember that IBM used to be the big personal computer maker, before the clones ate its lunch? There is embarassing video footage showing Steve Jobs introducing his friend Bill Gates as Apple's white knight in the war against IBM. Apple didn't have a clue who the real enemy was, and it was at that point that Jobs granted Gates a permanent royalty-free license to the Mac look and feel, for use in an obscure little program called "Windows."

Some years later, Apple finally figured out who the enemy was, and decided to join forces with IBM, who were disgruntled with Microsoft's handing off the PC business to the clone makers. But the software cultures of the two companies never meshed, and the only successful project was the one that was almost completely IBM's doing and well within its core competencies -- until IBM blinked, that is.

Re:Apple, IBM and Microsoft

[k_187]

Jobs granted Gates a permanent royalty-free license to the Mac look and feel, for use in an obscure little program called "Windows."

The Steve didn't do this. I don't believe he was still with apple when this deal happened. Michael Scully (of Pepsi fame) made it.

That's a realistic limit

[Rui del-Negro]

I mentioned 4 terabytes because the current limit is 4 gigabytes, and because the processor that's likely to become the first 64-bit "home" CPU (AMD's Sledgehammer) will start with a 40-bit limit (1 terabyte), and later be expanded to 48-bit addressing (roughly 280 terabytes). And I'm willing to bet "home" versions of Windows will be locked at something lower (to force you to buy the "server" version if you want to use all your memory).

If you want the exact number that full 64-bit addressing can give you (2^64) just see my first message (it's 18446744073709551615 bytes).

And anyway, this doesn't apply to drives or files (that depends on the drive interface and the file system), only to memory. Current ATA-133 drives can go up to about 144 petabytes.

If one of your pr0n pictures is over 4 TB, I suspect you need some "compress your penis" pills.

RMN
~~~

Re:Shades of PowerPC

[MoneyT]

Um, quadras were pre-steve's return. No one bought a quadra to run OS X.

Yes, but...

[artemis67]

Apple's next "Best Thing" has been heavily dependent on "Dilbert Office Award Winner" Motorola being able to develop faster chips in a timely manner.

With IBM entering in this equation, I have no doubt that they will be able to keep pace far, far better than Motorola.

Re:Apple working on a CPU? Not likely...

[dbrutus]

You mean chip designers like these

Or this

Apple does do hardware, and they do have their own chip designers. They're just sensibly not interested in making their own CPU.

Re:First mover advantage

[jbolden]

gcc has been supporting 64 bit processors for a very long time. By making gcc the system compiler I think Apple has solved their tool problem.

Re:WOW!!!

[jbolden]

The penguin runs fine on Itanium2. Redhat is almost ready to ship an Itanium2 distro. If you are using the penguin you can have the chip now.

Motorola isn't interested in desktop CPUs

[Colin Smith]

Their forte is embedded systems. They're really getting dragged kicking and screaming into the desktop market.

Re:Computer noise, it's not so bad

[nettdata]

Apparently the white noise is supposed to be similar to the sound of the womb.
I'm not at all sure what this says about you. Perhaps you want to go back... :-).

Been trying non-stop since I was 14. ;)

Re:Computer noise, it's not so bad

[Mortanius]

As someone who has tinnitis (hearing a constant ringning / squealing noise,) I've grown to love computer fans in my bedroom. I had an old K6-2/400 with a monster of a fan on it and one on the front that made a fair deal of noise, I found that I actually was able to fall asleep much faster with that drowning out the ringing in my head. Light music is still supreme, of course, but fan noise works about as well. Now, if we could make musical fans...

Re:POWER4 == GigaProcessor

[drinkypoo]

That's quite astute of you. It's significant that MCP601 (AKA the PPC 601) is based on the original POWER architecture. Actually, IIRC it supports all but one of the POWER instructions.

If you look at CPU history: A timeline of microprocessors which is an E2node I just wrote up a couple days ago, you can make some inferences about the progression of the POWER and PowerPC CPUs. Unfortunately I never did find a good architecural timeline on IBM's site.

Re:First mover advantage

[Shuh]

There was a time that Apple was an innovator. Now, unfortunately, they follow Microsoft and in this case they're chasing Intel.

I guess they are following M$'s digital-video editing lead... from 2 years from now. Not to mention their non-existant easy-to-uses-UNIX lead... </sarcasm>

Intel's Merced will be better positioned when the 64-bit market takes off simply because they'll have been out longer and so will have better tool support.

Intel's Merced is already out: that was the codename for the Itanium 1. It was a miserable beginning. The Power architecture has had 64-bit experience from before the Itanium ever hit silicon. Additionally, the Power architecture for consumer 64-bit will be much more backwards-compatible with the PowerPC than the Itanium ever will be with x86...

correlation or causation?

[brokeninside]

In fact, our whole world (mine, anyway) is like this - far more noise than we were intended to hear regularly, and it slowly causes us to lose frequencies and ranges...

It sounds (!) to me like you're just getting old and starting to lose your hearing as is not atypical. I'm aware of much evidence that loud sounds can damage hearing. I'm not aware of any evidence that low level white noise of the sort found in a server closet can do the same.

Unless your server closet has an unsually high decibel level, I think the problem is far more likely to exist solely in your ears and not as a result of your environment.

Note to Marketing Department

[g4dget]

"Giga" is so 20th century. It has the ring of Dr. Evil's "One Million Dollars" to it (imagine backwards pinky to corner of mouth). The new marketing-compliant prefix is "Peta". Please take note.

show me the future!

[jafac]

At some point though, Apple's gotta throw us a frickin bone. Something to let us know that the platform has a future. Judging by the course of development on the Hardware side for the past two years, wrt not only bus speed, but CPU development, with AltiVec being practically the ONLY high point, the Macintosh Hardware landscape is incredibly bleak. The only thing selling Macs now on the Hardware side is Gee-Whiz fancy cases, DVD burners, and LCD monitors.

The SOFTWARE story, on the other hand, is BRILLIANT. But what the fuck are you going to run this tremendously asskicking OS on in 5 years?

I don't give a crap what the rumor sites say - I'm *not* going to invest $3500 in a pro Mac until Apple brings it's system architecture into the 21st century. I'm talking about bus bandwidth. I don't care if I have to squeeze another two years of life out of my heavily upgraded Beige G3. Apple's not getting my money, until they offer a system that's worth it to me.

If I see developments - rumors, in the positive direction, I'm more likely to wait for the worthy upgrade, than I am to say "FUCK Steve Jobs, I'm building an AMD box, and running Linux". It's as simple as that. A platform that has a future, that I can afford, versus one that does not have a future, that I can't buy at any price.

Re:I'll believe it when it's on the shelf at CompU

[Anonymous Coward]

> I wonder what their motivation was? And did Apple
> truely benefit in the long run?

Their motivation was to be in on the design of the CPU, to make sure it was small, low-power, highly-efficient. Apple has always had a good chunk of their business in portables, since the first PowerBook many, many years ago, and also they were making or working on Newtons and such, and small, quiet, desktops. If you are used to x86, there are a whole host of compromises that you don't question, but Apple's systems have been smaller, lighter, quieter, and have had MUCH longer battery life for years and years and years now.

The G4 gets dissed for only one reason: it was introduced just as Intel started their marketing-driven pursuit of clock speed, clock speed, clock speed. Before the low-power G4 could ramp up in clock speed, Intel was overclocking their big fat hungry chips and talking GHz. When you examine the actual performance of G4 and P4 systems, you see that there is so much more to the story. My PowerBook G4 has 5-hour battery life while Intel portable struggle to give you 2 hours, and the PowerBook is fast, fast, fast (I use mine as a portable recording studio, for example, and it is widely used as a portable TV studio with Final Cut Pro by CNN and many others). There is one company making a "luggable" P4 system now that's like a big briefcase with no batteries at all, simply so they could use a real P4 instead of the "mobile" P4m. You take its 20-pound self somewhere and plug it into wall power and get to work. Nobody is so power-starved on the Mac side that they want that ... a PowerBook fits the bill for all kinds of people, even in audio/video.

The big beige box PC seems like such a dinosaur to me after using Macs for the past few years. The huge fans, the noise, the lack of ports, the 15-hour USB MP3 transfers, the USB Ethernet adapters, no Wi-Fi built-in on most notebooks, even today ... no UNIX compatibility in Windows, lack of internationalization in Windows (there is only one Mac OS X for the whole world, fully Unicode), the unstable NT kernel. After using Macs for a while, you come to expect FireWire and Gigabit Ethernet and Wi-Fi and you get all kinds of things done that you wouldn't otherwise, because there is a whole system there, designed and qualified and tested and well-supported by a single support team.

Why compete when you can leap-frog?

[crovira]

Why should Apple compete with M$ on the desktop that's ruled by the x86 architecture?

It can just be where M$ doesn't seem to be able to go. Window's doesn't run on anything else but the x86 and I predict it never will. Not for technical reasons but for administrative and political ones.

The server market has always been mainly 64 bits. (Sparc w. Solaris & other Big Iron,) The portion that wasn't (Linux boxen) is migrating to 64 bit.

The desktop is goin to follow. Its gone from 8 bits (where CP/M and Apple OS were king) to 16 bits (where Mac OS and M$ got their start) to 32 bits and the next step is 64.

Linux is already there, its part of the kernel tree.

Mac OS X is already there its also part of the BSD tree.

Linux has the necessary developper base ready, willing and able to create distros and port everything to the new architecture. Since they have the source, they CAN.

Apple has complete control of the hardware and OS. When Jobs decides the user base going to 64 bits, then they'll accomplish it like they did the switch to the PPC (680x0 -> ppc60x) and the switch to OS X (OS1..9->10.2).They have control and a track record of doing it successfully.

Windows is going to be trapped by its own installed base and stymied by the internal difficulties of managing and maintaining development teams across architectures.

I'm not even going to mention the quality and security, or lack there of, of M$s offerings.

M$ will bog down in the platform shift and will disappear with the x86 architecture as surely as CP/M did and for the same reasons (which WEREN'T technical.)

Say bye bye, Bill. Though with billions in cash, M$ will be around in some form or other. And he'll probably abuse a Mac on his desktop because it works there.

In case anybody has any doubt, the desktop is NOT where Jobs wants Apple to play. There are more bedrooms and kitchend and living rooms and dens and hovels in the world than there are corporate desktops.

M$s credo "A computer on every desktop"is very limiting.

Apple's credo might be "computing everywhere else."

no way man

[7-Vodka]

ever tried copying songs onto an ipod then onto another computer? apple doesn't LET you do it.

Re:Computer noise, it's not so bad

[Eccles]

Apparently the white noise is supposed to be similar to the sound of the womb.

I'm not at all sure what this says about you. Perhaps you want to go back... :-).

I have an intense desire to return to the womb. Anybody's.

-- Woody Allen

Re:Salvation for the iMac?

[gig]

The iMac G4/800 runs Quake III at high-quality 1024x768 just a couple of fps slower than the Gateway Profile P4/2.8GHz. They are also very, very close on a suite of Photoshop tests. Go and sit in front of the iMac you want at an Apple Store and do some of the things you do and see how it feels. They are very fast, ridiculously reliable and stable machines that are a joy to use, and you'll be three years ahead of where you are now in DVD authoring and DV editing and digital photography. Also, they are ergonomic, attractive, rugged, and the fan is quieter than a hard drive (so you don't hear it at all).

Macs not *that* great

[0x0d0a]

Okay, I've used and liked Mac for years, and I've certainly done evangelism of my own, but this is stretching it.

The big beige box PC seems like such a dinosaur to me after using Mac for the past few years.

You can get x86 machines in all sizes, shapes, colors, and designs. The beige box is simply popular because it's cheap. Apple doesn't *offer* a beige box -- you *must* pay a premium for their cases.

The huge fans, the noise

I have a PII/266 and a PPC 6100/60. The 6100 is noticeably louder, though it also has older bearings. And the Klammath was a pretty hot chip.

the lack of ports

You're crazy. Your typical new PC has 2 serial ports, a parallel port, (with OEM models) frequently modem and Ethernet ports, two or four USB ports, two PS/2 ports, and sometimes Firewire. The only leg up Macs have is that they always have Firewire. Apple left SCSI behind a while ago on most models, so that isn't in the cards any more (and if you really use SCSI, you can get a $25 card in the PC world). Consumer-level Macs have been ragged on for having too few ports, as a matter of fact.

the 15-hour USB MP3 transfers

So get a Firewire player. Same story if you plug a USB MP3 player into your Mac.

the USB Ethernet adapters

Oh, yeah, those are *really* common. How about Apple's AAUI-to-10BaseT Ethernet adaptors, if we're going to be getting into corner cases?

no Wi-Fi built-in on most notebooks

Why the hell do people keep calling 802.11b "Wi-Fi"? It sounds like a home electronics fixation. Anyway, this is increasingly less true, and many people just get the cards. Were you really out of PC card slots? GSIA students at CMU have Thinkpads with three PC card slots and built in modem, wired Ethernet, and 802.11b.

no UNIX compatibility in Windows

Well, I solve the "Windows problem" by using Linux instead, but what do you mean by that? Grab cygwin or mingw + UnixUtils.

lack of internationalization in Windows

Oh, knock it off. Apple pimps their i18n, but the fact is that Windows and the Mac OS both speak Unicode just fine. Linux less so, but if you're using modern KDE or GNOME, you're pretty well off (particularly GNOME -- *hell* of a lot of translations there).

the unstable NT kernel

Bullshit. You can add a flaky driver to it -- NT today runs drivers in kernel space, *just like the Mac OS and Linux*, but the vanilla kernel is fine from a stability standpoint. The same claims are just as valid with respect to *BSD, Linux, or Mac OS.

Red Hat does PPC

[0x0d0a]

You can get a Mac and run most of the popular flavors of Linux on it (notable exception: RedHat)

Red Hat does put out a PPC distro, though I'm not sure if it's for Macs or IBM's PPC line.

Re:Shades of PowerPC

[cpeterso]

It wasn't just that C became the preferred development enviornment, it was because they decided not to support Pascal at all. This was a horrible miscalculation, because it put developers using what up to then was the preferred development environment at a huge disadvantage. They had to retrain their programmers and port their applications. This left some applications stranded in emulation land for two years or more.


hmm, that sounds an awful lot like Steve Jobs' plan for forcing application developers to use the "Yellow Box" or Cocoa. Apple introduced the backwards compatible Carbon APIs only after people (rightly) complained.

I think Steve Jobs is sometimes TOO eager to drop legacy hardware/software.

Boot times have *increased*

[0x0d0a]

You wanted sub-2 minute boots?

My Mac Plus showed a bootup screen featuring a tiger, played a startup sound, loaded all of its extensions, loaded the Finder and was completely ready to use in seven seconds from hitting the power switch.

My much newer Linux box takes much, much longer.

Re:Boot times have *increased*

[bill_mcgonigle]

Ah, System 4.2 from a 10MB hard drive. Those were the days. :)

But you're right, boot times have increased and it's because people's perception of what an acceptible minimum level of functionality is have dramatically increased, which is the point I was trying to make.

As much as I loved the old gal, I don't think I could use a MacPlus today.

the name

[forkboy]

GigaProcessor Ultralite? Sounds like something a cheezy anime character would name his mech.

Re:Shades of PowerPC

[gig]

The PowerPC architecture has been 64-bit from the start. There is no 32-bit to 64-bit transition. Current PowerPC chips already have some 64-bit and some 128-bit portions. The architecture is less than 10 years old, and it started at 32-bits ... the designers knew that they would want 64-bits later. There are 64-bit POWER chips already, and they are all related (they have the same instruction set). This is not like Intel, whose 32-bit chip grew out of a 20 year-old 8-bit chip.

In addition, Mac applications are actually special folders that can contain just about anything a developer likes, including multiple binaries, one for each platform or whatever, so these kinds of transitions can be hidden from the user with a patch at the worst. Apple just rewrote their entire OS over the last five years, so I'm sure the idea of 64-bit computing was on their minds. Steve Jobs is also the CEO of Pixar, and I'm sure the Pixar programmers know how to take advantage of 64-bits ... maybe you're used to seeing the consumer side of Apple and don't realize the kind of resources that their pro desktop users are into. Audio and video means great big files, huge amounts of data ... the platform is ready for 64-bits.

Re:Shades of PowerPC

[gig]

> Clearly you have a short memory. The "emulated"
> 68k mode of PowerPCs (which were also supposed to be
> waaay faster) weren't because the emulator didn't fit in
> the cache. And for christ sakes, who the hell believes
> what chip companies say about speed anymore?

The very first PowerMacs ran 68K software faster than it had ever been run before. You are completely wrong.

The 32-bit compatibility mode your'e talking about is an Intel thing, to make up for the fact that they've been bolting things onto their chips for 20 years, going from 8-bit to 32-bit currently. PowerPC is younger and benefits from a much more mature industry when it was designed. There are already 64-bit POWER chips, and some parts of the current 32-bit PowerPC are 64-bit and some are 128-bit. The switch to 64-bits was designed into PowerPC.

"Classic" Mac software runs in a partial emulator (some hardware is emulated, but not the CPU) on Mac OS X because Classic Mac apps have a 20 year history ... they're just too different from modern apps to run natively on a modern system (different event model, different multitasking model). Similarly, "Classic" Intel apps (32-bit x86 architecture) are going to run in a special mode on 64-bit chips because they are just too different from modern ideas about chipmaking. After 20 years, you have to scrap some things, which means you don't get perfect compatibility.

The important thing to remember is that Apple has been on their current CPU for only a little more than five years, and on their current OS for only two years. They are RISC, they are 64-bit, they are UNIX, and they are ready for the future like nobody else. Every Mac sold for the past two years has had a Wi-Fi slot in it and antennaes built-in, as well as FireWire, and also Gigabit Ethernet on all pro machines for the past 18 months or so. The platform is in a great place for the future. In fact, that's the only thing holding Apple back for the past few years ... they've been so future-focused (Mac OS X) that many of their traditional user base are still using three and four year-old machines while they're currently selling to "Switchers" and UNIX people.

Re:Shades of PowerPC

[gig]

Codex The Sloth is so far off on his Mac knowledge that he is in troll territory. Give us a break. Read something before you post. So many times people who only have experience with x86 make fools of themselves publicly by assuming that the myriad problems of the Intel platform exist on other platforms as well. No, they don't.

watch your threading

[bill_mcgonigle]

You're quoting me as having said what the parent said. Non-kosher.

And, BTW, I do use a Mac (I have 4, actually), and it does crash occasionally. Applications like Internet Connect crash every time I use them. 10.2 has locked up on me twice. There are a couple of libraries that crash too, but not since I put 10.2.1 on. Look in you ~Library/Logs folder and see if you have any there. Some crashes aren't reported by the OS. You do have crashreporting turned on in Console.app, right?

It's a dream compared to 10.0, though.

Re:Shades of PowerPC

[MoneyT]

As a follow up to me ealier response, I finaly have the time to sit down and read th earticles you linked. From the first one:

We could move forward powerfully, but to do so, we are going to have to let go of a lot of old ideas that aren't serving us well.

That mean OS X can't support the quadra natively, my iBook can't support OS 3 natively, and when we start moving forward and 32 bit becomes a hinderence, 32 bit will die. Plain and simple. Unlike PC users, mac users don't always hang on to the old. Case in point, until Win2k, windows still relied havily on DOS. That became a hinderance. In the same way, OS 9's legacy code was becoming and hinderance, hence OS X. OS 9 chews up resources, and developers have had a long time to get to X compatability. It's time to move on, and part of that step is not booting into OS X.

The second article had no evidence of developers getting screwed at all, with one exception of a brief foray into the early 1990's of Apple's history which was a dark time.

Same with the third article. None of your references point to devlopers getting screwed with the switch to OS X. I think you're just looking to bash apple, bu tyour really reaching here.

Re:I'll believe it when it's on the shelf at CompU

[blakespot]

Apple could have cared less what Jobs over at NeXT thought about anything at the time that PowerPC was being laid out.

Also as for Jobs forcing OS X on you -- it's a miracle Apple is even here, peddling a OS all these years that is, from a kernel perspective, the inferior of Windows 95.

Get some knowledge.

blakespot

Processor names

[Zork the Almighty]

Ha ha now it's high time this happened to all those Apple people. The X86 platform has had to put up with a string of idiotic processor names, Pentium, Pentium Pro, Pentium II, P3, P4, etc.

I can see it now : GPUL, GPUL Pro, GPUL2, GPUL3, etc. and you can't pronounce any of them!

Re:Apple working on a CPU? Not likely...

[overunderunderdone]

Apple designs one of the bridge chips on it's motherboards

I realized even as I hit submit that Apple does probably design some of their own chips, just not the CPU. The post above your own asserts that Apple even works on the CPU in conjunction with Motorola (and apparantly IBM). I knew they used to do that, I just thought they didn't any longer (I guess I was wrong). Steve slashed a lot of R&D back when they were bleeding red ink - especially homegrown stuff they could outsource and the really out-there speculative research (the Advanced Technology Group). Of course they didn't totally stop (though they did kill the ATG). Now that they are back in the black I would imagine they are also back to investing heavily in R&D. Hopefully that will even include some of the more speculative stuff the ATG used to do.

Apple will bend over and lube up when they need to

[Sloppy]

Apple has made a market by keeping a user's options open.

Apple sells computers with DVD drives, Apple DVD player software, and Firewire ports. Put those facts together, and one very obvious and intuitive and natural capability comes to mind. But it isn't there, on purpose. Apple does what it thinks it needs to do, thus they got a license from DVDCCA which came with ridiculous terms. They either had to do that, or be left behind where DVDs were concerned. Apple chose to survive, which is why they are still around today.

Here is the future: the dark lord in Redmond is going to create a large unwitting/unwilling installed base of DRM implementations, and there's not a damned thing anyone can do to stop it. Once that installed base exists, then various mass-market media will be made by the "big players" (the ones with all the money, who are able to put asses into seats in theaters worldwide, the ones who can buy slots for radio play) and you can only play it if your computer implements DRM.

Apple, the company that cares enough about multimedia that they got the studios to release movie trailers in their Quicktime format and the exclusively-licensed-to-Apple Sorensen codec, can either be a part of this or not. They can either throw up their hands and say, "Well, you need to be running Windows on x86/Palladium boxes to play that movie trailer" or they can say, "Yes, of course you can play that music "CD Next Generation" media on Macs too."

Do you really have the slightest doubt which way they are going to go?

Re:A/AUI? You Are Kidding, Right?

[0x0d0a]

My point is that almost no one uses USB Ethernet adapters. New computers destined for a network just come with Ethernet. You might dredge up some four-year-old systems that predated widespread Ethernet in homes, but few people have USB adapters. It makes as much sense to attack the PC market for clunky USB Ethernet adapters as the Mac market for the equally rare and clunky AAUI Ethernet adapters. I'll bet one in a bazillion machines actually have one.

As for the volume, that was just an interesting aside.

Frankly, I'm quite fed up with the heat generated by x86 chips, but I swore off propriatary Apple hardware after Apple killed off the PPC clones. We'll see what other options present themselves.

Re:Shades of PowerPC

[ZigMonty]

Well, we'll find out if IBM's new chip has a different cache line size on October 15th. If Apple does use it, it probably won't be for almost a year. Developers will have at least six months to fix the routines that will break.

Big companies making products like Photoshop should have the cache line size as a #define anyway or preferably, autodetect it. I'm assuming the programmers of large pieces of software with a lots of optimized code know what they're doing and have at least partially planned for a change in line size

Smaller outfits won't have as much to do. Let's hope they get started soon.

What are you talking about?

[overunderunderdone]

I'll remind you that OSX doesn't speak arabic or hebrew, or any right to left languages; and apple doesn have any plans to include support!

OSX HAS Arabic and Hebrew support. I honestly don't know how their Chinese & Japanese support compares to Wintel but it looks pretty good and is one of the things they are touting as an advantage over wintel.

yeah

[7-Vodka]

tell that to your sister who can barely use the gui.

The fact they fucked up, doesn't negate the fact they tried to restrict my fair use.

Re:Shades of PowerPC

[hey!]

The complaint I've always heard from developers is that PPC could not be targeted under MPW in Pascal, and that they were forced to rewrite their code in C. Of course they could have rewritten their code in Think Pascal, but this still is a porting situation.

Proprietary?

[0x0d0a]

No, the way Apple killed the clones was by denying them ROM licenses. It wasn't the OS -- it was, in fact, proprietary hardware.

Re:WOW!!!

[Lars T.]

I'm not so sure.