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Apple to Announce the Power Mac G5 at WWDC?
a.ameri writes "Apple Insider is
reporting that Apple will announce computers based on IBM's 64 bit PPC 970 processor in the upcomming WWDC and will market them as G5. The new Power Mac G5s will sport a completely new motherboard design utilizing DDR 400 RAM as well as AGP 8x graphics, FireWire 800, and USB 2.0, sources said. "In the box" connectivity among the news systems is based on Hypertransport which provides 64-bit addressing and will replace Apple's multilevel bus architecture found in current systems. Initial offerings of the Power Mac G5 are said to boast 1.4 to 1.8GHz, single core PPC 970 processors, with the possibility of a dual 1.8GHz chips shortly thereafter."
While it is probably true that Apple will launch a PowerMac G5 at WWDC the information given here is only from a rumor site. Many of the rumor sites cannot be trusted much (such as MacOSRumors) and a one or two are extremely accurate (ThinkSecret). AppleInsider is one of the oldest rumor sites and at one time was one of the best. Recently though it has been taken over and the general accuracy of its stories is now unknown. However this rumor seems to have enough other sites reporting generally the same thing to be true. Its not fact yet though!
My dual g4 450 that I got back in the fall of 2000 had gigabit ethernet, so I don't see why they'd remove it from the machine.
I have tried to use the Distributed.net client on an AMD Athlon 1600 XP running Linux 2.4.10 and a G4 864 Mhz using Mac OS X 10.2. It seems that in terms of raw processing power, the G4 was actually more powerful, at over 10,260,280 nodes/sec, while the Athlon was only at 8,160,200 nodes/sec, and that's with no backgrounds processes running (besides the OS)
It's kind of naive to equate OGR performance with "raw processing power". Computing OGR nodes is a very special case of computing something. There may be other cases where the Athlon is better.
Disclaimer: I'm neither an Athlon nor PowerPC fanatic.
Of course it runs NetBSD. BTC: 1NT7QvbetmANwaMzhpVL6
What's the frequency, Kenneth?
Also the current Macs with PCI slots or ANY Mac that can run OSX with a PCI slot has been able to support USB 2.0 for almost a year.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
SGI's Graphics Fuel workstations run on a MIPS R16000 at 700MHz. You can give me a P4 3GHz overclocked to 4GHz with watercooling, I'll go with the SGI any day.
Clockrate isn't everything? How about, for comparisons between architectures, they aren't *anything*. Get a clue.
those rumors have been floating around for a few weeks, if not months on other sites. For the wannabe-mac fanatics among yuo : here are other rumor adresses :
macrumors (reliable, good forums)
macosrumors (unreliable, bloated, no forums)
looprumors(reliable, low traffic forums)
thinksecret(reliable, low traffic content, low traffic forums)
macwhispers (reliable, mostly hardware info, no forums)
macslash(slashdot for mac, mostly blahblah)
macbidouille(french, rather new, so reliability unconfirmed)
appleturns(100% reliable news by Steve Jobs's alter ego)
When will I end this grieving ? When will my future begin ?
Perhaps you should ask AMD; that Athlon XP 1600+ really runs at 1.4 GHz, you know. AMD seems to be in a similar boat as Apple with the clock speed myths.
And, AMD has done a pretty good job at disguising the real clock speed. I bought an Athlon 2400+ not too long ago. I couldn't find the real clock speed anywhere on the package, until suddenly a small note in a really tiny font size near the UPC label said: Operates at 2000 MHz.
But there's no reason for USB2 not to be used for a lot of the "rest of the stuff", such as portable storage devices, CD burning, cameras and MP3 players, etc. There's no reason to believe that while these devices are being used, the machine itself will need to do a lot of other work, and given the price difference, it seems reasonable.
You might liken it to IDE vs SCSI, except IDE was a real heap of crap so even when performance wasn't an issue, there were still good reasons to go with SCSI. USB2 on the other hand is a decent enough standard, has wide support, and shouldn't be treated with the snobbery it usually attracts.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
the dnetc RC5-64 and RC5-72 client for MacOSX both make extensive use of hand coded Altivec optimisations. All that your results prove is that Altivec is an extremely powerful vector unit - but we knew that already.
Look at the dnetc client comparison database and you'll find some spectacular results for the MP Macs - a 2 way 1.42 Ghz G4 scores like a 16 way 1.05 Ghz Sun Ultra SPARC III.
That was classic intercourse!
g{FireWire 800? Show me a hard drive that can even write your data at 400Mb/s or show me a piece of consumer hardware that NEEDS 800Mb/s today. There is no big hurry to adopt FireWire 800.}g
400Megabits/second = 50 Megabytes/second
a fair few higher end ATA disks can top that on sustained reads/writes
and you're assuming that only one device is attached to the bus.. that's not always the case.
I didn't think PCI-E and hypertransport were in competition, eg: How HyperTransport and PCI Express complement each other. Could you explain why intel chose one over the other?
Slashdot looked deep within my soul and assigned
me a number based on the order in which I joined
He died this March. Consult your psychic before you'll call him.
Who's to say Apple will announce it now, but not ship it until Panther debuts? Apple announced and demonstrated the original iMac (IIRC) in May 1998, but did not actually begin shipping until August of that year-- I may not have the dates exactly right, but there were certainly at least two months between announcement and availability. And that was not an instance of Jobs saying "This is available now," but product not shipping until weeks later because they couldn't ramp up production quickly enough. It was a stated two or three month delay from the start.
I think that this time, however, Apple would be doing the right thing to release the G5 ASAP-- that way the hardware will be available during back-to-school time, one of Apple's busiest sales periods. If they do the announce-and-wait thing this time, they'll miss the back-to-school sales. They'll also piss off a lot of people who just blew their wad in August on a G4 with significantly less computing power for about the same money that now buys a G5.
As long as everyone who buys a G5 gets a voucher in the box for a free upgrade to 10.3, I see no problem with shipping the hardware a few months before the OS that takes full advantage of it debuts.
~Philly
USB 2.0 is 480mbps. The 800mbps you're saying is probably confusion with FW 800.
Conglom-O: We Own You (TM).
AAPL currently sits at a price it first set in 1987!
Yah, if you neglect the fact that AAPL split twice during this period of time, the price is the same. In actuality the value of a share of stock purchased in 1987 is 4 times higher today.
You're misunderstanding the analogy. The point isn't that engine RPM doesn't matter, because the law limits how fast you can go anyways. The point is that engine RPM is only one factor out of many that determine a car's overall performance. Similarly, clock speed of the CPU is only one factor out of many that determine a computer's overall performance.
I've had two of the dual-USB iBooks, a 500MHz/320MB/20GB/CD purchased back in June 2001 and used daily until December 2002, when I upgraded to an 800MHz/640MB/30GB/Combo. I have never had a problem with either unit, nor with iTunes locking up. The speed is just fine.
I think the problem is that you don't take care of your hardware, and don't know how to maintain the OS. Either that or you're just making the whole thing up.
(won't someone think of the pr0n collections?)
Speaking of pr0n, here are some on-topic boudoir photos of the PowerPC 970 (attribution: As the Apple Turns)...
1. Chip with feathers 1 [ibm.com]
2. Chip with feathers 2 [ibm.com]
3. Chip in the eye of a peacock feather 1 [ibm.com]
4. Chip in the eye of a peacock feather 2 [ibm.com]
Thanks IBM for posing this beautiful little G5 in its natural environment.
Show me a hard drive that can even write your data at 400Mb/s or show me a piece of consumer hardware that NEEDS 800Mb/s today.
HD-DV camcorder. What? They're not available today? Oh, well, then forget it. If it's not on the market right this fucking minute, I don't guess there's any reason to worry about it, is there?
640K is enough for everybody.
There is no big hurry to adopt FireWire 800.
Virtually every FireWire product manufacturer (except Sony, of course) has moved to FireWire 800. No big hurry? Dude, there's no big hurry to adopt Fiber Channel, either... among the homebrew hobbyist set. Out there in the real world, both FireWire (400 and 800) and Fibre Channel are everywhere.
Looks like you got one of the 2.8% of Apple "bad stock" 97.2% quality is the HIGHEST in the computer industry.
Your "problems" are bogus because either you haven't updated your software properly, dropped it, or just got one of the very FEW lemons. The Ibook is one of the fastest, nicest (for the price) laptops availible.
Few points:
- Apple should fix the latch right away (did they?)
- iTunes - if application(s) start locking up, trash the associated preferences file(s), and/or fix your permissions (try Google); it's weak, but it beats having to fix your registry
- YOUR REBOOTING IT? You should rarely have to do that, just open it to wake it up and use it, close it to put it to sleep (this takes literally 2-3 seconds)
No. It would make no difference. The bus protocol makes no difference. They could not simply pull out the PPC970 and drip in a Hammer and expect it to work (different package sizes for one), so a new motherboard would be required. After that 'all' that they'd need to do would be is recompile the OS (easy), optimise the OS so that it actually took advantage of the Hammer features, and didn't rely on PPC features in order to run at a usable speed (less easy) and persuade all of the Apple software houses to do the same thing for all of the software they ship (impossible). The last step is required since it is not feasible to emulate a PPC on any kind of x86 chip (even a Hammer) due to the incredible small number of registers in the x86 architecture, and there would be no point in buying a Mac if you couldn't run any software with it.
Apple could create a Hammer based Mac in under a month if they tried, but it would be a silly thing to do, since there would be no software or market for it.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Profit motive.
Let's say you're IBM. You send one of your marketing guys out to snoop on the market to see whether there's any hope for your brilliant plan to sell PowerPC 970 motherboards to Linux users.
Your marketing intern logs on to Slashdot, and immediately sees 500 posts about how much the PowerPC sucks next to the Whatever. He reports back.
The "let's sell PowerPC to Linux users" plan is seen for the disaster it would be. It's immediately abandoned.
This is, incidentally, generally why stuff is not available for Linux users. Some companies have bitten the bullet and gone down the Linux road. Most who have tried to do so have failed. The rest look at this and recognize that trying to sell into the Linux market is a slow-motion train wreck.
First, my original post is correct: adjusted for splits, AAPL is stagnant since 1987. This chart clearly shows it. Notice that the blue line is upbroken. If it were not adjusted for splits (ALL charts are adjusted for splits, but apparently you don't know WTF you're talking about, so I'll inform you), the blue line would take have a break (down to half the preceding day's price) every time there was a split. So, nyah, nyah, nyah.
Second, in reply to this particular post, stock price is always indicative of a company's perceived prospects, relative to the other financial opportunities available. The fact that AAPL never makes any sustained headway is due to the fact that they have had NO sustained increase in earnings. Their profits rise and fall with their hardware cycles, but they never improve market share or margins for long.
I was trying to use a widely-accepted proxy for a business's past success and current prospects--its stock price--as a quick way to make my point, but apparently people just took it as a red herring. Let me be more specific: Apple Computers, Incorporated has been struggling for over a decade--poor profit picture, poor market share. I don't actually give a shit about Macs one way or the other. I was only pointing out that it's important for the company that these machines succeed (i.e. turn a profit and increase market share), and to do that they must be reasonably priced.
(To those who posted that the 970 may actually be cheaper than the Moto chips, I thank you for the information. We'll know shortly, I suspect.)
The clip that holds it shut broke within the first two weeks.
The clip that holds an iBook shut is made out of 18/10 stainless steel. It's not going to break.
iTunes locks up half the time and is seriously lacking in the features department.
iTunes never locks up. Seriously. It has never locked up, ever. The nature of the operating system makes it impossible for iTunes to lock up. The only way OS X software can lock up is if it gets executed as part of the kernel, as a kext. Apart from the iPod driver, iTunes has no kernel software.
And features? What features?
The thing is so slow that it's almost painful to use.
Wrong. I own a 500 MHz iBook with 256 MB of RAM. It's no speed-demon, but it's not painful to use.
I have to go do something else while the damn thing boots up.
Well... yeah! Mac OS X takes a while to boot. Duh.
I've booted my iBook twice in the past year, not counting software updates. Once I had to change batteries on a plane. Once I had a kernel panic. (A USB thing, since fixed in 10.2.6.) Both times, the reboot was interminable. But so what? If you do it twice a year, what's the big?
You, sir, are a troll. And an exceedingly bad one at that.
Haha, that's pretty damn funny. I love macs, in fact I have a Rev B. iMac and a TiBook on my desk. But they seriously heat my room up to sauna standards. Even in the winter time if I have my door closed I have to open up the window in my room to let cold air in.
-Alex
That's just mini8 serial devices or printers, is it not? If you need actual localtalk, you're forced to use one of those crappy ethernet-localtalk bridges.
You probably mean appletalk (network software, protocol, etc) support is still there.
Or am I mistaken?
Ummm,
While Firewire does stuff that USB2 cannot (because it's effectively dumb and requires the host CPU), they do compete in a LOT of markets.
Firewire only
Consumer digital video
Point to multi-point, hi-bandwidth networks
Firewire and USB2:
External storage connection - HD CD/DVD
Medium bandwidth imaging, scanners, printers and webcams
Point to Point networking - adhoc networking cables
Satellite peripherals - MP3 players, Handhelds(though I haven't seen a handheld to date that included firewire)
--
So they do compete in MANY markets. It's a shame because firewire was set to take over the high-bandwidth PC peripheral area. Intel announced USB2 and scared off a lot of motherboard manufacturers. USB2 came in late and buggy.
USB2 will never truly be able to compete in the digital video area. I have seen a few recent offerings that stream video over USB2.0, however I expect these to be absolute flops. Despite USB2's higher theoretical bandwidth, it's reliance on the CPU makes it subject to unpredictable dropouts and dropped frames.
Beyond that, the need for a host CPU controller makes it an unreasonable option for handheld and mobile devices. Their "hack" for this area "USB On The Go" is a two year old standard that to date is complete vapor-ware.
It's a real shame that Intel chose to intervene with USB2 and effectively sabotage large scale firewire deployment. The lack of critical mass has kept firewire prices high (with relation to USB) and kept firewire as a niche player in high-performance (low CPU utilization) scenarios.
One last comment, the Firewire folks DID screw up in a way. The 4-pin connector includes no power. That connector (due to it's smaller size) has showed up on all kinds of notebooks. The problem is that plugging a dependent peripheral into these 4-pin plugs does NOT provide power. This puts Firewire at a serious disadvantage when compared to USB. All the USB ports theoretically CAN include power. As much as Sony wanted the smaller connector, I think Apple should have insisted on a small form-factor plug that INCLUDED power capabilities. Certainly, they should have insisted on licensing policies that prevented computers and hubs from including integrated 4-pin, unpowered connectors.
Have no fear. Firewire is alive and well beyond the reach of any of Intel's machinations. The Consumer Electronics has embraced the standard as a replacement for RCA, S-Video, and component video cables. Furthermore, It's widely speculated that some derivative of firewire (firewire 800) will replace DVI (and ultimately RGB-15) as the method of interconnection between computers and digital monitors due to it's ease of fabrication, size (low pin-count) and a plethora of hardware from the TV industry which will run on firewire.
Beyond that, Firewire has some serious applications in the arena of cluster computing and storage area network. The firewire protocol itself is designed to run over CAT-5 and fiber to produce super-bandwidth networks.
So yes, Firewire does do a lot more then USB2. A lot of these things CAN be done on USB (poorly and inefficiently). But it would have been nice if USB2 hadn't butted into the desktop/laptop space and prevented a very, very QUICK introduction of firewire across EVERYTHING (including cell phones and PDAs).
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
Not quite. Hypertransport is a high speed bus used to connect the CPU to the peripheral chips. There will still be an ethernet chip, and a firewire chip, but they will live on a Hypertransport bus rather than a PCI or PCI-X bus.
HyperTransport technology transfers data at 12.8 Gigabytes per second. It is designed to be approximately 48 times faster than PCI, 12 times faster than PCI X and 10 times faster than 4-channel Infiniband.
The current G4 suffers from a severe bus bandwidth bottleneck. This is an on-chip problem, so no fancy peripheral chips can rectify it. This is why the current DDR PowerMacs don't see the significant benefit that DDR technology should provide. In most current P4/Athlon/G4 performance comparisons, the G4's lagard performace can be much more attributed to its poor memory bandwidth than it's core clock speed.
Although initial 970 core clock speeds don't seem to be significantly greater than the current G4, its peripheral interface bandwidth is lightyears ahead. Hypertransport would help the 970 sing, significantly improving its throughput. Hypertransport would be wasted on a G4. It would be like having a superhighway run by your city, but your on/off ramps are potholed dirt tracks with metering lights.
Well, by "intuitive", you probably mean "like Windows". Mac OS is far more intuitive to people who have never used computers before.
Similarly, you're used to having the Windows right-click. Apple thought about adding that and decided that it would make more sense to have a single mouse button and give it modifier key support. Think about the mouse as having a key instead of a button. I know, it doesn't seem to make much sense, but I find that the Windows way makes much less sense to new users.
Also, remember that the Mac OS has built-in support for something like twelve mouse buttons. You just have to get a mouse with more than one.
As for hosting a web site, surely you don't use IIS for that, do you? OSX has all sorts of great server software like Apache. You just have to install them and turn them on.
For surfing, OSX has easily the coolest browser that I've ever seen. Safari beats Mozilla hands down in speed and it's more standards compliant than IE. Essentially, it's everything that Mozilla Firebird is, but it's built by the people who made the OS.
Macs are widely acknowledged to be the best computers for all sorts of multimedia stuff. If you want to edit video, there's iMovie, CinePaint, Final Cut, After Effects, and loads of other tools. For stills that could be used on a website, you have all of the standard tools like Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Page Maker, Painter, and CorelDRAW, and the myriad Macromedia applications and quite a few that I've never seen for Windows such as Combustion. For audio creation and editing, you can use Logic, Deck, Cubase, Peak, Reason, and Spark, just to name a few. For 3D modeling, Maya is the only one that I know about, but I don't exactly research that.
If you just meant playing multimedia, I have found that QuickTime and iTunes do a far better job of that than Windows Media Player.
I really wish that I had a Mac, but I'm WAY to cheap to actually buy one new.
so tell me, why do YOU need gigabit ethernet on a workstation?
Because my system acquires DV data far faster than I can transfer it over 100Mbps ethernet.
-- The world is watching America, and America is watching TV.
Of couse most of the graphics and video software leverages Altivec, but Seti@home, Folding@home, and BLAST all get a significant boost from the vector processor. There is a significant Mac presence in the physics, genomics, and protienomics sectors. It is the platform of choice for Internet2 connectivity (because of the built-in GigE). Macs aren't just for graphic arts and publishing.
Please people.
...
Stop using "Distributed.net" to compare microprocessor performance. It's a highly skewed benchmark that really only tests the speed of the "Rotate" instruction (which is on the critical path of the program).
Altivec supplies a data-parallel version of the Rotate instruction so processors with altivec can do many rotates in parallel which is why a G4 will beat anything else (no other processors have this data-parallel instruction because it is completely useless with the rare exception of this app). That is to say that most other computer designers felt that adding this instruction would be a complete waste of die area and power, since no other ISA supports it (x86, SPARC, MIPS, POWER etc...)
Distributed.net
1) Does not test branch predictors because it's a simple loop that is very easily predictable by even the most trivial preditctors
2) Does not test the internal L1/L2 cache hierarchy because all of the data fits in the L1 of most processors
3) Does not test the memory system (DRAM/Front-side-bus/memory-controller) because, as mentioned in #2, all of the data fits in the L1 cache.
4) It does not test the instruction cache performance because all of the code fits in the L1 instruction cache.
Stop using it to compare general-purpose computer performance. It is only important if the only app you care about is distributed.net
Your Athlon 1600 will spank the G4 at most everything else.
If you're going to mention As The Apple Turns, you must also mention its evil twin site Crazy Apple Rumors.
I visit them both daily.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
Clock speed is not very informative when comparing processors of different design, but it is certainly relevant when comparing similar processors. PPC's are faster than Intel processors at comparable clock speeds--but clock speeds have not been comparable for some time. The speed advantage of the PPC is not enough to compensate for the much faster clock speed of current Intel chips. So Apple does need faster processors, and one part of this is a faster clock.
Just a short FYI, the 1.2Ghz PowerPC 970 goes through about 19 watts, a 1Ghz PowerPC 750FX (current G3) goes through about 6 watts, so the 750FX can be used in enclosures where the 970 or a 7455 would be too hot.
okay, so the 970 will absolutely BURY the G4 performance wise, and outstrip it on heat output as well (22w @ 1Ghz I think), so the G4 is pretty much a dead end at this point.
Damn, yeah, it's too bad you can't run mandrake on them.
Or SuSe.
Or Debian..
Fuck, they don't run anything, do they?
Apache is installed by default in both the regular and (of course) server versions of OS X.
All you have to do is check the "web sharing" box in the sharing panel.
If you uncomment the appropriate lines in your httpd.conf file you can get php going too.
As far as I'm aware, there's only one Apple-made G3 machine that doesn't run OS X. This is the original PowerBook G3 - the original, not the many subsequent revisions. All iMacs with enough memory and disk space are capable of running an out-of-the-box copy of Jaguar, as far as I'm aware.
There are various third party tools available that will allow OS X to be installed on computers that were never produced with G3s or G4s. Apple has, in the past, when it's "opposed" to something made strenuous efforts to close down unauthorized hacks. Apple has made no such efforts in this case. Given (ironically, considering the oft-proffered explanation for Apple's reliability record with its OSes) the wide range of different platforms it's sold with very different architectures and chipsets, it's not really unfair that they've limited themselves to machines they know came with a suitable processor to begin with.
The Power Macintosh G3 I'm trying this message on was made in 1997. I find it doubtful that many PCs released in 1997, without heavy upgrading, will run Windows XP. Many of them have motherboards that can't even support the minimum memory requirements of XP.
I think Apple has been fairly reasonable with OS X. Indeed, if Panther turns out to drop Beige G3 support (unlikely, but it might happen), I'll probably be unhappy about it, but I wouldn't consider it a fault of Apple.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
People may blow off Altivec G4 performance, thinking that it's something very few applications take advantage of. That was true with Mac OS 9- all but a few, specifically coded apps would be any faster on a G4 than a G3, given the same bus, RAM, CPU MHz. Without Altivec, a G4 is about 15% or so faster in raw FP ops than a G3 of the same speed. Int ops are about the same.
But most folks don't run OS 9 anymore as their primary OS, for a number of good reasons. People run OS X. And OS X has Altivec optimization throughout the core of the system- in libmath and others. Anyone who has used both has noticed a signifigant speed increase in OS X when moving from, say, a G3/500 to a G4/500 that doesn't exist in OS 9.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
No, it's not *exactly* like FireWire. Actually it's not the same at all.
FireWire is a true peer-to-peer model and can work in a ring or star mode. USB uses a Host-Periphieral model where all data must go through the host and only operates in a tree mode with the host at the root. If it is both host and peripheral, it is a leaf on the peripheral end and the root of another tree on the host end.
In FireWire if you have three devices device A can send and receive data directly to/from device C. If it's in a star mode you need a hub, but that doesn't put any load on any of the other devices and is essentially just routing. In ring mode device A sends the data to device B but it just passes it through at the hardware level to device C. You can combine stars and rings, but that is just phyiscal and not logical, as the data is essentially still just passed from one device to the other with no software processing required by any of the intervening devices.
In USB you have a Host and a Peripheral. First off, the host must essentially 'poll' each peripheral to see if it has anything to say. A peripheral cannot initiate a transaction. The polling happens each frame, which is 1 msec in USB 1.x. Secondly, if you want to send from device A to device C you really have to tell the host that you want to send the data to C, then it asks C if it is OK, then the host essentially brokers all the transactions. All the data has to go into the host, get buffered and prioritized and repacketized and peeked and poked and then is turned around to device C, mostly all in software running on the host processor.
FireWire uses a collision avoidance scheme on the virtually shared wire similiar to the way ethernet works. There is no host required to poll peripherals or broker and process all the transactions.
Devices that have both a host and peripheral controller means it has to have 2 connectors since they are different physically. (There is that USB2Go thing, but that's really just a repackaging of the hardware, while all the same host-peripheral and sofware issues remain.) While it is a peripheral it is at the mercy of whatever the host is allowing on that side of the fence. You don't really get a star, you get a messy tree with a slew of idiocsyncracies, and delivery times that become very unpredictable.
If you want to be a host, then you have to essentially replicate what the major OS vendors have done as far as driver support and such. Host controller software is infintely more complicated to implement than peripheral software. It has to have drivers for all the possible peripherals that may be connected to it, and possibly support loading of drivers (at least for updates and such, if not to work with mfg. exclusive-class peripherals). It has to be able to a whole bunch of stuff, hard stuff like scheduling for all the peripherals. If this custom host is also to be a peripheral of say a computer or other host, it has to deal with bridging between the other host and the peripherals connected to it. It has to intervene on every transaction. If you want any kind of throughput you have to have a pretty heavy duty microcontroller to do all that work.
Then there is the issue of drivers. The host has to have native drivers for all the peripherals it is to support. When the peripheral is plugged in it has to negotiate with a driver that knows how to talk to it. The host can't ID a device that it doesn't have a driver for. So if you had a camera, a printer and some weird host in between, that host would have to support both devices with drivers just to pass data between them. Do you think the scanner and camera manufacturers are going to provide drivers for every propietary host OS? It's hard enough to get drivers for Mac/Win/Linux/Unix OSs. In FireWire only the two devices that are communicating need to support a common protocol, since any other device in the ring or star would just be passing around the raw data and doesn't have to support each device.
A processor is just one part of a computer. You need to have a variety of buses and other attachments surrounding it, and they cost money too. Presumably, this new system will carry an updated surrounding architecture -- if it doesn't, a lot of people will be very pissed off.
As I understand it, Apple has not been giving it's newer desktop machines very good underlying architectures as of late. There's a lot of speculation that this is because most of their hardware development effort was going into the new G5 line.
Get Iconic.
.eps and .ps files.
It's free and changes the icon of an image to a preview of it.
If you have PStill (an eps/pdf converter) installed, it will even make preview icons for
There are two rules for success:
1. Never tell everything you know.