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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."
I've not seen any gigabit ethernet capabilities ?
Does anybody have information about this ?
Intel has 3GHZ+ chips out these days. Thats double what the new Mac would have. I know clock speed isn't everything but at a certain point wouldn't you want clock speed over architecture ?
If the dollar is an "I owe you nothing", then the Euro is a "Who owes you nothing." - Doug Casey
Thoughts, anyone?
I wouldn't say that they've caved into the Mhz myth, so much as the G4 processors have pretty much hit the top of their lifespan quite some time ago. This is just a natural progression, they needed a new processor, and Moto's offerings are pants, so they went with the 970, which is a darn good processor.
Furthermore, if they were really caving, they would have gone with a processor with a few more RPM.. 1.8Ghz? That's pretty weedy in the world of x86.. That's actually pathetic as far as "new" machinew would be concerned..
whats stopping IBM from making these chips available
with an appropriate motherboard for folks who would like to run linux/bsd/ on them?
Aye aye aye, now don't get me wrong. I'd LOVE to see the next generation of chips being put in Apple's machines, but doesn't this just seem too easy a rumor to put out? C'mon rumor-mongers, there are much better ones to go after.
Take for instance, this snippet taken from the article: ""In the box" connectivity among the news systems is based on Hypertransport -- a universal chip-to-chip interconnect developed by AMD and partners..."...why don't we start the speculation that we're going to AMD chips? Hm...that could be fun. And to be honest, I'm surprised nobody brought it up yet.
Then again...it wouldn't really surprise me to have IBM's new chips in there (I'm still wondering what's going to happen with Motorola and their silly little antics). We've got FinalCut Pro 4 coming out, Panther (OS 10.3) coming out, a couple new updates just happened (ie, iSynch)...all setting the stage for something new.
Now if they'd just hurry up with the Windows version of the music service to ward off the Redmond fellows...
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang
"These initial units will ship with Mac OS 10.2, and hence, will not be optimized for the 64 bit PPC 970 processor. Consumers who purchase these Power Mac G5s will receive a coupon for a free copy of Mac OS 10.3 (Panther), which will ship in September and will be optimized for the new 64 bit processor"
Translation: It's a pet rock until September, by which time production can be geared up and units will actually be available. Of course this will kill all sales until then, so announcing this early would be a very bad idea. So an announcement this early is unlikely.
But... we all know it's coming. Won't be cheap tho, but you get what you pay for in the OSX/Win/Linux world. Over 2 years and still not one crash on my Mac.
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
Didn't Steve say some time last year that Apple will never introduce new hardware at WWDC?
Of course, the way of Steve is complex and sometimes contradictory.
I don't know, but it works for me.
Some rumor sites claim the PPC prices will be lower than Motorola's G4. Who knows for sure? I would think IBM would offer the lowest prices possible to speed adoption of the chip. I have also read on the web that IBM's costs for G3s were lower than Motorola's because their production facilities were better. *shrug* If PPC970 truly is 25-35% lower than G4s its a no-brainer for Apple to use them.
If the prices are that low I wouldn't expect Apple to lower prices though. The pro models have been fairly consistent at their current price point for some time. I'm sure other costs have gone up with new features like Hypertransport, Firewire 800 and USB 2.0 (how much does Intel charge for that?). All o fthis si specualtion until the hardware actually comes out of course.
As for the stock comment, prices go up and down. I seem to recall a stock split a few years back. The stock has gone up recently with the iTunes sales announcements. However I think stock price is one of the least indicators about how well a company is doing - and certainly has nothing to do with the price of mac hardware.
Which wintel motherboards have fw 800 and hypertransport? I'd be interested.
I wasn't really going to comment on this, but since it got modded up 5, Insightful...
nForce, nForce2
You might be further interested in knowing that hypertransport was primarily designed by AMD and is used in all of their Opteron systems, and will also be used in all Athlon64 systems. I guess that's not wintel per se... but it's a PC motherboard nonetheless.
Furthermore, if there is a demand for fw 800 on PCs, they will have it... a small upside of not being at the whim of a single company *cough*Apple*cough*.
Uttering logically derived and empirically supported truths to the disciples of the orthodox establishment.
well, most of those sites just copy from eachother, xcpt from thinksecret who seems to have an insider source.
I myself, like many others, know someone who knows someone that works at Apple (+ another one at IBM) who had this rumor confirmed quite a while a go. The guy from Apple only had access to a G5 prototype once, about 6 months ago, and confirmed the machine to be a total screamer, esp for video thanks to the wickedfast bus and a huge gub of ram.
The only remaining issues now are : what will they be called and when will they ACTUALLY be released (see the 17inch powerbook story)
When will I end this grieving ? When will my future begin ?
Where is the apple one? Is it available? No.
I'm an AMD proponent anyways, 8X AGP has been here for a big while, 64 bit cpus coming later this year (who knows, maybe even before apple's), I don't care about FW800, much like everybody else so that's a moot point. I'll just stick a card in there if I ever need it, at least I have the option of not paying for it.
Apple needs higher clock speeds to remain competitive in the minds of Joe Consumer and Joe IT Worker (see #2).
Apple doesn't have a prayer of competing in the Joe IT Worker space. Wintel rules business operations, Unix still has a mindshare in web services, Linux is making a LARGE dent in web services, Mac is a non-player.
The first job of any Mac today is to PRESERVE market share in it's core demographics, Elementary Ed, Higher Ed, Graphics Artists, Publication, Videography. BTW, did you know that many hollywood and HBO/Showtime movies are edited with Final Cut Pro????
A PPC970 machine would obviously be a higher end offering for high-end customers that need serious CPU horsepower. Most of the market doesn't NEED 64-bit and probably won't take advantage of it for quite some time.
In the higher ed space, I see that a 64-bit processor could become a great tool for researchers who want to do simulation work on their desktops (and notebooks).
This is especially relevant as IBM starts putting PPC970 CPUs into super-computer rigs running linux variants. It becomes feasible to run the same large scale programs (at a dialed down resolution) on a G5 OSX Mac.
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The PPC 970 treats PPC32 code much in the same way that an Athlon 64 or Opteron handles x86-32 code: it's basically seamless, like you were running the code on a pure 32-bit machine.
OS X is supposed to need a few small tweaks to use PPC 970s, but I hear that they're mainly to tell the 970 "hey, this is 32-bit code!" rather than anything dramatic. I wouldn't be surprised if, as AppleInsider said, they just need a small update to 10.2 to make this work.
One thing to remember about PowerPC chips, by the way: PPC64 has always been part and parcel of the PowerPC architecture, it's just that it has taken a long time to get to the point where it's realistic to use it. PPC64 is also just a superset of PPC32 and has more to do with the size of data than any radical new features.
One thing that often gets missed in the Intel world is the architectural beauty of the PPC design. IBM and Apple, did create an outstanding base CPU architecture.
The sad part is that with IBM's lack of progression of the chip, the PPC has not maintained the competitive advances it SHOULD have been implemented years ago that it is capable of doing.
The DEC Alpha Chip was another amazing design of CPU architecture that has been lost due to Compaqâ(TM)s killing of its advancement.
The Intel CPUs are fast, with branch prediction, hyper-threading, and other advances to make them good chips, but somewhere along the way Intel was more willing to repackage and re-label rather than innovate the core of the CPU. Even the Itanium Processors are a sad evolution from Intel.
AMD has done a better job with the Intel designs than Intel itself has - hence the 64bit Hammer designs.
And I don't believe that Intel is incapable of doing better, I think they buy into their own marketing and are reluctant to push new technologies into their CPUs when they can sell what they already have.
As an OS junkie, it was a sad day when WindowsNT for the PowerPC was discontinued; it was also a sad time when Compaq stopped Windows2000 development for the Alpha chip. (And this was especially shocking, considering that when the DEC Alpha premiered at Comdex in 1992, it was WindowsNT that DEC used to demonstrate the power of the processor.)
I've done a brief analysis of the 970 on my website: http://haxor.dk
well... if the dnetc client performed better on the G4 than the atholon (and someone said that the 2 way G4 did the same as the 16 way spark) what does that tell you? I don't know, but what it tells me is that the fualt of any app being slow isn't that of the CPU or it's maker, its that of the application developer, the dnetc does better a lot better cuz it's optimzed for the G4s VPU, what if all apps were optimzed for the VPU? what if all apps written for any CPU were optimized for that CPU?
:-)
to me I see that 70%-90% of the time the it's the programmer's fualt the app is slow, then the rest falls on the machine running it with all it's parts RAM, mobo, HDD and everything else included they all affect speed, but most of the time it's the programmer's fualt.
when Apple releases a new OS update it's always faster than the one before it, even on older machines, the recently released iMovie update speeds it up on G3s! it ran a lot better on my 400Mhz pismo, a 4 year old notebook! OS X v10.2 or jaguar was much much much faster than 10.1 on the same machine!!! why is that? better code!
anyway my point is that programmers should be screaming at cuz of slow apps, I should know, I'm one
Canon recently (as in the last couple of weeks) announced their G5 digital camera ... this is the followup to the G1, G2 and G3.
... I find it doubtful that after that, Apple will now come out with the G5 themselves.
Why no G4? Because, apparantly, Apple had discussions and pursuaded them to skip "G4".
So
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