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."

Comments

Probably true but...

[iJed]

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!

Re:"New!"

[pldms]

3... 2... 1...

Go!

Which wintel motherboards have fw 800 and hypertransport? I'd be interested.

Appleinsider is a rumour site, btw.

Re:No Gigabit Ethernet ?

[pschmerg]

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.

nTh Post!!!

[FosterKanig]

Anyway, what I found most interesting about the rumor/article was the inclusion of USB2.

They have long championed Firewire as superior (which it is, and is still included) but it is nice to see that they are willing to adapt and a more common USB2.
This acceptance of USB2 shows a willingness to accept standards, no matter how wrong they are.

Re:nTh Post!!!

[squiggleslash]

There's nothing particularly wrong with USB2 - it's seen as a competitor merely because the bus speeds of FW and USB2 are similar. USB2 is cheap and processor intensive. FW isn't either cheap or processor intensive. You'd want to use Firewire for most storage applications (ie the computer's permanently attached disks, etc) and processes where there'd be high processor involvement while those devices are in use, such as DV cameras.

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.

Re:nTh Post!!!

[huckleup]

EXACTLY like firewire does

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.

I'm really not trolling, but...

[niko9]

whats stopping IBM from making these chips available
with an appropriate motherboard for folks who would like to run linux/bsd/ on them?

Shenanigans

[Anonymous Coward]

I call shenanigans on both AppleInsider and Slashdot for being lame. I'll believe it when I see it.

No news really

[selderrr]

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)

Re:damn

[Alan Partridge]

if you placed it on your lap, it would at least protect your family jewels from most forms of ionising radiation.

That's gotta be worth SOMETHING...

Announcing early not unprecedented.

[phillymjs]

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

Re:No Gigabit Ethernet ?

[The AtomicPunk]

Yes. Despite having moved to it in all their current models, they've decided it's overkill for the consumer and are moving back to 4mbit token ring.

Re:No Gigabit Ethernet ?

[Anonymous Coward]

You know, the rumor sites haven't said anything about a keyboard, either! Does anybody know whether Apple plans to ship a keyboard with the G5?

Re:G5 a good name?

[Hawthorne01]

It will work right up until the G8 is released, which will not sell due to massive "spontaneous" protests that form around each machine with it inside.

simple

[chocolatetrumpet]

It's very easy.

The processors will continue from G5 to G9, and eventually to G9.2. The next processor after that will be GX 10.0.

Got it?

Re:I didn't like it

[Dylan Zimmerman]

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.

Re:Reminders of ALPHA hype

[multiplexo]

Back in 96' or 97' I can recall a bunch of hype in the public markets for the infamous DEC ALpha.

What was so infamous about the DEC Alpha? I worked for a large e-commerce company that used AlphaServers from the AS1000 up to the big 8400s and they were fast, solid boxes with great storage options. Having 64 bits available for databases was nice and the megahertz of these systems wasn't that bad either. Plus the fact that you got Tru64UNIX which despite some annoyances (most notably problems with AdvFS) had some nice features and was far more pleasant to work with than any variant of Slowlaris that I ever touched. The university where I worked also used a bunch of DEC hardware for number crunching, they were quite happy with them. As far as I can see the Alpha wasn't hyped, the 8400 with a bunch of Storageworks BA-370 arrays smoked everything on the market at the time. It's a pity that DEC's marketing department was run by the people who weren't smart enough to be in their engineering department, otherwise the Alpha architecture might still be alive instead of being discarded by HP.