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Apple To Discuss HyperTransport For Future Macs
macrealist writes "CNET is reporting that Apple will discuss the use of HyperTransport in Macs at the Developer's conference. The interesting thing is that the article claims that Apple is not likely to use hypertransport to link the CPU to the memory, but instead to link chipsets together because IBM would have to 'to adapt it to the Power architecture.' But according to arstechnica, the 970 does have a frontside bus that operates at similar speeds to Hypertransport."
does not necessarily need to be used throughout the system. I can see where they'd use it to connect the two processors in a dual chip computer but let the front-side bus be something different. Though it is interesting that they picked the name "Smeagol" for the OS revision that allows thee 970 to be compatible, because the whole idea behind HT is to allow all the chips to speak the same language so nothing has to be translated from chip to chip. "One bus to bind them" perhaps?
... what I always wanted SGI to become. A cool hardware company with seriously good intentions towards the Unix world.
My next computer will be another powerbook, that's for sure... please continue to rock, Apple.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
I have been thinking of switching over to Apple, and now that many designers are coming up with cool products with OSX support, I am paying much more attention to Mac. I can remember back in the day when I first saw an Apple 2e, and I thought that it was so much better than my TI 99/4A, because of the games mostly. Oh and it had it's own monitor, and at the time I needed a TV for my TI. :)
I like the idea that Mac develops the hardware and software together under one roof. I think following the process from all angles like that would make for a better product. It's a better philosophy than the Windows/PC mish-mash way of thinking, primarily because no person sees all ends of the production for PC, and you can bet that there are quality issues with computability under PC that just aren't there with Apple (or at least that is what one would expect). So looking at Hyper Transport, at this stage, I'm a tad leery of it because it didn't come from Apple. I'm worried that it might have some kind of negative impact on the technology.
The necessary question is; is this going to be the next evolutionary step for Apple, or is it just an added hardware feature that is relatively minor?
Heres to hoping that the Hypertransport consortium becomes to Apple what the CHRP spec always promised to do. Common specs + multiple vendors (apple, amd and who else?) = cheaper prices for everyone. From what I gathered the first area we will see the hypertransport spec will be in connecting the PCI bridge and various components like that - not processor to memory connections. But that said, it seems to me Apple is really jumping on the right bandwagon here, anything that moves the platform away from this starved processor pc133 ram shit is in my opinion A Very Good Thing.
And yes i will be selling both my macs to get a ppc970 the day they come out.
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It's true - Macs are harder to upgrade the CPU than PCs. Everything else is fair game, but the CPU is expensive to upgrade. On the plus side, Macs retain their resale value for much longer. If you buy a top of the line Mac in year X, by the time you ebay it in year X+2, it'll probably pay for half of your new top-of-the-line mac. I'm trying to sell my laptop right now to buy a mac... because my Laptop is windows based, I can't get crap for it - even though it's only 8 months old. -- Funky.
The CPU to main memory link for the PowerPC 970 is a point-to-point protocal and can support up to 16 CPUs. And you can just hook a 970 to a Hypertransport link, all you need is a hypertransport bridge. Hypertransport can hook into PCI, PCI Express, Firewire, ATA. That being said, I doubt the CPU to main memory link is a hypertransport link. But I wouldn't be surprised to see it used as the chipset glue.
What kind of Mac do you have? And what kinds of tasks are you doing?
I have a dual-processor 1 GHz Power Mac with a Radeon 9000 card. I run lots of stuff, from basic Internet tasks with Safari and Mail.app to Project Builder/Interface Builder to InDesign and Photoshop to Virtual PC to Microsoft Office (when I have to). I find the UI to be quite responsive. I never have to wait on it, except when I'm running VPC, but that's to be expected.
If you're running Cocoa/Java applications, expect the GUI to be sluggish. I have found that this is the case. I took a not-too-complex Cocoa/Java app (iLeech, if you must know; yes, I'm a stinkin' thief) and rewrote it in Cocoa/Objective C, and the results were astonishing. I won't guess how much more interactive it was, but it was a LOT more interactive. The Java implementation of NSTableView just doesn't handle 10,000+ rows very well compared to the Objective C implementation.
Post a few more specifics. Let's see if we can't help you figure out whether something's not right on your machine.
This is a non-rhetorical question.
Why would Apple buy SGI instead of doing it all themselves? Like you say, in the long term, the OS and the current hardware and the sales organization would be punted. With the 970, Apple looks to be be developing the guts of a strong workstation/server technology on their own. Buying the customers and transitioning over might be possible, but would the (checks NASDAQ.com) $241M be worth it? Wait, $241M? That's all for all of SGI? Well then!
A few things I could see Apple wanting out of SGI:
Maya. Buying that and making it Mac only would be in keeping with all of Apple's purchases lately. Make a free rendering client for Xserve. It'd be neat
The sales organization. Given what SGI is facing in the market place, that they're still around and showing some revenue suggestions SOMEONE is rising to the challenge there.
Existing customer base. Buy the accounts. Make an IRIX compatibility layer for MacOS X.
Engineers. Presumably they've still got some good folks there. Apple could certainly use all the talent they can get in UNIX code, hardware design, etcetera.
I don't see much long term value in SGI's existing products if Apple bought them though, and Apple is certainly willing to give up market share on other platforms in order to make a package Mac-only.
Still, given that the whole company is only $241M, it seems like there might be something worth cherry-picking there.
My video compression blog
My question is why isn't why isn't FireWire used inside the box?
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Good question. A few years back there were rumors that Apple was going to switch to Firewire for internal connectivity. Reporters had spotted machines at Apple with internal Firewire cables sticking out of drive bays. But this was never shipped. Why? Well, I have one idea.
Consider, for a moment, what Firewire is. It's a bus to transfer data from a chain of devices. This is why it supports speeds up to 800Mbps. Individual drives cannot utilize all of this speed by themselves. Therefore, unless you have multiple drives on the same bus (daisy chained), the speed is never fully utilized. That said, why would Apple WANT to use anything but IDE internally? IDE controllers are cheaper, and the IDE interface is plenty fast (100 Mbps) for any drive you can throw at it. In reality, Firewire drives are simply IDE drives with a new interface slapped on. It's cheaper for Apple to ship computers without that extra interface.
Plus, Apple would get a lot of flak for shipping computers with their proprietary standard. And to be honest, I would be one of those people dishing out the flak.
For example, if I don't buy a SuperDrive-equipped box now, can I add one later? Are there any other things like this I need to be careful for that are "missing" from lower models? What are the architectural differences between the iMac/PowerMac and iBook/PowerBook? Is the rule about Quartz Extreme acceleration as simple as, "G3's don't support it, G4's do"? What min CPU would me to acheive "reasonable" speed for business-type apps under Virtual PC (only one or two apps I'll need there)?
Thanks.