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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. --
As many people (keep) saying, Apple kit isn't necessarily the fastest out there in terms of raw speed. However, from a day-to-day point of view, is raw speed what you want on a minute-by-minute basis? Probably not. If you do, then you've probably got a dual or quad processor x86 box churning away with your favourite SMP kernel-based OS. For everyday use (productivity apps, Internet, media manipulation) Apple kit does a really good job. Firewire is fast and convenient. More importantly, Apple kit (and software) is very stable in my experience. Apple looks like it is selective in its choice of cool new tech (tm) to incorporate into its products. This is a Good Thing.
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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?
<pedantically> I think that Apple has already developed a tried and true solution for external, non-ethernet-based, high-speed data transfer. It is called FireWire800.
Of course, an IP substack can be built on top of the FW, to have additional networking options. (Check out)</pedantically>
0.02â
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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First of all: A "frontside bus that operates at similar speeds to Hypertransport" most likely isn't Hypertransport - just like a car with performance similar to a Porsche isn't a Porsche. So you can't just hook up a 970 (or POWER/PowerPC) to a Hypertransport link.
Furthermore, linking a CPU to main memory via Hypertransport (a point-to-point link) means you can't share the memory with other CPUs (unless you have dual-ported RAM - uhh, yeah, good luck with that plan).
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Yeah! I can't wait until I can transport my Mac through hyperspace! Now all we need are the flying bicycles!!
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.
To do it right, you'd have to get a new bus as the chips are being strangled by bandwidth bottlenecks on current bus designs.
I don't know where these rumors get started.
The combination of fat caches, low latency, and predictive fetching basically negates the memory bus bottleneck in the current-generation (MaxBus-based) Power Macs. Even in SIMD instances, the processor generally doesn't have to wait on data that much. (This is especially true in SIMD instances, because these are almost always sequential-read applications, which makes those fat caches and predictive fetching work up a sweat.) Consider Apple's AltiVec-optimized BLAST, for instance. It's 10X faster than BLAST on a Pentium 4. It's not memory-bound. It's compute-bound.
What's that famous Seymour Cray quote? "A supercomputer is a device for turning compute-bound tasks into I/O-bound tasks."
So if anybody produces PowerPC 970 upgrades with MaxBus interfaces, they're almost certain to be good buys. Unless they cost thousands of dollars, of course. A dual-1.8 GHz (pulled that number out of my ass, guys) Power Mac G5 (pulled that out of my ass, too) will be faster than a dual-1.8 GHz upgrade in a MaxBus G4, but it'll still be considerably faster than the G4 was originally.
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.
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My question is why isn't why isn't FireWire used inside the box?
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The new chips, rather than being laid out in a traditional manner, where there is a strict heirarchy in terms of data flow and hand off, etc., are said to be more like an large modern urban city, where there are pockets of industrial activity and zones for local administration mixed in with housing and recreation.
The new city has main roads that are rings (one or two), rather than grids where the government is focused in one area....industial parks in another.,...and families and fun parks all bunched up in yet another sequestered section. These ring roads serve to generally define city structure.
The dispersed control of new, very large cities is only possible by taking advantage of modern communication and thoughtful agreement to locallized authority.
When city government sits on a throne, and nothing happens without strict review and approval, a city can become bound up in red tape and suffer accordingly.
By applying this logic to chip layouts, the goal of rapid and coordinated decision making can become a more rapid and efficient process.
Let go of the frontside bus logic for a moment or two, and you'll perhaps see how this can be a leap forward, as opposed to an operational liability
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.
Reporters had spotted machines at Apple with internal Firewire cables sticking out of drive bays.
I'm not sure about the "sticking out of drive bays" bit, but Macs (and PCs) with FireWire support can generally mount internal firewire drives as well as external, which is what that's for. Since (as you go on to point out) many firewire drives are just IDE drives anyway, there's relatively little point to this.
In reality, Firewire drives are simply IDE drives with a new interface slapped on.
Well the cheap ones are. You can also stick a RAID of IDE drives on a FireWire interface, for example, and take advantage of greater throughput. I also have a FireWire storage device that strongly resembles a digital camcorder...
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.
FireWire -- aka IEEE 1394 -- is hardly all that proprietary (and it's not just owned by Apple; there's a consortium). FireWire has low associated IP costs (a few years ago some companies were complaining that a FireWire controllers cost about $1.00 to add to a device).
The main problem is that IDE is very entrenched and so device manufacturers see FireWire support as an unnecessary added cost. FireWire won't be able to compete with IDE in the low cost hard disk interface market without much greater uptake and it won't get the uptake without cheap IDE hard disks. Oh well.
For example, if I don't buy a SuperDrive-equipped box now, can I add one later?
:). It runs virtual PC quite well (emulates a 667 MhZ P III), only concern is RAM (i have only 256 which is really not enough when switching back and forth OS X and Windows XP). 1 GB RAM should do. RAM is dirt cheap these days.
Yes: internal or external. Careful about support though: go to Apple's search page and look for DVD-RW. These are supported officially, others are not.
Are there any other things like this I need to be careful for that are "missing" from lower models?
The bottom of the PowerMac line is missing, well, nothing. All PowerMacs have an AGP 4X slot, plus 3 (or four?) PCI slots, so you basically can add what you want.
Connectivity: an airport extreme slot, bluetooth-ready, FireWire 800, USB 2 (the OS doesn't support it yet, but apparently there are some hacks that work), Gigabit ethernet. You can add Fiber Channel (2 Gb/sec) too.
Expandability: you can add 3 more hard disks (RAID support - I think), a second optical drive, go up to 2 GB RAM (maybe 4 GB with 1 GB sticks?). Some vendors sell G4 upgrades (some currently manage to get their Cube at 1,42 GhZ), but at a price.
You can change the video card; all Powermacs come with either Radeon 9000 (dual display, one ADC, one VGA/DVI, adaptor included), 9700, or GeForce 4 Titanium.
What is good about Powermacs (in my opinion) is not that you can upgrade like you would on any PC, but that even without upgrading, well, it still works after 15 years (I have relatives that type text on a Mac Classic / Apple printer). When I replace my G4 (in 3/4 years), it still will do a very sweet SSH / web / email server (maybe Darwin or Linux)
What are the architectural differences between the iMac/PowerMac and iBook/PowerBook?
iMac still has no DDR (!), its SDRAM. You can upgrade to 1 GB. It comes with a SOLDERED video card (GeForce 4 MX). Don't ever think of upgrading anything on an iMac (except RAM and hard disk). You can have airport or airport extreme (depending on the models). But my 3-year old iMac (g3 400 MhZ) runs Mac OS X fine, does Word, internet and email jobs for my dad.
iBook is still G3, maxes out at 640 MB of RAM. I consider it to be a cheap laptop, made for students (well, it manages to do serious DV video editing, so I presume it's powerful enough).
I never really used a powerbook, but they look like sweet machines. DDR, Radeon Mobility 9000, VGA and SVideo out.
As for speed: I have a dual 1 GhZ, it's fast enough. I don't know about your business-type apps (if this means word-processor, well, any mac is enough; if it means Oracle database, well, I just don't know
Quartz Extreme: it's not about the processor (only iBook still has G3 anyways.), but about the graphic cards: you need more than 16 MB VRAM to enable Quartz Extreme (so all the current line, including iBooks, support it).
Anyway: WWDC is REALLY close now, you should wait for the event and decide wether you can wait for the 64 bit processors and huge FSB, or pick up the discounted G4's Apple is sure to sell right before introducing the 970's to the market.
Here, hope it helped. Applestore / Knowledge base webpages should help, or you could check www.xlr8yourmac.com
Hello! I'm a disaster waiting to happen!
Apple did ship all "Sawtooth" (1st generation) G4s with an internal Firewire port.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck