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New G5 Power Macs "Fastest Desktop In The World"
Beyond the many numbers, the bottom line is that the new machines have a new architecture, and that the memory speed is now the bottleneck, not the processor or bandwidth speeds. So they can have up to 8GB of 128-bit DDR RAM, as it is efficient to keep data in memory. The memory bandwidth is one of the most talked-about features of the new architecture.
USB 2.0 is now included, as are FireWire 400 and 800, Bluetooth, AirPort Extreme, and digital audio in and out. The 4x SuperDrive is now standard, and it can house up to 500GB of internal storage.
For video, the GeForce FX5200 is standard on low-end models, Radeon 9600 Pro on high-end models.
The case of the new machines is redesigned too, from the ground up, focusing on decreasing noise and heat. It is an aluminum enclosure, with ports for FireWire and USB on the front, and a door on the side to get into the box. It has four distinct "thermal zones" with computer-controlled cooling with its nine (yes, nine) independent fans. And it is much quieter than its predecessor.
The G5 is 10 percent slower than the P4 and Xeon in SPEC int scores in single-proc units, but 20 percent faster in FPU scores, and the dual-proc G5 beats the dual-proc Xeon in all SPEC scores.
The models are a single 1.6 GHz ($1999), single 1.8GHz ($2399), and dual 2GHz ($2999). They will ship in August. A 3GHz processor will be available from IBM in 12 months.
Apple notes that recompiling apps for the 64-bit architecture is easy, and in some cases can be done in minutes.
There was no word about the heavily anticipated redesign of the 15" PowerBooks.
Thanks to iPalindrome on irc.arstechnica.com for his running transcript of the keynote address.
Power Mac page
Apple store
Is this the *fast* USB 2.0 or the USB 2.0 that used to be USB 1.1 but got renamed USB 2.0 so as to not confuse consumers?
Interesting tidbit there. Doesn't that make some people want to wait for the extra year? I thought hinting at anything to come in the future was very much against Apple policy.
Random is the New Order.
-T
Sun should be very scared. Their Dual 1.2GHz 64bit offering is $14,995. Ouch!
Too bad I have to wait until August to pick one up. Oh well I guess that gives me time to think up a good excuse for why I need one and my wife should be okay with it.
For video, the GeForce FX5200 is standard on low-end models, Radeon 9600 Pro on high-end models. Canadian bias!
http://www.beosjournal.org/wwdc/
for some pictures of the new case.
user@host$ diff
Yeah... I saw it on the website for a second there... then I clicked a link. It must be getting a lot of hits cuz i can barely get the Apple Store.
...
Why does Apple use DDR as opposed to say RDRAM or some other higher-speed technology? I mean, it might not be 64-bit compatible, I don't know, but they don't put it in their 32-bit machines either.
:-)
Ok, okay, I'm sure a thousand people are going to call me clueless now...
My journal has hot
â Dual 2GHz PowerPC G5
â 8GB DDR400 SDRAM (PC3200) - 8x1GB
â 2x250GB Serial ATA - 7200rpm
â ATI Radeon 9800 Pro
â Apple Cinema HD Display (23" flat panel)
â Apple Cinema HD Display (23" flat panel) + Apple DVI to ADC Adapter
â AirPort Extreme Card
â Bluetooth Module
â SuperDrive (DVD-R/CD-RW)
â Apple Keyboard & Apple Mouse - U.S. English
â Mac OS X - U.S. English
â Logitech Z-680 THX 5.1 Speakers & Monster 2-meter Cable
â AirPort Extreme Base Station (with modem and antenna port)
â APP for Power Mac (w/ or w/o display) - Enrollment Kit
Subtotal $12,632.95
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Fastest desktops.. now? When you can't have one? You see, when these ships, we'll have Athlon64 on the desktop too, so you're not competing with P4s or 32bit Athlons any more.
So this is just my imagination ?
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/64bit/
I am kind of disillusioned with apple.. they seem to be all huff an no blow oftentimes.. i.e. their webservers that were going to "revolutionize web serving" or whatever.. oh well, they at least "look" nice for the ladies and men who read cosmo. Guess we will see.. I won't totally give up them yet... they at least have a unix'ish core for the OS now, which is really what has brought me back to apple...
anime+manga together at last.. in real time.
Why would they put 2nd-rate (or in this case, third-rate) video in a machine like this?!?
...Steve
If I wanted to be running the fastest desktop in the world, I'd be impressed.
:).
Personally though, I want to be running the fastest applications in the world...
But that's just me. I don't choose my computers for asthetic appeal
http://www.apple.com/powermac/
if you didn't see it yet.
"world's first 64-bit desktop processor"
I am quite sure there are some people out there who used Alpha-based workstations back when Digital made them.
Of course, issue is still price. $3000 at the top line is about 30% rich in my opinion, but Apple likes its margins fat, what can you say.
Apparently, the G5's aren't entirely house-broken, yet.
G5-based computers previously leaked on the Apple store
As a PC user, I was used to buying a machine and having a processor with double the clockspeed a year down the line... And now Apple has pulled the same trick :(
Oh well. I'm not going to complain... The specs on those machines were unbelievable - I'm just glad Apple is no longer lagging behind in the specs anymore, and the prices on those machines are reasonable to boot.
Gimmie.
-agent oranje.
I think we've succeeded in /.'ing the entire Mac community. Their store is down and their site is slow. No to mention all the links list in these comments. Come to think of it, the only site with G5 info that is not slashdotted is... slashdot. Hmm...
Totally Life!
ALL replies
I'm not sure if it supposed to be so green, but I got this link to the pic of the G5 case off of macrumors.com mirror site.
http://www.oisdata.com/g5.jpg
I'm sure that better pics will be turning up, but this was the first one I found.
All that technical jargon...they didn't even tell us what colors they come in!
I'd like to see some independently-verified benchmarks before I believe that it's the "Fastest desktop in the world". I seriously doubt ol' bullshitter Stevo would tell the full truth.
I'm not a Mac'er, but I was curious -- This thing is obviously fast because of the impressive hardware, but what good is that speed? I know that graphics apps were at one time huge on Macs, and needed this kind of horsepower. What do you run on Macs nowadays that needs this speed?
--My other sig is a ferrari.
We've been waiting for it for so long now.
:D:P
And now watch and laugh as x86 users take that classic Mac argument - MHz doesn't matter - and try to use it against every Mac user. But dear x86er, only yesterday, you said that MHz did matter!? I'm so confused...
The tables are turned. Now you have something very pretty, you have Microsoft Office, you have some decent games, you have pro applications, you have UNIX, you have open source...
It's all there, and the speed argument is over. This is what every geek has been waiting for.
iqu
...SGIs fitted on my desktop. In fact, they have a smaller footprint than PCs. Can we sue Apple for misrepresentation in advertising?
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
For those of you who were trying to get regularly updated info on the release of the G5, you may have noticed that most of the Mac sites are specifically requesting their users do not refresh the page continually. Likewise, most sites have taken their forums offline (even Ars Technica, who is not a "Mac-only" site).
Is this the new Slashdot effect? Mac users going ballistic over Apple's latest release and posting and reloading their favorite sites continually?
On a side note, is it just me, or is the new design very "bland," even "unoriginal."
Apple did a REALLY good job keeping this info under wraps untill really recently. 64 bit desktop, affordable, 1ghz memory bandwidth.... the price/performance is definetly there!
__________
Love conquers all... except CANCER
As amazed as I would like to be by these claims I can't help but be a little aprehensive. Could Apple really have closed the over one year gap Intel has (or had) in technology? Going from Pentium 3 speeds to speeds surpassing the latest from Intel & AMD? I'm not going to swallow that claim until I see some independent benchmarks.
Am I the only one wondering whether or not we'll see some new displays to go along with this? :)
PCI-X has nearly the same bandwidth. Why put legacy crap on this? What's next? A 5 1/4 floppy?
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
So, Steve, I'm going to be saving my money again to get one of your products. The last one, a 9500 bought in 1996 has lasted very well. I wish I could say the same for the Pentium PC I bought in 1997.
I look forward to making tons of recordings and music with this new rig!
It's either on the beat or off the beat, it's that easy.
I moderate therefore I rule!
--
1994: Your peecees suck so bad because they're soooo slow. Our CPU benchmarks kick your butts. We are the speed kings!
1999: So what if your peecee CPUs are faster than ours. It's not about speed, it's about quality. Speed is totally irrelevant. You're all just speed whores.
2004: Your peecees suck so bad because they're soooo slow. Our CPU benchmarks kick your butts. We are the speed kings!
Steve Jobs must be back in the shrooms again.
Or maybe there was a misprint. Should be:
"Fastest Desktop in My World".
.sigs are for post^Hers.
Other important questions:
- Do you actually need to be *that* smart?
- Would it hurt you to be just a little less attractive to the opposite sex?
- Could you please be just a wee bit less awesome?
- 640K should be enough for anybody, shouldn't it?
The SPEC results are really interesting. Single-processor integer performance (which matters most at least for me, although CPU performance is hardly interesting for me these times) is slightly worse than Intel's flagships, but the clock rate is also significantly lower.
However, the most interesting part is that they used GCC to compile the SPEC suite, and not some special compiler to make hardware look good in benchmarks (in contrast to some vendor compilers). Given that all the software I run has been compiled by GCC (with the exception of a few Lisp programs), the numbers are a bit more relevant than the usual SPEC results for me.
On the other hand, you could claim that Apple chose GCC on the Intel platforms to make them look bad in this comparison...
only 20% faster in fpu?
:'(
and 10% slower in int?
than a p4?
and it's supposed to compete with the optetron/itanium?
how dissapointing...
-judging another only defines yourself
Calling this computer the "fastest desktop in the world" is like calling the McLaren F1 the "fastest car in the world."
I'm trying to see who wants to buy my pc as we speak. Windows is so 1984.
In other news, Apple is going to ship these with a no-button mouse, simplfying the input device to ease new users into their new faster-than-thought systems, as well as pissing off /.ers everywhere.
Apple will never replace my Linux boxes because there will always be a place on my desktop for open source, but these announcements today are pretty impressive. Unlike some of you, I don't follow Apple news so I really didn't expect them to pull this off. I've never bought an Apple, but the Wintel stuff is suddenly looked *real* old-hat. I'm still debating it, but I think these new G5s will make a dent in my budget. :)
--zb
...my ass. It was the Mac community that brought it to it's knees. Though I admit having the rest of the geeks in on it helped. The return of Apple is near, leave your PC's and come on over to the dark side...
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of these new systems will be seeing how AltiVec performs now that the processor has a bus with sufficient bandwidth to keep the AltiVec unit supplied with instructions and data. On the older G4s the AltiVec unit could execute instructions faster than the bus could supply it with instructions and data to process.
Apparently someone got sacked over last week's "leak".
Looking for a new job as a Web Publishing Manager? Apply at Apple Today!
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
For 3000 bucks, you'd have to compare the G5 against 2 or 3 P4 based systems. Otherwise it's like AMD comparing an Athlon based system against a Pentium Pro based system.
Honk if you're horny.
The G5 is 10 percent slower than the P4 and Xeon in SPEC int scores in single-proc units, but 20 percent faster in FPU scores, and the dual-proc G5 beats the dual-proc Xeon in all SPEC scores.
Which Xeon? The 2 Ghz Xeon?
'Course the SPEC benchmarks arn't everything and this is just a very limited test, but damn, those G5 scores ain't nothing special. It's both slower and faster, it almost balances out. And on top of that, you know the regular 'ol Xeon is commonly available at 3+ Ghz. That's still hella faster than the Mac any way you look at it. Not to mention if you had two of them.
I do have to give Apple credit for getting the prices down. Still, a Dual 3 Ghz Xeon machine is cheaper and much faster.
Of course I'm ignoring the nice Apple designs and workable functionality (even if OS X has craploads of overhead and slowness).
The ratio of people to cake is too big
Or are they using super-high-quality fans and that explains the relatively high prices?
9 fans is only 9X as many as early systems had for years -- or an infinite number more fans than the late, and often unlamented, Cube. Is this progress, or does it just let me go out and tell people my system has more fans than yours?
Why do I care? I want a reliable system, which more complexity always works against.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
People who will be running apps in a year or two. You think they can't find uses for that much processing power? :-)
Aluminum cases? Yeah BABY -- no more cheesy plastic! For years now I've been impressed by Apple's being the only computer shop doing anything whatsoever with industrial design. Ever since I saw the original Mac in the mid-80s I've been impressed by the 'fit and finish', for want of a better term, of Macintoshes versus the basic generic shitbox clone PCs. However, ever since the iMac New Way I've been really, really disappointed by the cheapness of the desktop cases, especially of the high-end towers. If you want me to pay extra, give me something that looks worth the price.
From what I can tell of the WWDC pictures, things have finally changed. These things look sweet, even if they do look just like the last 5 years worth of towers. Plus it sounds like they kick ass performance-wise. All I have to do now is convince myself why I should go and drop 3 grand I can't afford for no other reason than to connect with the iPod I don't have.
What if life is just a side effect of some other process and God has no idea we exist?
I just wasted good money for a 128MB FX5200 video card. It stinks. Slower FPS than my old GF2 Ti 32MB card in most every 3D game. I was so disappointed wit hit that I had to go spend another $150 and get a Radeon 9500 (not even the 9700 or 9800) which BLOWS THE FX5200 AWAY BADLY in fps, and in overal picture quality. The *only* thing the FX5200 has going for it is that "Dawn" fairy/pixie graphics demo, and now you can even make that run in an OpenGL wrapper. Definitely recommend the Radeon cards. Right now thay are the king-daddy-paw-paw. Nvidia really pooped thier corporate britches with the whole FX 5#00 product line.
According to the specs there will be only 8GB RAM. why?! It is after all a 64-bit system, isn't it?
I do, dumbass. I don't have a seperate desktop!
Hey freaks: now you're ju
The case is engineered well, but from the crowd reaction in Glendale, it's not a 10 in the looks department. I was shocked at how utalitarian it is.
YEAH I WANT A MACINT0SH C0MPUTA THEY IS S0 FAST THEY IS TEH SUPA C0MPUTA
Are you serious? Wouldn't you like to have a laptop that was fast and affordable enough that you didn't need a desktop?
Well it looks like Apple is in the position they were in when the first PowerPC's came out (486/Pentium era). Or better really. This machine (2GHz dual G5) smokes the dual Xeon 3GHz in a number of demonstrated apps and benchmarks. 2-3x faster in some apps. And that audio demo (emagic) where the Mac started scrolling fullscren video while doing audio - amazing. Still blakespot
-- Heisenberg may have slept here.
iPod Hacks.com
Look at the benchmark graph at Apple's site for them! (here: http://www.apple.com/powermac/
They compare a Dual-CPU G5 to a Dual-CPU Xeon machine; but strangely only to a SINGLE-CPU P4 machine?
Gee why could that be?
Perhaps because those benchmarks are pure-CPU benchmarks, and will scale very close to linearly with extra processors.
Double those bottom numbers from the P4 and it handily beats the Dual-G5...
I browse at +5 Flamebait- moderation for all or moderation for none.
The new G5 machines, with the IBM 970 processor, use the "world's first 64-bit desktop processor" (and the "fastest 64-bit processor ever")
Wow, I'm sure people who had Alpha workstations back in the day will be surprised. Even the n64 had a 64 bit processor, the MIPS r4300. The chip was $35 dollars in bulk in 1996. Iâ(TM)m pretty sure this chip has been used in PDAs in the past few years.
The only reason that they havenâ(TM)t been used in desktops so far is that A) There is a huge legacy base to support and B) The speed increase isn't even that great. I mean, you don't need more then 32 bit ints for the vast majority of the calculations you need to do on a PC (whereas on a 16 bit computer, you need to use several instructions to calculate 'both halves' of the number anytime you needed to do math with numbers larger then 64k.). And anyway, all of the major CPUs available today have instructions that deal with huge amounts of data for floating point and SIMD multimedia stuff.
I'm suppressed apple isn't claming that their machines do 'twice as much work' because they have twice as many bits. This subversion of technical facts for marketing purposes is something apple is constantly guilty of, and it's really annoying. Because you know you're going to have some idiot mac zealot come back at you with something like "yeah, well this is the first 64-bit desktop EVAR" Just like how they claimed the g4 was the first "Desktop supercomputer" or something like that, because it met some obsolete government export restrictions, the same restrictions that the playstation two had surpassed months before.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Is is just me or is apple.slashdot.org getting slashdotted?
To say that for Just $300 I could build a faster AMD machine, and dual boot Linux and Windows XP!
Why? Because everytime there's an Apple product announcement, some smarty-pants always does and I want to be first this time!
"oohhh... I didn't know Schopenhauer was a philosopher!"
They finally release something with as much power as a PC, and it's as ugly as a PC. :)
Sun should be very scared. Their Dual 1.2GHz 64bit offering is $14,995. Ouch!
How do you figure? The two are aimed at entirely different markets. A home user will not be purchasing a Blade 1000, and an engineer doing solid modeling in Catia or Pro/Engineer will not be purchasing a dual G5. There's absolutely no reason for Sun to care about what Apple's doing. The two do not compete in the same marketplace.
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
just thought i'd point out that Apple is claiming fastest SPEC benchmarks.
normally they just brag about photoshop. but this time they're actually breaking out SPEC.
Dual 2.0 GHZ G5 is supposedly 3% faster in interger and 42% faster in FPU than a dual 3 Ghz Xeon. might be worth the premium that Apple charges.
though come to think of it, $3000 is pretty sweet. i can't imagine where you'd find a dual Xeon for $3000.
if you are running emagic logic audio, you are going to want this machine.
I doubt it can beat this one in the quarter mile.
For several years, Apple has lagged in the megahertz race. Motorola's G4 processors have only slowly improved in performance, while Intel and Advanced Micro Devices crank out ever-faster chips at a much swifter clip. Megahertz isn't everything when it comes to performance, but increasing the clock speed generally does boost chip and computer performance.
Yeah the writer eventually says megahertz isn't everything, but fails to grasp that megahertz isn't anything. The only scale that matters is how much work the system can do. Megahertz doesn't even have to enter into the discussion.
Btw, for the record, I'm a PC owner/user who probably won't switch, but still thinks these new Macs, along with the AMD Opteron chips, are the best news to come along in a good long while for all of us!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
nice try but no. try reading benchmarks, asshat. i see you've already gotten your flamebait designation....
think portable recording studio.
Is it just me, or does the new G5 look like a massive cheese grater from the front?
Unfortunately, it looks like they've abandoned the easy-access pull-down door that let you add ram and add-on cards with ease. Oh well, at least its *supposed* to be quieter...
But does it run Linux?
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Why should I pay for something that is 10%-25% faster when it costs 30% as much as a PC? I care about value over absolute top performance.
I don't care about the Mac's legendary ease of use, I'm not braindead. Windows XP is very stable for me (3d graphics in Maya, 2d in Photoshop, video editing in Combustion, games), so OS X is not matter. And I don't care about any of those iLife applications.
So why should I, a PC user, buy a dual 2GHz G5 Power Mac instead of a 3GHz P4 PC, if I care about bang for the buck?
Compare Apple's numbers against the official SPEC results from other companies.
Sun Ultrasparc I - 64 bit.
Introduced: 1995
Aquired, used, for a few hundred bucks and running on my desktop: 1998
Am I the only one who thought, immediately after hearing about the high quality firewire based iSight (not to mention that new video codec), that there ought to be able to connect that sucker to your iPod to record on the road? So your webcam can double as a REAL cam?
Of course it would be much easier if you could display color video on your iPod... and generate it on the fly...
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
As loosing out to the Fisty Prosty to the slashjanitor that posted this piece of crap shouldn't count (much like ANYTHING a slashjanitor does doesn't count at all). YOU DID IT!
Well, click here for more info about the new PowerMac:
Powermac
This thing looks awesome!
Get my e-mail after a captcha test in: http://tinymailt
Apple lists some rather low scores for the intel xeon on their website as compared to the scores listed on www.spec.org (889 vs. 1164 in base-integer, 693 vs. 1213 in base-fp). The fine print on apple's web page says that the scores were generated with gcc on both platforms. Give me a break. Intel should be penalized because they have better compilers?
Also, the opteron, using intel's compiler, manages to beat the 970 in int and fp.
Fastest desktop processor? No.
The same fools who need more than 640K of memory.
Was that Steve Would address the attendees like a mad Principal addressing a class called in for detention:
Steve: "We WERE going to sell 10.3 for $129, but since one of you had to go and ruin it for the rest of you, it'll be $200."
Attendees: Awwww!
One guy punches another guy in the arm in the back row.
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
You know, with all that cooling, and the chip running faster than expected, I'll bet Apple is overclocking these things. Why else would a company that's typically prided itself on simplicity of design come out with this case that's a cross between a Kryotech PC and a Boeing turbine?
And I'll bet that mesh front panel's gonna get all gunked up with dust and cat hair. It'll probably look like the air filter I just pulled out of my turbocharged Volkswagen. Ugh. Hope the thermisters know to shut down or slow down the chips!
Hey freaks: now you're ju
So, when is slashdot going to change the icon?
NMG
I opened the gallery in a tab, and it decided to resize my whole browser window... I *really* hate that...
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
An excerpt taken from the press conference...
It was also pointed out that even though the G5 competes with the Xeon on standardized industry benchmarks, the new G5 models pull ahead on the new Debauchery Benchmark Testing Suite from Slime Studios.
The G5 can eliminate stretch marks, tatoos, and colorize bleached hair at 300 jpegs a second, trouncing the Xeon. It also does breast enlargements at 60 fps, turning the average porn actress from a molehill into a mountain.
The reverse-pixalation test measures the ability of the G5 to restore pubic regions altered from Japanese origin back to an unadulterated state at over 670 jpegs a minute using the Altivec instructions. This is over a 4x increase over the Xeon.
This is exciting news for armchair porn producers looking to get their products out sooner.
iPirate is the new DVD ripper tool included in Panther. iPirate seemlessly rips DVDs and sends them to friends and family where they can re-burn the ripped version. iPirate should not be used on copyrighted movies, only homemade videos.
iPirate also comes bundled with iLawyer. It is projected legal questions will cost 99 cents each or you can place iLawyer on retainer for $9.99.
The fastest desktop claim is based on two 64 bit processors.
In order to extract that >4GHz performance, the program you are running will have to be optimized for 64bit dual processor computing. It won't run every application that fast.
The good thing is, all the major apps (Photoshop, Illustrator, Quark, etc.) will have to be ported to 64bit. Hopefully this will give 64bit computing on the PC a boost too.
My subtext is just a figment of your imagination.
i wholeheartedly agree.
Gayist Desktop In The World
There is no god
How much you want to be they'll be outperformed by the p5 and Athlon64 by then?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Seriously - who needs that much speed in a laptop?
People who use their laptops as their primary machines.
Also, I happen to know several musician/engineers who can max out the CPUs of fairly new machines (PC or Mac) with realtime plug-ins in Logic or Cubase in a heartbeat.
Free yourself. Everything else will follow.
Fromt he G5 page: And models starts at just $1999.
I can'ts waits tills thens. My hearts is poundings
Pleasure Overload!
Power Mac G5 Dual 2GHz
Bluetooth Module
250GB Serial ATA - 7200rpm
Dual 2GHz PowerPC G5
SuperDrive (DVD-R/CD-RW)
512MB DDR400 SDRAM (PC3200) - 2x256
Apples ram prices are just silly i will pick up 4gb elsewhere
Apple Keyboard & Apple Mouse - U.S. English
ATI Radeon 9800 Pro
Accessory kit
AirPort Extreme Card
Fibre Channel PCI Card
Mac OS X - U.S. English
Logitech Z-680 THX 5.1 Speakers & Monster 2-meter Cable
AirPort Extreme Base Station (with modem and antenna port)
iSight
total $5,273.79
Bad Panda! No Bamboo for you! In matters of importance ACs will not be responded to. Want to say something critical,OK
Please consider: whatever PC you can buy for 3000 dollars won't match the performance of the top of the line Mac G5. I'd say value/price ratio is again in favor of the Mac. For how long ?
Either I'm surfing /. at too high of a threshold, or the anti-Apple trolls seem to have run away in fear today... :^)
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
They might as well go with MoSys' 1T SRAM (what the gamecube uses, with a PPC archetecture, I might add). They claim it's pretty much like low-grade L2 cache, making it a whole hell of a lot faster than DDR.
I don't know if it would actually make it go any faster, but with what they're charging for the system, I don't think it'll impact the price that much.
BTW, they mention how memory is "40x" faster than virtual memory repeatedly. It just reminds me about when Sega kept stating that the 32X made the Genesis "40x" faster. Not bashing apple, but a funny coincidence.
-=-=-=-=-=
I'd rather be flamed than ignored.
Yeah, they oughta just stop making faster processors.
And what's with those silly auto-mobiles? I just bought a new horse! It's not like anyone really needs to go faster than a horse can run, after all.
(To be honest, though, I know what you mean. I'm already feeling like my poor 2-year-old 500MHz G3 iMac is hopelessly oudated, even though it runs my everyday stuff just fine.)
Jesus, from the shrill whining of the Intel apologists here, you'd think Apple was a tobacco company lying about killing babies.
Could you ever walk down to a retail store and buy an Alpha for $2K? And run MS Office or a shrinkwrap game on it? Apple's claim seems pretty reasonable to me.
i am too excited, pardon.
Apple holds captive a group which will believe anything they say. It won't matter if you got an Opteron or another "Desktop" system. *Apple says they're first so it must be* Anyways the term "Desktop" is amiguous because any of these machines today are fast enough to be called servers too.
Too bad the dual 2Ghz G5s just walloped those dual 3Ghz Xeons in all SPECmark scores during the keynote.
That's a savings of $5800 or so... So you could nearly buy 2 much slower machines for the same price.
By the way, you only priced one monitor.
Summary: It not only beats up the P4 and Xeon, it takes their lunch money as well.
It did even better at DNA matching: "Testing BLAST with common searches using a word size of more than 11, the Power Mac G5 far outperformed the Pentium 4-based system and the dual Xeon-based system, and nearly five times faster at the long word length of 40."
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
1998 called. I think it wants its joke back.
Your mind is squeezed by a blast of pain!
Sun Blade 2000
The Single 900MHz is 7,595
The Single 1.2GHz is 9,995
The DUAL 1.2GHZ is 13,995 (whoops off by 7.5%)
What about Dual 2.0GHz don't you understand? They may not have been in the same market before now. However, that will soon change (there is your clue). As far as the 106 CPU Version Cluster the XServes the same way Sun does it. I said Sun should be scared. They no longer have a lock on the 64bit market.
I guess things never change in your world. Look out someone may be moving your cheese.
Um...
Just read the specs on Apple's site. The dual G5 beat the dual Xeon 3.06 GHz, in all spec tests.
Sure, the dual Xeon may yet be cheaper, but that doesn't mean it's something I want. I can buy a Porsche Boxter, a BMW Z3, or some such european sports car, or spend a lot less money for a turbo-charged Subaru WRX. If speed were all it was about, the world would be all "Ricers".
Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons, for you are crunchy, and taste good with ketchup.
What is a "workstation" other than a higher price (and yes, $3000 qualifies these days) and higher performance desktop?
A REAL Mac user refers to them as "flavors". :p
Panther will include a final X11 client for Unix-based applications, improved NFS/UFS, FreeBSD 5 innovations as well as support for popular Linux APIs, IPv6 and other important acronyms.
lol, looks like a frustrated copy editor didn't know what to write to impress the geek crowd!
New G5 Power Mac, with 8x AGP, 1GHz bus, 3GHz CPU, Firewire 800, and a bunch of other numbers!
door comes right off quicktime VR here
I'm almost sure that SGI was the first... not sure if Sun beat them to market, though
The target customer is not going to be buying from "Newegg". How many 8GB machines do they ship? Do they even know if it will work?
Price out a similar workstation at Dell and you'll get a similar price. IBM will probably be even more expensive than Apple.
To be fari, he did add in a digital sound system and a second 23 inch apple monitor.
Mod point free since 2001
Why hasn't Jobs negotioated Quadro or FireGL support for the G5? That would make a killer CAD/CAM/CAE platform.... Guess we're sticking with the Precision 650.
As others have pointed out, but nobody seems to get;
Sun's primary market isn't 1, 2, or even necessarily 4 processor markets. Their big market is in the E10000, Sun Fire 12000, and Sun Fire 15000 machines--the smallest of which is limited to a maximum of 52 processors. While their midrange pushes up to 12 processors, and even their entry level servers can push as many as 8 processors. Not only that, but Sun machines are known for scaling incredibly well. Quite simply, Apple does not compete in these markets, IBM does, and for this level of scaling, IBM's Power4 is the high end.
If anything, Apple's highest end box is in a similar position as Sun's highest end workstations--supporting role for massive servers acting as computational farms (render and HPC--IBM's target) and high capacity transaction processing (Sun's target). Yes you can use smaller machines for some of these tasks, but when you NEED that capacity, Apple simply does not exist in that market.
To address your comparison with the Blade 2000 workstations--what if I happen to need a 3DLabs Wildcat or Oxygen graphics board for my CAD box? Can Apple support that?
Yes, one day desktop machines will catch up, but today isn't that day yet.
So, when's lunch?
That is one sexy case...
There's nothing here you couldn't do in an Opteron system. With an Opteron system built from scratch, you'd have the option of replacing the processor(s) or the motherboard when newer technology became available. With Apple, there's no upgrade path short of buying a new system, which can get expensive.
A common miscinception, which I used to share. Apples are VERY upgradeable. There are a lot of people running OS X on ancient beige Powermacs. Having spent years in the peecee world, I know how big of a fallacy the "upgrade a piece at a time" theory is -- I generally wound up gutting the machine every year and a half, keeping only the case (if that) and drives. I fully expect to get a lot more life out of my Macs than that, and spend a lot less time screwing around with them in the interim.
Then wouldn't you expect the Power Mac to be a few hundred cheaper than the comparably performing PC -- not the few hundred $$$s more?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Heck, I put down the PC laptop from 1998 to write my thesis on a Powerbook 540c from 1994.
That's the painful part about Macs. They keep putting out these machines with a high drool factor that you just have to buy, but the old one is still more than adequate. What to do, what to do. . . .
MOD DOWN!!
Oh wait, its already at -1. Good. Anything that bashes my beloved slowMac is bullSHIT!! FUCK I AM ANGERY AT YOU!
Someone mentioned they thought the new cases were kind of ugly; I only partially agree. One of the nicest things about the Quicksilver G4's was how you could open it up with only one latch; that seems to have changed with this model. Also, the insides do not look nearly as elegant.
About the price, if you dump the optical drive and modem the intro system is only $1,770. As soon as the educational pricing gets updated it should be even cheaper.
They may not have been in the same market before now.
They are in totally different markets!
SUN is in the "We sell really expensive hardware with pain in the ass UNIX software to anyone buying." market.
Apple is in the "We sell hardware for anyone up to any reasonable size, and it comes with friendly UNIX software. Some of it is a little expensive, but it all kicks ass." market.
A couple things:
Yours only has 1 flat panel instead of two-- add another $2205. Also, you'll be unable to hook both DVI monitors up via the Radeon 9800-- you'll need to get a slower PCI video card to hook the other up.
Yours doesn't have a 3 year support contract, does it?
Also, the Apple you could get much more cheaply if you were to use third party RAM. Vendor RAM is always expensive.
Finally, as to "2 much faster machines"-- the dual 2GHz PPC G5 is 41% faster in SPECfp_rate_base2000 than a dual 3.06GHz Xeon, which IMO is the most important SPEC benchmark. It's faster in all the others, too, except single processor integer performance.
Let me think-- I could pay $12k and get two of the nicest LCD panels available and the fastest dual processor workstation available in the world made by a vendor with great fabrication quality and customer support. Or I could spend $9k to get two good (but not as nice as the Apple) LCD panels and machines that are only 71% of the speed from a no-name vendor. I think I'd pick Apple.
..."but does it run Windows?"
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
Your a real dumbphuck, you know that?
How the hell are you gonna install 8GB of RAM in your Xeon and have it recognize it, moron?
How you gonna turn the Xeon into a 64bit CPU that can deal with that much RAM, moron?
Oh, and how the hell is it faster? The SpecINT and SpecFP numbers are better on the 2Ghz G5.
God damnit, stupid people piss me off.
> "I allege that SCO is full of it" -Linus
the cpu + mobo specs are great (and i'll probably buy one in a year or so), but this thing only has 3 bays! i'm using four in my alpha now, and that's after i took out the drives i was using for netbsd and freebsd. what are "power users" suppost to do?
w/ my current raid setup (twin 15k.3 cheetahs), i'd have to pull the stock drive and buy an external enclosure for it, if i wanted to use it. and i won't ever be able to add a third raid drive. all the onboard io is great, but it's useless when it all stalls while accessing a single drive!
Here it says it can theorictally address 40,0000,0000h bytes with 40h bits? Wrong, that should be 1,0000,0000,0000,0000h bytes. They must have 2Ah address pins.
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
Three things.
First, the 2x2 GHz G5 is 3% faster than the dual 3 GHz Xeons at integer performance, and 20% faster at FP performance. According to SPECfp-rate. And that's at 2/3 the clock-speed.
Second, half of that 8 GB of RAM will be wasted. Xeons are not 64-bit chips. They cannot address 8 GB of RAM.
Third, the machine that you're $5800 less than had TWO 23" flat panel displays on it. So you're not nearly as much cheaper as you think you are. AND you're slower. AND you can't run 64-bit applications.
Man. Is that really the best you could do, dude?
Exactly. The longevity of Apple Computers are I think the over looked factor. Yeah, sure, speed it might not be the fastest. For games, it might not be the best. But for getting shit done, it works.
It's either on the beat or off the beat, it's that easy.
I moderate therefore I rule!
--
That's what Sun used to think about Intel. I'm not saying that Apple is going after Sun's market right now, but Sun's smug attitude hasn't hindered Intel's quest to bury them in the server market.
If you're on top of the market and you assume that nobody has plans to unseat you, sooner or later you'll get a rude wake up call to reality.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Safari 1.0 is now available through Apple's software update.
The new version seems noticibly faster and has no bug button, but there is still a "Report Bugs To Apple" option under the Safari menu.
Integrate Keynote and LaTeX
--- Submission is feudal.
Apple sent me new Mac today..
It was tight..
But my dog ate it...
It was a really good new mac..
Bummer...
Did anyone notice an iTunes icon on the PC used against the new G5?
Given Apple's history of rigging the comparisons I expect the 3G P4 to have a 533 FSB not 800. But hey that's fair in marketing. Also VC++ or Intel's compiler would be more interesting than GCC. All that said this seems to be a fair and impressive comparison.
http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/030623/sfm092_1.html
"In the SPEC CPU 2000 independent testing comparing the Power Mac G5 against leading 3.0 GHz Pentium 4-based systems and 3.06 GHz Dual Xeon-based systems, the Power Mac G5 won three out of four key benchmark tests. All tests were run with the same industry standard GCC 3.3 compiler to insure a fair comparison; Single processor tests results show the Power Mac G5 an impressive 21 percent faster than the 3.0 GHz Pentium 4-based PC on SPECfp_base2000, which measures single processor floating point performance, and 10 percent slower on SPECint_base2000, which measures single processor integer performance; and Dual processor tests results, which determine the fastest personal computer since dual processor systems are faster than single processor systems, are a clean sweep with the Power Mac G5 beating the 3.06 GHz Dual Xeon workstations by an incredible 41 percent on SPECfp_rate_base2000, which measures the total floating point throughput of the system, and edging out the same system by three percent on SPECint_rate_base2000, which measures total integer computation throughput."
it's such a mess putting those G5's in a 1U rack.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
For that matter, why limit your network to 54Mhz? It's a desktop, it's got lots of wires. Run an additional Cat5 in and drop a few hundred off the price.
--
n/t
Actually I still remember how my father paid about 3500$ for a 386 or 486 over 10 years ago...
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=68312&cid=6252 335
rebeka thomas, slashdot genius!!!
Ok, so now we've got a 64-bit platform, which is arugably more than the average user needs. But why does the altivec still only support instructions for 32-bit floats?
I read before that they were trying to go after the scientific computing comminuty with the new G5s, so it doesn't make much sense to me. Our company borrowed a dual 1GHz G4 from Apple last year in order to do some high performance benchmarks (weather forecasting simulations) but we decided that they really weren't worth the price difference vs AMD or Intel platforms when using double precision floats (ie: G4s aren't much faster than Intel/AMD without SIMD)
All of the SIMD instruction sets that I know of (SSE2,3Dnow and Altivec) can only parallelize single precision FP operations. This is fine for Photoshop and 3D game optimization, but we need double precision SIMD for high accuracy simulations.
And before anyone says "Beowulf"...yeah, I know, but wouldn't it be nice if each node was twice as fast? I'm not a chip designer, obviously, but it only makes sense to update the SIMD component to match the processor's native data sizes...it doesn't support 64 bit ints for parallelization, either.
You could use it...
Not trying to start a flame war, but intel is actually providing some support for linux these days.
All that said, it's some very impressive hardware, and it's certainly the hottest thing to run Mac OS X on. And the SMP advances they may be pulling from FreeBSD 5 will make Panther *scream*. But it's not fair to say it's unique in the raw performance or maximum memory aspects. The evidence isn't there.
Me, I'll take a quad Xeon for my work, but I'd sure as hell point your average Photoshop, Illustrator, or Premiere user at Apples impressive beast.
I'm guessing it's more that people who don't agree with you piss you off.RDRAM last time I checked had higher total bandwidth than DDR, but fails to be faster where it counts - latency. Latency on non-sequential read/write is where the memory bottle neck is.
Yep, this is why in memory intensive operations like a DAW (digital audio workstation) that a good solid PC2100 DDR machine with P4 Northwood CPU and at least i845D chipset with its 2.1 GB/sec over a 64-bit wide bus will run just about as good an otherwise identical machine with i850 chipset and PC800 rambus memory arranged in 32-bit wide dual/pairs for 32-bit wide bus at 3.2GB/sec total bandwidth.
You cannot just take an enterprise machine and replace it with a desktop, because eventually the desktop will fail, usually unexpectedly and usually at the worst possible time.
Desktop PC's are meant to go on DESKTOPS, where if they fail, the most you've lost is a few man-hours of work. Enterprise machines go in server rooms where if they fail you might have just lost a few million in sales, and pissed off your customer base.
Jherico
What can the average user can do to ensure his security? "Nothing, you're screwed"
I'm kinda surprised you didn't mention how much cheaper PC's are, and how OS X is based on BSD, which is dying. Other reasons to own a mac, which I never really see refuted by the PC crowd, is the Total Cost of Ownership, longevity and the cheaper support costs. As I see it, you get what you pay for, and if I could get osX running on an off the shelf PC, then I would. As it is, mac os(es) are the best for me. So I need to buy the hardware to run it. It also helps that it looks good and performs well.
Happy the Apple people are fairly cutting edge. Nice to see ATI and nVidia options.
Why only 8-gig of RAM? 64-bit CPUs supports terabytes. I guess it's not a server, but 8 gig isn't that much any more.
Some comparisons with the Opteron (or, to be more fair, Athalon64) would be nice. Of course, since you can (or will be able to) select from a slew of motherboards, it will be tough to get a decent comparison.
One other thought just struck me (I can feel a bruise developing) - Apple never releases their stuff to independant hardware vendors. Never seen an Apple product (other than an iPod) reviewed at Anandtech, Toms Hardware, TechExtreme, Ars Technica, etc. Would be interesting to hear what a site like that had to say.
Maybe you should try repricing that with two screens, like the system you're trying to compare against?
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
Actually, the P4 can address more than 4GB of memory thanks to bank switching and using 36 bit addressing in the MMU. It makes things more difficult on the OS kernel and can require more MMU cache flushes and copies, but it does allow IA32 to scale up to 64GB-- in much the same way as 16 bit 8088/8086s were able to address up to 1 megabyte.
However, the most interesting part is that they used GCC to compile the SPEC suite, and not some special compiler to make hardware look good in benchmarks (in contrast to some vendor compilers).
Given that Apple uses gcc to build MacOS X, in part if not entirely, I don't think it is very surprising. Apple has also been pretty active in improving the PowerPC code generation as well.
Seriously. Apple thinks that just because it announces something that wont be shipping for 3 months, it can claim the title of the "only" 64-bit desktop machine.
Apparently, either Jobs hasn't been paying attention to AMD, or AMD doesn't count because it's not Intel.
I'm sorry, but aesthetics is important to me and the fact that the new system with its multiple fans is almost twice as quiet as the current G4 tower, is trés cool. The case is massively cool. I'd like to know how they are gonna put that thing in Powerbooks without requiring the use of oven mitts.
The most significant aspect of the whole presentation was the distributed computing built into the new xTools. Are you kidding me??? Anybody wanna guess how soon we'll be seeing OTHER apps taking advantage of the distributed computing capabilities built into the G5 Mac/Panther?
The old joke about a Beowulf cluster of those becomes reality!
Curious George
***General Consultant to the Human Race*** My opinions are free. You get what you pay for.
You're quoting statistics from apples site? Don't you think that those statistics would be a little biased? Lets wait until the review sites dig into the G5s before we declare anything.
it says that they ship with radeon 9800 pro cards some of them on the site.. but it says 9600 in the keynote paste
confusion?
Steve Jobs also noted in his speech that the new G5 outperforms a comparable Xeon system on the all imporant "Duke Nukem Forever" time demo. Attaining the impressive score of 233fps compared to just 147fps on the Intel system. As verified by the idependent test lab Pixar Studios.
However SCO has sued to challenge these results.
http://www.kubuntu.org/
Found one that is thinking about not paying up! Somebody get The Enforcer down to his place real quick! And bring the iTorture, you may need it.
But seriously. Please stop complaining. If it's worth the price, pay it and be happy. If not, don't pay it and be happy. It's YOUR decision.
Nobody is holding a gun to your head and forcing you to upgrade. Your computer works just as well as it did when you put Jaguar on it. Nothing changes that. If YOU want to get new features, YOU have to decide if they are worth the price. End of story.
Me, I'm buying, but then my wife gets it with educational discount for $69 (if I remember right, that's what Jaguar was). I'd pay the $129 if I had to, the user switch feature is worth the upgrade alone. But if you don't want to, Cool! Save some dough. Just stop whining (oops, I said that word, this must be a flame instead of an intelligent reply).
And we went over this last year with Jaguar. But I'll reiterate: Windows full version is something like $199. More for Pro. Compared to that, $129 IS a good "upgrade" price.
And one final thought. If you own a computer capable of running Panther, and you buy the retail box, then BY DEFINITION you are upgrading. Therefore $129 IS the upgrade price. There is no "full version" price because that is absorbed in the cost of a new Mac with Panther preinstalled (I guess that makes that one the OEM version).
Make sense? I hope so! I'm not an Apple apologist, just a whiner hater (sorry, said that word again, please disregard my entire post, as it is all flamebait with nothing intelligent to think about). Don't buy it, that's fine by me. If that's what you decide.
Yeah, the pull down door, where the neighbours kids used to help themselves to your RAM...oh well.
This computer is plain f**ken awesome!
P4 != Xeon
You != smart
Is the Xeon 64-bit? Show me a set of test suites that show the dual Xeon as being faster than the dual G5. Until then, it would seem like you get what you pay for. ("quad Xeons", indeed!)
To all of you smart guys, the claim on the part of Apple is that the G5 is the world's first 64-bit "personal computer." At least according to their website. I did not see any widespread mention of it being the first 64-bit desktop processor.
Suppose you are like me and run Linux on your Intel boxes. What results are you going to get? The gcc results, that's what.
No. The Intel compiler is available for Linux.
Apple's stuff is indeed droolworthy, but their support for their flat panel displays is less than stellar. If you take a look at a competitor's page, you'll see that Apple won't accept a panel as defective unless there are ten dead pixels in the display, an unnacceptably high number in my opinion. Furthermore, their displays aren't supported (to my knowledge - haven't checked their site) for longer than a year.
The obvious solution: get the dream system, but buy your two displays from Formac (or other manufacturer of your choice) instead.
In case you weren't paying attention to the apple store, a full-loaded G5 (with all the options) will cost you (drum roll):
:)
$13,730.90
Ouch!
I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Mac fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a Mac (a 8600/300 w/64 Megs of RAM) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. 20 minutes. At home, on my Pentium Pro 200 running NT 4, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this Mac, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.
In addition, during this file transfer, Netscape will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even BBEdit Lite is straining to keep up as I type this.
I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various Macs, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a Mac that has run faster than its Wintel counterpart, despite the Macs' faster chip architecture. My 486/66 with 8 megs of ram runs faster than this 300 mhz machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that the Macintosh is a superior machine.
Mac addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use a Mac over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.
A "$1000 general-purpose computer" is easy to define. The $1000 general-purpose computers (PC and iMac) are built on x86 and PowerPC architecture respectively.
I define the difference between a "desktop" and a "workstation" in terms of application support. A "desktop machine" is one that natively runs the same binaries as a $1000 general-purpose computer. A "workstation", on the other hand, has little consumer-priced commercial software because there is no consumer-priced model of the hardware, and only a place of "work" can afford hardware of that platform.
Will I retire or break 10K?
It is. Of course, there are no low-end Macs, which means that PC's pretty much have that part of the market won. However, if you configure a dual Xeon / dual Opteron machine similarly to the G5, I think you'll find that the G5 is cheaper and spanks the x86 boxes in performance.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
that the majority of the FPUS calculations are done on the video card. duhhhhhhhh
you mean it's attached to you?
that's hideous!
That was classic intercourse!
Uh, it's only 9 more fans than the Cube, not infinity. perhaps you meant the ratio/percentage of fans from Cube to G5 is undefined, as 9/0 = the slope of y=x*infinity
steve jobs' keynote address is now available as a quicktime stream here: http://stream.apple.akadns.net/
First, Apple crams all sorts of stuff in there, some of which you don't need, but it's standard on all the macs of a class. This matters when you need one of those things, and it's absolutely already there, and very few people have marginally compatible upgrade cards. Do I need gigabit? No. Firewire 800? No. Is it cool? Yes.
Second, Apple's stuff is "highly engineered" meaning that they made sure it all behaved fancy and looked fancy, and absolutely charged you for that improved experience. Yes, this is a higher margin for them, but the added value is in the overall experience.
Third, I consider OSX at least the equal of XP, and Apple's more expensive. So consider a several hundred dollar OS premium that you might not be adding in otherwise.
In the end, these are surprisingly cheap. (Although I still tend to add in some third-party components...)
Looking for freelance Actionscript (Flash/Flex) or ColdFusion work and/or freelance developers. Email me, put Slashdot
If you look on spec.org you'll see that intell scores much higher than on this comparison...
cint2000rate = 22.5 ( dual 3.0 xeon )
cint2000 = 1200( 3.0 p4 )
cfp2000rate = 17 ( dual 3.0 xeon )
cfp2000 = 1229 ( 3.0 p4 )
value? what is the value in a system that you have to replace in two years?
Large print giveth, and the small print taketh away
That is one thing that has always annoyed me about macs - it always seemed that the processor upgrades were based on the sentimental value of your old machine.
"Well, Binky, you old 8600. We've had some good times together. I remember when I first wrote that letter to Father O'Day while trying to copy a bunch of files. Now, I'm going to get the 400 mhz G4 upgrade card for you and be stuck with your old FSB and slow ass memory because I really don't want to have to move the stickers on your case that define my personality. And its 14 dollars cheaper than a new dual 800."
So will I need to get a stupid daughtercard, or will I be able to drop a new processor in? Or will I be stuck with a 1.6ghz until I buy a whole new box?
No good ol' 10/100BASE-T Ethernet in the standard product?
;)
This will be my first mac, I hope the pci expansion
slot will take an oold RTL 8139
The Bug Button is still available - it is one of the choices in the View menu.
It was the Digital Alpha in 1994, while it was a desk-side, more than a desk-top.
Give it a few more years and Apple will be one of the leading computer companies again, victorious! They have the aesthetic appeal and solid OS and software; now they need to reach a broader audience, and lower the prices just a little.
OK, half of you people are complete idiots. You keep arguing with the FACT that it's the first 64-bit desktop. When they say, desktop, they mean personal computer. Go read it at apple.com. It's on the front page. It says "The New PowerMac G5... The world's first 64-bit personal computer." Essentially what this means is that this computer was designed for the HOME USER from the get-go. Therefore these statements are completely accurate. All of you guys are saying "well i got a 64-bit sun procesor and running it right now." SURE, youre running it, but does that mean that it's a 64-bit personal computer? NO. It means that you took a 64-bit workstation meant for use at a company or soemthing, and simply converted it for your own use. And to all of you who are dissing the new G5, KEEP YOUR MOUTH SHUT TILL YOU USE ONE. I am a PC and a Mac owner, and I know what I'm talking about.
gain speed? cause i know i'm not (lets not mention the fact you make the statement that the xeons are outclassed by 41 percent but you say the system is 71% slower.. missing 10 percent.. and that is only in reference to ONE benchmark.. but i digress)
as for support, my bestfriend has a g4 powerbook that he has returned repeatedly and been lied to vehemently by the apple store here in indy as it has a broken ram slot and they swore up and down they replaced the board 3 times and it is STILL there and STILL broken and STILL killing brand new dimms that they refuse to acknowledge as being their problem because the ram isn't Apple ram so they claim it's the ram that is bad not the Clearly broken dimm slot.. i've been up there twice and he's been several other times.. their "support" is abysmal.. and they hold the machine for weeks when they have it...
having said all that, and owning no macs (save an old ppc 7200 that is laying at my ex-g/fs basement) i like osx and have no problems with apple but the original poster is right
apple caters to elitists, and they finally found (another) large niche market of those to tap into
-- unixgeeks =)
besides the most intensive thing i do is play ET so i don't need dual flat paneled anything, making both machines grotesquely expensive and worthless from my standpoint
yes the apple machines are nice, but they're also extremely expensive.. and i awnt to see some of the big *nix stations do some kind of comparable benchmarks.. i would like to see if hte sun/sgi are fucked posts are accurate..
Well, Photoshop, for one thing...yes, Macs are still used for graphics, dontchaknow.
Try editing CMYK graphics at 600 or 1200 dpi for high-end print work sometime. With layers. And masks (which are essentially added layers). Running filters. The whole she-bang.
Such a file can easily get into hundreds of megabytes in size, and Photoshop generally needs 2x to 3x as much RAM as the actual file size to efficiently work; even then it starts to bog down at those file sizes.
My dual G4/450 with 1.5 GB RAM and Radeon 9000 already gags on that enough so that it's a hassle when I have to design and edit that kind of stuff. Believe me, I'm going to be first in line as soon as I scrape together the $2500 or so for a new G5 system with added RAM (the more RAM, the merrier -- Photoshop is VERY hungry for RAM).
Not to mention video editing and 3D, both of which are markets that the Mac has generally been strong (if not dominant) in for some time.
I might add that you could ask the same question about P4-based PCs. Who needs that kind of firepower? Not many (mainstream) people, really -- aside from perhaps gamers. The vast majority of users just do e-mail, web surfing and word processing, maybe a little photo editing. A P2 or P3 running Linux or an older version of Windows would be more than enough in those cases. Hell, even an old Pentium with a smallish Linux installation would be enough in many cases.
OTOH if you give users and developers the added power of new processors and mainboards (strange that HyperTransport hasn't gotten much mention here), people will find a way of using it. One example: Apple's predicted that video editing will be the next mainstream computing revolution, like desktop publishing was twenty years ago. If you think about it, they're probably right.
Most newer computers can easily handle basic video editing now; the question is just how to make it easier for Joe Sixpack to edit his family videos (and maybe make Junior a budding David Lynch).
Cheers,
Ethelred
Everyone wants to be Ethelred. Even I want to be Ethelred.
If you go to the apple store and check out the new G5's, at the top of the page it reads:
Step 1: Select Your Power Macintosh G3
Nice, I've been waiting -5 years for those things.
MHz isn't everything. For the programs I run, my G4 iMac is slower *per MHz* than my Athlon PC.
...can it run Half-Life 2?
What's the resolution on those Apple flat panels? And what's the refresh rate. And color depth. Because you'd be better off putting them on seperate video adapters. Your video memory only has so much bandwidth and sticking two large resolution, high color depth, and high refresh rate displays on there will completely fuck your video card performance. You'd be better off putting a second display on a PCI card than trying to stick two high demand displays on a single AGP card.
Does anyone else find the slightest hint of irony in the emphasis on the partnership between Apple and IBM?
Maybe upon consideration of the ad that signaled the launch of the first Macintosh?
Anybody?
Don't become a regular here -- you will become retarded.
The Xeons have been based off the P4 core for a while. The name 'Xeon' is just a marketing brand by intel to differentiate their workstation and desktop processors. And still ,even the P3s had 48-bit memory addressing.
you != smart ;)
Oh yeah? Well MY dad paid $6500 for his IBM PC/XT with a 4.7 MHz cpu, 256k memory, and a 10 MB hard disk. 20 years ago. Nyah!
The machine is fast and the OS is advanced. But what irks me to no end is that Apple seems hell-bent on keeping the Mac in its little niche market. It doesn't make much sense but Apple refused to capitalize on people's migration from traditional Unix to the more "user friendly" NT. As an example I'll use the situation I am most familiar with but keep in mind this sort of thing is probably similar across dozens of industries. Computer hardware and electronics design. The most popular tools today are probably those from Cadence and Synopsys. Both have powerful software suits available for 32-bit and 64-bit versions Solaris, Linux, HP-UX, and NT(32)/XP. For some reason people started migrating from Unix to NT. So now I'm stuck using design and verification tools on 2000. When I use Mentor Graphics ModelSim and Cadence's Layout and PSpice I have to install all this extra stuff like Cygwin, and Perl just to try to imitate the functionality avaialable in Unix. I'm sure many other people do this. Plus, these third party tools are so poorly integrated into the rest of the OS.
With Mac OS X, it's all there. The complete Unix toolset and environment comes standard, the Macs are good for graphics as it is (which is what all these new design tools focus on anyway), and the UI is a dream to use. It's simply a better platform in a lot of different ways. Check out Sun and SGI's third party applications pages, then look at Apples. There are whole industries missing.
Here's where Apple needs to come in and sell these people on their product. Users want better software, software companies want a larger use base and better product and Apple wants to ship more units. Why is this not being done?
The funny thing is that in-house ASIC design at Apple is probably done on Solairs, HP, or NT. I'm sending e-mail Cadence and gang. Everyone who doesn't want to see this whole industry to be swallowed by NT and wants to move to OS X should do the same.
The benchmarks on Apple's website are complete fabrications.
They say they're specing against "3.06 GHz Dual Xeon-based Dell Precision 650".
According to Apple, the Precision 650 has a SPECint of 836 with a SPECint_rate of 16.7, and a SPECfp of 646 and a SPECfp_rate of 11.1.
But according to Spec, the Precision 650 has a SPECint of 1089, with a SPECint_rate of 21.7, and a SPECfp of 1053, with a SPECfp_rate of 15.7
Which puts the Dell Precision 650 FAR ahead of the Dual G5... I can't believe there are such blatant lies on Apples website.
Just curious why no one is comparing these suckers to AMD SMP systems. I would assume AMD SMP is slower, but they're going to be a heck of a lot cheaper than Xeon systems, and probably cheaper than these new macs.
Just curious, I'll probably look the stuff when I get off of work. However, if anyone wants to assist my laziness and look it up before then, be my guest!
I don't like these designs. I like the G4 ones.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
1984 is starting to look a lot like 1984 now isn't it?
Thanks for the chips IBM!
Thanks for the bailout Bill Gates!
Thanks for the chips again IBM!
Where would Apple be now if its "foes" didn't come to help out?
Not as much a flame as a question actually. I really do like PPC when compared to X86 and it is always good to add excitement of any sort in this industry.
The new Intel Canterwood chipset has on board raid for the serial ATA interface.
Does Apple have that?
Apple has great hardware engineers. Their website fu)%ing designers need a baseball bat upside the back of their head. Repeatedly.
Yeah, yeah. Troll. Flamebait. Redundant. Offtopic. Yada-yada. This kinda stuff just pisses me off. I still want an ipod, though.
Can someone explain to me the logic of not only announcing your new products months before they ship, but pulling the old ones straight away? What I mean is, Apple is currently not selling Powermacs. The G4s have vanished from the store, and you won't get your G5 until god knows when in August.
I bet a lot of people who are currently interested in getting a mac are now going to get windows machines instead, because either they don't fancy a maybe 2-month wait for a machine, or they don't want to splash out on the higher-priced G5s. Apple would have done a lot better to at least keep selling G4s until August - preferably at a discount. But then Apple marketing appears to be confusing. Powerbook prices are dropped in the run-up to a new product announcement...but instead of announcing new portables, they launch a new desktop. Surely the big question now is when the G5s move into the powerbooks and the G4s into the iBooks. a 64-bit notebook -- now that really would be a first
The author of this post asserts his moral rights.
Unfortunately, it's probably too late to make the rest of the world start using it. Go to any large PC dealer's homepage (I picked Dell to verify my "workstations can cost less than $3000" claim) and see whether or not they claim to also be selling workstations.
oooooohhhhh
64-bit... wow!
Like, you can... ummm... support more than 2gb without swapping?
hrmmn...
like... you can support signed ints greater than 2.1 billion without some trickery?
ummmmm... that's about it.
64-bit != faster (necessarily). In fact, it could concievably be slower because of all the extra data that you are passing back and forth...
Step away from the pulpit... Whether the 970 ends up being faster in practice is yet to be seen. Whether OSX can take advantage of horsepower is a different question. We're talking about too many unknowns just yet.
I said no text, /. code :)
Y'all do realize that this means that the prices on the older generation of dual 1.25s & so forth is going to go down, right?
We'll have at least a year before 64-bit apps are the only game in town.
The scores they list are *not* official SPEC scores, they could come from anywhere!!
I can't believe so many slashdrones are praising apple's amazing SPEC performance, when the numbers could have come from thin air!
Apple marketing has not changed at all.
Of this year. That's what? FOUR MONTHS AGO.
If you read the small print: "RUNS ALL WIN64 AND WIN32 BINARIES".
Unhappy with Intel? You've been able to buy AMD Opteron,
from several places for months.
Starting at around $1,100 and from about $1600 for a dual CPU system.
While it is a pretty good design and all, from watching the presentation, it seems as if there is only room for one internal optical drive, something that may tick off a lot of people. Of course for years now apple has been preaching the use of firewire periperals and such.
Also of note, no mention of how easy it is to open the case. they made a huge fuss over the fact that theere was just one latch on previous powermacs, now there seems to be no such latch , and there is a plastic panel inside that also needs to be removed.
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
While it's sitting there on the set it will also be rendering the effects for the entire show!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The new Apple PC is far more than just a PC. It is a workstation in its own right and outperforms the workstations built by Sun. The new Apple PC is both (much) faster and (much) cheaper than a Sun workstation.
Just look at the specs of the new Apple PC. 1.6 GHz and only $1999. It also does UNIX and Linux. Steve Jobs lucked out -- again. There will a surge of demand for this machine from engineers, moving beyond the traditional Apple core users (i. e. educational institutions, graphic artists, etc.). Apple will supplant both Sun and HP as the new workstation company of Silicon Valley.
By the way, the bell tolls. It tolls ominously for Sun.
Mod parent up +1 funny
Apple is still selling the OS 9 bootable G4s. Look under the "Apple Products" sidebar on the store's front page.
Single 1.25GHz for $1299, dualies for $1599.
~Philly
It's a plain and simple fact that everyone seems to be ignoring -- apple (or veritest) unfairly biased this against intel by using a crappy compiler and *not using* the official SPEC results!
yeah, the SPEC scores are completely out of line...take a look what intel published today... at a mhz-to-mhz comparison, of course, AMD has them completely in the shitter, but...that'd be too obvious... and yes, AMD was the first with a desktop 64-bit processor since you can buy the BOXX systems, etc. with the processor...so, the Anon. Idiot a couple posts back can rephrase what he said. cheers, dave
Storage Editor, AMDZone.com
I just acquired (used) my "Yikes"-powered G4 a couple weeks ago, and I'm *very* happy with it. This is a machine that was sold for a couple months back in 1999, with a 400MHz CPU (I actually have it o/c'd to 450), and it runs rings around the PC from just a year ago with a 3x faster CPU that I was using before I got this! In usefulness and stability, that is (not in raw clock speed, which Really Doesn't Matter.)
Absurdity: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion. -- Ambrose Bierce
i wouldn't say that apple is lying on this. all they're doing is using the SAME compiler.
i realized that it's not the compiler everyone is using in the windows world, but it is still valid for comparison. for their rater image benchmark (i.e. photoshop) they used the same version of photoshop on both platforms. indeed, corel photopaint may run the same actions on the PC much faster, but the point is that they were using the same benchmark.
apple could have, and no doubt will, re-do these benchmarks with a 64 bit highly optimized compiler. when they (or someone)releases those benchmarks some people will cry "foul" because the same compiler isn't available for the PC side. it's a no win situtation.
also, you can correct me if you wish, but it's my understanding that GCC is actually faster for somethings than Intel's compiler.
So before today, I heard lots of rumors about the 970 being less expensive for IBM to make (25% or more cost savings) than the the chips from Motorola in the G4.
Does anyone have any numbers to note if this is true? I (foolishly) didn't write down the previous G4 specs before today.
Are there any Store.Apple.com archivists who would be willing to enlighten us on the G4 vs. G5 pricing?
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
Indeedy. Kind of amusing to note how it "breaks through the 4gig barrier".
The reason it is a stupid comment though is that high end Intel chips have supported more then 4 gigs for quite a while, using the same funky segments+offsets system they used back in the 286 days to allow them to access more then 64k. And not only that, the new g5 machines only support 8 gigs of ram anyway, so it's not really that much of an improvement.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
o.k.: Which compiler generated your OS-binaries? gcc or VS7? Propably not the Intel C-Compiler. So measuring with hypothetic data is a bit unfair. You also need to take into account that Intel is heavily tweaking its compiler for the SPEC-Suite - the gcc-guys are not (in general Intel compiler is faster, no doubt).
The Opteron is aimed at the Server/Workstation market - have a look at the AMD-homepage. The Athlon64 will be for Opteron whats G5 for the Power4. And Athlon64 will be worse at the SPEC as it wont have a 128bit memory-bus. You also have to take into account that the goodies of the Opteron will only be available with rewritten code - PowerPC always had a 32/64bit compatibility, where AMD is now struggeling for support.
The G5 is competing with the P4 as a desktop processor, not with the Opteron in the Server. Please go an compare the Operton to the Power4.
We all now that all this "fastest ever"-bla is marketing-babble. Try to be happy that there is a new interesting and blazing fast Desktop-CPU available! (If you dont like PowerPC or OS-X, enjoy the competition driving your favorite architecture)
According to Apple's web site, they tested their machine against two Dell Intel boxes (Dell Dimension 8300 (P4) and Dell Precision 650 (Dual Xeon)) running Red Hat Linux 9.0 Professional (at Apple's request).
.PDF format) including all hardware and software used is available from Veritest's web site.
Intel states that Red Hat Linux 9.0 Professional is one of the Linux OS's currently available that "include optimizations for HT Technology and are currently eligible to carry the Intel® Pentium® 4 Processor with HT Technology logo".
Apple commissioned the benchmark from a company called Veritest. The full report (in
This could make Intel take notice! Of course, this benchmark comes on the same day that Intel announces the 3.2GHz Pentium IV (and Xeon) processors. Go figure!
Of the published data on both (in SPEC processor benchmarks), Apple's Power Mac G5 generated a SPECfp_base2000 score of 840 and SPECint_base2000 score of 800, while Intel claims that their new 3.2 GHz processors get a SPECfp_base2000 score of 1252 and a SPECint_base2000 score of 1221.
And the SPIN goes on!
-Joe
If we're all god's children, what's so special about Jesus? - Jimmy Carr
Sorry, malformated HTML :P
Indeedy. Kind of amusing to note how it "breaks through the 4gig barrier".
I've got 1.5 gigs of ram in my machine, and a self-coded app that takes shitload (I could have spent hours upon hours getting the mem use down, or I could have purchased more ram for insanely low prices). Memory is so cheap now that putting 4gigs of ram in your PC isn't even impractical.
The reason it is a stupid comment though is that high end Intel chips have supported more then 4 gigs for quite a while, using the same funky segments+offsets system they used back in the 286 days to allow them to access more then 64k. And not only that, the new g5 machines only support 8 gigs of ram anyway, so it's not really that much of an improvement.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I also am not sure if they have a lot of 64-bit PPC optimizations yet. But like you said, all of the application demos showed an equally impressive boost in speed which speaks well to how it fares in real use.
It will be interesting to see more independent reviews when these things come out.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Please explain how this would be a bad thing.
http://stream.qtv.apple.com/events/jun/happy_wwdc/ wwdc_250_100_56_ref.mov
-You may license this sig for only $6.99.
If he's gutting his PC case to upgrade, new mobo, etc. is that supported?
--
As a matter of fact, I am a lawyer. But I play an actor on TV.
For students and/or educators (personal purchases), the Powermac G5 line goes like so in prices:
1.6GHz - $1,899
1.8GHz - $2,299
Dual 2GHz - $2,849
The discounts are consistent with previous Apple academic discounts. These are the same configurations as the corresponding non-educational priced retail systems:
1.6GHz - $1,999
1.8GHz - $2,399
Dual 2GHz - $2,999
-Joe
If we're all god's children, what's so special about Jesus? - Jimmy Carr
Jesus. I guess this is slashdot, so I should expect this, but come on!
Apple's site says: "The world's first 64-bit personal computer." PERSONAL COMPUTER. Not Desktop. Come on, you can't honestly expect the slashdot editors to get it right, can you? RTFA. Oh wait, this is slashdot, nevermind. Nobody does that here.
With that in mind, I don't see any trickery whatsoever. No previous 64-bit machine was ever considered a PERSONAL computer. Alpha, SGI, Sun, HP-PA, Itanium, even Opteron. Calm down everyone!
Fortunately, as soon as I recieved the call, I alerted the appropriate government authorities, and I'm sure that our boys in Los Alamos have their spatiotemporal specialists on the job right now.
If not, we may have to...consider...activating Task Force Crimson Bravo, although I'm sure I'm as loathe to do that as you are.
Your mind is squeezed by a blast of pain!
TOTAL BULLSHIT. You have no idea what you are talking about. A 33 Mhz PCI video card is better than 2 flat panels hooked to a 9800 Pro?
Give me a major league break. You a clown.
Only an idiot would try to use the displays for something like gaming. I, for one, would use one as a monster Maya editing window and the other to design my textures. Both of those are fairly static, so I don't really need a high refresh rate. I do, however, have the ability to cut off one display and use only the other to do some nice, full-screen, real-time rendering.
Also, due to the way Quartz Extreme works, the UI would be nice and responsive and there would be no refresh rate problems at all. You see, QE uses a really cool tripple buffering system. It essentially renders the entire display to a giant PDF and then displays it full screen. This is much more efficent than what Windows does.
THANKYOU! I keep trying to say this, but they don't freaking care. 1st 64b PERSONAL computer. Nothing more, nothing less.
you've posted more crap in the last 3 days than i have in six months obviously something gets done enough for you to come back here and waste your life eh
My completly self-serving question is: How does it stack up to a machine I can buy myself for gaming in terms of price performance? Here's the system I'm about to build myself -
:), and I'd be interested to know.
$85 - AMD XP 2600+
$140 - 1 Gig (2x512) Kingston 2700 DDR ram
$150 - Chaintech Nforce2 board (raid 0, surruond sound, ethernet)
$160 - 160 GB (2x80) Western Digital Special Edition drives, 7200rpm, striped raid 0 for speed
$360 - Radeon 9800 pro 128
$230 - Sony DRU-500A mutliformat DVD burner
$120 - some descent computer case
$180 - Win XP
$50 - Descent keyboard and mouse
Total - $1475
A comparable (except obvious diff of OS and processor) 1.6 Ghz Apple system comes to $2820, and that's without the raid harddrive setup. How much better is the apple system going to do at games? I realize that's not the entire (or even a big part) of the computer market, but it is MY market
Actually the 8088 and 8086 could access 1MB directly. They used bank switching to address up to 16MB.
And don't say "What about the 640KB limit?". That was an IBM system architecture limitation, not a processor limitation.
G5, been there done that, where are the pics of the G6? What are the specs? When can we expect it?
No, exactly the same. If the processor can't address more than 4 GB of physical RAM, then the kernel can't slice that RAM up into chunks and hand it out to the various processes. If you have 8 GB of RAM in a 32-bit machine, you're wasting 4 GB of RAM.
That's ridiculous. The 32bit Intel chips can access way more then 4gigs of ram. They use the same segment+offset system that allowed the 286 to access more then 64k of ram. Modern Xeon chips can access 2^36 bytes of ram, or 64 gigabytes. Do you really think 8-bit CPUs could only use 256 bytes of memory?
Second of all, even if a CPU can't access that much memory directly, they can use a paging system to flip between different 'pages' of memory. This was popular back in the 8/16 bit CPU days. These days, CPUs use the virtual memory system to give each application it's own address space, which maps to a real address space in hardware. So even if a program isn't written to take advantage of > 4 gig address, other programs on the system can use that space.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
1994 + 1999 + UNIX = WOW
/. favorite OS) plus now the hardware kicks butt. Heck, even if it's not as fast as the competition, it's back in the ballpark and it has Apple's design + IBM's technology = momentum.
I.e. Panther is beautiful and elegant (and based on our
I know this probably isn't _too_ significant a factor, but wouldn't a 64bit equivalent of a 32bit program use more ram? I mean. all of the pointers are now 64bit, all of the ints (unless specificed) are 64 bit.
With all of these data types twice as large, wouldn't you need a noticably larger L1 and L2 DCaches in order to get equivalent performance?
Furthermore, if all of the instructions are aligned to one word (64bit), wouldn't the ICaches need to be _twice_ as large as before?
I think this is an interesting point that no one has seem to have brought up...
If you don't need to burn the pretty DVD movies, you can "downgrade" to a CD-RW/DVD-ROM and save $200.
Considering they used gcc to test the Xeon I do not put much credence in those, so bring on the DoomIII benches.
Whenever the offence inspires less horror than the punishment, the rigour of penal law is obliged to give way...
How many Sun, Itanium, Opteron and Alpha based computers are being used in YOUR NEIGBOURHOOD? What's that? NONE?
Proof that the world is full of idiots!
I want one:
Speed Mac
SPEEEEEDDDD MAC
Dammit! The RIAA strikes again!
Dear Gawd: A Beowulf cluster of THOSE!!!????
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
First off, GCC is probably better optimized for x86 then it is for the PPC 970 by virtue of the fact that it's been running on x86 for so much longer. So, even using the same compiler, the field is still tilted in the direction of x86.
Second, the test is of the speed of the processors, not the quality of the optimizing compilers for them.
Third, the "fastest" comment was made with respect to the dual-processor configurations. The numbers you site are for the single-processor version.
Yes, in single-processor land Apple lost in intspec by about 10%, but won in floating-point land by about 30%. This is using a compiler that is better optimized for the competitor. And they still came out ahead.
In dual-processor land they came out ~10% ahead in integer land and over 40% ahead in floating-point land. A tremendous difference.
The real-world tests they performed seemed to back up these results with Photoshop, Mathematica and a few other programs running an average of 2x faster on the PPC 970.
This may sound incredible, but it is just a matter of bandwidth, and the G5 has plenty of it.
The dual-processors have completely independant busses, a 1Ghz FSB, 400Mhz 128-bit DDR memory, two independant floating-point units and two independant integer units. The PPC970 is capable handling over 120 in-flight instructions, that is, instructions which can be worked on and processed in parallel. In P4-land only a few dozen instructions are can potentially be run in parallel.
Do you really think that Apple would hire a company like VeriTest to verify their results and then lie about them? If they didn't actually have better spec scores they just wouldn't have used those tests...
Justin Dubs
I was losing a lot of sleep over the 4byte 2038 unix time rollover bug.
Now all I have to do is buy a new Mac and recompile everything!
Yay Apple!
I wonder when 8byte time will roll over..
One detail that nobody seems to have seen is the hideously huge pricedrop on some older G4 towers. 1.25GHz Tower: $1,299 Dual 1.25GHz Tower: $1,599 Look underneath Apple Software on the Apple Store webpage. http://store.apple.com/
I meant "yes, also..." rather then "no, but..."
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
It's 64 bit, It's unix. What more do you need?
This is my sig.
You can get a quad Xeon for less than $3000? Tell me how that is possible with a 5.1 S/PDIF audio card, FireWire 800, USB2.0, independent SATA channels, DVD burner on a board that supports 8 gigs of ram. 4 Xeon CPUs ALONE will run you $2000. A quad Xeon board is another $400. Already up to $2400 for a CPU/Mobo without a support contract! A case with all the fans you'd need to cool those Xeons will cost a good deal, as will the dual power supplies you're gonna need. And you get to run Linux or WinXP Enterprise on it, you don't even get a cool OS like OS X. No, give me the Mac any day.
Are you kidding? A quick search on pricewatch.com lists quad xeon cases with motherboard (no CPU, Memory, HD, anything) starting at $2500. Then you get to pay $200-$700 each for the CPUs.
or it could be a second there are plenty of 64bit laptops/notebooks around for example http://www.mobileworkstations.net/products/index.h tml The g4's are still there, the powerbook price was probably dropped because they're ageing and dropping the price will attract people who have been thinking about it for a while to buy them
Anyway, if Apple's use of the 970 processors are anywhere as sophisticated as IBM's the Mac G5s will kick butt.
As to the relative speed compaired to a INTEL/AMD/VIA based PC. When they are first shipped I'ld expect the Mac G5's to be about 25-30% faster. However, I'm pretty sure that AMD and INTEL have been holding back realising newer, faster processors and trying to make some money on their current offerings. So, when there is a faster processor out there, both AMD and INTEL will rapidly release much faster/more sophisticated processors. I'ld also be very curious about the relative speed/power consumption of all the different processors 600Mhz Eden and 1Ghz Transmeta are the top two (currently).
Galium Arsenide is the material of the future, and always will be.
If nothing else, the capability of feeding the processor at DDR400 alone will make a current G5 faster than any G4 in the market.
GPL Deconstructed
Interesting prediction, but Sun workstations have been on their way out for years. Their main market is, and remains the server space.
Apple doesn't have the reputation in workstations that HP and Sun have and as of right now, they aren't marketing their G5s as a solution for that market. It will take an excellent sales and marketing team for them to displace SUN and HP, although I do agree that these new machines have the potential to do it.
Opinionated Law Student Strikes Again!
First off, GCC is probably better optimized for x86 then it is for the PPC 970 by virtue of the fact that it's been running on x86 for so much longer. So, even using the same compiler, the field is still tilted in the direction of x86.
Not really, commercial x86 compilers have an advantage over gcc. I recall that there is a class of code optimization that gcc does not attempt because generating the intermediary form might provide an exploit where the GPL can be bypassed. I apologize for not having a link, I merely recall reading an article a while ago.
Regarding PPC970 Apple has been improving PPC code generation in gcc for some time now. Gcc is their in-house compiler. It is naive to think this work was not taking 970 into consideration.
In any case the Intel compiler is available under Linux, and Windows based comparisons should be done with VC++.
This is the fastest desktop ever. Of course a recompile can be done in minutes.
There arises from a bad and unapt formation of words a wonderful obstruction to the mind. (Francis Bacon)
Of course you can encode MPEG4 in real time. On lots of different kinds of architectures... do you even know what MPEG4 is?
MPEG4 is a framework where you can combine different elements of different things -- sounds, text, video, still images, whatever -- into a single scene. In the "video" arena, there are several codecs you can choose from, at different bit rates, at different qualities, and at different sizes. Many of these combinations can be encoded on-the-fly by a moderately fast microprocessor or DSP.
Anyway, if you look at real performance numbers for the CPUs, I believe that you'll find that the 2Ghz G5 is faster than (say) a comparably-configured 3Ghz P4 on some things. The P4 is probably faster at others. For just about everything, they probably have similar performance. With a similar transistor count and silicon process, you expect reasonable architectures to come out with similar performance.
But can you get a dual processor Pentium? Of course the answer is "yes". Not only that, you can get 4x and 8x (and possibly more) Pentium and Xeon systems. You can also get 1x, 2x, and 4x, etc Opteron systems with a Hypertransport bus.
But obviously you didn't even investigate that... you just think that since Steve hinted at it, it must be true. You probably also think that this is the first CPU family to have a 64-bit datapath. How unfortunate.
The only true thing in your post is that, to my knowledge, no desktop PC system has a 1Ghz/64 bit bus to their chip. You can get an 800Mhz 64bit bus on the P4. The Opteron has its northbridge memory controller on chip, running at full frequency... so that would be the equivelant of an 1.8Ghz system bus (in some ways).
Please, investigate matters before you post. Or you just look like a fool. And not a fool in the good way. And you end up frustrating people like me. I'm embarrased for both of us.
-- Erich
Slashdot reader since 1997
I'm a grad student in chemistry. There's a lot of down time when waiting for experiments to finish, I will admit.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
Combo Drive (CD-RW/DVD-ROM) [Subtract $200]
Timeo idiotikOS et dona ferentes
Explain whats wrong or fuck off, idiot.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Um, they are comparing the processors. Hence using the same code.
They also compared the performance, and I don't see any of the foamy-mouthed x86 fan boys claiming that Apple rigged that =P
Besides, didn't nVidia and Radeon get into some strife over writing "optimised" code for benchmarks?
Just another point on the compilers, if you're using icc, aren't you restricted to using Windows, or am I missing something?
Those statistics were tested outside of Apple by veritest
l e_performance.pdf
http://www.veritest.com/clients/reports/apple/app
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
did anyone else notice that in a certain camera angle, right before the "real world" tests for adobe photoshop, it showed the active app icons in the lower right of the title bar on the xp box? ... ...
There seemed to be quite a few of them
Mabey they dont effect the overall performance
Im sure itunes was running in the background in osX too .
Dual PowerPC G4 processors at up to 1.42 GHz, etc. OOPS!
I guess the Steve frightened the web designers so much that nobody wants to touch that part of the page again until he gives the OK in writing.
Geez, exactly what is the $2000 buying? Only 9 fans? For that many clams, I figure it should have at least 20!
The new AMD Opteron PC is far more than just a PC. It is a workstation in its own right and outperforms the workstations built by Sun. The new AMD Opteron PC is both (much) faster and (much) cheaper than a Sun workstation.
Just look at the specs of the new AMD Opteron PC. 1.4,1.6,and 1.8 GHz and only $649 for a complete system [pricewatch.com]. It also does UNIX and Linux. AMD lucked out -- again. There will a surge of demand for this machine from engineers, moving beyond the traditional x86 core users (i. e. educational institutions, graphic artists, etc.). AMD will supplant both Sun and HP as the new workstation CPU company of Silicon Valley.
By the way, the bell tolls. It tolls ominously for Sun.
Two infinite things: your stupidity and mine. But I'm not sure about the latter. If my sig offends you, I'm sorry.
OTOH, to be realistic for a moment (sorry!), this machine's still plenty fast enough for pretty much everything I do with it, so I don't worry. Nice though it is to think of being 'the fastest' and the shiniest, it's real-world usage that matters, and for which you must justify the cost.
In which terms, I'm quite happy actually, and only a very tiny bit jealous :)
Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.
Mac's (in the past) have a very long usablity life. In fact, I've been using my beige g3 sinse 1997, and haven't needed to replace it, and the only upgrades I made were RAM, video card (rage 128), firewire/usb card, and hard drive. I still use a g3 233 mhz computer for doing my DV work!
Admittedly, I got a AMD XP 2500 linux box desktop (it is doing some file sharing) this year, but with my dual monitor mac sitting next to it (all I had to do was plug in the monitor to the onboard graphics card, no configs to change or anything), I do not consider my mac expensive. For the amount of work and entertainment I've got out of it, it has more than payed for itself. Hopefully my Linux box will do the same.
This may sound cliche, but even though I may get 250 more fps in quake 3 (I do=]), my mac is a productive tool. Now that the performance of G5's are competitive, if not better than many desktops today, I don't see many things against them.
If you got a new mac, I bet you wouldn't replace components as quickly as you would in a PC. First of all, there aren't as many things to replace them with, secondly, there isn't much need to.
Actually there was a company in the early '90s that marketed an Alpha based PC to compete with the new Pentiums that had just been released. The company started with an "E" but I can't remember the nam now. They marketed heavily in PC Magazine and PC World. The cost was a bit prohibitive though and the need for 64-bit PCs was not all that important. Quite frankly, it's not all that important even now except for workstations and as many have already pointed out Apple can't claim this either as Alpha's were used in numerous workstations. SGI and Sun Sparc had 64-bit workstations as well.
The new tower looks like a cheese grater and has less HD and Optical bays! Argh. Nice specs, ugly case.
I think the one thing to remember about the "offical" SPEC results is the choice of compilers - the ones I saw on the SPEC page used Microsoft's compilers. The ones in Apple's test use GCC 3.3 for both Apple's and Dell's test systems. You can get a PDF detailing the tests, results, and configurations of the systems at http://www.veritest.com/clients/reports/apple/defa ult.asp, VeriTest's site, which handled the testing...
I want to know which hole i push a unbent paper clip into to open the superdrive. "To make it, one must first know what 'it' is!"
Quote: Except that the Octane's bus is theoretically much, much faster. It has an end-to-end point speed of only about 3 and half GB/sec, but it can connect any of the individual systems to each other simultaneously at full speed Uh, for those of you on the short bus, Apple's new memory chip is also point-to-point. From the G5 (system, not chip) white paper: Advanced System Controller A new system controller is central to the overall performance of the Power Mac G5. This revolutionary application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC)â"one of the industryâ(TM)s fastestâ"is built using the same state-of-the-art IBM 130-nanometer process technology as the PowerPC G5 processor. A superefficient point-to-point architecture rovides each primary subsystem with dedicated throughput to main memory, so massive amounts of data can traverse the system without contention for bandwidth. In contrast, subsystems that share a bus, as on other PCs, must deal with time-consuming arbitration while they negotiate for access and bandwidth across a common data path.
Stand back. I've got a brain and I'm not afraid to use it.
...there's no such thing as luck.
Liberty uber alles.
Am I going crazy, or are all three systems using the same CPU?
Given that BusSpeed * ClockMultiplier = Processor Speed
Apple's three configurations:
1.6 Ghz - 800 Mhz bus
1.8 Ghz - 900 Mhz bus
2.0 Ghz - 1000 Mhz bus
Means that all three systems have the same multiplier on the chip. Which strongly implies to me that they're all the exact same chip. We'll have to wait and see how easy they are to overclock, but if you could just change the 800Mhz bus system to 1Ghz bus, you'd save yourself $1000 in the process.
Congratulations to Apple. They are finally moving ahead. But is it enough to conter AMD and Intel juggenauts?
- 840------800- --2000---764------756
/ res2002q3/ cpu2000-20020827-01593.htmlr es2002q3/ cpu2000-20020827-01594.html
Let's see MHz per MHz (you'll see below why it's too early to stop believing in MHz myth, at least with regards to Apple):
--------MHz----SPECfp---SPECint
G5------2000--
Opteron-1800---1095-----1122
P4A--
P4 SPECint:
http://www.spec.org/osg/cpu2000/results
P4 SPECfp:
http://www.spec.org/osg/cpu2000/results/
Opteron (SPEC.ORG)
(P4A is an old modification, the 3.2 GHz P4C has some modifications that should make it faster on the per MHz basis)
We see that while G5 is looking quite good compared to P4 at THE SAME MHZ, it looses out completely to Opteron. No wonder because G% is a cut-down (1/2 exactly) version of POWER4 chip. An excellent chip when it came out in 2001, but now IBM is readying POWER5 with much improved performance.
Anyway it's a great day for Apple. Compared to G4, the new processor is almost twice as fast (of course, for the applications that can use its power). But we'll be waiting for G6 to see if they can beat Intel/AMD on MHz per MHz basis.
I for myself am a big fan of OS X (and all the great apps that come with it - FOR FREE! Windows doesn't even have a descent terminal), so this is one of the key reasons to buy a mac - since it wont run on PC-hardware (no matter what u pay and how it performs).
But I know a lot of people that will stick to MS Windows. Either because they use an app thats not available on Mac or just because they are used to it
Whatever the reasons: I think the new G5's are competitive machines. I am upgrading from my g3 powerbook and so even the low-end models will be a significant performance. And I am glad that I have waited and not upgraded my PC-based system that is only rarly used for quake 2, although its newer than the powerbook.
Just my 2cent!
This means I'll be able to afford a G4 system in the coming months!
No sig for you!!
So, in two months we'll be able to buy a 64 bit workstation class PC with a high quality OS and a great UI? This can't be a great thing for Intel.
damn, no wonder its fast... the chip is huge!
0 30 623/170/4hcda.html
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/
photo caption:
"Apple CEO Steve Jobs holds up the 12-inch compter chip for the new Apple Power Mac G5 personal computer, while introducing it to the world at the Apple World Wide Developers Conference in San Francisco, June 23, 2003. Jobs says the new G5, available to consumers next August, will be the world's fastest personal computer. REUTERS/Lou Dematteis"
This document from Apple is very interesting indeed. Lots of technical data on the G5 as well as some handy tips for optimizing code.
From the report PDF:
Second paragraph on the second page of the report PDF:
As I said before, I will wait to see unbiased testing before I form my opinions of the G5's performance, testing done by people who are not being paid by Apple, and in a neutral testing facility. I would not trust this report without independent verification, just like I wouldn't trust a report commissioned by AMD or Intel without a second opinion. Companies will do what they must to show their products in the best light
I define the difference between a "desktop" and a "workstation" in terms of application support.
In the old days, a "workstation" was defined by 2 properties: 1) SCSI 2) A Multi-User OS.
Now pretty much every OS is multi-user, and the value of SCSI in a desktop is debatable. (Although the Dell comparison boxes still have it).
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
..that that includes boring old ATA/100 IDE. Unless you failed to mention that was a SATA drive. But to my knowledge none of the big Intel vendors are shipping SATA drives just yet.
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
If you want a little extra information about Apple's new motherboards and the PPC 970, check out this press release: http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2003/jun/23joint.h tml
Aluminum cases? Yeah BABY -- scratch city! Let's hope that these cases are made from 3003 H18 and not 1100 H12, which is one of the softer types of aluminum, while 3003 is a more widely used aluminum alloy.
moox. for a new generation.
I don't have a desk, you insensitive clod!
The interesting bullet point that Steve Jobs included in his keynote was that both architectures were using GCC 3.3 for the SPEC testing.
I wonder how much faster SPEC becomes when Intel gets to use their own compiler?
The Dual 2Ghz Apple is a "workstation" par excellence at a high end desktop price.
Everything about the Mac shines, except software tittles available, but give it time, something Apple (NOW) has!
I can't wait for the 3Ghz versions to come out, so I can snap up one the 2Ghz at heavily reduced price.
I think with all the hoopla surrounding the G5, people overlooked the fact that the G5's are coming with the Apple Keyboard (the one with the usb ports in the back) and the Apple Mouse (no click pressure control). I find it strange that their G5's come with lesser keyboards and mice than the still available G4 towers.
I'm truly shocked at how brilliantly designed every aspect of this thing is. So, what games are available for mac? If the ID games, Command and Conquers, and just a few other top games are available, then I'm switching. Anyone have a list of top games available for Mac?
Apple's numbers are a valid comparison of the benchmarks *when compiled with GCC 3.3*. The numbers you saw were done with different compilers.
Should Apple compile the fp benchmarks using AltiVec optimizations? Of course not. Instead, they simply compared Apples with apples (pun intended) which is what one should do in benchmarking.
In the end, what really matters is:
1. Real world performance. The Photoshop tests suggest that these new machines will at least hold their own against the Wintel world for content creation, Apple's core market.
2. The user experience. This is a slam dunk for Apple - after all, they wouldn't be in business at all if not for their vastly superior user experience (that's what people who buy macs pay the premium price for). This is due largely to Apple's complete hardware-software integration - "It's not Windows, call the manufacturer," "It's not our box, call Microsoft."
The Dell XPS (their new sexy alienware rip-off case maxed out machine) duked out with a gig of ram and 200gig ata drive comes in at ~600 hundred cheaper (canuck dollars in my test) than the apple-- and the Dell has a monitor.
However, this is compared to the DUAL G5 64bit with a GIG of RAM. Plus, I don't really need another monitor from Dell (already have a nice one). Dell would probably be cheaper if they didn't force me to buy Windows--have licence already/officeware(dido)/roxio and overpriced RAM).
This is good mojo all around.. I hope Apple sells them fast and well.... and gains some market share.
Do not spread "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0" over the internet, thank you.
Do we REALLY know what USB it actually has?
Does this mean next time an interface looks different we can start predicting box mods for the new cases?
With the new CPU and system buses, these new Macs
are more than likely to outperform the Xserves. The question is, when do the Xserves get upgraded, so the server back room will have the same or greater power than the desktop?
Does anybody have a link to the Osama Music Store parody? I thought it was hilarious.
No other company can pull off so many cool things so quickly like Apple, not MS, not Sun, not HP, not even IBM, and certainly not Dell the box maker.
You have to watch Steve in QuickTime to fully appreciate how many amazing things Apple has done. Panther Developer Preview has already left Longhorn (Windows 2005) firmly in the dust bin: the new user-centric Finder, search-as-you-type, Expose, fast user switch, iChat AV, FileVault, Xcode, FontBook, and so on.
The PowerMac G5 is just amazing, 2 GHz 64-bit CPU with 2 independent FPUs and Velocity Engine, 1 GHz FSB, PCI-X, Serial ATA Drive, FireWire 800 & 400, USB2, Bluetooth, 802.11g, etc.
In terms of SPEC2000 floating point performance, the 2 GHz G4 is 21% faster than the 3.06 GHz P4, and the dual 2 GHz G5 PowerMac is 41% faster than a dual 3 GHz Xeon Dell which cost $1000 more. In real world tests (PhotoShop, Mathematica, 3D rendering, music), the PowerMac is more than 200% faster than the Dell.
It's clear that Apple has all the vital pieces nailed - harware, OS, applications, developers, Apple Retail Stores, iTune Music Store, iPod. It's time to buy some more Apple shares.
No, Apple quotes comparable runs, meaning, runs compiled with the same open source compiler, not some proprietary benchmark generator with specific optimizations for spec.
The whole idea of benchmarking is to make everything as much the same as possible (i.e., controlling variables) so that the variable of interest, here, the CPUs, can be compared on a level field. That's exactly what Apple have done.
If you want instead to look at real world performance, not useless benchmarking, see the Photoshop comparisons, or the BLAST comparisons, where the G5 also handily trounces the Wintel boxen.
Behold... the iUrinal!
If you need #2, then I guess it could be said you are shit out of luck...
You know what?
Small details in light of the mighty new G5... but I haven't seen any new accompanying mouse or keyboard with the new G5. Anyone else??
It also cost over 10 times more than G5, and consumes 3 times more energy.
Just had a little play, and noticed that the base price is really $1770 - you give up the internal modem, and swap the SuperDrive for a CDRW/DVD-ROM.
Cheers, Paul
Hello, you could have 4 16-bit segment registers (SS, CS, ES, DS) that you could reference within. The 4 segment registers, shifted left 4 bits + the offset register or constant you were using == a 20 bit address.
If you want to get really picky, on the 286 and later it was 1024k + 64k - 16 bytes, as you could carry into the 21st bit. This "extra" 64k segment was used to implement extended memory.
Being able to look at 4 64k regions of memory at once out of a 1MB address space == bank switching. If you've not had to try and fit stuff into 64k regions, you've not written 8088 assembly. Get a clue.
Is this Full Speed 2.0 or High-Speed 2.0? :)
In Soviet Russia, articles before post read *you*!
Actually, PCs got that way too, somewhere around 1999-2000. I am using a single-CPU 1GHz Athlon from late 2000. I keep drooling at the thought of dual-Opterons or Xeons, but then I think: except for a Gentoo upgrade, do I ever really wait on my processor anymore?
Finally, someone who actually reads the documents.
After looking at these machines, the prices, and available configurations, it seems to me that the middle configuration is the winner.
The low end one does not have PCI-X, and at $2000, it's pretty pricey, though you could remove the superdrive, modem, and load it up with cheap 3rd party RAM (only up to 4 gig tho). Does not seem to be competitively priced with Wintel.
The dual 2 GHz seems nice for the price, but you can't get less than 512 megs of RAM, or 160 gig HD, to save yourself a few bucks that you don't need to spend. So if you're frugal, Apple gets that little "dig" into you for at least a few hundred anyway. WHY do they do this. Are they just anal control freaks? Some people like to do all they can to minimize PORK items from a purchase, so why won't Apple throw us a friggin bone here?
But the middle-system is ok, because you can unload some of that way-overpriced Apple RAM, the combo drive, the modem, and get it down to around $2200, which is only slightly more expensive than the overpriced bottom model, + PCI-X and no RAM limit (and a trivially faster CPU, which you're going to upgrade in 3 years anyway).
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Given that Itanium currently peaks at 1 GHz, cost over $3000 per chip and consumes 3 times more energy that the G5, and there is virtually no software for the Athlon 64, is there any immediate competion to the G4?
Apple just confirmed that 64-bit apps is as easy to build as a recompilation with GCC 3.3, and lots of OS X programs like PhotoShop and Mathematica will run natively on the new G5 PowerMac by August. In contrast, it's very difficult to write software for the Itanium.
This kind of power is only really useful for professionals or niche users. I wanna see a low-end low-power conusumption G5 in a PowerBook. That will make my day (..week, year)
Parent post is a troll. There's no way on earth that a 17 Meg file takes 20 minutes to copy. That's simply a troll's lie.
$300? With support from a first tier vendor? Really?
Get out of the clouds and come back into reality.
The spec scores you cite from the spec site use a different compiler which is only availible for intel, and probably optimzed for the spec benchmark.
Apple have used an open source compiler - GCC 3.3 - available for both platforms.
IOW, Apple's benchmark is a fair comparison of CPU speed, not a biased comparison of proprietary, benchmark-optimzed compilers.
And in the real world, the G5 spanks the fastest Wintel PCs in Photoshop and BLAST.
Look, there were cheap alpha desktops for sale, and people used 'em. they were 64 bit desktops. There were computers that sat on desks that were 64 bit. That were personal, a computer that you sat at and used by yourself. It's idiotic to claim "the first 64 bit Personal Computer" when a) it's not true, and b) 64 bit technology has appeared in $90 game systems and PDAs years ago. I mean, fuck a lot of people take the term PC to mean IBM compatible anyway.
And it annoys me to have my intelegence insulted in that way.
The world's first 64-bit personal computer, with standard 3.5" hard drives, an optical drive, a 3-d video card, support for several GB of memory, and a whole bunch of other stuff in a tower enclosure, marketed at not only professionals but consumers who have some money to spend too.
Yeah, that just rolls off the tongue. Somebody call Apple and tell them to use this new product slogan!
How 'bout they just DON'T SAY IT? Is that so fucking hard?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
The Pentium 4 is SPECIFICALLY designed to not be able to be put in a multi processor solution. If you can find me a P4 system with more than one processor that isn't a garage hack, I'll eat my hat.
It's not necessarily faster...if the code is 32 bit. With 64 bit code, you can trasnfer twice as much data per cycle. You can pack more information into an instruction. The bus is twice as wide, and carries twice as many people. Twice the living room in that double wide trailer....
The increased bus speed plus processor speed plus bus width all adds up to a faster machine no matter how you slice it.
>> I'd love to see a comparison against the, er, what is it, 1GHz Itaniums?
You don't want to know. The Itanium2 chip alone cost over $3000 which is more than the whole dual 2 GHz G5 PowerMac!
see iw as there with him one of the times, and they put his ram in in front of him and it powered up.. and then we went out to the car and it stopped working
he went back inside (i didn't want to see the violence) while i waited in the car
and came back out exasperated, and without the laptop as they took it for Yet Another Week
mind you he has cancer, and the whole reason he had the laptop was so that he could use it in teh hospital during his chemotherapy treatments and they continously made repair time promises and broke them savagely...
this story goes on and on as similar events happened.. i asked him if they had some kind of lemon law policy.. i think what happened in the end is he bought the Apple Ram and it magically started working...
do I ever really wait on my processor anymore?
You might not, but I do. I have a speedy 1.73 ghz Athalon and I still wait and wait for video to encode. The thought of a dual 970 system with 8 gigs of ram makes me want to cream my pants.
The longer Apple waits to update the 15" PB, the more likely it will be a G5 for lots of reasons.
:-) ).
1. The 12" (or perhaps the 17") motherboard could fit in the 15" case, so from a tech standpoint, I can't see the motherboard design being 6+ months behind that of the 12" (or 17"), it would be nearly impossible to be that far behind.
2. Steve wants to be the first to ship a 64 bit portable. (No one is closer than Apple now).
3. Bluetooth, AirPort Extreme. Plenty of people want those in a portable, but don't want a 12" screen or a 17" screen. (me for one
All this points to the fact that something significant is going on. It is something like the G5 or, perhaps, a higher-density screen. I doubt it would be the higher-density screen because that should NOT be that huge a tech issue, and I can't believe they'd delay the product 6+ months for that when they could've shipped it with a regular screen and then updated it now.
My scenario about the 15" delays is this:
They intentionally held back on the 15" in Jan/Feb 2003 and kept it as it was so that if there were huge problems with the 12" and 17" (e.g. long(er) delays, engineering/manuf issues etc) they'd have a proven machine that was shipping. They were planning that the PB 15 was supposed to be updated in May at WWDC with a G5 (or very shortly thereafter) and so didn't waste any design and engineering resources on updating it to the specs of the current 12" and 15" because (back then it would have been May 2003 for WWDC, so only about 3 months wait for it). They intended to make it the 1st 15" G5 and have it ready with the PM G5s.
However, they are a little behind for some reason, just like they were with the PM G5s - that's why they pushed back WWDC a month.
Until they know when they can ship them in volume they're not announcing it for at least two reasons: avoid killing 12", 15" and 17" sales; and so they'll get even more bang for the buck when the announce "the world's first 64-bit portable," just like they got with the "world's 1st 17 inch portable". It will be on its own and won't get overshadowed by the PM G5s.
Face it, Apple loses sales because of some of the factors above and they don't want to lose sales. Therefore there is some BIG reason for the delay. The only logical one is a 15" PB G5, followed as quickly thereafter as possible with a 17" ("The world's 1st 64-bit 17 inch portable) and a 12" ("The world's smallest 64-bit portable). Followed thereafter by G4 iBooks.
I can see a 15" PB G5 announcement within 1-3 months (e.g. by the end of the summer). Apple *has* to do something to update the 15" PB to current specs (speed, AEX, Bluetooth) and if they've invested engineering in the PB G5 they don't have time to go back and do the engineering to make it a G4 - which is why I think it will be soon. If it was going to be > 3 months then they'd have time to do a 15" G4 to match the 17", BUT then they would've done it well before now.
I don't think it is wishful thinking because Apple is not dumb. They wouldn't hold up 15" PB sales for more than 6 months without a great reason. (Plus I read somewhere that 15" PB supplies were low.)
These computers won't be available until August. What will Apple do for sales until then? I wouldn't even buy a laptop with a G4 after seeing these babies.
What I want to know is how it compares with the other -real- 64bit processor out there...the much maligned Itanium. (Which by the way, is an excellent processor, just not at running 32-bit code in emulation mode.)
Foo?
Slashdot renders much better in 1.0 than in previous versions of Safari. The background colors under the story titles are solid, and the fonts are crisper. Only slightly faster if at all, but looks so much better. Ah...
Apple have been working for the last 3 or 4 years on that photoshop filter routine. Probably several million dollars of R&D have been poured into optimizing that one little routine. They use it in every single statement of specs they have. Of course a hand-crafted Altivec routine is going to perform well. Lets see how that scales up to large software projects. Last I saw their high-end compositing package, Shake, was dog-slow on a Mac compared to a Xeon.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Looking at pages 7 and 8 of the Veritest performance comparison quoted on Apple's website, I see that hyperthreading (HT) was turned off for the Intel P4 SPEC CPU2000 Rate Base testing. Am I missing something here? I wonder what the Intel benchmarks would have looked like with hyperthreading (HT) on?
SO you think that somehow fetchign 8 bytes on a 64 bit wide bus is somehow slower than fetching 4 bytes on a 32 bit bus?
Yes, I understand that just by virtue of being 64 bits wide, it's not automatically faster, but the wider bus has all KINDS of room for speeding things up, it's not JUST about the math operations.
You also need a big wing to keep the rear wheels down in corners for maximum performance.
17,179,869,184 DIMM sockets to max out the 64 bit address space with 1 GB DIMMs!
I *know* I'm going to complain to Apple on this one.
...the USB2 jokes stopped being funny about three days ago.
Didn't you get a copy of that memo?
I find it kinda strange how the SPEC results varied quite markedly between what Intel had listed and what was on display on the Apple website. So, I decided to look into it. First thing I did was goto Veritest's site and look at how they did the benchmark.
I noticed something odd... Veritest decided to run TWO different tests in the P4, one with and without Hyper-Threading enabled. Hyper-Threading is enabled by default on the P4 processor. Odd.
Then I decided to goto www.Spec.org and do a benchmark search for Intel P4:
SPEC.org results:
SPECint2000 : 1200
SPECfp2000 : 1229
SPECint_rate2000 : 14.1
SPECfp_rate2000 : 13.7
Apple.com results:
SPECint2000 : 889
SPECfp2000 : 693
SPECint_rate2000 : 10.3
SPECfp_rate2000 : 8.07
And yes, I did choose the latest results for the Intel P4.
It is very clear that the results obtained by Veritest and put forth in their report is of a P4 3.06 GHz with Hyper Threading DISABLED. The last I checked, HT is a feature which is enabled by default. WHY would someone purposely disable HT? Purposely make their CPU run SLOWER? Hmmm...
Come on Apple, do a serious system comparison, the best versus the best. Not the best versus a crippled system.
I remember looking at Sun's webpage for the "free" x86 version of Solaris....Sun wanted something like $75 for the cost of media and S&H.
After I complained, one of my friends pointed out, "$75 probably *is* free to Sun".
> these new machines have the potential to do it.
... Two, we'll have to replace all of our
Not entirely. They have the power, and surely they may be adopted
in some instances, but in many cases Sun workstations are installed
as part of a package deal ("enterprise solution") with the Sun
servers and business-field-specific application suites. These
suites of business software in some cases are specifically written
for Solaris (not Unix in general, but Solaris specifically). The
G5 isn't going to be compatible for that, so it would be not just
an upgrade-type replacement but a full switch.
So there will be Sun workstations for years to come. A similar
argument applies to AlphaStations (though there are fewer of
those than SparcStations, and VMS may be passing away faster
than Solaris, what with the nested buyout and resulting FUD).
> It will take an excellent sales and marketing team
That part Apple could handle, but to break into the workstations
market they'd have to sell their platform to solutions vendors,
who would then in turn target it with their next major product
line, which would be 2-4 years out from release in most cases,
and after it's released most of the customer sites drag their
feet for 2-4 years before doing the migration.
For example, in the field of library automation software: some
time in the mid 90s Microsoft managed to sell Gaylord Information
Systems (makers of the Galaxy library catalog/circulation suite)
on the merits of going from VMS to NT. Circa 2000 GIS announced
the release of Polaris, their replacement for Galaxy. There are
still *way* more Galaxy installations than Polaris at this time.
The library where I work is not planning to move from Galaxy for
two more years at least. Ad interim, we're still buying DEC
hardware, maintaining a maintenance contract with HP (who own
Compaq and thus DEC).
[I'm about to seem to wander off-topic, but it relates back...]
Oh, and I would prefer to change jobs before we migrate to
Polaris, for three reasons. One, all the staff have to be
retrained, and Polaris will require mouse and GUI use, and
some of our staff are sufficiently technophobic that this is
an excruciating prospect. Galaxy tells 'em what buttons to
push (literally: the word printed on the key on the keyboard
appears in inverse video after "Press "), but Polaris requires
knowledge of how standard widgets work -- scrollbars, drop-down
lists ([shudder]),
catalog terminals (VT510s) with Windows PCs -- a bunch of
extra Windows PCs out in parts of the library where patrons
have unobserved physical access to them, whee. Three, the
web catalog will run on IIS. Oh, and four, VMS is solid (in
terms of never needing any maintenance, other than changing
out the backup tape, and never stopping running unless the
hardware breaks -- every VMS problem I've seen was hardware
failure); I'm less confident about NT, even recent versions
of NT. ObTopic...
As you can imagine, IT folks (and even execs) in various other
industries may feel similarly about switching from what they
know and are comfortable with ("FooSolution", which runs on
Solaris or whatever) to something else different. So it takes
years for the vendors to get all their customers migrated.
That means _even after_ a new server & workstation maker sells
their platform to the ISVs, it's _years_ before the revenue
pours in.
So, just because the G5 is as powerful as a SPARC and a lot
cheaper doesn't mean the SparcStations will all be replaced
with PowerMacs any time soon.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
However, it's not the most useful thing since a single process cannot address more than 3GB (usually 2GB). Although physical memory can be addressed with a 36-bit pointer in hardware, the software outside can only use a 32-bit pointer for a memory address. The system itself and shared libraries need to map in the process space, hence max 2 or 3 GB per processor.
-30-
So Apple says in two month we will release the "fastest desktop PC ever"... It might be old by then. But at least they might bump back over 3% of the market. Also a PM G5 might be cheaper than a dual Xeon but switching platform is no picnic. Try getting Adobe to sitch your Win. PS License to Mac... And that's just one App. In the end it's a matter of ease of use and personal taste not benchmarks. I call this stock bumping to make up for the AMS....
Now I'll get the "Unexpected error has occured because it cannot be found" twice as fast!!! Will the type 2 error now be type 4?
http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/ptech/06/23/apple.new .reut/index.html
According to that news story, Al Gore joined Jobs. The man who invented the internet says that the new apple computer is worlds fastest PC. I really trust, him I do.
which was optimized for SPEC tests?
I can't believe this got moderated insightful. Without 64bit you are stuck with a 2GB (possibly 3GB) limit on memory for every process. Swapping has nothing to do with it.
Where I work people are running processes that require well above 3GB or RAM. Those don't run at all on 32-bit machines.
Next year or the year after that *you* will be crying for 4GB of RAM, and you will need it. 32-bit computing is as good as dead, it's only a matter of time (and a short amount at that). The only thing that will maintain it is Intel's insistence that you don't need it, like they did with the 80x86 line with 32-bit vs. 16-bit.
Hey, you're a fucking idiot, you know that?
You don't know shit about technology, but you strut around like a 13 year old swinging your dick around, too stupid to be embarassed.
That slashdot encourages this type of behaviour-- and that you're not alone in being such an idiot, is just pathetic.
Piece of shit idiot-- you're a fine example of the american educational system.
You want to know why tech jobs are going overseas? Look in the mirror.
I was fairly excited when the MDD towers were released... Apple was finally getting to par with current cases. Dual optical drives have proved very useful to me, both in Macs and PCs... which brings me to my point (finally) - what happened to the second bay (door)? Only two 3.5" bays too...
"Sometimes I lie awake at night, and I ask, 'Where have I gone wrong?' Then a voice says to me, 'This is going to take
Ah, let me guess, they have an inbred idiot scholorship program.. there's no way someone as incompetant as you will ever be a decent engineer... but then, Georgia Tech isn't CalTech or even MIT.... or maybe you got in on the faggot affirmative action program? That would explain it.
Kill yourself now, you pathetic piece of shit.
that's because I KNOW that in 18 months, some dudes from Redmond, WA would come up with something that's twice as bloated than the stuff everybody uses now.
As I sit here looking at my 3 year old 64-bit Sun desktop (not even a tower), and remember the other, much older 64-bit desktop in my office at work (and the 64-bit Alpha box right behind the Sun box), I can't help but wonder which is the bigger tragedy: the huckster that dishonors the company's shareholders by constantly lying to the public, or the wasted lives of those cultish people who spend their days and nights repeating the lies, as if they repeat the lie enough times it will become the truth.
And how ironic that the very same people who bleated for years and years that "speed doesn't matter" are suddenly crowing about their latest bit of vaporware being "fastest".
P.T. Barnum must be spinning in his grave!
> Apple's numbers are a valid comparison of the benchmarks
> *when compiled with GCC 3.3*.
They used different versions of GCC (look at the report). The G5 test was compiled with an Apple-optimized version, the Dell test was compiled with a "plain" version.
> The numbers you saw were done with different compilers.
How many Windows programs are compiled with GCC? If you want a meaningful comparison, you need to use a compiler that's likely to be used in the real world. For most of x86 software, that means Intel's or Microsoft's compiler. Do you have any doubt that Apple used the compiler that gave the G5 the best possible results?
> Should Apple compile the fp benchmarks using
> AltiVec optimizations?
Of course. And with SSE2 optimizations on the P4. How else can you get an idea of the system's true potential? Isn't Altivec standard on all G5 Macs? So why should they ignore such an important part of the system?
Personally, I don't find synthetic benchamrks all that relevant, but the fact that Apple felt the need to lie about the results of their competitors (by quite a big margin) is significant. Here are the results (ordered by score):
int_base_rate
- (in the real world) Dual Opteron 1.8 GHz = 25
- (in the real world) Dual Xeon 3 GHz = 21.7
- (according to Apple) Dual G5 2ghz = 17.2
- (according to Apple) Dual Xeon 3 GHz = 16.7
- (in the real world) P4 3 GHz = 13.8
- (according to Apple) P4 3 GHz = 10.3
fp_base_rate
- (in the real world) Dual Opteron 1.8 GHz = 24.7
- (in the real world) Dual Xeon 3ghz = 16.7
- (according to Apple) Dual G5 2 GHz = 15.7
- (in the real world) P4 3 GHz = 13.6
- (according to Apple) Dual Xeon 3 GHz = 11.1
- (according to Apple) P4 3 GHz = 8.1
int_base
- (in the real world) P4 3 GHz = 1213
- (in the real world) Xeon 3 GHz = 1053
- (according to Apple) G5 2 GHz = 840
- (according to Apple) P4 3 GHz = 693
- (according to Apple) Xeon 3 GHz = 646
> The Photoshop tests suggest that these new machines will
> at least hold their own against the Wintel world
The conditions of the test were not revealed. Namely, they did not disclose what kind of drives each system was using (which is kind of relevant when you're opening and saving a 360 MB file).
> The user experience. This is a slam dunk for Apple -
> after all, they wouldn't be in business at all if
> not for their vastly superior user experience
If the user experience was that vastly superior, perhaps they'd have a bit more than a 4% market share. User experience is largely a subjective issue. Some people think Lacoste makes superior shirts and, to them, Lacostes feel more comfortable than shirts from other (usually cheaper) brands, even though they may be made from exactly the same fabric and have exactly the same design (minus green crocodile).
My experience with Macs is paying more and getting less. I put up with them for a long time (usually dressed up in Avid clothes), and seeing how Apple continues to lie outrageously in their "product presentations", I doubt it would be any different this time.
Still, I hold back my final judgement until I see some real-world benchmarks made by independent institutions.
As is noted in another section of the comments, though, it's the compiler. Apple states that the tests use GCC 3.3 (the OS being Red Hat Linux on the P4 and Xeon). So Apple's argument is that, software being as neutral as possible, the G5 is supposed to be faster.
Now, one could dispute this and argue that developers aren't going to only use GCC, and so on... but remember, Intel is interested in skewing tests in their favour at least as much as Apple is.
It's faster in all the others, too, except single processor integer performance
First, I really don't mean this as an anti-Apple rant, and will readily admit the G5s look rather impressive, from the point of view of a coder who tends to write a lot of seriously CPU-intensive apps. I can truly appreciate having the ability to obtain the SVD of an arbitrary 1k by 1k matrix 41% faster.
However...
99% of the desktop machines out there have only one processor.
Additionally, outside of special, generally very-domain-specific FPU-heavy apps, well over 90% of code consists of integer ops (not counting heavy-3d games, for which the simple matter of availability makes the PC the choice without a second thought, and most of the 3d math occurs on the video card anyway).
Thus...
Apple rocks - As long as your primary use consists of serious number crunching. For gaming, for word processing, for doing your taxes, for surfing the web, for just about anything short of "hard" physical system simulation, Apple's own (arguably biased at least somewhat in their favor) testing shows them to fall behind.
Oh, and Apples have better color coordination. I secretly resent having a white mouse, a black keyboard, a beige monitor, and a purple case.
Something else was 64 bit. It was called the Atari Jaguar. You know what's 32 bit? The Playstation. You tell me with a straight face the 64 bit is better.
Given that Quake 3 is more of a CPU-bound test at the resolution Apple was using on its benchmarks, I'd say it was a shame that they put them on the page they did. Although they only compared scores to the single-processor P4, it's still a pretty impressive feat for a company which still precedes a Q3 benchmark of 76 fps (however they obtained that number, and yes, I know, that's a PowerBook benchmark) with the word "scorching."
So, why aren't these numbers counted in the "real-world" performance category when SPEC benchmarks are?
Go look at the prices under the ADC
Now, rationalize it by getting that discount on a G5, going to WWDC next year, buying an iPod (30gb for $399), perhaps getting a second machine, etc.
If you're a developer, the hardware disccounts you get can add up pretty quick. And then there's the software seeding, etc...
This is the machine that I have been waiting for (and have been putting off upgrading my G4/450).
:), but having that many slots allows you to upgrade at your desired rate. ie: you are less likely to have to pull out chips to make room for new ones. My G4's slots are all full right now, so if I wanted to add RAM, I'd have to ditch one chip.
Still, there are a few things I would like to have seen different, that I think are a step back from my Sawtooth:
1) Only one outward-facing drive. My Sawtooth can only have one optical and one 3.5" (A now-nearly-useless Zip drive for me), but the last generation of G4s had those dual optical drive bays. Given how cheap standard IDE CR burners etc are, it would be great to have that upgradeability option. In my quest to convert my friends, this has been a sticking point for many of them (most have at least two optical drives). Externals work, yes, but are much more expensive, and take up much more space.
2) Two hard drive bays. Even my Sawtooth has room for four internal hard drives. Again, IDE hard drives are cheap (Serial ATA not as much, but still....) and not everyone wants to pay a $100 premium for an external firewire box, just to do a drive upgrade. In many cases, that doubles the price of the bare drive. There are PC cases out there (ugly ones, natch) which give six front-facing bays and as many hard-drive bays.
3) The G4s were notoriously easy to access. The one side just flipped down and BAM! there was your whole motherboard. While the side of the G5 may be easy to remove, you still have to cram your hands into that tiny space to reach anything. Having everything fold out was a great innovation that I'm sad to see go.
4) The handles look OK in my opinion but are fairly thin metal. I can't imagine these things not hurting your hands if you're carrying a G5 around. I know you don't move a tower case that much, but if you're going to bother putting on handles, at least put on comfy ones.
5) As others have said, it would be nice to see a 128MB graphics card in the high end. But that's a minor quibble, really.
6) No reset button on the front. I know OS X crashes quite rarely, but sometimes this thing comes in handy. And it's a lot easier and more intuitive than holding the power button.
That said, I think these are fabulous machines, and will do Apple proud. Aside from the obvious blazing speed, a few other touches I liked:
1) front-mounted USB & firewire. Finally!
2) Optical digital audio ports. Also finally! Crossing my fingers that this means there's a 5.1-enabled DVD player app en route.
3) I think the cooling system is a stroke of genius. Nine fans sounds like a lot, but it gives much more custom air circulation patterns.
4) Eight RAM slots! I will likely never need 8 gigs of RAM (at least not before the Power Mac G7 in 2008
All my whining aside, this is a great machine! Now if only I had some money...
"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one " -Albert Einstein
Funny sig. Nice and subtle...
If I point out that you are incorrect, making me a foe does not make you any more correct.
Does it have a 1 GHz bus?
Sun and Apple are more or less unrelated. If you want just a dual processor Sun, then face it, you're a genuine novice. Sun produces hard-working number-crunching workstations and servers. You run Sun when you have to do something like heat-stress simulation on a 1,000+ part product.
In that light, how can you compare it to Apple's G5 lineup? I have no doubt that the G5 2.0 GHz is faster than the Sun's 1.2 GHz offering,... but when you can get a Sun Blade setup with 100+ processors, it's obvious that you're paying for the expandability.
Apple is for personal computing and Sun is for professional computing and PC's are generally jacks of all trades, but masters of none.
-=-=-=-=-=
I'd rather be flamed than ignored.
A 2ghz P4 is probably going to be about twice as fast as a 1ghz p4. Simply from the relative speed deltas, its easy to see that intel chips have been accelerating much more quickly then the g4.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
The diffrence between a 'desktop' and a 'workstation' is like the diffrence between a 'coup' and a 'sports car'.
Its the same thing, just targed to diffrent people.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
It can use 8GB of RAM. That being more than 4GB. This provides significant potential performance improvements for apps that use lots of RAM.
Not!
A 2GHz runs twice as fast relative to its main memory, mass storage subsystem (hard drive), and peripherals (display adapters, network cards, etc.). In short it has to wait twice as long for any operation outside of its on-chip caches. As a result you do not get a linear performance increase with clock speed. Instead you quickly run into the Law of Diminishing Returns.
And that's an (pardon the pun) apples-to-apples comparison. An AMD Athlon at 2/3's of a P4 clock rate performs as much real work, so clockrate is not the determining factor in performance -- much as Intel marketing would like you to believe otherwise. Instead performance involves a much more complicated computation taking into account clockrate, average instructions per clock cycle, branch misprediction penalities, plus latencies in the system. This is why even the various benchmarks give different relative performance values when run on identical systems.
But as a user, all you should care about is: How fast does it run my application?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Get a real job instead of one that requires you to copy the same file from one folder to another over the course of several months.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
Then why not use the standard version...? I mean, if they go to the trouble of running their own P4 benchmarks (which, whaddayaknow, turn in results almost 50% below the ones listed in SPEC's database), and are careful to avoid any mention of the Opteron, what are the chances that they didn't optimize the Mac benchmark as much as they could?
Which is fine, and in fact the right thing to do, IMO. But they should compare it to the best compiler for the P4, not the worst. Of course, their hope is that no-one will notice, or even bother to check SPEC's actual database. But after the tricks they tried to pull off over the last decade, I doubt anyone will give their tests any credibility, no matter how many times they manage to write "SPEC" in the same page.
Looks like Apple and Inte^H^H, I mean BAPCo share the same vision for benchmarks: if the benchmark doesn't show your product in the first place, then... "adjust" the benchmark.
The file used was 600 MB, not 360. Meaning the type of drives being used is even more important.
But your 1ghz Athlon is less than three years old. The Macs we're talking about are still usable six, eight, ten years after they're introduced. Come back in three years and tell me if you're still comfortable on that 1ghz Athlon.
I personally took the 1GHz bus to work this morning.
Sorry - Coudn't resist :-)
it seems a little unfair that apple is comparing it's performance of a 64-bit proc to that of a 32 bit proc. I wonder how it stacks up against a 64-bit PC?
funny you should call the plastic cases cheesy... considering the comments regarding how the new case is a cheese-grater....
lol
Ok, forget those "benchmarks", they are complete crap. Hod did they manage to get those scores for PCs so low, as you can see here and here, the usual scores for similar systems are 20-60% better, ie beating G5 hands in the pocket.
Coolest sounding name?
How about Lesbian Linux or GeekOS ?
Or there is the good old Plan9 and they even have a Rabbit mascot.
There are two rules for success:
1. Never tell everything you know.
Is how fast does it run virtual PC???? *tongue firmly in cheek*
As someone who uses and develops bioinformatics software for a living I should point out that BLAST is not a great benchmark in this case. The performance graphs Apple is showing are very misleading. The longer word lengths are rarely used because they are very insensitive. More usually a word length of 14 down to 7 would be used for nucleotide searches and at those word lengths the difference in performance is nothing like as marked.
Also, BLAST is IO bound rather than CPU bound so what the graphs are showing is that BLAST needs a lot of memory and a 64 bit processor is a significant advantage in this case. This is why SGI, SUN and Alpha systems are popular for running BLAST as services. You really need gigabytes of RAM especially for DNA searches. I expect a comparison of BLASTp (protein search) would be nothing like as impressive which is why Apple chose BLASTn.
Now, this is not to dismiss the performance in any way, the new Apples look very quick and I am surely not the only one who is very interested in getting one.
Actually, the performance of HMMer is more telling, this is a CPU bound application and clearly AltiVec is doing some good, I wonder if the x86 version is as optimised though?
"I have the attention span of a strobe lit goldfish, please get to the point quickly!"
You are *soo* wrong. I worked 6mo at a startup that purchased 100+ brand spanking new Sun servers and workstations. At least 10% of them were Dead on Arrival, and another 5% failed in the first 3 months.
Please - stop this silly FUD from Sun and big iron manufacturers.
The reality - how many of us have 2-3 extra old PCs sitting in closets because they're slow, but they never broke down? I have 4 PCs and use one of them, but the other 3 still work.
I really could care less about karma, but just realize you're wrong. Enterprise machines cost more often times because they can be easily bundled with redundant hardware/software, but don't fool yourself into believing Sun machines don't fail. Why do you think they have every component in racks? It's not for easy assembly - it's for easy replacement!
I happen to like the "book" style cases that Dell has for the towers, but I find that the desktop models can be a little cramped. Thus it's a little bit of a pain sometimes to change parts or upgrade them. Overall, I like Dell's systems, too, as far as prebuilt systems go. I myself have always preferred to build my own. Back to the Apple end of things: I like the looks of the new tower. It's an Apple, yet not fruity colored
(begin rant on bad cases)
Kinda OT, but while we're on the cases subject... as far as the company who gets my vote for worst cases (and I have worked on enough of these particular systems that if you give me $5 for each one I'd be rich...) is COMPAQ. The design I hated most were the "pink" presario mini-towers. Reasons:
- On some models, the powersupply was NOT a standard micro-ATX. It was about the same size, but a micro-ATX powersupply would not mount in it's place.
- On the model(s) with the non-standard powersupply, the powersupply was mounted at the bottom of the case, opposite the motherboard, attached to a huge bracket running vertically in the case. It blocked practically everything such that removall of the powersupply was mandatory, unless someone with really small hands was nearby to lend a hand (and even then, the part you are removing/installing has to be small enough to fit by).
- Also, if you needed to remove the cdrom drive, you had to dismount the backplane the motherboard was mounted to in order to reach the 2 screws on that side. Might I mention that any cards plugged into the PCI/ISA slots had to be removed first to pull out the back plane, and to get the cards out the powersupply had to be removed! Which goes right back to points 1 & 2.
Those were my major reasons for hating those particular models. Mainly because the most common things I had to replace on those customers PCs were CDROMS, where I was having to get the mobo & backplane out of the way to even see those 2 screws in the cdrom.) The other common thing was upgrading the memory. My hands just aren't small enough to fit in that gap... thus I had to pull the powersupply just to add ram! sheesh!(end rant)
The thing is, the bulk of integer math on PC's today is plenty fast. My ancient G3 does just fine in web browsing or word processing. When you need serious computation these days, it tends to be FPU intensive (whether it's doing CFD or gaming).
Apple wins on dual processor integer performance due to superior interconnect architecture. Apple also wins on both uniprocessor and multiprocessor floating point. It's likely that integer performance will also scale better with processor MHz due to the quality of the buses. This is what counts, IMO. Be afraid SGI, be very afraid.
I've had apples in my kitchen for ages! Oranges and Bananas too.
Actually, 3D graphics, video editing, image editing, compositing, encoding, and some sound apps all do use lots of FP maths. And those areas are very much inside Apple's domain, and not very isolated, like you make them out to be.
You are not serious of course. Opteron a threat to Sun ? LOL !!!
On a side note, one of the main reasons the PPC 970 core (aka Power4) took so long to become the Apple/IBM G5 was because Apple insisted on keeping the Velocity Engine alive. Motorola balked at producing the G5 chip with an AltiVec pipeline and thus IBM was awarded the contract be default. As an Apple tech/user I'd much rather see IBM making the chipsets anyways, so this is a good thing in my opinion.
Sapere Aude - Homer
Sapere Aude - Homer
Nevermind that at the time I bought the dual G4, the differential in terms of speed between Macs and PCs in the same class was negligible.
Nevermind that changing from a Mac to a PC would mean having to re-purchase something like >$10K worth of software (Photoshop, Freehand, Dreamweaver, Acrobat Distiller, Flash, MS Office, numerous fonts, etc. etc. etc., plus QuarkXPress if I decided to keep using it).
Yup, that's some savings.
Cheers,
Ethelred
Everyone wants to be Ethelred. Even I want to be Ethelred.
Where Sun shines - pardon the pun :) - is reliability and scalability.
I'd certainly buy a dual 2GHz G5 for my home desktop if I had the money - not a Sun Blade 2000. But I wouldn't buy a cluster of several G5's for a mail server backend cluster at work (I work for a major ISP).
Why?
I must be able to manage the mail cluster remotely, since I don't work in the huge underground machine room which is located several blocks from my office. It must run 24/7 and be able to monitor itself and give advance warning of possible failures, such as overheating, failing disks, etc. Such things as mirrored root disks and dual power supplies help with this.
The Suns have some neat features that Apples don't have. One is Lights Out Management: I can remotely power down a machine and still be able to manage it - run diagnostics, reset it, power it back up... Another is the ubiquitous serial console. None of our Sun servers have graphics cards. Instead, they're connected to a console server. If I have to get at the console of a box, I connect to the console server, select a serial line and do my thing.
Yet another issue, that often comes up with clustering, is that of storage. Can you hook up an external terabyte SCSI RAID box to a G5 cluster? (A serious question!)
Also, as load increases, I can keep buying (=having the company buy) bigger and bigger Suns, bigger and bigger disk arrays, bigger and bigger tape libraries... Money isn't as much of an issue as scalability and reliability, and manhours spent due to lack of same, because all those systems are making money. Therefore it's worthwhile to pay the price if it means we can keep charging our customers.
So, in the end, I welcome the G5 as a great desktop computer, while I continue to use Suns on the server side. Both have things in which they are good.
According Jobs, you can buy Pro GPUs from some other vendors and just plug then in.
Do youself a favor and get a couple fast drives. There's nothing like waiting for pshop's swap, but w/ fast drives who needs 1.5gb of ram? I don't. (even using cmyk @ insane 1200 dpi).
No drive, no matter how fast, is going to be as fast as RAM. Buying RAM is a much better bang-for-your-buck investment if you want speed.
And yes, I have three UltraATA-100 drives with an UltraATA-100 card. (UltraATA is again a better bang-for-your-buck solution than other alternatives.) One of those drives does nothing but swap and backup of important data to avoid fragmentation of the other two.
(As an aside, 1200 dpi is hardly "insane". That's what you have to use for high-end printing jobs. It's no more "insane" than doing uncompressed audio or video at high bitrates for mastering.)
Cheers,
Ethelred
Everyone wants to be Ethelred. Even I want to be Ethelred.
Now hot grits, I know that was a joke, but seriously, what can one get in a 2 processor opteron system for USD 3K? One place a checked wanted about $750 for each Opteron 242. That does not leave much of a budget left.
Before people jump on me about comparing a Linux server to a Mac, this is really what I want to buy, a cheap (err, relatively speaking) 64bit box with at least 6G of memory. If it has to come with pretty box and a religon (well, true in both cases I suppose).
The opterons are a bit faster, at least at the top end, but the 970s seem ok. And the Macs are much easier to buy for a University (as in one phone call, compared to chasing down 3 quotes and filling out extra paperwork).
So here is a partial answer to my own question. Looking at one vendor (www.einux.com) then a server with twin opteron 240 (1.4GHz, right?) and 512M memory (for comparison), 120 G disk, prices out at $2500 w/o OS. So the extra $500 is not so bad considering what you get.
My back of the envelope calculations suggest the fastest 970 (2GHz) is about the same speed as the slowest opteron (that I quoted above). Namely, take the Linux gcc specint 2000 1045. Scale down by 0.77 to get a number for 1.4 GHz of 811.
Then of course you have to spend about the same amount on RAM. Sigh.
What the hell are you working on that requires 1200 frickin' dpi?!?!?
Usually illustrations or photo collages, which are later shrunk down to a lower resolution. Collages usually look better in the final version if you work in a higher resolution while composing them and shrink them later. (It's the same principle as cartoonists or illustrators with pen and ink -- they almost always work at many times the size of the final image, then shrink it down.)
Because the same images are often later used for a large variety of things, from packaging to magazine ads to corporate reports and so on, I need to have them in a big size so that I can shrink them later. You can't scale up without significant quality loss.
Also note that I don't *always* work in 1200 dpi. Usually 300 dpi is more than enough. For posters, 144 dpi is usually more than enough. But once in a while I do have a job where such high-end stuff is needed.
And a real prepress house uses a ColorSync RGB workflow. CMYK is generated for proofing and final files out the door only.
I don't do prepress, I do design (though that line is getting increasingly blurred). And I work in CMYK deliberately, because it happens all too often that RGB files accidentally get sent to the RIP and come out totally wrong, which in these days of direct-to-plate can be very costly. Which means a print run is ruined and I'm left taking the blame (even if only partially).
No designer I know works in RGB for print work, at least not intentionally.
Cheers,
Ethelred
Everyone wants to be Ethelred. Even I want to be Ethelred.
The Opteron's FSB speed is the same as the core speed. So, a 1.8GHz processor has a 1.8GHz FSB. Each Opteron also has its own 128bit memory controller. If you had 4 Opteron's, and installed 2 64bit DDR333 DIMMs per processor, the system would have 21.3GB/sec (5.3GB/sec*4) total memory bandwidth.
Why do people focus on the SPEC2000 rather than real world performance?
/
According to Apple
http://www.apple.com/powermac/performance
the dual G5 PM is 2.2x the 3GHz P3 for PhotoShop, 3.3x for Logic, 6.9x for BLAST.
The reality - how many of us have 2-3 extra old PCs sitting in closets because they're slow, but they never broke down? I have 4 PCs and use one of them, but the other 3 still work.
Amen brother. I've been picking up old PC's off the street. Incredibly none of the solid state bits were broken (mobo's, cards, etc). Everything from i386SX20's to PII's.
Moving parts often tend to be dead though. Really old HDD's and CDROM drives.
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
sparks coming out of my keyboard from all the drool. I want one. Too bad its a mac though.
-- Karma Karma Karma Karma, Karma Chameleon - Boy George
Take that opteron "server" and add components that are comparable to the G5 boxes (2 x 1.8 GHZ CPU, 2 x 256 MB RAM, 160GB ATA 133, PIONERE DVR-A)5, CREATIVE LABS Sound Blaster Audigy, USR PCI 56k Modem, 2x Case Fans, Keyborad, and Mouse), and the prices jump to $3348.61 -- hardly a price savings. This doesn't include a high end video card, serial ATA, or a 1GHZ system bus, so it is not really comparable.
-- Charles A. Plater
Any opinions/qualified guesses about when the powerbooks will be upgraded to G5?
The Power4, to which you are comparing the P4 in SPEC benchmarks, is IBM's high end UNIX server chip which costs thousands and thousands of dollars, and furthermore, would never be found in a Mac, or any machine that sets you back less than the price of a decent house. Why you make this comparison is beyond me, but it has nothing to do with the PPC970's results.
I don't feel a need to debunk your claims about the Itanium2, since it seems that other people have already done a good job of it.
You simply can't isolate the CPU from the compiler.
A rediculous assertion. If that were true then you'd have no basis for your claim that the Intel compiler produces faster code than gcc. Apple's benchmark is a pretty good existance proof that one can try to isolate the two.
If I were to lock you in a room with the SPEC benchmarks, whatever compilers you wanted, and two machines that were identical except for one has a 3GHz P4 and the other has a 2.4GHz P4. Would you be unable to determine which CPU was faster, rather than which CPU/compiler combination was faster?
Your solution is to normalize the compiler.
This is not my solution. It's not even a problem. It is merely a statement of fact that this was part of what Apple was trying to do with their benchmark, and that the benchmark is valid in that context.
[..two mysterious binaries scenario here..] Is it impossible to compare performance?
Of course not. However, the performance comparison would be of CPU and compiler (and likely as well a host of other system components). With this limited bit of experimental data, you could not be certain how much of the performance differences would be because of CPU's or the other components in the system. If you didn't have the source code, it'd also be hard to isolate differences there. Indeed, differences in the source code could easily outweigh any other differences.
Gcc is great, I use it all the time, but for performance, I'll use Intel's icc. The reason the Intel compiler isn't used [..host of problems with the Intel compiler..]
You just listed off a ton of reasons (and there are others) why one might want to use the gcc instead of the Intel compiler. Guess what? Those of us in the real world frequently have to address BOTH some of those factors as well as performance. This is why people almost invariably never use the exact configuration that produces the best SPEC benchmarks for their work.
Heck, even when Netscape & Microsoft were fighting like cats and dogs for market share, Netscape was compiling their Windows browser (as well as their Windows servers) using VC++, not the Intel compiler or any other compiler that likely would have given them faster executables. It's a simple concept:
even when peformance is critical, there are other factors which would drive you to pick something other than the choice which gives you the best overall performance
No other vendor does this optimization because it's so lame.
And more importantly, customers (well, those who care to know the details) know that this optimization is not likely something that'd be in place for the particular scenario they are trying to address.
The general guideline for the SPEC benchmark is to try to find a system configuration most like what you would likely use for your needs, and compare it with other systems which meet the same criteria. You should also compare the SPEC benchmark which most closely resembles what you would want to do. So, if you are a Intel/Linux user, the Intel portion of the tests Apple selected are actually likely to be more representative of the how those systems are going to perform for you than the SPEC benchmarks made with Windows 2003 server, either Microsoft's or Intel's compiler, a commercial heap solution, etc.
I can't believe your even arguing this point. A basic notion of science is doing experiments where you control variables in hopes of isolating a particular variable. That's all that is going on here.
sigs are a waste of space
First the 8086 could access 1Meg using a 20 bit overlapping segment+offset system where the segment registers were 16 bits and the offset address was 16 bits. This was done by shifting the segment register left by 4 bits and adding it to the offset to produce a 20 bit address. It wasn't bad except that 'OS's from the time didnt make sure that the bottom 12 bits of the segment register were clear. This allowed all kinds of ugly hacks and workarounds. The 286 extended it to 16 megs (24 bits) by introducing segment selectors in protected mode. The offset register was still 16 bits same as all the other x86's at the time. Selectors now had base addresses which selected the base address which was added to the address offset.
Finally the 386 showed up and extended the offset address to 32-bits and extended the segment selectors to be capable of having a full 4G base register offset using a 4k granularity in protected mode. This 4k was important because the 386 introduced paging using 4k pages. The problem was that the maximum linear address space that a segment could exist in was 4G. This matched the physical address space limitation. This 4G linear address limitation meant that everytime a task switch happened the TLB had to be flushed. Which is another discussion..
Eventually the Ppro was released, with it came the idea of physical address spaces greater than 4G. It was the first x86 processor to support PAE (Page Address Extensions, if your really interrested you might also look at PSE, page size extensions) which extended the physical address space to 36 bits where it has been until the x86-64. The only problem is that Intel left the linear address range (the base address that a selector could be, see section 3.8 of the P4 sys programmers guide) limited to 32 bits. This kept people from playing the multiple segments pointing at diffrent address ranges games that were played with the 8086. It also meant that any one instant it was impossible to accually access more than 4G. In order to do this the page tables or the page directory pointer has to be played with (again requiring a TLB flush, or fancy page fill algorithms). Its basically a banked system similar to those used on Apple ]['s and the like where the linear address space can have windows into a larger physical address space.
At the bottom of the page you will find the following:
"with the exception of HMMer, application software [was] optimized for the PowerPC G5"
When I separate the word "desktop" into its constituent words, I get "desk" and "top". Naturally I assumed that a "desktop" might be something that's made to sit upon a desk. So now I know that the correct word for a computer that sits on my desk is "WORKSTATION". Thanks for clearing that up.
As far as price goes, my 64-bit Sun "WORKSTATION" sitting on my desk cost me $999.95. Okay, it's a "5 digit price tag" if I count the pennies too. I guess that makes Apple's offerings have 6-digit price tags ("it's one louder..."). Precisely how many 64-bit "WORKSTATIONS" that sit upon desks does Apple have for under a grand?
So I was thinking more about how far you can go with a 64-bit architecture, and here's my roadmap, built from nothing more than my fuzzy recollection of the computers of my youth, and a little curve fitting. It seems like we're doubling demand for RAM every 6 months (i.e., we need two more address bits every year).
The observation is generally that GCC is optimised for the G5 and not sufficiently optimised for Intel. And there is no evidence for a more optimised compiler for the G4 and G5 available to Apple, because they use GCC to compile their operating system.
Also note that arguably GCC's code generation on Intel has *no* bearing on code generation on PPC. They're different beasts.
-Stu
I mentioned this a while back, but I really think IBM has an opportunity to take down Microsoft by Dumping Linux and using OSX. The one thing that has kept Java(and hence IBM) off the desktop is the poor support for java on Windows. Apple LOVES Java. IBM LOVES java. I think this could get really interesting. Just think Web Sphere running on an XServe Cluster. With Apple Power Books and and IMacs on the desktops. Pretty scary if you ask me. You say watch out Sun, I say watch out MS. Apple finally got a clue. Now if they can just get a decent Database and an app server, they will blow away the enterprise market. IMHO
I tried for 5 years to come up with a clever sig...only to realize that I am not clever.
Gee, Apple has the "world's fastest personal computer" for two of the last 363 days. Seems like I remember Apple saying the bell was tolling for CISC processors back in 1993. Guess they were wrong.
Half that much will buy me either a nice cozy Athlon-based, Rad9700Pro-Equipped game box, stuffed with 1 Gig of RAM, or maybe a nice dualie Athlon-based box with a 760 chipset for video encoding, or some other variants I can think of. Slightly more will buy me an 'Intel Inside' sticker on the case.
Twice half as much, hence same as what said G5'll cost will also buy me a black AseTek Vapochill case, phase change and all, that makes the G5's noise level, cooling and general sexiness look like an 80-year-old wartnosed hag next to Nicole Kidman. And I'll probbably have enough left to throw in a small SCSI 36Gig 10K-spindle dual-HD stripe (3'll kill the PCI).
So WHY exactly would someone buy that G5, other than to prove something to the big wide world by showing off his mac?
And spare me the "I'm into Graphics" bit. Wake up and smell the Hummus. All adobe software runs just fine on Windows nowadays.
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You'd be a fool to buy the RAM from Apple. Cheaper to buy it elsewhere and install yourself.
Romans 8:38-39
Funny, I haven't seen this on the Bible before.
...I waste a lot of time every day waiting for the MacOS X GUI to catch up with me.
So your saying you work faster than the 64 MB ATI Radeon 9000 Pro Graphics card occupying your 4X AGP slot?
Got three 1995-era Macs running G3-400 CPU upgrades, 512MB RAM, ATA HD controllers, internal 40 MB 7200 ATA HDs, combo FW/USB cards pushing hacked PC video display cards (VooDoo 3s), all running Mac OS 9.1 -- machines are very productive for all but the most intense Photoshop jobs -- page layout for 300 page books is speedy and stable, web cruising with Mozilla or IE acceptable -- only recently picked up a DP 867 running OSX 10.2 -- 1995-era Macs are still in use daily, and will likely continue as production machines for the next couple of years -- DP 867 is used to process BIIIG Photoshop files, mostly.
Can't think of ANY 1995-era Windows PC machines that are still running -- much less running in a full-tilt production environment.
Have no intention of buying a G5 -- likely will pick up some used DP G4 Macs, as I migrate the shop towards OSX over the next few years.
Nah, Solaris sounds cooler than all of those together.
Not that I've actually ever _used_ Solaris or anything...
but the name sounds cool.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
I'd like to see it in another way than jumpy streaming.
It's Christmas everyday with BitTorrent.