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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.
The difference in policy regarding announcements of future advances may be a result of the processors being made by IBM now. I think it is an IBM announcement more than an Apple one.
Karma: Can there be a void?
.. -. - . .-. .-. --- -...
Doesn't that make some people want to wait for the extra year?
I suppose some people might wait, but don't underestimate the pent up demand for a high performance Mac. Apple's customers have already been waiting a looooong time for this machine. I don't think announcing that there will be a speed bump in a year will do much to the short term sales of the new boxes. Maybe in six months people will start holding off for the promised 3GHz boxes, but not now.
I think the keyword is "desktop" as opposed to "workstation".
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."
Oh yeah, and they can also run Mac OSX, OS9, and 64-bit UNIX scientific, math, and engineering applications at blazing speed and with unprecedented ease of use. So what's a Sun box good for again?
I'm no Sun evangelist (as a matter of fact, I hate their products lately), but let's at least stop displaying our abject ignorance. What's a Sun box good for? How about naming me a high-end manufacturing/engineering design package that runs on OS X first, then we can talk about what a Sun box is good for.
- 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?"
Out of interest, how much is it for the 106-CPU version of the Mac, again?
For the workstation market, it doesn't matter very much.
I have been a Sun fan for some time, now, but I see the dual PowerPC 970 Mac and dual Opteron workstations coming down the line and wonder. These, feature-for-feature, make Sun Blade, IBM RS-6000, SGI Fuel, etc., much harder sells.
The G5 is gorgeous and powerful (like a Bond girl). The Opteron will be white-box and powerful (like the neighborhood geek-girl:). There's probably something for everyone, here. For completeness, I suppose Windows on Itanium would be like some sort of beast woman who still gets guys, because she is easy (blecch).
Sun and Apple are targeting completely different markets.
This was very true three years ago. However, what would happen if PTC released Pro/E for OS X? It's really a matter of the applications. Not only that, but I would bet getting Motif on OS X isn't too hard (suddenly lots of UNIX applications on OS X becomes plausible).
The workstation is going through serious evolution, right now. 64-bits is no longer the domain of the "big guys." The next two years will be very interesting.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
If you don't care about your time or the quality of the software you use, you should stick with windows.
It's as easy as that.
There is a very important reason for announcing a 3Ghz processor for next year...
The G4 used to be very impressive compared to PCs of the time - but it's been around for far too long, with limited speed bumps...
Announcing a 3Ghz model is letting people know that there is a roadmap in place for ramping up the performance...
People want to know that there is a future... with many Mac owners and quite a few potential 'switchers' staying away from the dual G4s as they are past their sell by date, announcing a roadmap for G5 development - and not just new machines themselves - may well see an increase in current Mac sales...
First off, your English unfortunately is working against your making a point. I think you meant to say that Macs cost 30% more than PCs, which is simply ignorant to state. Second, you are dead wrong on price/performace. I work in a lab doing bioinformatic analysis of the bovine genome. The OLD G4 Xserves gets twice the performance per dollar as any linux-based workstations, built in-house or otherwise. In many ways they are faster to use for our jobs than shared-memory supercomputers to which we have access. Third, I also compose music, do some game development (including some 3D graphics work), and have done so on Macs and PCs. Even on an older Mac, I am far more productive, but back to the point: Configure a somewhat equivalent Dell and compare the price to a G5. Not only is the price competitive, the performance is superior with the Mac. Your attempted point on bang-for-buck is outright false. In any case, no one has suggested you buy a Mac in the first place, so why are you so defensive?
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.
Apple used GCC 3.3 to run the SPECmarks on the Intel processors too, so the results are indeed valid.
A comparison between ICC on the Intel and GCC on the G5 is interesting to determine how fast your code might run out-of-the-box on a P4 vs G5 but ultimately flawed for comparing CPU performance.
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.
Software can always be ported to meet the demand. I would be pretty scared right now if I were sun, honestly. If people realize that an apple could be used for the same sorts of purposes as those extremely expensive sun boxes, they may just be tempted to switch. Does that mean it's guaranteed to happen? definitely not, but the mere fact that it's getting more feasable should be enough to at least freak out sun.
Here's the deal: if you want to know how one computer compares to another, you have to use the same compiler.
not true at all. See below.
I mean, you just have to. Otherwise the test is meaningless. You can only test for one variable at a time if you want to get results that mean something.
Say you have compiler A which rocks for architecture A and sucks hard for architecture B. You run SPEC with this compiler, and A wins.
The next day you have compiler B which rocks for architecture B and sucks hard for architecture A. You run SPEC, and B wins.
How are these results meaningful? They say absolutely nothing about the two architectures independent of the compiler used. If you used completely different compiler brands for each architecture, you'd end up with the same thing: Results that are dependent on the compilers used.
The fact of the matter is, cross-architecture comparisons suck no matter what you do. GCC 3.3 for IA32 and GCC 3.3 for the G5 need to be treated as completely different compilers in any valid testing methodology. It doesn't matter that they have the same name and version number -- if they're compiling for different architectures, they're doing things differently. using "the same compiler" to try to feign fairness is simply a sneaky marketing trick.
So what is one to do? Well it depends on the result you want:
-- if you always use GCC 3.3 to compile your high speed apps and want to know which CPU GCC 3.3 works best for, then apple's (Veritest's) results are perfect for you. However, those results really say more about how good GCC is at optimizing for the separate architectures, rather than anything about the merits of the architectures themselves.
-- trying to compare the merits of the architectures themselves is the tricky part. Generally, modern processors need their code to be very well optimized to fully exploit the power of the processor. Therefore, a fair comparison would be between The Best Compiler for Architecture A vs The Best Compiler for Architecture B. This is the only way to even come close to comparing "What architecture A can do" vs "What architecture B can do". And this is what most people want out of a benchmark.
(Of course one has to make sure that the compilers used aren't cheating on the spec benchmarks to give huge results. This is where the base vs peak distinction is important.)
Finally, on a somewhat related note, if the speed of specific applications is most important to you, then of course you'd be looking at application benchmarks and not SPEC.
The following sentence is true. The preceding sentence was false.
That's not a desktop that's a workstation, and hardly commonplace. When was the last time you ran down to Walmart and picked up a DEC Alpha or SGI?
mo
Actually, if you look at the benchmarks, the GCC scores are actually pretty close (for the FP benchmarks). Where the Intel side really fails is with the Fortran compiler, which is generally considered to be a pretty good Fortran compiler.
Given that if you are comparing Linux vs. OS X, the vast majority of your code will have been compiled with gcc, and the number of man years spent optimizing gcc's x86 performance, I think this is actually a pretty fair benchmark.
sigs are a waste of space
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.
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.
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