Slashdot Mirror
PowerPC 750GX Begins Sampling Next Month
Trollaxor writes "The June issue of IBM's PowerPC Processor News features an article on the latest G3, Big Blue's PowerPC 750GX. The chip, which begins sampling next month, runs at 1.1 GHz and has 1 megabyte of on-chip L2 cache. Could this be Apple's next speedbump to the iBook?" Or, maybe, they will kill the iBook altogether in favor of the 12" AlBook.
with G5's announced, why would they still produce any G3 machines? G5 for pro, G4 for consumer seems the path to go. An iBook with a G4 and Altivec should run Jaguar and Panther much better than the G3 versions. They could use features and clock speed to differentiate between iBook G4 and Powerbook G4 until the G5 Powerbooks are ready.
also, a g3 is faster than a g4 for non-altivec operations. I even have toy benchmarks to prove it!
I'm not going to shell out $600 bucks for a 1 gigahertz G4 upgrade for my trusty 400mhz G3 server, but I might consider a 1 gigahertz G3 if the price was under $300.
This is hardly an Apple story. The G3 (aka PPC 750) has many applications other than Macs.
P.S. It's only a G3, G4, or G5 when it is used in a Mac, otherwise it's just a plain old PowerPC.
"Or, maybe, they will kill the iBook altogether in favor of the 12" AlBook." Apple still needs a sub $1000 laptop for college students that provides e-mail, web browsing, instant messaging and small ventures into the graphical arts. There is no way a PowerBook would ever breach the $1000 barrier... The G3 processor still has legs. My iMac DV Special Edition (purchased in 1999) runs Jaguar quite well with only 256MB of RAM at a 400Mhz clock speed. Throw a 1.1Ghz G3 with 512MB RAM and that would be one kickass machine. It would run quietly, have a more compact design and offer speeds that would, if not by benchmark than by real-world usage, equal that of a much-higher clocked Pentium 3.
I'm not popular enough to be different.
Homer Simpson, The Simpsons
A lot of this stuff will really hinge on Panther. It will be tough for apple to sell G3's if Panther doesn't run well on the processor. I know Jaguar runs fine for what it does, but it still misses having Quartz. How much of Panther will require more than what the G3 can handle.
What's worse is that there is no guarantee from Apple that they will even continue to really care about the G3. They are already trying to steer people away from the sub 1ghz G4's with the creation of Pixlet. So it definitely leaves a hole with concern to the G3.
I hate to say it, but the G3's time may be almost up.
Slashdot...it's like Fox news, but without the biased sl...or maybe not.
Until the G3 has an AltiVec unit, Apple will not be ditching Motorola completely.
The next PB will probably use moto's G4+. Apple's reluctance to put the same chip in both its "consumer" and "pro" laptops will mean that the iBook wont get Altivec for a while.
Pixlet is designed for HD quality video with good compression. How many FinalCut Pro users are working on iBooks?
QuartzExtreme is not dependent on the CPU but on the GPU. There is no reason why Apple couldn't continue to use G3 processors and upgrade the video hardware to support QuartzExtreme.
Rumor has it that the next generation of G3 processors will also have AltiVec. This will extend the lifespan of teh G3 line of processors.
The G3 has 2 major factors going for it low cost and low power. The G3 will continue to find a niche in Apple's product line. Perhaps we will see it in future iPads or other consumer lifestyle devices.
With Apple's announcing that beige G3s won't be supported for Panther, that's probably an indication of Apple moving away from the six year old processor.
As for Apple not using the same processor in pro v. consumer notebooks, the same was true in Power Macs and iMacs until the iMac G4(and then eMac). There will probably be a short time in which Apple will put the G4 into an iBook replacement to co-exist with the Powerbooks.
My guess is they will put a new name on the 12" AlBook and maybe even a "new" 14" version. The 17" with a better processor(MPC7457 G4)/motherboard(DDR333 RAM) combo will be the main selling feature until they can get heat to a manageable level on the G5.
I can't imagine them phasing out the iBooks right now. This being the "year of the laptop" and all, the price point on the iBooks is just right for competing with low-end PC offerings.
The iBook is also a more durable machine, designed to better hold up to the kind of abuse you'd expect from students and whatnot.
Chris -- http://www.bitter.net/
If IBM can continue to improve the G3 like this, why not drop Motorola's dead-in-the-water G4 and sell the G5 as the high end chip and continue to sell the G3 as the low end chip? If IBM can keep this up, the G3 will surpass the G4, performance-wise, fairly soon. Especially if the rumors about AltiVec support and 1.5 GHz are true.
Lack of eloquence does not denote lack of intelligence, though they often coincide.
If apple keeps the G3 in the iBook for another year, it may not be able to compete against other sub 1000 notebooks with desktop 2.2 Ghz P4, 15 inch displays, and combo drives. You can argue small size and battery life (I would agree), but that would still be a tough sell to those on a slim budget and don't look that far down the spec sheet. Unless Apple leverages the low power capabilities of the G3 and built a sub 5 pound notebook with a 14 inch display to replace 12 inch, I wont be able to recommend it.
You don't have to be smart to use a Mac, you just have to be smart enough to buy one
Yeaah, man, the G3 is a beleaguered platform!
In fact, current iBooks have Quartz Extreme. Minimum requirement is a Radeon, which my wife's six month old iBook 800 MHz has.
My video compression blog
I'm talking about this Bad Boy:
s um mary.jsp?code=MPC7457&nodeId=03C1TR04670871865 3
http://e-www.motorola.com/webapp/sps/site/prod_
Should be shipping in quantity Q3 of this year.
My video compression blog
And Apple's OS X will continue to get faster and faster on all CPUs because they're stilll getting it more and more optimized. They use GCC, which has a LOT of room to grow on the PPC arch (not to say that it's bad now). I think Panther uses GCC-3.3, which has a new processor pipeline description model (DFA) that makes scheduling for a particular CPU easier to describe and produces code that takes better advantage of the CPU.
Also, (AFAIK) Mac OS X has the ability to put multiple compiled versions of code into any binary, meaning that the application you run (or the OS itself) could have seperate binaries for the 970, 74xx, and 7xx CPUs all rolled into one file, your machine picks the best one to use at runtime. The same feature works for seperate archs too, so you could have one app file and INSIDE it you have the PPC binaries and x86 binaries. Resource forks are kewl!
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
Whoops! I just got to thinking. I may be wron in the above post.
The G4 is going away, it won't clock-up enough, and Apple pays through the nose for them. The IBM 970 is a power/heat hog (compared to the G3 and G4) because it's based on the POWER4 chips. IBM has the G3, which is low power and heat, but a bit feature-starved. I don't think the 970 will ever scale down well for laptop usage, it's from a family of CPUs with no power considerations to worry of.
IBM could certainly reengineer the G3 line with some SIMD stuff from their 970, not an 'AltiVec unit' but just add some SIMD instructions to the CPU. You wouldn't even need the full set of SIMD instructions, just get the core features in. The resulting CPU would be very attractive for Apple and DVR manufacturers (for video compression).
I hope they juice up the bus if they do this, maybe they can put the memory controller/ethernet/usb2/firewire onto the chip as well (in the package, but not on-die), since those are all features that I'll bet most of their target market will want.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
As I remember Apple actually used "G3" chips for early G4. Anyone back me up there, or shoot me down?
You're thinking of the motherboard, not the processor. The new motherboard Apple developed for the G4 wasn't ready by the time His Royal Steveness wanted to ship the G4 system, so they hacked up a G3 motherboard to make it work with the G4 processor, code-named it "Yikes!" because of the time crunch, and shipped it. Apple officially refers to this system as the "PowerMac G4 (PCI Graphics)" since it has no AGP slot. The next revision was the "PowerMac G4 (AGP Graphics)", with the motherboard originally planned for the G4, code-named "Sawtooth".
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;