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Yet Another G5 Roundup

Posted by pudge on from the you-thought-we-were-done dept.

Lawrence Person writes "This article on Low End Mac talks about why the PowerPC 970 is so fast, covering its superiority to Intel chips in Multiply Accumulate, double precision arithmetic, and Fast Fourier Transforms, among other operations. A short, clear article for those who don't have the time to wade through Parts 1 and 2 of Ars Technica's exceptionally detailed dissection of the 970/G5." Trollaxor writes "IBM has a neat two-page history of the PowerPC architecture, detailing its evolution from the first RS/6000 chipsets in 1990, through the POWER ISA, and into the processors that we know and use today. A very interesting read."

5 of 69 comments (clear)

  1. Okay by Japer+Lamar+Crabb · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I understand the excitement over these machines, so I won't get all pissy about this, but...

    Until these machines are widely available, each and every thread concerning the performance of the PPC 970 will run the risk of degenerating into a heated debate over whether the figures being offered are reliable. In other words, a flamefest.

    Don't we already have enough of those around here?

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    Habit is the ballast that chains the dog to his vomit - Samuel Beckett, "Proust"
    1. Re:Okay by Johnny+Mnemonic · · Score: 4, Insightful


      Hey, I'm a Mac fan, and I totally agree--while this bodes well for the future, the benefits of the G5 are clearly application specific. So until you'll be able to test it yourself, with the apps that you use, compiled with whatever they're compiled with, it's just another flamefest.

      That said--both you and I clicked the link to "Read More", didn't we?

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  2. Re:Yea, but does it run Linux? by Steveftoth · · Score: 2, Insightful

    The design is really to minimize noise I think because if you have lots of slow moving fans, it's a lot quieter then one or two fast moving ones.

    Computers put out too much heat to use passive cooling anymore, the old computers of yore didn't use fans, but people today don't want slow machines so we have to use active cooling.

  3. Re:Yea, but does it run Linux? by Watcher · · Score: 2, Insightful

    This may be a logical answer: its much easier for them to update the code running the fans from the OS than in firmware.

  4. Re:But it's really only 32 bits by coolgeek · · Score: 2, Insightful

    You are trolling, right? Or do you just fail to realize that 32bits in each direction is one of the ways they achieve a 1Ghz FSB speed? By skipping the direction bit on the bus, they are saving a little propogation time, which leads to more cycles per second.

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    cat /dev/null >sig