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G5 PowerBook "Challenge"
CarlBenda writes "MacWorld/UK has some interesting quotes from Jon Rubinstein, senior vice president of Hardware Engineering at Apple concerning the possibility of a G5 powerbook. He's said that a G5 powerbook is "an issue of good, solid engineering" and that "a few years ago, nobody thought it would be possible to get a G4 processor in a PowerBook". Start saving your money."
I have a PB12. There is no heat problem. There may have been a few defective units at the beginning of production, but it doesn't get too hot to use directly on my lap, nor does the wrist rest get so hot that it's uncomfortable. The only way I can make mine seem to get too hot is if I plug it in and leaving it running something like say... itunes visualizations all day, with no air flowing over it, and no hands running over it. Then it gets hot, but still, no hotter than the bottom of my Latitude.
But hopefully Apple, unlike Sony, will allow an easy way to control which gets priority.
They already do:
"In addition, the Power Mac G5 computer allows the user to control bus slewing mode. The options for specifying either high, reduced, or automatic processor and bus speeds are located at System Preferences>Energy Saver>Options; then select Automatic, Highest, or Reduced."
~Philly
Agreed.
I'm typing on a 12" G4 right now. I've pounded on the CPU pretty hard, and the only time it seems to get hot is if I set it on a blanket or something rather than on a surface where the heat can actually efficiently dissipate. That's a problem with all notebooks, not just Apples.
The 12" G4 is no hotter, and in fact seems to feel a bit cooler, than the Dell Inspiron 5000 PIII notebook that it replaced.
Remember, no-one has said that we'll see the Desktop G5 processor (a PowerPC 970) in a portable form-factor. Just like we never, ever saw the first Desktop G4's processor (a PowerPC 7400) in a PowerBook. What the portables got were more power efficient, less hot chips -- like the PowerPC 7410, which popped up in the first titanium PowerBooks.
Since Apple can still call these revised chips "G4", "G5", etc, it may seem like they've accomplished this incredible engineering feat in getting the big ol' chip inside that teeny case -- but the first breakthrough is the improved processor, over at Moto or IBM. They still have thier work cut out for them, but at least Apple doesn't need to ring the entire case with fans...
The Power Mac G5 has nine fans in it because they want it to be quiet. If you run nine fans at low speed, you move the same amount of air as one fan at high (i.e., noisy) speed.
The PowerPC G5 at 1.8 GHz dissipates 42 watts of power. That's about the same as the G4 at 1.25 GHz... which is now shipping in a PowerBook.
Good grief, I see comments like this in every story about the G5. There are large numbers of fans so that the machine can run quietly. They could have got by with less if they made a machine as loud as a typical Intel/AMD offering. The fans spend most of their time not spinning or at very, very low revs. Also means that they can add faster, hotter processors for quite a while before they need to worry about changing the design. It's a forward-looking, quiet, controlled bit of design, not a roaring oven.
1-3 belong to commedore.(Amiga)
1. The VIC-20 shipped in 1980 and the Commodore 64 in 1982. The Apple I shipped in 1976 and Apple II in 1977.
2. The Amiga didn't ship until September 1985. The Macintosh shipped in January 1984 (remember the SuperBowl ad?).
3. The Amiga used the same Motorola 680x0 CISC chips the old Macs did. Only the new ones are PowerPC-based. Apple has been shipping PowerMacs since 1994.
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I went to the local CompUSA where they leave them on all day running some screensaver, and felt both the 12" Powerbook and the 12" iBook. There was a VERY noticable difference. The iBook seems significantly cooler than the 12" Powerbook and the 15" TiBook was cold (Since the case doesn't transfer heat well through the casing).
As a laptop user my #1 priority is being able to use it comfortably. The Aluminum Powerbook was too hot (12"), the 17" was tolerable, and the 15" Titanium was a dream (paint chips are not acceptable either). So I chose to wait for the new Al 15" and when my local CompUSA eventually has one on display (3-4 months from now) I'll see if it's cool enough. I bought a 900MHz iBook instead and it stays relatively cool. Hell maybe I'll just wait another year and hope for the G5 powerbooks.
I'd rather have these things than a hot laptop:
Less speed (Apple already has this covered, My PIII from 2 1/2 years ago is 1.2GHz)
More Fans/Noise
Less attractive case (design is for girls, I'll take ugly and cool over cute and hot every day).
Larger/heavier case.
Erm, unless Apple had a RISC based PC in or before 1987, I very much doubt they were the first to bring RISC out of the server room.
Acorn in the UK developed its own RISC processor (Acorn Risc Processor or ARM - sound familiar?) and released their first computer using it in 1987. It was, what, 5-6 years later or so that Apple released its first PowerPC machine?
Of course, the A in ARM has been replaced with "Advanced", but Acorn were still the first company to bring out a RISC based personal computer.
People just assume that G5 consumes this enormous amount of power because of all the fans in the G5 desktop. This isn't true. Even the 2G takes only about 40 watts or so. One P4 3G takes in the range of 80 watts of power. All of the extra G5 fans are to make the cooling quieter.
I'm glad to see someone finally point this out. The exact wattage number is 46.7 watts for the 2 GHz PowerPC 970 "G5" running at full speed (2GHz CPU and a 2:1 multipler for a 1 GHz FSB).
A 2.4 GHz P4 (400 MHz FSB) uses 62 watts, newer P4s use even more. Prescott is expected to use 100 - 105 watts. (And this is totally ignoring the even further power needs of the "extreme" edition with its added transistors for on-die L3 cache)
Apple has always seemed to overengineer the heatsinks and fans in their desktop model, for about as long as I can remember. Oddly, many of the PowerBooks use a much different "transfer the heat from the CPU, Chipset, and GPU right to the bottom of the case" cooling method.
Last year I purchased a top of the line 14.1" ibook with 700Mhz G3 and 640MB ram, combo drive and Airport card. If I am using say iTunes, iMovie and Photoshop, the lower left hand corner will get a little warm and the fan kicks into overdrive, but that is after 3 or 4 hours of running all those apps. I bought this to replace a Viao Z505 ultra thin. I loved the 1"thick and 3.5 pounds, but even with a pentium 233, the damn thing would almost burn me if I left it on for too long and windows would crash due to overheating. I say someone saying how they had 1.3Ghz PIII laptop a while ago, that's nice, but can I tell a difference in say PowerPoint between my 700Mhz G3 and a 1 Ghz Althon? Not really and my mac has crashed twice in the last year. Once I was trying to see what it would take (photoshop, itunes, imovie, Golive, and FCP and then launch a classic app...that did it). I can close my laptop and reopen it without it crashing like on my old laptop. I reset my ibook only after downloading updates every two weeks or so. At one point it had an uptime of over 28 days. That's 28 days of open, close, open, close and the system began doing strange things. I guess 1 reset a month isn't that bad for a laptop. Now I design webpages for living deployed on *iux based servers. Being able to develop in a *iux enviroment and still have tools like Photoshop and Dreamweaver/flash is a tremendous advantage to me and a feature that I will pay a little more for. Another issue is TCO. One the clients I met with today does video production and he is still using a G3 500 and uses FCP and PS on a daily basis. He's had the machine almost 5 years and can still purchase new software. Will it run as fast as a G4, no, but as he said, if it takes 4 hours to render a video, I go fishing and come back. One other photographer switched to using Dell's, but quickly found that he was upgrading about every 18 months compared to 24 - 36 with Macs and even though the hardware costs are cheaper, but he said that he was losing a lot more time with system crashes and is considering going back to Mac's and getting a dual G5. This laptop will proable last me another two years with proably a new battery needed in that time, but maybe at that time I will consider a powerbook and a g5 will be in it.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.