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Apple's Dual 2GHz By The Numbers
mallumax writes "ComputerWorld has an exciting review of Apple's Dual 2GHz machine." An excerpt: "It's clear from two weeks of testing that Apple's new Power Mac G5 dual 2-GHz machine is the fastest thing the company has ever produced. And while you can debate benchmarks until eternity, it certainly appears poised to meet or beat anything now out on the Windows side."
Of course it's the fastest ever, CPU speeds are increasing all the time. If I go out and buy a new AMD CPU it'll be the fastest ever....for about 2-3 months.
Plus there's the "it beats anything on the PC market", erm quad CPU Xenon? it's a PC ain't it? where do you want to draw the line?
Macs are cool but speed doesn't convice people to buy a computer, the price often does. Mac users were once ridiculed for knowing very little about computers, however I think this isn't true these days. Mac users know enough about computers to be able to choose between a computer running Windows and a Mac.
I know of more people in the last year to 18 months that abandoned Linux as their desktop for OSX. I am one of those because at the end of the day, I like Photoshop much better than GIMP, and the ablity to develop PHP/MySQL apps on my iBook and still have powerpoint is exactly what I need.
I do come from a video/graphics systems admin background. I worked during college part-time at a friend's father's architecture firm where they had a small 24 unit ALPHA rendering farm.
Now I do indy technology consulting, mainly to small businesses and video firms. I had a number of clients switch to PC's (Dell's mainly) in the last two years because the hardware costs were so much less, however they quickly found out that programs like Premeire suddenly crashed a lot more and the time in lost work was far greater than what it would have cost for a mac. ALthough this was mainly due to Adobe Premeire 6 generally being a piece of junk, not really windows itself.
I have one customer that is going to order the dual G5 after 10.3 is shipping. He is semi-retired, but does some commercial and wedding video work. He has a six year old G3 400 with 1GB of ram to run Final Cut Pro and he has upgraded X.2 and some of his rendering output times are 6 hours. No big deal to him, clicks render, goes out the back of his house onto his boat and goes fishing the rest of the day. Well, the local apple store was flying a specialist from apple over FCP and DVD studio pro and we were in the store and had my client's last video, which took about 4.5 hours to render. We imported the file from a DVD onto the new G5 with an enhanced version of FCP and then on a single 1.8Ghz G5 and the difference was about 15% for the same footage in favor of the dual compared to the single G5 and about 1/3d of the time that it took on his G3.
Granted configured with a new 23" HD and 17" flatpanel, the dual box is about $15,000 with all the software he needs as well. Add in about another $3000 for upgrades over the next 5 years in software and and the new box he will be buying is cheaper that his old G3.
Now granted, in video production, you can spend $20k on a mac and it will do just about anything you want, or you can jump and spend $250k on an Avid. Even dedicated editing boxes are $3500, so this industry will & must spend the money and for many graphic/video firms, that 15% difference means 15% more money because they can turn around and start the next job that much faster. Couple the increase in turn around with the prices some of these firms charge, that can pay for a couple dual G5's real quick.
Then finally, there is TCO. Most small wedding video/indy video companies I know of tend to hang on to their equipment for a long time. I know a lot of people that purchased G3's and still are using them because they knew a year ago that the G5's were going to be out, so they decided to wait. Some have already purchased the G5's and have been extremely pleased with their purchase and the dramatic increases in speed. Another video company in town switched from their Casablance/Kron editing tools to FCP on G5's and after about a month, their turn around times for videos has gone from about 14 days to 7 or 8. Many of their editors are full time college students and FCP is what is being taught in the classrooms, so the cost of time in retraining was extremely low. Now they purchased Single 1.8Ghz boxes with 2GB of Ram, but it seems to be more than enough for them.
So will the average "user" need dual processors...um, no, but there are those out there were it such high end specs can be usefull and profitable.
I have to admit that I was not a fan of Apple until a year ago and bought this iBook. The main reason why I switched was I wanted something that worked and thus far everything has worked perfectly and I have no complaints.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
The new G5 from Apple is more than merely "fast". It is a workstation in its own right. In "Byte of the Apple", "Businessweek" notes that the new Macintoshes are, in fact, UNIX workstations. The notebooks based on G5s are, in fact, portable UNIX workstations.
Steve Jobs, if he had any sense, would be marketing these machines as workstations instead of mere personal computers. With 64-bit processors, these machines are fully capable of handling engineering workloads like Verilog, HSPICE, fluid-dynamics simulation, etc.
Right now, a tidal wave of Linux-on-x86 machines is drowning Sun Microsystems in the workstation market. It sure would be nice to see a G5 take some market share bled from Sun Microsystems. In fact, it would be ideal to see a Linux-driven G5 take market share.