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90nm 3GHz PPC 970FX by Summer
dmdimon sent in linkage to a Forbes story on the upcoming PPC chips and notes "IBM is said to be ready to deliver a new version of its PowerPC processor to Apple by the end of this year in from sizes of 130 nanometers to 90 nanometers...
Apple CEO Steve Jobs has already gone on the record saying that the G5 computer will contain PowerPC chips that run at 3 GHz by the summer of 2004. A mid-step between the current systems, which top out with two chips running at 2 GHz, and systems with chips as fast as 2.6 GHz would be a logical move come January..."
You supply 3% of the computer market with chips, you can hand pick your chips and speed bin the rest.
.09 transfer.
On a side note, I have heard that AMD plans on using Apple's experience to help them with Athlon 64 chips with the
It rather makes you wonder if the IPC is going to be dropped with new stages to the pipeline to up the clock. Afterall, IBM has already said they are going to remove unneeded chip die components to reduce costs for Apple... HRm.
This will also mean they can fit a G5 in a powerbook. Time to start saving up.
It's a boon for consumers. Now we have a real choice in architecture (ppc vs. x86) as well as brand (amd, intel, ibm) without sacraficing performance.
Perhaps this will force Intel to to up the ante.
Most of the people encoding audio and video
Macs have been the native platform of artists and designers doing serious image creation/manipulation, video editing, and music composition for a long time. OS X just continues that tradition, but makes it simple for the end-user to also get into how powerful a multimedia machine the Mac is with tools such as iMovie, etc. And of course, on the other end, you've got these two.
So, to answer your question, ramping up speed on the G5 chips is not only good for the whole marketing "Mine is bigger" approach, but there is also real value to Mac users, from casual to hard core.
El riesgo vive siempre!
You missed the part about the G5 running cooler than G4 and also, the switch from .13 to .09 processes should help as well. The net effect may be an overall cooler machine which does not sacrifice MHz.
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One thing that caught my eye is that the term "open-source" is used without any explanation, presumably because readers are expected to know what it means. It's a relatively technical article for Forbes, but they did provide a definition for "compiler".
Is there a name for this IBM compiler? Is there any word as to Apple's long-term plans for it versus gcc?
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
I think that if Apple would invest only a little bit more in managing their current products, they would be much more successful, and would therefore have more resources with which to innovate.
Think of it this way: Why is it that Apple has, what, 2% of the market, when Dell, which doesn't innovate at all in its product, has a huge chunk of the market? Dell does nothing but manage.
I'm saying all of these things because Apple's product is very promising, and I would be very happy if they would gain a larger chunk of the market, so that more people would use Apple computers, so that more software would be released for them, so that more hardware options would become available for them, and basically so that the computer world, as regular folks see it, won't be the monotonous Wintel platform...
Of course, I want to see my favorite OS (BSD) getting a big boost.
-_-
Does anyone even care about the leetness of their speed with Apple stuff? I always thought the sort of people who used "the other computer" were more interested in doing normal everyday things that don't require much cpu power: word processing, email, web etc. Most of the people encoding audio and video and playing games are running x86.
Well, a huge number of design people use Macs, and image processing can be very processor intensive. Everyone knows Apple always quotes Photoshop benchmarks when trying to say that their computers are faster (with this version of photoshop! with these patches! with this filter! On Tuesdays! In March!)
That being said, there's one interesting point here - there are a lot of people who, after OS X, are switching to Apple because it's a Unix derivative that, for desktop use, is more polished than Linux. The scientific project I work on has just ported all of the analysis tools to OS X, because they like the Mac desktop better than the Linux one, so I think in addition to image processing/design tasks, developers may slowly switch to Mac as well.
One other interesting point now is that the reasons for sticking with x86 are quickly dwindling. It used to be a joke that Macs were faster. Macs, in many things, were three to four (yes, 3 to 4!) times slower at general-purpose tasks. Ever since the G5 was introduced, maybe it's still a joke because of Jobs's overzealous description of Apple's prowess, but it's not that much of a joke anymore. A dual 2GHz G5 is not a slow machine. Not by any stretch of the imagination.
At this point, the only things that can seriously keep people on x86 are software and price, and considering people still pay more than $1K for computers, I think it's safe to say that people are perfectly happy to spend way too much money on computers if they look nice and are well supported.
I think Apple is quite healthy: I'd be really surprised if Apple's market share doesn't continue to grow. If you're willing to shell out the money to shift to a Mac for the ease-of-use of OS X, then I don't think you're likely to shift back to x86.
My understanding is that applications are free to use 64 bit instructions if they wish.
Am I mistaken? Does the system, stack organization or memeory management some how preculde the use of 64 bit instructions?
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I'm not really sure what you mean by this comment. How do you invest a little more in managing your current products?
Do you mean that Apple doesn't market their products aggressively enough? Maybe you haven't seen their ads everywhere. Remember that Apple is one company marketing an entire platform, while Dell, et. al. only have to market their products, not the OS.
Dell owns a huge chunk of the market because of their assembly and distribution mechanism. Dell started out with no retail mechanism to support, which allowed them to beat other Wintel OEMs on price. When a price war heats up, Dell can take a smaller margin on each unit sold without going under.
Apple is not "promising". It has led the personal computer industry for a quarter of a century. The fact that you're saying, "I would be very happy if they would gain a larger chunk of the market, so that more people would use Apple computers, so that more software would be released for them, so that more hardware options would become available for them..." reveals that you haven't used a Mac lately.
There are over 17,000 software titles available for the Mac. There are zillions of Open Source packages you can use with OS X. Besides that, how many crappy "me too" Windows programs do you really need? There are great software choices in every category for the Mac, and a lot fewer shovelware products than in the Windows world. Mac users just don't tolerate that sort of sloppiness for long.
As for hardware options, Apple is able to make computers that are relatively problem-free specifically because they control the hardware and the OS. Apple has tried the hardware licensing thing in the past, and it only cannibalized their own sales. The Mac will never dominate computing, but then again, Apple's desire to grow and profit has never been predicated on wanting to rule the world.
For that, look north to Redmond. ;-)
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
See MacRumors.com for Forbes' "sources".
the fastest PC workstations beat the Mac's in Photoshop Could I ask where you are getting the statics to back that up? Every test I have read shows the G5 beating the fastest PC in photoshop renderings,
Macs will run at 3 ghz? WOOHOO! That means AMD and Intel will have 6gig chips!
Realistically speaking, though, performance increases have slowed down in the x86 camp. The jump from 2.8GHz to 3.0GHz came with a much larger increase in power than than the 7% increase in raw clockrate. Ditto for the 3.2GHz P4. Now Intel is apparently having a lot of trouble just getting bumped up to 3.4GHz, a CPU that dissipates over 100 watts. I'm not saying Intel won't break past this barrier--of course they will--but diminishing returns have kicked in hard. A 4GHz P4 is going to dissipate 150W at this rate. How long can it keep up? These are not the kind of CPUs you can easily put in a desktop, let alone a small-form-factor PC or notebook.
IBM is going to have the same troubles with the PPC970, but at least they're ahead of the game. The cleaner design of the PPC line has suddenly become a powerful advantage.
High-end Video Codec Pixlet is the first studio-grade codec for filmmakers. Pixlet provides 20-25:1 compression, allowing a 75MB/sec series of frames to be delivered in a 3MB/sec movie, similar to DV data rates. Pixlet lets high-end digital film frames play in real time with any 1GHz G4 or better Panther Mac, without investing in costly, proprietary hardware.
"I don't think it's selfish, to eat defenseless shellfish." -NOFX
Does anyone even care about the leetness of their speed with Apple stuff? I always thought the sort of people who used "the other computer" were more interested in doing normal everyday things that don't require much cpu power: word processing, email, web etc. Most of the people encoding audio and video and playing games are running x86.
But there's getting to be quite a leet-geek crowd using Macs now, thanks to OS X. It's a huge draw for people who understand the advantages of UNIX, but don't want to get into the Linux fray (because of lack of certain commercial applications, for example).
I wonder why it's so exciting (that we have to post it on slashdot) that Apples are going superleetfast, when Apple owners don't need speed...
2 reasons:
One, we really do need all the speed we can get. OS X is getting really fast and nice on the new G5's (with Panther only helping the matter).
And Two, because for a long time Apple wasn't competing at the high end of performance, and now they are.
It would also be nice if they put back Quartz support over tcp/ip (they took it off in the NeXTStep days because of security issues). Apple has lousy market presence in the business/office world, but a high-powered QuartzTerminal(tm) and a headless imac might be nice. In the meantime, I buy my Macs used on ebay!
"Only in their dreams can men truly be free 'twas always thus, and always thus will be."
--Tom Schulman
I wonder how many software errors will be caused by neutrons hitting the processor and upseting logic gates? I have not seen any test results from Los Alamos for 90nm processors using EIA JESD 57, (1996) JEDEC Standard - Test procedures for the measurement of Single Event effects in Semiconductor Devices from Heavy Ion Irradiation. Unfortunately the Radhard server at NASA is down right now so I can't check the server for the latest test results.
Some people think Failures in Time (FIT) rates will get better at 90nm than 130nm. Some think the opposite. Xilinx and Actel are arguing over it. Caches are epecially vulnerable. In a critical software application, this is unacceptable, and sometimes the cache needs to be disabled altogether.
One method of addressing this is built in checksumming on the cache, and triple redundancy on certain registers like program counter, etc... This does induce a performance hit.
Holland
Well, I for one am doing robotics & AI simulation on a mac.
In fact, it wasn't until I *left* x86 (linux) that I got a platform where opengl worked well enough that I could write a proper display layer on top of my system, not to mention that my PB g4 was actually cheaper than the pIII thinkpad it replaced and in my tests was significantly ( e.g. more than 3x) faster.
Now, I don't do any audio, and I don't do any video; but my simulation is pretty f*cking heavy on the cycles -- and it rips. I have no complaints.
People who gripe about mac performance just haven't actually *used* one. And they certainly haven't written any code for one.
lorem ipsum, dolor sit amet
These days, when people say video editing they mean video editing, compositing, sound sweetening, re-recording and a bunch of other fun stuff.
In my end of the market, mid-low end, nobody hires a second person to do the extra jobs. Once you get the raw goodness, that's it. You get to do it all, and then do it over when the producer changes his mind.
That being said, horsepower is very important in video editing. It seems that everybody wants multi-layer titles, stuff flying around the screen, translucent layers, and then we get into color correcting. Tonight for instance, I will probably give my Dual 500mhz G4 two or three hours of tendering to do, and this is just for a couple of dozen titles on two half hour programs! I could very easily keep two computers busy with work.
Graspee Leemoor was talking about the home user, not the pro, but the difference is narrowing. The full version of Final Cut Pro is not that expensive, and Final Cut Express is only $300! With signifigant editing goodness being that cheap, people are starting to do more than just chopping together their clips. Once they get a tast of all the fancy crap that these programs can do, they start loading up their video with all kinds of stuff, and that's what will perk up their appetite for computing power.
I'm not saying that this is a good thing, by the way. Most people would be better served by getting a decent tripod, spending some bucks on microphones and recording equipment, and spending time thinking about whether they really need that fourth shot of little Jim-Bob playing in the mud. Quality production is never easy or cheap, and people think post can fix anything, damn it.
Basically, the DV video format has broken the prosumer market wide open. This will introduce people to decent video editing that wouldn't have had a chance before. Some of those people will start playing around and feel the need for more power.
When a post production facility is paying editors big bucks per hour, ten grand for a machine that saves just a little time per day is nothing. This is good for everybody downstream. Sadly I don't get paid much so the bosses don't see the need for anything faster than what we have..
Need some video help?
Why do I have this? I don't smoke.
I think Apple makes great stuff, but at the end of the day, I really do believe in free software and can't wait to own a (dual?) Power4 workstation so I can run Linux on it.
When I saw this article, I followed the procedure that I've done whenever I saw something new with the Power4 (Apple calls it the G5) chip - I went to IBM's site to see if they sell their own
workstations on it.
This time, however, I was incredibly happy to see that this was the case! The IBM website advertises Intellistation POWER series available for purchase. There are two large buts, though - and are probably related. Firstly, they are ridiculously expensive. As in, 8K+ for a 1 CPU at 1.0 GHz. Without a monitor. Secondly, they aren't running Linux - they're running AIX.
Does anybody know this situation? Has Linux been ported to the Power4 chip? I remember reading that it has, but I've never heard any success stories. Secondly, is IBM planning on releasing a workstation running Linux? I imagine the AIX license is a big part of the hardware and hopefully this would make the package much more affordable.
http://www.talknerdy.org
We're a 100% Apple shop running Final Cut Pro 4 and DVD Studio Pro 1.5 and I assure you we need that power.
We upgraded from a DP 450 G4 box (which was no slouch itself) to a DP 2.0GHz G5 recently and we've more than quadrupled our productivity when it comes to big renders, mpeg2 encodes and multiplexing.
I don't know of anyone in our business using x86 for video editing. None seriously anyway.
I know a couple of shops who use x86 boxes as cheap horsepower in render farms - but ultimately controlled by a Mac at the nose end.
We use our DP G4 as a Quake III server for company LAN matches when it's not encoding mpeg2 on a job. I know Q3A isn't exactly a taxing game on today's graphics cards (none of our client machines even break sweat) but you can't beat it for gameplay.