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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..."
where smaller is better.
wow... with this Apple will be dying much faster !
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Does anyone even care about the leetness of their speed with Apple stuff?
Why my friend converted: Final Cut Pro, he's in the movie/TV biz.
You can't take the sky from me...
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 editing the audio and video you're encoding on your x86 are using macs. Well, maybe not most, but a hell of a lot of 'em.
"If you're thinking what I'm thinking, you're right." -
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!
I agree with the wisdom of letting others find the flaws in a first generation laptop--It's too easy to get burned with a brand new laptop design, pun intended.
That said, Apple puts more effort into laptop design than just about any other manufacturer I can think of. I seriously doubt they'd slap a G5 processor into a G4 design and call it done.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
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.
Why would AMD be talking to Apple? If anyone AMD would be talking to IBM but even then unless IBM will be manufacturing the chips or has some kind of partnership agreement with AMD they would n't be inclined to pass on that kind of valuable experience to AMD.
This guy trolls for these types of posts, hoping to get modded up. His sig is the most disgusting thing ever, please mod down.
The new G5 chips will require 1.21 jiggawatts of power to operate effectively.
3D Printing Tips and Tricks at Zheng3.com
-_-
The iMagnifying glass will be available for purchase from the Apple stor in 4Q 2004. It will have a retail cost of $99.95 which is mostly due to "Apple Engineering" costs. Sales are expected to be brisk despite that fact that a standard magnifying glass only costs $9.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
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.
Yeah, I'm willing to bet that the people who make 80 million dollar movies with them do. Your friends who encode Simpsons episodes into DivX don't count, sorry.
don't click, nasty goatse.cx and defecation pictures
Mod this asshole down as a troll, plz
"There are no technical hurdles to producing a Powerbook G5. It could easily appear in January," Glaskowsky says.
I dunno ... that sounds more like rumor-mill feedstock. 'No technical hurdles'? Seems far-fetched. Reducing the heat output is a good start, but the 970 still eats power. Something like 74W, IIRC. Most portable chips draw something in the 20W range. Again, reducing the transistor size is a good start, but there are significant hurdles still to be jumped if it's going to fit in a laptop with a reasonable battery life -- and not burn poor, unsuspecting scientists' winkies.
"Diplomacy is something you do until you find a rock." --Richard Pound
Does anyone even care about the leetness of their speed with Apple stuff?
Yes I do... The more speed, the faster my photoshop projects render.
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.
" He forgot that there are people in the world different from the guys at his LAN party and his mom's friends.
There are lots more uses for computers than browsing the web, playing games, and making DivX rips of netflix DVDs, but, hey, your world is pretty small when you're 13."
I am extremely confused by your comment, because all the statements in it are wrong. Please reply with the source of this misinformation so I can correct their computer records.
graspee
It takes a lot of R&D whenever you move from one feature size to a smaller one and since chip fabrication R&D costs $$$ that's why unless AMD have some kind of technology sharing agreement I doubt they would just "give away" something they've put a lot of money into.
ready to deliver a new version of its PowerPC processor to Apple by the end of this year
So, within the next week? (:
Well, unless you're paying for Premier or something like that, I think most "consumers" are pretty much willing to pay for either open source tools (free) or Windows Movie Maker (free).
I'd say for most consumer editing, the iLife Suite (free or $49 with iDVD) is a pretty compelling package. And power users can get their paws on Final Cut Express if they want to shell out some more bones for something a little more full featured.
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
That's a completely bogus post. Every chip manufacturer does die shrinks periodically. And Intel also makes a line of optimized compilers specialized for its chips. Apple and IBM are nothing special in this regard!
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
See MacRumors.com for Forbes' "sources".
Windows Movie Maker (free).
Since everything bundled with windows is free (IE, mediaplayer, explorer, the kernel and whatever) why isn't the cost 0.0 USD. Nothing is free, thats the answer.
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,
I'd answer, but I'm busy working on a documentary in Final Cut.
Mod point free since 2001
Name one chip manufacturer that doesn't do both of these things...
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
Pringles.
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).
Most People? You must mean most people trading Paris Hilton WMVs... For those of us who do not live in our mom's basement, who actually make a living in the audio/video industry, Macs are still the dominant platform. Yes, I know PCs have been gaining ground, but they've hardly sent the Mac home with a pink slip. I work in 5 different OSs daily (2 Mac flavors, and 3 Windows flavors)... In the 8 years I've been doing this work for this company, the Macs have always been more reliable and offered more flexibility. Though they may not be as fast per se, the amount of time a stable system can save you over a cheap system adds up... and of course in this business, time is indeed roughly equal to money. We've had this argument a few hundred times in the last few years, so I will spare everyone the usual lengthy comment. Suffice to say that I work in that industry, use those machines, and you are mistaken. I'll grant you the games comment though... But I have to tell you, it's not exactly breaking my heart.
Someday a real rain is gonna come...
You supply 3% of the computer market with chips, you can hand pick your chips and speed bin the rest.
Right... How does the *size* of the market relate to the yield? If a certain fraction of the chips you produce are exceptionally good, Intel/AMD can "hand pick" just as much, or as little as Apple. Their chips aren't 3% hand picked from 100%, they produce 3%, and a fraction of those again could be "hand picked".
The rest are just unsubstantiated rumors, following up a good troll. And the moderators are falling for it hook, line and sinker.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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.
From the article:
Where 32-bit chips are limited to addressing only 2 gigabytes of memory, 64-bit chips can theoretically address thousands of gigabytes of memory, though Apple's G5 boxes are limited to 8 gigabytes. Secondly 64-bit chips can perform complex calculations in fewer steps than 32-bit chips.
So far Apple's machines can see all the memory, they can't yet do 64-bit calculations. Present it with a 64-bit calculation, and a Mac with a G5 chip still breaks it into two 32-bit pieces.
First of all 32-bit chips can access 4 GB of memory, not 2 GB. And second, he's got it backwards. Apple's machines CAN do 64-bit calculations, but they can't do 64-bit addressing.
As others have mentioned, there's no great benefit in changing from 32-bit pointers to 64-bit. The optimizations for the G5 that you see in today's apps are from handling complex 64-bit calculations. In this regard Mac OS X is fully up to speed.
infested with jello like fishes no melotron wishes
Apple has always stated that there is a Megahertz myth when comparing computer platforms, to which I agree.
However, non-technical people are still buying Intel/AMD-based computers because they have the largest processor speed posted on the shelf (More MHz/GHz = more power, right?).
It's interesting that Apple's upcoming 3+GHz G5 processors will now tout the same speed numbers as Intel/AMD chips.
Surprisingly enough, if "3.xGHz" is on the Mac's box, Apple just might win a few Joe Sixpacks and a few PC converts.
Only time will tell.
Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, START
... that they can fit more chips on a wafer. Which means that the price per chip is reduced. That's the REAL reason for die shrinks and moving to processes with smaller feature sizes.
Not that cheaper PPC970s are a bad thing, mind you...
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
The two things you quote are very mundane and ordinary ways to get more performance from a CPU. Barring redesign, miniaturization and voltage drops are the ways to make hardware faster, and compiler optimizations are the way to make software faster. These are the bread and butter of performance improvement, and you give Apple/IBM entirely too much credit for doing these things. (And this is coming from someone who works on an IBM compiler.)
Having said that, the PPC compiler team's work has been amazing, and congratulations are due for the sheer magnitude of the performance boost. In a field where a 2% improvement is an achievement, 50% is incredible.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
You don't need a "fully 64 bit OS" to get the speed improvements (although there still are memory limitations. see below). It would break a LOT of things, and really wouldn't be any improvement over the current offering. Unlike x86, PPC was designed for the 64bit transition from the start (even though it remained unused in Apple's product line for almost a decade), and so there is no speed penalty, whatsoever for running 32bit PPC code on a PPC970.
Specifically, the article states:
So far Apple's machines can see all the memory, they can't yet do 64-bit calculations. Present it with a 64-bit calculation, and a Mac with a G5 chip still breaks it into two 32-bit pieces. That's because, Glaskowsky says, Apple doesn't have a 64-bit operating system
Among it's other inaccuracies, it claims that a 32bit machine can only address 2GB.
They fault Apple for only allowing 8 GB of RAM in a desktop enclosure, even though this is still a significant improvement. This limit is still physical, there are 8 slots, and the largest capacity chips are 1024MB right now. They will work when 2048MB chips are released, increasing the max capacity of the existing line to 16GB.
As for the 64bit calculation bit, that's also incorrect. If the binary is compiled for the g5, then 64bit calculations will not be split as they are on 32bit architectures. The downside is that this binary will no longer work on 32 bit machines, for the obvious reasons. For best performance/compatability, two binaries, one 32bit, one 64bit, can be compiled and placed in the same Application bundle, making the difference between the two irrelevant to the user (only a single icon to click on, works on both systems, full 64bit calculation on the g5)
The biggest limit of the G5s at the moment is (and it's quite severe), to my knowledge, a single processes can still only address 4gb, because the size of void* is still 4bytes. Apple will need to duplicate all the libraries in 64bit form to make this work seamlessly, which will probably have to wait until 10.4.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
Here's the thing: If you're a Mac user into high end whatever (gaming, video, music, graphics, art, ...) you automatically move up with the processors Apple provides.
...).
Already the G5 gives a huge performance boost on all apps and an even greater one on those that are optimized - mainly the pro apps (FCP, Photoshop, Logic,
So while it's perfectly possible to keep buying G4 processors in iBooks, Powerbooks and iMacs, there's no reason to go looking for G4 towers when you can buy very reasonably priced G5 towers that will blow away all previous models both in features and in performance.
While I get your drift - and don't want to interfere with your personal preferences- I feel that with the backward compatibility and the performance boost Apple provides, your point is utterly moot for everybody else.
I think, therefore I am...I think.
Oh come on!
Macs are everywhere, turn on the TV, go to the movies.
Now if you want to be a bad guy, buy a PC, but all the good guys and hot chicks use macs.
QED
I think, therefore I am...I think.
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.
I wanna 60nm G5 SMP system for under $2000.
:)
Or maybe a laptop for around $1200.
The longer it takes them to bring it to market the lower my pricepoint drops. So.. Hurry!
Apple had a lot to do with the 970 design. If you loot at the design, Apple's fingerprints are all over it. The used the ALU and the FP2 unit from the Power4, then they specified the SIMD unit, they specified new PowerPC 32-bit to 64 bit protected instructions to allow for their OS X 32bit VM to work in native 64-bit mode. Apple developed the proprietary hyper-transport derived "coherent interconnects" (3 in all that would allow for 8-way systems and cache sharing when more than one processor is present, similar to Opteron.) and of course the non-coherent hyper-transport connectivity for all other bus interfacing. IBM was not previously a hyper-transport proponent. In addition, Apple developed a unique 130NM ASIC controller that is described as more complex than the 970 itself. This ASIC is just as important as the 970 in the G5 computer, if not arguably more important as it enables the fastest and widest FSB among mass produced computers. As far as volume, in this price range, I bet Apple is one of the volume leaders right now. It would be nice if the analyst would segment their market share numbers better. Who cares how many $400 PCs are sold. (At least I don't, IMO they are throw away computers with very short desk life.)
The heat is addressed not only with the 90NM process but with the new PowerTune technology which scales the voltage along with the frequency providing a quadratic decrease in power and heat whereas frequency only scaling only provides a linear decrease. Too, if IBM is including their "voltage island" techniques under the PowerTune umbrella, then IBM can use lower voltage components for none core processor sections. Too the efuse technology can dynamically switch and turn off redundant components that may become defective improving the life of the processor and of course more importantly the yield.
Nintendo is already going to use PPC processor for it's next console which is slated to debut in Japan late next yr. Microsoft was the last to go with IBM because both Sony and Nintendo had already been signed on with them for months and months in advance. ATi is also slated to be used in all 3 consoles as well.
As I have read previously, the G5 runs cooler than the G4 only when running at the same clock speed as the G4. The temperature gets hot however when you run the current 130nm G5 at its native speeds. I think as long as Apple can get a hold of 90nm G5s, and use very effective processor speed ramping, they can create a Powerbook G5 without too much trouble. I don't think they'll need nitrogen cooling or anything like that. :^)
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
Okay, I'll have mine at 115 nanometers please.
I am still thinking of replacing this iBook eventually with another iBook but only when they come up with the model that's at least twice as fast as the 600MHz iBook (actually CPU speed is the only reason I want to upgrade it).
Now, while I would rather recommend holding all iBook/powerbook purchases (I think that major speed progress is intevitable in 2004), you would actually notice huge difference between your iBook and a contemporary one, sometimes even surpassing the "at least twice as fast" condition. Your old iBook uses ATI RAGE 128 with mediocre 8 megabytes of video RAM, the new one is a RADEON 7500 with 32 MB VRAM. If you play games, the difference is huge. But even if you don't, MacOS X GUI heavily relies on the GPU support, so your CPU has to sweat a lot just on calculating all those pretty widgets. And finally, many applications actually take the full advantage of the G4 architecture and they also could have a ~2x boost on a new iBook (a megahertz of G4 is not the same as a megahertz of G3).
Carbon is a procedural API, Cocoa is OO. There is room for both and we should expect both to continue evolving together for the next 5 years. Carbon isn't going anywhere.
I think you're missing part of the story here - megahertz for megahertz, the Pentium III outperforms a Pentium 4! The P4's "NetBurst Microarchitecture" or whatever is the ultimate incarnation of the megahertz myth - Intel made a bunch of design decisions to boost the clock speed at the expense of slowing down the number of instructions that could be processed per clock cycle compared to the P3. Why? Because Joe Consumer goes to Best Buy and looks at "how many megahertz it does" to make the decision about what to buy. Joe Consumer doesn't know what SPEC is. Heck, Joe Consumer probably doesn't know what a benchmark is.
The new Pentium M processors (used in Centrino laptops), based on the old Pentium III design, clock for clock outperform the Pentium 4. An AMD Athlon 64 3000+ runs at 2.17 GHz, yet AMD claims it runs like a 3 GHZ Pentium 4. AMD uses these model numbers because of the "megahertz myth." An Opteron or Athlon 64 at 2 GHz performs on par with a P4 at 3.2 GHz, thanks in part to a better cache design and higher memory bandwidth. The world's #2 supercomputer runs on 1.25 GHz Alpha processors. (ok, there's 8192 of them) and the #8 and #9 computers run on (8192 and 6656) Power3s at 375 whole megahertz!
The megahertz myth is alive and well. Trying to sum everything up with a single number is arguably a bad thing, but Joe and Jane Consumer want their single number. Look at digital cameras - before they became a mass market consumer item, companies said their camera had XGA resolution, or 1280x1024 resolution, or 640x480 VGA resolution, or whatever. Now you have megapixels.
But don't worry, by next summer, you'll be seeing 3 GHz Athlon 64s and Opterons along with the 3 GHz G5s. (AMD says they are going to start volume production of 90nm chips in Q3 2004 - i.e. the end of next summer.) If patterns hold, these will probably all perform about the same as a 4.5 GHz P4 (extrapolating from today's numbers.) And who knows what Intel will have by then? Rumors of an Intel 32/64 bit CPU a la Opteron have been flying lately. And even if they just could scale the Pentium M design up to around 3 GHz, it could be quite formidable...
Here.
OS/2 and NT share a considerable code base, the first three versions of OS/2 and the first version of NT. OS/2 v3 became Windows NT 3.0.
GPL Deconstructed
the new one is a RADEON 7500
Small corecction: the new Ibook uses a Radeon 9200. It is much better than the 7500.
You don't have to be smart to use a Mac, you just have to be smart enough to buy one
You know of at least 200 reports? Where? Did you see 200 posts in Apple's tech forum and assume that there are 200 different problems with G5s? Are you claiming that of the 500,000 machines shipped, you have personal knowledge of 200 defective units? What is it?
I ordered a dual G5 2GHz for the office and I've only noticed 2 issues...
1) It used to hang when the plastic cover was removed and replaced while the machine was running (Apple specifically says I shouldn't do this so it's my own fault). I think this was fixed with the recent firmware patch.
2) There is a very subtle high frequency noise when the machine becomes active from rest. It isn't noticable in a normal office, but in a very quiet room I imagine it could be annoying. You can, however, stop this with a command line argument (can be run from startup script if I prefer)
For a machine based on a completely new architecture, the G5 has been the model of great design. It's stable, it's blazingly fast, and I really have zero real problems to report as I consider the above to be incredibly minor issues.
I have had Zero issues with fan noise, termerature sensors, sleep mode, or fan failure. I've not had any service calls to repair any issues with G5s in my division either and I've seen new G5s poping up.
So, I know it's easy to come on here as an anonymous coward and claim there are hundereds of problems with "beta" G5s, but where's the pudding?
Put up or shut up.
I'm not feeling witty so bite me
Apple stole the idea on which they built the gui concepts microsoft in turn cloned, from xerox.
Not quite, one reason Xerox invited Jobs to PARC was because Xerox was investing in Apple and than likely he'd be able to do better job of commercializing home/small computer technology than they could. And that's born out by history, PARC has come up with a bunch stuff but they rarely ever commerically release what they do. Done properly it's the smart thing, go ahead and create new stuff then incubate a startup to commercialize it.Steve Jobs Tours Xerox
"In 1979, the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center developed the first prototype for a GUI. A young man named Steve Jobs, looking for new ideas to work into future iterations of the Apple computer, traded US $1 million in stock options to Xerox for a detailed tour of their facilities and current projects. One of the things Xerox showed Jobs was the Alto, which sported a GUI and a three-button mouse. When Jobs saw this prototype, he had an epiphany and set out to bring the GUI to the public. "
www.smalltalk.org
Should there be a Law?