Slashdot Mirror
One more G4 for the PowerBook?
PurdueGraphicsMan writes "Much as we'd love to see the next PowerBook revision include a processor evolution to the mighty G5, we know it's not that simple. The Register provides some sound reasoning (and boatloads of model numbers and voltage specs) as to why we'll probably see a 1.5GHz G4 PowerBook before any G5 PowerBooks materialize." I don't want a G5 on my lap anyway. It'd make me feel guilty, having that much power in a small package while other people can't even get it in a PC tower. Oh, and I don't want to burn my lap.
Motorola is out on the PPC processors. They lost that gig and IBM does it all now. Motorola just isn't producing right now.
Evolution or ID?
Actually, that somewhat dorky statement about feeling guilty was relentlessly added into my post as though I said it. I would never say something that dorky.
The guitars sound good, now give me about 10db more on the cow bell.
Those issues will largely be solved by the recent die shrink at IBM.
Either it was intended to be a joke or the editor has bought into Apple's marketing. G5's are fast, but they're not the fastest. Saying "It'd make me feel guilty, having that much power in a small package while other people can't even get it in a PC tower" is just plain ignorance. An equivalent statement would be "Having a Pentium 4 would make me feel guilty, having that much power in a small package while other people can't even get it in a Apple computer."
To be honest, if someone gave me a G5, I'd definitely use it. But, if I was given a choice, I'd take an AMD 64bit based PC over a G5.
Crack smoker! The powerbook is still way ahead of the PC's. My 667 DVI Powerbook runs rings around the 2.4 Dell I have from work, it's just silly. And over half of the Win apps just about kill the whole system. I want a G5 laptop as much as the next guy, but the G4 is still the best game in town.
Motorola is focusing on embedded processors these days with the MPC range of chips so they have n't turned their back on PowerPC architecture. They are just concentrating on low power, low clock speed chips.
> The G4 is grossly underpowered in comparison with a Centrino [...]
Centrino is the name of the CPU, chipset, and WLAN card. The CPU is called the Pentium-M (or Banias). It's a sort of hybrid between the Tualatin P3 and the P4, taking the best features from both, with energy efficiency as one of the primary design goals. It's probably the nicest chip Intel has done in years.
What version of MacOS was your professor using? You never just see "scrolling text" take over the GUI.
/Applications/Utilities/Console.app. Usually what you get is a dialog saying "The application -blah- has unexpectedly quit," and a log file is written to one of several convenent locations.
If OS X kernel panics, the screen dims and you get a message in multiple languages saying a reboot is necessary.
You can view crash logs with
Where did you get lines of scrolling text?
Um, Didn't IBM just release the 970FX, which uses the the new (.09nm ?) process and significantly less watt's of power consumption, along with PowerTune, a speedstep-like technology that would further reduce power consumption?
Why yes, yes they did. Maybe that's how they will fix the heat issue.
You'll noticed that he mentioned Centrino (actually the processor is the Pentium M). A 2.4 GHz machine is going to be slower than a 1.6 GHz Pentium M on certain applications, because of its short pipeline and larger cache.
Apple will let you "trade in" any purchases you made, if a newer model is released. I can't remember if it's for 14 days or more that the coverage applies to. I believe it's 14 days though.
Just call the Apple store if a new model is released, like tomorrow, and they can hook you up. I did just that when I purchased my 17" Studio Display (price dropped $200 3 or 4 days after my purchase, and I got my money back).
I like big butts and I cannot lie.
There is a second mouse button - it is labeled "Ctrl".
"I don't think it's selfish, to eat defenseless shellfish." -NOFX
First, IBM is using SSOI (Strained Silicon on Insulator). Second, the last statistics I saw showed a greater than 50% power consumption reduction with the new 970FX processors (die shrink and SSOI). That's promising.
NOT APPLICABLE HERE
The G5 benefits from nicer architecture as well as a higher clock speed.
Mod parent -1, Irrelevant.
It must have been in Verbose mode when he restarted it. That'll put lots of lines of white text on a black background on the display. Handy to see exactly what's going on at startup - but you Unix types knew that.
Veteran, Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force, 1992-1951
Don't they make the G4 processors in the eMac's, iMac's, iBook's, and Powerbooks sold by Apple currently? They're still very much producing them if you ask me.
WTF?
The sleep function on Apple notebooks work so well that the ONLY time I reboot mine is for updates.
Now if you had a windows machine I could see the complaint since putting it to sleep is rolling the dice that the sucker will come up again :)
A sure sign that Apple is doing well is when people start to complain about the boot time because they have run out of other complaints!
seSales, Point of Sale software for OS X.
Well, I had a whole response typed upped but I went and read up on the 970FX on IBMs site and you are indeed correct. They got around the problems of leakage of strained silicon by combining SOI and SS. Pretty cool...literally. They also will be using IBMS voltage island techniques to reduce power (that's the real reason you will be seeing power use decreases, not the die shrink. SOI and SS both have issues as you get smaller. AMD and IBM will be completely combined in process tech starting at 65nm at AMDs new plant that is being built in Dresden and at the East Fiskill plant where the FX will be produced).
The prime benefits of the combined SOI and SS is that you get the ability to run with less power at the same frequency from SS but the SOI keeps the leakage characteristics of SS from generating ridiculous heat (look at Prescott).
It is going to be interesting.
[RIAA] says its concern is artists. That's true, in just the sense that a cattle rancher is concerned about its cattle.
Use the sleep functionality on your laptop. No OS's boot time can beat OSX's wake from sleep time.
I personally never actually power off my laptop, except for when I need to apply a security update.
PowerBooks are already cooled by heat collectors and gaz pipes, wich is far more efficient at moving heat than by using a heat-generating water pump.
man it has been a while, ok to fix it should say:
Lets take a reasonable fair look at both sides. I myself am slightly biased against macs because i don't seem to be compatible with them but that is another story.
Many people are saying that the G5 "Rules" cause it is a 64 bit chip, and granted it is. There are also the AMD fanboys myself included that say, "hey we had the first desktop 64bit processor and ours kicks your G5 to the curb." Also there are the intel automatons that say, "man apple computers sucks man they can't touch the P4/XEON performace wise." Which depending on the facts given, any one of these could be seen as correct (most likely not the last one).
Then there are those who say, "that apples are the best because we have a unix based OS that is sooo user friendly." The PC (L)users like myself say, "there are more applications and games written for our OS, you will be assimilated." Last but not least, there are the linux-geeks who say, "we have the best of both worlds we have a unix-like OS that is completely reconfigurable and runs some windows apps if we want it to and has a community of geeks behind it, so our OS is l337." Which there are major facts and opinions that support any of these claims, minus the assimilation part, and either way you look at there are tradeoffs for the OS you use.
Then there are the benchmarkers who say, "Look at this G5/Opteron/P4 it totally outscores the others, in my totally unrealistic and unrepeatable and highly illogical benchmarking procedure." Also there are benchmarkers that listen to the whiners and try to compare the apples to oranges to watermelons to pear to peaches over and over again, and are flamed cause the G5/Opteron/P4 was the winner and it is against their "religion."
The trouble with 64bit computering is you need 64bit everything in order to reap the maximum reward. Not every app on every platform has the exact same coding and drivers and hardware supporting it. There are going to be differences and they will vary widely.
From what i have discerned from all this inane babble is that the G5 is indeed a worthly processor and people do like the OS that supports it (i do not). Also the opteron/Athlon 64 chip is indeed just as fast if not faster (code permitting) than the G5, the crown passing between the 2 based on what your running and how optomized it is. But that leaves us with the poor old P4/Xeon, which even though it has a 1-2Ghz lead on its competitors, is just competing with them. This is my opinion and i base it all the stuff i have read on the issues. Show me an unbiased review, ha you ain't going to find one, and i might change my mind.
To sum this up people need to stop listening to what they are told, if they won't actually hear what people are saying.
A Fatal OE Exception has occurred, Sig will now reboot.
The G5 is faster per clock than the G4
So, why not a 1.5 GHz G5 laptop? It would be even cooler than the G4.
You might want to get your facts a little straighter as the G5 consumes 24.5W@2GHz. So much for the Athalon 64@35W.
"...Oh, and I don't want to burn my lap. "
That is why no one calls them "laptops" anymore. Most companies either call them portables or notebooks.
There is a small bug that is in 10.3 that tries to reference a file that doesn't exist.
is a fix. This will make OS X boot as fast as Linux and Win2000.
...And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak out for me." - Martin Niemoeller (1892-1984)
IBM actually don't make a single G4 chip - the G5 was the first chip they rolled out with AltiVec, and there's a much rummored G3 with AltiVec that apple will probably call a G4. Bob
Yup -- since you don't use need it, everyone else must be a fool to pay for it.
I guess the fact that I use my laptop as a portable recording studio isn't a reasonable justification? Even the top of the line 17" 1.33 Ghz can't always keep up with my realtime processing needs.
You're right in general about people buying more power than they know how to use, but there are also a lot of us who actually need that power.
Personally, I am itching to get my hands on the next major powerbook revision. I doubt I'd spring for a measly 166Mhz bump, but I need all the power I can get. Definitely getting a G5 when they're available.
Cheers.
I don't see why they just don't put (slightly) larger batteries in them. It would be interesting to know how they balance battery life vs size.
Strangely enough, my older 15" tiBook has a 61-watt hour lithium-ion battery. It has 33% more capacity than the new 15" albook battery, which has a 46 watt-hour battery.
The 12" albook has a 47 watt-hour battery and the 17" has 58 watt-hour battery. The iBook 14" has a 61 watt-hour battery and the iBook 12" has a 50 watt-hour battery. This is all from the apple store specs on the replacement batteries.
Why don't they just put a 100 watt-hour battery in the 17"??
Uhh, dunno where you got this nugget of information from but the newer G4 systems are DDR based.
"The strong will do what they want, the weak will do what they must."
-Thucydides
This (usually baseless) need to have more and more power on a laptop - and to pay top dollar for it - has to be the marketing triumph of the century (well, maybe after bottled water). My old 400MHz IBM still does everything I ask of it, and if I had the choice I'd rather double the battery life than the processor speed.
I said the same thing about my old 300mhz Celeron IBM Thinkpad until about a month ago, when I finally realized I was deluding myself, as you probably are. No offense, but to an extent I think this is a case of not really knowing what you're missing, and it's been true of public perception of every incremental speed increase in PC land in general, not just in laptops.
No doubt you think of your laptop as being the perfect machine for a certain task or tasks. And at 400mhz, it does those tasks well. Maybe you use it for programming, or word processing, email and web browsing. Maybe you even store your pictures and play your mp3's on it (though I doubt a 400mhz laptop has a very big hard drive). I did these things on my 300mhz machine too. Eventually it got to the point where even web browsing was ridiculously slow compared to my desktop, so I upgraded.
And with a faster laptop, especially a dramatically faster laptop, you are able to do many more things that you wouldn't have considered a laptop suitable for before. My new laptop has become my primary PC - I do everything on it, from photo and video editing to gaming to watching DVD's, dual-booting Linux and Windows (couldn't before; hard drive was too small) plus all the things I used to use my laptop for. Simply being a laptop is not the limiting factor that you probably think it is with an older machine.
Oh, and you will likely get better battery life with a new machine. Mine gets around 4 hours and it's not even a Pentium-M.
While I'm at it here, I want to say something about the following in the original article posting: It'd make me feel guilty, having that much power in a small package while other people can't even get it in a PC tower.
I'm not sure what to make of this. Is this a swipe at PC (in this case meaning non-Mac) users, or is it some kinship with fellow Mac users (including Macs in the term "PC" as it technically should be)? If it's a swipe at PC users, it's at worst inaccurate and at best debateable, as test after test has shown common x86-based CPU's to be at least as capable as the fastest G5 chips on a variety of real-world tasks and in synthetic benchmarks. Even a Mac-biased site such as this one shows older, slower x86 compatible chips to be neck and neck with the fastest G5 Apple still sells (and faster if you move to the games page) - and there are faster x86 chips out now (Here is a slightly more up to date comparison that focuses on 64 bit chips.) In laptops, a 1.7ghz Pentium-M runs neck and neck on most tests with a P4-3.2 desktop chip which would probably put it about on par with a single-CPU 2.0ghz G5 (I don't believe anyone has made this comparison yet, since you can't get a G5 in a laptop). And most Pentium-M laptops trump any Apple laptop in battery life. The Pentium-M is truly a revolutionary mobile chip - far more important by almost any measure than the 1.4ghz G4 being talked about here (sure wish I had one - I went on the cheap with a P4-M).
I know I burn through karma like a wildfire every time I post something like this but it needs to be said, as there are a lot of assumptions made by people out there, along with plain old myths, that just are not supported by any real-world evidence. The equivalent of PC urban legends (and yes, I do post about real UL's too!).
Well, you can buy 64-bit laptops today. They're just not x86 or Mac/PPC based.
No?
It's ugly and I wouldn't buy one, but yes, there are 64 bit x86 laptops out there, on the market, right now. And they're not expensive at all.
Aaaaactually, there is a grain of truth there. For integers and fixed point calcs, true, there will be no difference in precision between 32 and 64 bit procs, just a difference in the actual range of numbers that can be dealt with.
But we are discussing 32-bit vs 64-bit chips. To claim that a 32-bit chip can't do 64-bit arithmetic is peverse. And to claim that Intel 32-bit chips can't handle 64-bit arithmetic natively is just plain wrong.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
Figure once IBM has their strained silicon process down, temperatures will drop. I imagine that's what Apple's waiting for, for their laptops.
I drank what? -- Socrates
"According to Motorola sources, a tweaked version of the Apollo 7450 G4, the 7470, will be ready for volume production shortly after the end of Q2, in time for a summer ramp. The 7470 will be manufactured on a 0.13 micron process, allowing for a smaller die size with room for 512K of L2 cache, and support up to 4MB of DDR-SDRAM L3 cache. The 7470 supports a modified bus protocol, MPX+, which supports double data transfer and which should effectively run at 266Mhz according to sources."
as taken from http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/3/24018.html
"The strong will do what they want, the weak will do what they must."
-Thucydides
someone mod this down.. it's just plain wrong. the PPC family is WAY bigger than what Apple uses. plus, Apple still uses the G4 family chips from Motorola in most of their product lines.
Just raise the taxes on crack.
A G5 Apple Powerbook would mean my switch to Apple from x86 based machines - owning an iPod has pushed me part way.
I think Apple would be wise to go straight to a Powerbook G5 to catch the momentum that the Apple brand currently has. A so-so G4 update would not capture the imagination.
Lets hope that Apples rumoured current experimentation with water cooling bears fruit.
... would a comment based in such ignorance get modded up. You do realize that different CPUs need differing amounts of cache to achieve the same net effect, right?
--- I do not moderate.
This is not quite the same as the Athlon 64 or Opteron notebooks. They are Mainly used in LARGE, HEAVY laptops. And the Athlon 64 and Opteron are generally not currently purchased because they are 64 bits, it is because they are kick-ass I86-32 processors, that also do 64 bits.
So... This is what I would expect... Current PB parts moved down to the IB line, with less l2 cache. Artificially slower machines, but much faster than currently. They are going to be forced to bump the ibooks more, because of GarageBand. It just barely runs and there is too much lantency on an Ibookg4 800. The Low-end Ibook owner and a typical garage band user are going to intersect too much to not serve them better on this box.
I would also expect the Ibook to support a SuperDrive. Prices have fallen significantly enough to provide this and still maintain a good profit margin.
I would expect the ports and graphic parts to remain the same (but maybe a bump in the graphics part, but probably not).
The PB to get ~ 20 to 30% speed bump across the line. Remaining g4 (see reason above).
Same ports. Top of the line ATI mobility chips. To speed up Quartz Extreme, and provide better game playabilty.
Faster Hard Drives.
More Memory (512 and 1 G will be standard models)
Finally, the second shoe of the HP deal will drop, and enabled superdrives. With updated Idvd and Itunes for creating lables for your dvds.
These are two compelling upgrades, that should see significant performance improvement across the lines. Maintain profit and Price points. The Lightscribe enhancment gives a decent and exciting marketing message...
And then you can wait about 6 more monthes for the engineering challenges of making a true apple powerbook g5.
Actually, while I'm a big Mac fan, and I've longed for a chip that brought the PPC back over x86 for speed, the PowerMac G5 really was playing catchup to the PC world for motherboard architecture.
DDR RAM? Been there for over 5 years.
8 GB memory? AMD boards beat us by a few months.
Hypertransport? Been used for over 2 years.
AGP 8X? Been used for a few months before.
Dolby 5.1 sound on board? Been there for over 5 years.
USB 2.0? Been there for over 2 years.
PCI-X slots? Been there for over a year.
ATA-133? PC has been there for over a year with built-in hardware RAID 0, 1, 5, 01, & 10 support that the Mac still doesn't have.
Now...
SMP on a single chip? Mac beat the PC there.
Firewire 800? Mac beat the PC there.
...but neither of those really help the internal processing speed. (Neither does USB 2.0 or Dolby 5.1 sound.) The PowerMac G5 is just getting up to parity. The new 90 nm G5s will make a jump ahead for a short time, but Intel and AMD won't be sitting still. I hope that Apple doesn't sit on its rear on the PCI Express standard and gets us ready for it. With NVidia and ATI pushing it for graphics, I doubt that they can afford to.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
we don't have to plug in an external device to get a second mouse button.
:-)
not like you truly care, but this is a GREAT piece of software. check out sidetrack -- my left mouse button is touch-pad tap, my right-mouse button is the physical button. took about 2 hours to get used to, but is a godsend for one-handed REAL mousing.