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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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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!).
"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
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.