Slashdot Mirror
Mac mini to PC Hack
DiZASTiX writes "Kevin Rose, the ever so popular host of G4/TechTV's The Screen Savers, has managed to fit a PC inside the Mac mini. 'I've seen a ton of articles around the web lately comparing the Mac mini to the near full size desktop PC. What they fail to compare is the amount of computing power per square inch you get with the Mini. So, I decided to take it upon myself to create the fastest PC possible with the size constraints of the Mini's small form factor.' The article covers most everything he did and includes pictures."
Well, fun would be in hiding a McIntosh motherboard inside an nonymous PC case. Now, *that* would puzzle the standard user. "Hey, how may I lower-right-side-button double-click with this mouse?" ;-)
Pumbaa! I don't wonder; I know.
Seems like Slashdot has the Mac mini-news-o-matic up and running at full speed. Not that I blame them, it's so hip it can barely see over it's pelvis...
Not that I don't think that's a cool or challenging thing to do, but how exactly is that a hack?
There are some people in this world who should be removed in order to spare us their crushing banality.
how hard was an actual non-mangled clickable link?. Kind of a pity mirrordot is /.ed too
Caesar si viveret, ad remum dareris.
That's not a link, that's a URL. this is a link.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
power per square inch you get with the mini
That's what I keep trying to tell her. But it's all about size, size, size...
No way is a 1 GHz Via Nehemiah going to be faster than a 1.25 GHz G4. The mini is already one of the fastest PCs (personal computer, this includes macs by the way) that has been fit into such a small space.
I have an Epia system; to me it feels pretty anemic for its clock speed in comparison to say a PII or better.
From the article: "Additional thoughts: Due to size restrictions, fitting a CD-ROM drive in the mini enclosure would be impossible with this motherboard. Luckily, this motherboard supports pretty much every external bootable device, including bootable CD-ROM and USB thumb drives."
You should not only fit a CD-ROM, but actually a DVD-RW combo. In other words, you have failed to fit a PC in Mac Mini, so comparing its speed or price is quite pointless. I hate to say it as a PC user, but the result of this experiment is clear: Mac: 1, PC: 0.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
So he takes everything inside the case that makes a Mac a Mac, guts it, and puts in everything that Apple hopes people are leaving behind for the Mac.
I have to admit, it has a kind of black symmetry to it.
The coolest voice ever.
The Espresso does not even seem to come close to what a Mac mini offers performance wise. The specs you link to show that it has a max processor speed of 500Mhz. The Mac mini goes up to 1.4Ghz. They say that a celeron can go higher, but not 900Mhz higher.
The video card is also a 4MB card. The Mac mini has a ATI Radeon 9200 with 32MB of RAM. Again, a huge difference.
While the Espresso is in the right ballgame for size, weight, etc, performance is not even close.
kc8apf
The http://www.cappuccinopc.com/ has been out long before the Mac Mini, and the original was even a smaller form-factor, with modern P4 variants just slightly larger.
Anyway, this whole article is missing the point. Cheap OS X is good for everybody! I wouldn't buy a PC that small even though there's the option...
I guess Apple decided to give all those nerds that insist on "upgrading" their Macs with a PC mobo a challenge. :) /greger
Call me Rip Van Winkle, because I must have taken a nap for too long and missed out on the beginning of perhaps the most annoying, selfish comments to hit blogdom. It's like the freakin' Avon of the Internet on that page with everyone trying to get referrals for their own mini Mac.
Give the man props for his work on his site, don't be a smarmy pissant and use the popularity of his work to increase your chances at winning a Mac mini. If it's so precious and you have to have it, sell your current machine, get a part time job, and actually make the $500 it takes to buy the thing.
I am curious as to how many blog sites have a commenting community with so much self-zeal. I feel sorry for the frequent site visitors, who must find it necessary to wash themselves vigorously with soap and scalding hot water.
"We are not always what we seem, and hardly ever what we dream."
Schmendrick the Magician
Look everyone! I've figured out how to put my Ford engine, stereo, and electrical system into my Porche! Read all the details at www.whywouldiwanttodothis.com
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang
I thought this was cool, until the "can't fit a CD-ROM" part.
All this proves is you can fit a lower-powered nano-ITX mobo in the same case as a Mac Mini, and power it up. But it's not the same, nor even complete...
It was a cool experiment, but not a sucessful one... Hat's off to the Mac design team for shoving that much stuff into such a small box.
Due to size restrictions, fitting a CD-ROM drive in the mini enclosure would be impossible with this motherboard.
I'd say his project failed. The whole idea of such a device is to not have all sorts of other bricks (like external media) plugged in. Esp if it is to sit next to the nice 36" LCD TV (of course using DVI connector) and act as a media box.
But, yes, you're right - the point of the mini is to get a nice reasonably powerful box that takes up no space, costs very little and runs OS X.
Wow. Now all he has to do is cram a SPARC inside the PC inside the Mac Mini and he'll have Electronic Turducken.
--
Free iPod Photo: http://FreeiPodPhotos.com/index.php?referral=2546
Free Mac Mini: http://www.FreeMiniMacs.com/?r=13941255
- Rob Wilco
the result of this experiment is clear: Mac: 1, PC: 0.
Nonsense. Give Dell or HP a little time and motivation, and I'm sure they could pull it off. Hell, maybe IBM has a patent rotting in a drawer somewhere to help this kind of thing.
The result of this experiment is more like:
Lame tinkerers with way too much time: 0
Everyone else: 1
The coolest voice ever.
Logic - 5.82"(W) x 10.0"(D) x 2.79"(H)
Mini - 6.5" (W) x 6.5"(D) x 2.0" (H)
Been there, done that, spent less? Don't think so...
The mini is smaller.
The mini is more than likely less noisy.
The mini comes standard with certain things you might need in a computer, such as:
- hard drive
- cd rom
- processor
- memory
- operating system
The base price of the Sumicom PC is cheaper, but I doubt you'd actually build that PC for less than the price of the mini (especially if you actually paid for Windows *gasp*; Linux excluded).
Not to mention the Logic device is just plain fugly.
While I agree that a Cheap-o OSX box is awesome in-and-of itself, I disagree that Kevin misses the point. Many people have accused the the Mac Mini of being a poor value because it matches the price of an entry-level Dell pc but doesn't include a keyboard or display.
The point of Kevin's article (or at least, what I took away from it) was that it's damn hard to match the value of the mini when you consider it's size. Even with the Mocha PC it starts at $495, and that is without RAM, a hard drive, CPU, or even a CD-Drive!.
You know, the last time somebody gutted a Mac and put a PC motherboard in it, and had the gall to post it to Slashdot... I believe that person was lynched, if I'm not mistaken.
I would like a Mac mini myself, but my plans are pretty much to buy one when budgets allow I cannot believe how many people are suckered into this weird pyrami scheme and then flail around wildly seeking other victims to torment.
I would say that time would be better spent hawking things you really do not need on eBay in order to raise funds.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I assume they mean "computing power per cubic inch".
Otherwise what area are they talking about? Footprint? In that case my 1.5 metre tower case would have more computing density than your desktop G4.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
What did it cost him to put a PC into the space Apple engineers er...engineered so precisely for their own hardware?
- Wireless
- Bluetooth
- Optical drive
- Probable heating issues later
- SODIMM slots = more expensive RAM
- OS X, iLife, etc.
Also, Rose doesn't mention the cost of his parts, but I'd guess that, for the specs of the baseline mini even without the optical drive it would likely come to WELL over $500. That mobo in particular looks to be fairly pricey.
I'm not asking "What's the point?" but rather, saying "There is no point." This is just a geek's homebrew project, and a waste of a perfectly good Mac mini.
I've got more mod points and GMail invi
Ah, I see you've played Linky-URLy before!
Yes, unfortunately they're all bigger than the mac mini and incomplete. When you add all the other bits you'll need (a hard drive for example) they're way more expensive.
If you want something to compare to the G4, how about a 1.5GHz Pentium M at the very least?
http://cse.stanford.edu/class/sophomore-college/pr ojects-00/risc/risccisc/
CISC vs RISC
Yet you do nothing to actual disprove the point made in the first place... You're rebuttal skills are laughably poor ;-)
Not to mention the people who complain about people who complain about people....
Oh those guys are the worst!
None of the pictures on the page show the PC mobo going into the case. The picture called fit.jpg shows the mobo sticking out at the bottom left. The last couple of shots show no indication that the case has anything in it other than a normal Mac Mini.
I'm not saying that these guys haven't done what they said they've done but it would have been good to have some pictures of the back of the machine with the ports or perhaps some re-assembly shows so we could see just how tight the fit is.
If intelligent life is too complex to evolve on its own, who designed God?
Kevin's first slashdotting... Sara must be so proud!
Face it people, apple makes cheap and affordable computers in the middle range, and have done for a while. I've been looking especially for a small laptop, around 12". And which one is the cheapest I can find? Thats right, apple ibook. All the other manufactures sell their small laptops as "ultra portable" and takes out a higher price then for their 15". But with apple the 12" laptop is there smalles and thereby cheapest laptop.
I'm not an Apple zealot. The only thing that has brought me into thinking of buying an ibook is the price. But if you have a better deal, please prove me wrong. I really need an affordable small laptop.
Just who, other than Mac cultists and SFF geeks, is going to buy a Mac Mini?
People who hate Windows, don't want to get caught up in the learning curve or zealotry of Linux, and have been waiting for an inexpensive Mac to become available.
Ever since I got my Powerbook, I've had several friends ask to look at it and use it, and said they'd really like to switch to OS X if only the hardware was affordable. Now it is.
Do you think this will void his Apple warranty?
"Just who, other than Mac cultists and SFF geeks, is going to buy a Mac Mini?"
Good question, and thanks to a disaster with my PowerBook Saturday, I have my own input. Had you asked that earlier, I would have said the target audience was rather vague...perhaps people that wanted to test out the Mac, the Mac cultists, and a handfull of switchers. It's the price point that erases all the "well the Mac is too expensive" excuse that many people have.
After a nasty power issue with the laptop, I've had to take it in for repairs. Aw criminy...what to do? Can't really afford a new G5 or anything...ayeee! But wait...only $499 for the Mac Mini? That's a perfect solution. I can just use that temporarily, it's got a decent processor, is small...yeah...that's the ticket. And then I can use it as a database server when I get my PowerBook. Totally beats buying a G5 (even though I want one) or something used off of eBay.
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang
You're missing the point, like most people on this forum, seemingly. Fact is, outside of the tiny minority of humans that constitute the "geeky" market segment, the vast majority of people who buy computers really honestly couldn't give a crap about either "raw horsepower" or "small form factor". They just want a computer that is NICE TO USE and is not overly expensive. Read that part in caps again ... PCs just do not fit the bill (certainly neither Windows nor Linux), Mac Mini does.
You can do whatever you like to a PC, make it fast, small, whatever, doesn't matter, because no matter what you do it will still be "just a PC". Until someone makes a decent, usable operating system for the PC platform, I'll stick with the Mac, because I'd actually like to be able to use a computer for more than a few hours straight without wanting to put a brick through the screen.
I'm sorry for you if you think that only a "Mac cultist" would think Mac's have a vastly better designed operating system that is also more aesthetically pleasing .. obviously you haven't even used a Mac. Windows sucks no matter how much "raw horsepower" you give it, and Linux is not ready for Joe Public.
and SFFs like shuttles are a good bit bigger then a mini and a lot more expandable/capable.
The super small boxes that are via mini itx based are not selling like hot cakes. When you get to that size you are paying more for smaller less standard components and not equal performace. Plus there has been no large push by any mini itx system makers. Shuttles have been doing great cause the company has been pushing them very well, and they are something people want.
The mac mini will sell good though, it's cheap for what you get and has proper marketing behind it. And it runs OSX, which will be a huge bonus for a long time. Most people run windows, and if they are looking for something different it's going to be OSX cause it's just as easy for them, and plenty common and so forth. The selling point to macs is the OS not so much the hardware though the hardware helps.
x86 CPUs haven't been CISC since the mid 90s.
I like the analogy of a person physically moving 1,000 boxes from one side of the house to the other. The CISC person might be able to get from one side to other (and back) in 2 seconds, but each time he does he can only carry a single box with him, so it would take 2,000 seconds to move all boxes. Whereas the RISC person might take 5 seconds to make the same round-trip distance, but each time he can carry 20 boxes, so it takes a total of 250 seconds (5 seconds * 1000 boxes / 20 boxes-per-trip).
Your analogy is arse-about-face. The principle of RISC is to have small, basic operations and execute lots of them quickly. The principle of CISC is to have large, complex operations and get more work done from each one. In other words, CISC is the architecture that can carry 20 boxes at once and RISC is the architecture that can move 1 box twenty times in the same time period.
The real irony here is that most of the flagship processors for an architecture ostensibly designed for pumping up clockspeeds (RISC) don't actually have particularly high clock speeds.
G4s are slower than just about every desktop/server chip today.
I'm sorry but you're wrong. I have 2 computers:
1: Mac G4 1.33 GHz, 512 MB PC2700 RAM
2: AMD Athlon 3000+ (2.1 GHz), 1 GB PC3200 RAM
And both of them do raw MPEG-2 to Divx/XviD encoding at nearly the same rate. They also rip audio CDs to MP3s at nearly the same rate.
The G4 is a decent chip. The G5 is better however, because of its addressing and memory management (the two areas PC chips were still "winning" in). The only negative is the total GHz for PPC CPUs available is lower.
A Pentium M is at *least* as fast as a G4 clock-for-clock, and given the much higher bus speed and memory bandwidth, will spank it in general-purpose performance.
Me: This is just a geek's homebrew project....
You: You seem to be missing the point...
--
Second, it's ridiculous to compare production costs of a corporation with homebrew assemblies of non-commodity parts
When it was first announced and the first reaction was how cheap it was, the backlash consisted of a lot of "You can built a more powerful system yourself for $200" responses. (that all fell short in one way or another, I might add) Now that the shoe's on the other foot, it's "ridiculous".
--
Apple will buy bulk and get better prices even if you used the same freaking parts, were all of them available.
And then more than make up for it with their profit margins. Your point?
It's about the satisfaction of doing something with your own hands, the harder the better. Just because from your chair you don't see a point does not mean there's none.
Hard work done for the sake of hard work is the same as pushing a boulder up a hill. Sure, you might enjoy the exercise. Personally, I'd rather use the crane to move the boulder up and then get my exercise doing something that has more benefit in other areas at the same time.
I've got more mod points and GMail invi
The mini comes with an S-Video/composite adapter, a TV-out adapter for a little extra, just like their laptops.
That's why I bought my iBook, and because of the iBook I bought a MDD G4. Hell, I figured OSX was just a curiosity, and I ran OpenBSD on the iBook for a while, but then... I had to try OSX... and got hooked. If you start right out with OSX you'll be amazed, like I was when IPhoto recognized my camera without configuring -anything-. That's what did it for me.
http://gotvision.org/ROCK/images/contortionist.jpg
:)
putfwd.com - 1GB Free file storage with a twist
Hmmm, lets see. With OS X we already have a workable model available for purchase. With Windows, we have to rely on a guy 'working in his lab with spare parts.' Sounds like Apple 1, PC 0 to me... for now.
"There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals."
Sure a lot of Apple fans will buy one (though I've not ordered one). But that was most of the sales the first few days.
Since then the wait for a new order is still quite long, so many people do seem to be ordering them.
So who would buy a Mac MINI?
People wanting new computers and tried of PC's. People wanting new computers that already have bits (like monitors) but don't want to spend a lot. People with laptops that would like a backup computer. People who want a computer in the entertainment center.
There are a lot of people that can see a reason to buy a Mac mini. And it's cheap enough that a lot of people figure "why not?".
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
That probably has something to do with the fact that the Free Mac Mini ads specifically say "DO NOT BID! JUST CLICK MY LINK ALREADY!"
eBay can't be making much money off these listings (since they don't get to extract a Final Value Fee) and they're in violation of the Gratis Internet terms of service. I really wish eBay would crack down on these listings which pollute its service.
For more information, click here.
They also rip audio CDs to MP3s at nearly the same rate.
I/O bound! I/O bound! No Compact Disc Digital Audio ripper will go much past 48x max (really about 36x over the entire surface of the disc) because a drive that spins the CD much faster than that will break it.
The only negative is the total GHz for PPC CPUs available is lower.
Which can translate to lower current drain and thus a lower electric bill.
The heat sink was too large for the case...
I'll bet that thing sounded like a wind tunnel when you turned it on.
You can tell a great deal about the character of a man by observing those who hate him.
If there were a box moving instruction, CISC would win.
CISC always wins when executing the special complex instructions thanks to pipelining - which, by the way, is much more complicated than RISC pipelining. CISC boxes usually optimize the code to help this along. This is why CISC is winning: it has a lot of the features of a JIT compiler built-in.
Each trip would take 130 seconds, but it'd be able to do 1.5 of them at a time.
The only place that RISC wins is when the instructions must all be sequential, can't be improved upon more during runtime than during compile time, and require roughly the same amount of hardware to do for the entire operation.
Where would that be? Primarily in graphics. However, for your average multiuser system, CISC is a better idea.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
This is something which bugs me...Tiger's core video will require 64mb to operate but Apple's releasing systems with a paltry 32mb of vram. Seems like every system they release should have AT LEAST 64mb now, in preparation for Tiger (which Steve talked up but good at Macworld. People will expect the mini to be able to take full advantage of Tiger, and they're going to be a little unhappy that it can't.
It's put me off buying a mini (though I'll gladly take one if anyone has a spare!).
I'm yet to see a benchmark that proves me that the price per (volume/speed) - whatever unit of comparison you wanna use - justifies me buying a Mac.
This argument, while certainly valid from a point of view, is similar to saying that the price per horsepower is the only important criteria for buying a car. Fred Flintstone has you beat there, pal.
In computing terms, your brain has a better price per volume/speed than any computer, so why buy a computer?
I've yet to see a benchmark that proves that price per (volume/battery) justifies buying an iPod. iPods are more expensive than most portable music players. iPods also dominate the market because there are virtues other than cost per song stored on the device, and iPod customers sing their praises. iPods certainly weren't the first, they aren't the cheapest, nor are they the smallest, batteries aren't their strongest suit either... They are popular because they are easy to use, have stellar sound quality, and cost only a little more than the competition.
People who buy a Mac aren't buying it because it's the fastest ship in the fleet; they buy it because it's more luxurious than a Wintel box, or because it's able to do things that a PC currently doesn't do well, if at all. They choose macs because they are still more intuitive and easy than a Wintel box.
The majority of users I know of who complain about Macs are really only complaining about two things: Games, and 'upgradeability'. If it doesn't play their newest AMOR (Amusing Misuse of Resources -- apologies to the KDE team), the computer therefore 'sucks'. Then they complain about 'upgradeability.' That's an interesting argument, seeing that I can't 'upgrade' my PC without replacing the at least the Motherboard, CPU, and RAM. Yet PC's are more upgradeable? If I want a longer 'upgrade path' than sticking with AGP gives me, I'd have to also get an entirely new case and power supply for PCI-Express. Somehow this strikes me as little different than having to buy a whole new computer.
I don't own a Mac; but I've actually used them for real work(gasp). Once you get past the fact it isn't a Wintendo Entertainment System, Macs really are excellent machines, and I'll be glad to shell out the cash for a Mac the next time I 'Upgrade' my computer.
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
BMW's aren't the fastest cars on the road, but they're still plenty fast. Anyone with some mechanical skill can turbocharge a Dodge Neon or something and end up with more bang-for-the-buck, but it's just not the same.
...now that that analogy is wearing thin, let me address a couple points...
I'd be surprised if we don't see a PC variant with better specs within a few months. -- Me too! Apple always has a bunch of companies rushing to implement a knock-off of it's current design. (I'm not saying that Apple never takes other peoples ideas, I'm simply saying that when they announce something big/cool, other companies copy it in droves. There are too many examples to list, but here's a few: System7, iPod, Titanium PowerBook, etc.)
Other than the SFF community who are they targeting? Are most Mac/PC users going to give up significant amounts of horsepower to save a couple inches of space? -- I don't think the Mac mini is meant to be the fastest, most upgradable machine they have. In fact, I would speculate that most people buying a Mac mini are buying it as a second computer. I think it has 2 target markets, one of which is more important than the others:
Let me start off by saying I own a powerbook, 4 iMac's (one of them a G5), and I'm going to buy another PB when Apple gets its act in gear and puts a G5 in it. I recommend people get Macintoshes, particularly people who don't like "playing", they just want to do some work with their computer.
Mac fanatics will always say "There is a myth of megahertz" when challenged on the relative speed of PC's versus Macs. Which sounds like a fine argument, but when you point out something that is real and verifiable (i.e. Photoshop on a PC is faster than Photoshop on a Mac), then they fall back on the "Well, speed isn't everything, we just want to get stuff down, and Windows sucks".
Pick your argument.
I personally tell most clueless users that "Consumer Reports recommends a Mac, and here's a copy of the article".
That's enough.
If someone says to me "Well, PC's are better, cheaper, faster", I say "You're right. Go buy a PC".
Honestly, as soon as some geek fanboi says "...the megahertz myth...", I already put them in the "f*cking clueless" box where you pay no more attention to that person.
No, you are confused. While it's true that it will do more with each instruction, those instructions will take multiple cycles. In RISC architecture each instruction takes one cycle (with a few exceptions). In CISC, some instructions take up to 5 cycles to complete. Basically, one instruction != one clock cycle.
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo!
"Not exactly. About half the non-cache die area of a modern Pentium or Athlon CPU is spent on the various stages of decoding and scheduling i386 bytecode"
Perhaps with the original Pentiums, but it's much smaller than that now.
There's also disadvantages to RISC; binaries tend to be bigger (x86 has variable sized instructions) and that uses up some of the larger cache that RISC chips tend to have. Also, the really highly performing RISC chips spend a LOT of die space on scheduling instructions (G5 is a good example of this).
Evidence is strong that x86 chips are competitive in terms of power consumption and performance. For example, the strongest mobile processor is currently the Pentium M, which uses less power than G4s and performs almost as well as desktop processors. Opterons are comparable to G5s for server tasks. POWER scales to much bigger machines, but machines that big are quite rare.
Except for a very few areas, one should choose a platform based on other criteria (you like MacOS better, you need to use Windows specific software, etc).
I rarely criticize things I don't care about.
Anyone whose taken apart their mini to upgrade has already seen how remarkably simple and elegant (the classic Mac elitist term, but it applies) the innards are. It's a tight fit, and yet the mini compares performance-wise with any other iBook G4 released last year. I use the 1.42Ghz model with 512MB of RAM, and it is speedier than my somewhat equivalent giant PC tower (the look of which suddenly became obsolete the very day the Mac mini was revealed...it's sad to see the tiny white Mac mini sitting on top of a giant, ugly gray tower from Gateway). I actually use the mini to do multitrack recording at 24-bit/96kHz through Logic Express, and it handles it fine. It's also a blast to program with, even for making UNIX apps if you want to.
You start to wrap your head around it more easily when you start realizing it's really an iBook without the keyboard and LCD, but the fact it's even smaller than a laptop blows your mind. Trying to put a PC in such a size failed--he couldn't even include the CD drive. The mini really is an entire home computer in a tiny box, but the real trick is that it actually doesn't suck. That's what seperates it from the rest--it's a real, usable computer that takes up less space than my laptop yet doesn't suck.
Completely missing the point. Show me a small form factor PC - I still think shuttles are small, and they seem to be really popular by now - with all your *essentials*. Bluetooth, WiFi/802.11/wireless, DVD/CD-RW, USB2, Firewire, keyboard, mouse, 'modest memory upgrades' and all. Does it come out below $1000? It just doesn't work the same way for small form factor computers as it does with ordinary desktop boxes. What's great about it isn't that it comes without keyboard, mouse, monitor and an amount of memory that doesn't suck. What's great about it is that it's cheap enough so that you can get it now and upgrade at least parts of it later on. You know, the stuff that people have been asking of Apple for ages. And that it's small. It's the perfect Mac to 'mod' into something else. Buy a few of them for your software business and use them as build farms - Xcode has built-in distributed building. With external USB2 and Firewire devices, it can morph into stuff like file servers or media centers. And there's already people mounting it into cars and doing cheap dedicated hosting ("condos") with whole racks of the thing.
Yes, you're right. I think part of the problem is my mis-naming of the terms. Really, what I referred to as CISC should just be called 'Pentium 4', however it does things. From what I understand, it's instruction path is narrow and deep. Very fast, but bad for branch misprediction.
PPC970 (G5) is wide and shallow. Concurrent execution of many instructions, slower, better for branch misprediction.
CISC and RISC don't really have any standout examples any more (from what I know). Both Intel and IBM have hybrid chips that fall strongly into neither category.
"how hard was an actual non-mangled clickable link?"
It's not very hard at all. All you've got to do is post the URL, and some URL nazi will come along and do it for you. It's all automatic!
"Derp de derp."
I sold my Mini ITX (1Ghz Nehemiah) setup on eBay so that I could purchase my Mini Mac without losing any money. After having used both, I can state this difinitively: In no way does the Nehemiah come close to coming close to being as fast as the G4.
:)
Never mind the media encoding/decoding capabilities of the G4. It doesn't even come close in regular desktop use. Not even with Linux installed. To even do half what the G4 can do encoding/decoding wise, you'd have to add a PVR card (which won't fit in that case).
If the guy is doing this to build the "fastest PC possible with the size constraints of the Mini's small form factor," he should have left the G4 in there (unless PC=Intel/AMD in this case).
I'm all for hardware hacking, but I hate to see a perfectly good machine go to waste. I hope at least that he retrofitted in a non-destructive way so that he can put the original machine back together again. Some people just have too much money...
BTW, If I was a VIA executive, there's no way that I would loan out a Nehemiah for review so that it could be pitted against the G4. Nothin' but bad news there. Somebody outta get fired over that one!
665: The mark on the forehead of Satan's slightly less evil brother, Stan.
Why is that, you ask? Because RISC instructions are inherently more pipelineable. The only place -CISC- wins is if all the instructions must be sequential. RISC can do far more instruction reordering such as prefetching a chunk of data significantly farther ahead of its use because that fetch instruction is a separate, schedulable entity. Thus, to give CISC equivalent performance, it was necessary to split CISC instructions into roughly RISC-equivalent components. This is done in pretty much every modern CISC chip out there.
As for CISC compilers optimizing the code better, that's probably true. Now imagine what would happen if the code you were running on a RISC box were as well optimized.... Suddenly the RISC machine isn't just keeping up with the CISC. It is leaving it in the dust. Try IBM's POWER/PowerPC compilers some time.... :-)
And all that extra hardware for cracking pretty much every CISC instruction into multiple instructions? Extra heat, extra die space that could be used for cache, extra CPU cycles to do the cracking, extra power consumption....
Basically the only way CISC wins is if you stack the deck.
120 character sigs suck. Make it 250.
"And both of them do raw MPEG-2 to Divx/XviD encoding at nearly the same rate."
There's any number of ways performance can be affected. Are you using a codec that's optimized for Altivec but not SSE? Those chips would not demonstrate such a wide performance gap without something slowing the Athlon down.
"The G5 is better however, because of its addressing and memory management (the two areas PC chips were still "winning" in). The only negative is the total GHz for PPC CPUs available is lower."
What exactly is "addressing and memory management"?
G5s have a bus comparable to Pentium 4s, but Athlon64s and Opterons have on-die memory controllers. That gives them significantly better memory performance, particularly better latency. Better than G5s and better than P4s.
I rarely criticize things I don't care about.
I don't game. I use my dual AMD MP 2800 Linux PC for audio work (PlanetCCRMA), Maya, Shake, image editing via the GIMP, Web surfing, and Emailing. I built this computer myself. I've had problems. I could have gone out and gotten a Mac and probably had an easy ride. But I decided to stick with my PC.
Why? You know the old saying Knowledge is Power. It's true. I know my computer. I know what's in it, how the pieces go together, what it can and can't do. If I were to go with a Mac to me at least I would be handing my computing experience to some company. (Not that I don't to a degree already by buying the parts, but I can still choose what to use and what not to use.) There is something to be said for being independent. I know that if there is a problem I can work it out myself rather than take it in for a repair or restart it and make the problem hide temporarilly. (Note I am refering to, say, Dell PCs running Windoze as well.) What I have works, and I am happy with it. Maybe a faster box would be nice, but I have poored my own soul (well, part of it) into this box, and to me nothing else can replace it.
I walked in to CompUSA a few weeks ago looking for a new keyboard. I had to walk past the Apple section to do this. While I happened to look at one of the 30 inch displays, a salesperson came over and started giving his memorized speach about the Macs and how they were so advanced that you could drag and drop files with them. I politely listened, but wasn't really impressed. I'm not saying they're bad boxes, but they're just not for me.
Saying "I'll probably get modded down for this" in a post is the best way to get it modded up.
Tiger will need 64MB VRAM for CI/CV to be crunched in the GPU. However, if the GPU does not have the requisite memory/power, Tiger will be smart enough to direct the CI/CV crunching to be done by the CPU (unlike Panther, which just sends the eye-candy to the GPU, regardless of whether or not the GPU can do it).
Dr. Freud
Technology meets Transportation.
Looks like a fun project but to me, a 400 mhz slower... inferior processor and no optical drive doesn't seem like a design win to me.
On another note, about building one of these with high end graphics.... People get so focused on off the shelf cards they forget about a whole nother breed of integrated chips.... for laptops..
While I highly doubt the mini-itx standard will suffice in powering an x86 counterpart to the mac mini, a custom designed board with perhaps a radeon mobility 9700 or 9800 chipset would run most of the games Lan partiers play at playable framerates.
To acheive this type of miniaturization with the level of performace as Apple has done, it will NEED a company willing to custom design a laptop board varient to fit a case, that supports such mobile chipsets. Perhaps even the ability to upgrade the mobile graphics card via a slot in the bottom of the unit.
A dothan and a high end mobility graphics card would prove to be a nice little LAN party animal. but then the issue of $$$ comes into play a PC system outperforming the mini for $499 or less??? I highly doubt it.
Apple Mini - 1
PC mini - 0 & Currently TKO'd
The Property of One's : "The Oneitude is directly proportional to the Colditude of the one." - S.B.
Now I _don't_ believe that the G4 is the super-computer that Apple's marketting makes it sound like. It's a good CPU, but that's about it.
But a 1 GHz _Via_ CPU? Gimme a break. Those things are a dog, performance wise. They're not just lower MHz, they're also lower IPC (instructions per cycle) even than a P4 Prescott.
The fact that they only have 64K L2 cache doesn't really help there either. And Via's being still stuck on a 133 MHz SDR bus also doesn't help.
Also it seems that the article just illustrates what's wrong with all these "I can build a better PC" attempts. E.g., in this case they couldn't also fit a CD drive too in that case, so you have to use an external USB one.
Which is just missing the whole bloody point. So at the end of it, when you count the PC Mini _and_ the external CD drive, you have twice the desk space needed and nearly twice the volume.
<sarcasm>Yeah, buddy. Way to go...<sarcasm>
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Actually, the Via CPUs does have the entire required 686 instruction set. What they don't have is the optional cmov instruction. The problem is that gcc doesn't care about the "optional" in the Intel documentation an assumes that any 686 will have cmov, and most 686 cpus does... actually Via is the only one not to include it. They "fixed" this with C3 Nehemiah CPU.
The C3 is a nice CPU, a bit slow, which means that you'll have to run Linux or and older version of Windows, it isn't fast enough for Windows XP and OpenBSD... in my experience. I ran my 1GHz C3 with a Zalman copper heat sink, no fan, the temperatur never exceede 40 degrees. For a small home server its perfect.
People who buy a Mac aren't buying it because it's the fastest ship in the fleet; they buy it because it's more luxurious than a Wintel box, or because it's able to do things that a PC currently doesn't do well, if at all. They choose macs because they are still more intuitive and easy than a Wintel box.
I just bought a Mac mini, which was delivered 2 days ago. The reason I bought it wasn't because it was more luxurious, or because it's more intuitive, although I do enjoy those two aspects as additional perks. The reason I bought the Mac mini was because, despite it not being the fastest machine on the planet, it didn't take up much desk realestate and because it does everything I need it to do. I've been using my TiBook G4 (640Mhz or so) for nearly 4 years now, and it has become my main machine (with an external monitor and keyboard). It has been that way ever since my G3 wasn't cutting it anymore. I really couldn't justify an upgrade to a real desktop machine because #1 they cost too much #2 my TiBook did everything I wanted it to (including video editing!) perfectly well, which meant I had no real incentive to upgrade at all. However, there are issues with using a laptop as your main machine, which are specific to laptops and have little to do with the specs.
So along comes the Mac mini. Is it fast enough? Yep. Does it have enough memory? Yep, after the 512Mb upgrade. Does it have enough ports? Well... hmmm, I could use more, but it's the same as my TiBook, to which I have a USB and FireWire hub attached, so it'll do. Do I need to buy anything else (hidden costs!) to get it to work? Nope! I can swap it out with my TiBook! Is it cheap? Hell yeah! Can I easily transfer the data on my TiBook to the new machine? Holy shit, this was the first time I tried it, but all I can say is Holy Shit that wasy easy! Via FireWire in target mode, the Mac mini took care of it all! Truly amazing! (It took less than 1 hour since the moment it arrived to the moment it was in fully functional operation mode with all my data.)
So all in all, the Mac mini met all my requirements, and then fulfilled some I didn't even know I had! (Much in the same way that the original iPod was everything I wanted in an mp3 player, and then some!) That may very well have been the most boom for the buck I've ever gotten out of a computer purchase.
In a sense, however, the Mac mini worries me. Will it eat away at sales of higher end machines? I have a hunch it will. A lot of people I know that have tower style Macs purchased them because they want the freedom to a monitor better than the iMac/eMac, and that was it. They didn't need a 1.8Ghz single-CPU G5, let alone a dual-2Ghz. For most people, even people doing audio/video funkyness as a hobby, the Mac mini is perfectly viable. Yeah, you'll need an external HDD for that, but that's really not much of an issue. (For a lot of people, it won't be an issue because 80Gb is more than enough for them.)
The only people that would want a G5 tower are those that have very specific high-computation needs (high-end video/audio editing, scientific calculations) or they have some odd requirement for either FireWire800, FiberChannel, Gigabit Ethernet (tell me, who REQUIRES Gb Eth at home?) or some special PCI card. (Anything that's NOT special comes in a USB/FireWire package these days.)
So, it was both the cheapest and most effective upgrade I ever did. And before anyone says that an Espresso or Cappucino, or even a Dell tower is comparable in price, let me spell it out: it isn't. It doesn't come with iMovie, iPhoto, or iDVD, all pieces of software that I use, which would cost money if I were to get an equivalent on a Windows box. And even then they wouldn't work as well. I also don't need to suffer with installing FreeBSD/Linux on the box, because the pre-installed OS X already has the *NIX functionality I require, and the prettiness of a nice GUI. These are additional perks, yes, but time is money. Especially since I use