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Apple Updates Power Mac Line
Phreck writes "Apple has announced an upgrade to its Power Mac line today. The new Power Macs all feature dual G5 processors, 512 MB RAM, and dual-layer 16x SuperDrives. On the low end is the dual 2.0GHz with 160GB HD and ATI Radeon 9600. The mid-range includes dual 2.3GHz processors with 250GB HD and ATI Radeon 9600. The top-end system has dual 2.7GHz processors with 250GB HD and ATI Radeon 9650. The processors are not the dual-core variety as has been rumored for weeks now."
Perhaps you should start visiting the rumor sites. this powermac update was not a surprise
MacRumors.com
MacRumors' Buyer's Guide also keeps track of time since last release and a summary of recent rumors, and a buy or not-buy recommendation.
23" now $1,499
30" same $2,999
"I don't think it's selfish, to eat defenseless shellfish." -NOFX
*shrugs*
:\
Here's the latest info from apple regarding the G5. It mentions "two double-precision floating-point units", but I don't think that's marketing-speak for cpu cores.
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
Put simply, dual core means that both CPUs are on the same piece of silicon. They can share a unified cache, access it faster, and resolve deadlocks & invalidates etc much faster.
A dual core processor will also run cooler than two single cores, and the reduced number of external interconnects means that the whole thing can be clocked faster.
Since you are using up to twice the wafer size, you need to have a high yield rate of you're going to keep costs down: Yield decreases in proportion to wafer area.
It's worth reading up on System On Chip design - see how you can put the graphics controller, DSP, and USB controller on the same wafer. Furber's ARM SoC book is slightly dated but nevertheless a good read.
Relative to the latest AMD etc depends on the code you're running. PowerPC has a lot of registers, can do much more complicated floating point arithmetic, and has a fused multiply-add instruction (good for FFTs) but in pure integer throughput the latest AMD etc will probably triumph.
Hmm. Not sure how your math works out to 30%.
On my calculator (unfortunately, I don't have a G5 to do this calculation), 3.0/2.7 = 1.11 meaning 11% behind.
Still, it's clear someone at IBM was far too optimistic.
Dual core should be more efficient as the system bus between the processor cores are much faster and wider than the external buses. Dual processor systems must leverage off-chip caches (if any) which are generally slower as they rely on the external system bus for cache coherency.
Someone you trust is one of us.
Uhh, these PowerMacs ARE the G5 towers. You can't reasonably like one and dislike the other. Apple has 5 computer lines:
Server: XServe
Professional "Desktop": PowerMac
Professional Notebook: PowerBook
Consumer Notebook: iBook
Consumer desktop: iMac, eMac and Mac Mini
Which division is redundant?
Once spotlight has indexed your hd, something it does once, it will only require processor time when you change the metadata of a file and when you search.
Dashboard only requires processor time when it's visible.
You don't need a new Mac.
I really like the andantech's review of the mac OS from A Die-Hard PC User's Perspective
personally a $500 mac is a few hundred dollars to expensive to buy and so I'm just too cheap to even consider a mac. though i think emacs take too long to boot (remember I care for the lowend) but do have some good UI.
Some people believe 1-1=3 and for the sake of being politically correct, we should respect their differences
If I had mod points, I'd mod you a troll.
I know a million other people are going to say this, but...
The G5 at 2.7 GHz is significantly more powerful than a P4 at 3.8. The best comparison is to the Athlon64 or Opteron (also a 64-bit cpu.) And as has been said before, 2.7 is actually higher than the fastest current A64 (which appears to be the 4000+ at 2.4 GHz.)
And don't forget the whole apples to oranges deal.
http://www.barefeats.com/g5op.html
Thats for the 2.0 GHz chips, but you get the idea. Thats been posted before too. Go ahead mod me redundant. Does it show the G5 is always faster than an Opteron. No. So what? Pick the tool you like/that does the job you need. If you like OS X, doesn't get better than that. If not, you can still get your x86-64 box for less.
Am I totally impressed by the G5? No. Too much money, and I don't need that much power anyway. I recently replaced my Powerbook G4 with a Mini. 80-90% of the capabilities but at 20% the price.
I'd love to have a G5 dual-core Mini with a Geforce 6800GT, but that just ain't gonna happen anytime soon.
Dual core being "more efficient" depends very much on the task being considered.
For any sufficiently large task, the bottleneck is the path to main memory. For a given level of package & bus limitations, dual-core must use an amount of bandwidth to main memory to feed two processing units rather than one.
For tasks that fit in on-chip cache, of course, the bottleneck is processing, and dual-core can be a huge improvement, especially where the synchronization overhead would have to go off-chip in the case of dual processors, as you mention.
My God, how thick can you get?
The PM is designed for creative professionals.
Ever stop and look at the performance reqs for pro video editing, or pro audio, or even the new Adobe Creative Suite?
This isn't designed for PC users looking to move over without switching machine types. What the hell does that mean anyway?
(like last time ibook 800mhz g4 logic board failure grrr back on this g3 500mhz now)
Did you take it into the shop? The Logic Board failure is a known issue that Apple will fix at no charge. I had to have mine repaired, and they even replaced the outer casing on mine for free!
(The case got beat up after a bus driver stopped suddenly, throwing a woman who was in the back right onto my laptop. It bent the screen backwards (!), but the computer still worked fine. It didn't close quite right after that, though.)
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
The Logic Board failure you're pointing at is the one with G3 iBooks:
http://www.apple.com/support/ibook/faq/
The guy seems to have a G4
IIRC, when the G5 was released, The Steve said that 3GHZ chips would be available within 12 months. It's been almost 24 months, and we're still < 3.0 GHz. Close, but I don't get why the Mac Faithful are defending this modest speed jump, when we should have been there last year.
Not that you should ever put too much stock in any vendors quoted ads, and bearing in mind all the inherant problems with benchmarking as a figure of merit:
Apple has some benchmarks up that show a pretty significant relative performance advantage on Apple's side. This particularly on compute-intensive work such as rendering and scientific work. Makes sense considering where the chips comes from(IBM) and where they're being used (Virginia Tech's cluster, for one).
Not that you should use this to make a buying decision or anything, but it's probably better than MHZ at telling you what is what.
Long story short, at more or less equivalent clock rates:
AMD64 wins in integer ops and latency,
PPC wins in floating point ops and vector ops.
PCI-X and PCI express are targeted to different markets. PCI-X is seeing a lot of use in servers and workstations which is where Apple wants to be hardware-wise with it's pro machines. PCI express is being pushed as a replacement for AGP and has not found much support outside of that. The 8x AGP slot on the G5s is more than sufficient for today's and tomorrow's graphics cards.
Apple will go where the cards are. When they introduced the Blue & White G3 they used a 66MHz PCI graphics card which was faster than AGP 2x. When AGP 4x came out and ATI and Nvidia were not making all their cards for 66MHz PCI, Apple added AGP.
The travesty is that Apple has not gone to PCI-X 2. Oh well, I've had a G5 for over a year and I have yet to find anything for PCI-X but fibre channel cards.
Not since Marie-Antoinette played milkmaid has looking simple and honest been so fake and complicated.
There are no Macs with four CPUs, or even ones that can be upgraded to have four CPUs. You can't blame people for assuming that Apple wouldn't make a completely spurious upgrade to their developer tools on this kind of scale.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
> 2.7 is actually higher than the fastest current A64 (which appears to be the 4000+ at 2.4 GHz.)
Close, but the fastest available Athlon is the FX-55 at 2.6GHz and 1MB L2 cache.
Sort of expensive though :-)
Belief is the currency of delusion.
True for Intel, not so for AMD.
So no, the PPC970 hasn't received dual core yet, but claiming that IBM 'can't keep up' from a technological standpoint is absolutely ridiculous, and suggests that you don't really know what you're talking about.
Granted, IBM knows what it's doing. It should make a dual core annoucement soon for the PPC970 (if it has such plans) soon though, just for bragging rights.
Quad-core Power Macs would be sweet, especially at the same price point! =)
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
I haven't run any Mac Linuxes for a long time, so my knowledge on this could easily be dated, but IIRC, Apple hardware is not better supported for Linux use than Wintel hardware. It could be better supported (due to the common hardware that you pointed out earlier), but due to the cost and wide availability of commodity X86 hardware, it's historically been the best supported hardware on the market for Linux.
-Turkey
A Power5 MCM is not exactly 8 cores on the same die, it's actually 2 dies (plus another 2 for the huge shared L3 cache), with 2 cores pre die, with 2 SMT threads per core.
They share 2MB of L2 for both processors on a die, and 144MB of L3 for all processors on the MCM.
But yes, IBM has been doing multicore processors since the Power4, and is using shared caches, which Intel and AMD are still working on.
Each refresh is the greatest thing ever and will change everything!
Which explains why our announcement of the new G5s is in a tiny corner on the bottom of our home page.
Sigh.
AMD and Intel both rushed dual core to market for bragging rights. Both companies are using a design that's really not much more than two dies on the same wafer with a little interconnect circuitry. I think the *most* optimistic estimate I've heard for a clean, shared cache design is 12-18 months away still. This is very new stuff for both companies.
This is untrue for AMD's dual-core chips. For Intel, maybe. For AMD, no.
AMD's K8 core was designed from the beginning to accomodate dual cores. All K8 "Hammer" chips have the memory controller integrated onto the die. The K8 architecture does dual-core just fine.
And a shared cache isn't something that I'd call an advantage. Each core having its own cache is optimal, since it doesn't have to share the cache.
Remember when "shared memory" was marketed as being a good thing for PC's? In reality it never worked well.
Don't you mean the 130-90 transition? The first-generation 970 was already fabbed at 130nm at the state-of-the-art IBM plant that Jobs was showing off at the time. It was Motorola's G4 that was stuck at 180nm, finally making the jump to 130nm a year after everyone else joined the party. That's why my MDD G4/1.25 dual has such an enormous heat sink and runs so loud. Oh well, at least it's not a dual-core Pentium that wastes more power when idle than a stackful of Mac minis.
Why is it front-page-newsworthy when Apple updates their product line, but it is not newsworthy when Dell, Microsoft, or Intel updates theirs?
Well Microsoft and Intel (and AMD) get quite a bit of coverage when they release new products, even if they're just collections of bug fixes (Windows XP SP2) or minor speed bumps in their chips. Dell generally doesn't get coverage when they release a new product for the same reason that your local whitebox clone shop doesn't get coverage, it's just not that interesting to read about slightly faster PCs built around generic hardware components.
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
Unfortunately, that's not possible, due to the fact that you can't buy a 384MB stick of RAM. Powermacs have to have dual sticks of RAM in to work. The 512MB standard is made of (2) 256MB sticks. You'd have to go up to 1gb.
No, I meant PCI-X. We use AGP 8x Pro Wham Bam Bizzle, or whatever the hell it's called, for our GPUs. We use PCI-X for our expansion slots except in the low-end G5 which has regular old 64-bit/66 MHz PCI.
That's what he said.... not the dual core chips.
... which did indeed lack the Altivec unit.
Concerning Altivec.... the PowerPC 970MP "Antares" would/will have Altivec.
I think you're confusing it with, the original Power 4 processor from which the original PowerPC 970 was developed
As far as we can tell, the new PowerMac G5's are being powered by the PowerPC 970FX... just clocked a bit higher.
My personal thoughts on future Apple chip upgrades would have Apple move to the PowerPC 970GX (bigger L2 cache / faster clock speeds) before the 970MP comes out.
return 0; }
Put simply, dual core means that both CPUs are on the same piece of silicon. They can share a unified cache, access it faster, and resolve deadlocks...
Actually, the Intel dual-core CPUs are simply two core dies in the same package, not two cores on the same die. So, they do not share cache and resolve deadlocks in any faster way than two separate CPUs.
It's quite a bit different than a SoC design where you put a large number of components onto the same die. While SoC will suffer from yield rates because of a larger die, the dual-core strategy will not, because each die is still as small as the original single-cpu solution.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a 747 filled with CD-ROMs.
plinden posted this on Macrumors:
Guys, to put this into perspective, I did a bit of research. The following is the speed increase of various processors over about the past 2 years.
G5 GHz:
2.0-2.7 (35% increase) in 22 months
Pentium-M GHz:
1.6-2.1 (31% increase) in 25 months
Pentium-4 GHz:
3.1-3.8 (23% increase) in 29 months
Athlon XP GHz:
1.8-2.4 (33% increase) in 27 months
We all know that you can't compare clock cycles between architectures, but I think this shows that not only are PowerPCs keeping up with the PC chips in terms of change in speed, they are actually increasing more quickly than PCs.
The PowerMac G5's suck! I'm glad I bought my Dual G4 1.25GHz for $1,299 when they started clearing them out after the G5 was announced.
The PowerMac G5 case design is nothing but a big window fan. That's the last thing I want on my desk. Two years now and they don't seem to be looking at at least a low power G5 that allows you to use all that case space for internal hard drives instead of fans.
http://www.macworld.com/news/2004/06/28/liveupdat
See also this explanation from this very thread.
"Ad infinitem et ultra!" - Buzz Lightyear
Reasons Apple is not switching to Intel
1. Apple Software is heavily optimized for the PPC processor.
2. Emulating the PPC (which will be needed for a transistion) with any speed at all is a challenge.
3. Software developers have less incentive to write software for the Mac platform, if all the user needs to do is dual boot into windows.
4. Apple's been here before (more then once) and didn't switch.
The "Radeon 9650" is the highest upgrade option .. also an old card. There are no options for current graphics cards.
The NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra DDL is available as a build-to-order option:
http://www.apple.com/powermac/specs.html/