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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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.