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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."
Just a small speed bump. And no dual core G5 yet unfortunally.
Fuckity fuck fuck fuck.
I just bought a Dual 1.8 on eBay a week and a half ago, and the bum took a week to send it out. I just got it last night. Now this news. Nearly the same damn machine is $1499 refurbished, and I paid $300 more than that, and didn't even get Tiger.
Word for the wise: listen to everyone and WAIT when you hear something will be updated soon!
In summary: FUCK!
No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.
(no, Taco, you'll never live that one down).
I've heard Apple will come up with a new one button keyboard, soon. Because it's so much easier to use.
Georg
So ... why would anyone choose such a device over the PC??
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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
I do not understand their choice of base video card. Why would they use a 9600 series when the 9800s and X series are available? From a price concious view I can see it however the top end is Nvidia.
Also, are they still stuck on PCI-X? Is Apple going to move to PCI-Express anytime soon or will they be left behind for the time being?
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Tell AMD that 2.7 GHz is "5 years ago", then.
Even Intel is finally figuring out that pushing the whole clock speed = performance myth is starting to cause problems.
I realize you have an irrational need to bash Apple products, but please, try to do so in an informed fashion.
The ringing of the division bell has begun... -PF
I noticed an oddity on the linked page to Apple's store: the older 1.8 GHz dual had a built-in modem, but the new ones did not. Sure enough, if you actually order one of the newer PowerMacs you find that built-in modems are now a $29 option.
I suppose nearly everyone who buys these machines is using them in a networked office or can afford broadband at home, and the not-so-recent advent of internet faxing has made the other role of the built-in modem obsolete.
Still, it's an interesting omission. Like the floppy disk, Apple's opinion now is that the POTS modem is sufficiently obsolete to remove it entirely and free up space inside the box, rather than leave it in and lose the $10 OEM or whatever it actually costs them.
Never buy a computer when it's TODAY.
Always wait until it's TOMORROW, because something better may come out.
God Damn! Last year they were saying 256mb wasn't enough and people complained, now Apple doubles it and the trolls are out again. Next year when they hit a 1GB for a machine, people are gonna bitch again and comment on how cheap 2GB of RAM is!
I prefer it (just like other people have said) to get my memory elsewhere and cheaper than Apple provides. I'd be pissed if they gave to much RAM and then overcharged on the entire system.
Jonathanjk.com
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.
IBM had trouble going from 180 nm fabrication to 90 nm fabrication. We announced 3 GHz by 2004, but internally we were predicting 5 GHz by this summer, based on IBM's projections.
... Slashdotters are less interested in the truth than they are in making a big stink! But surely that's not possible ...
They didn't pan out.
For the record, Steve Jobs copped to this publicly during one of his keynote addresses. WWDC 2004, I think it was. Funnily enough, though, it seems like Slashdotters like to remember the initial projection, not the retraction, which is strange because they happened in exactly the same forum attended by exactly the same group of people. It almost seems like
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.
I just ran Hardware Update, and everything is much snappier!
Apple makes CHUDs? We're all doomed.
Best Slashdot Co
Lot of people are complaining about the "just 200MHz" speed bump for the high end model. 8% may not be that much of a speed bump, but neither Intel or AMD has been able to pull off dramatic clock frequency jumps lately. Clock speed stagnation seem to be a general problem in the processor design industry.
As for the dual cores, obviously AMD and Intel have much more incentive. The entire PC world is built around a standard form factors: ATX motherboards and ATX cases. Intel's efforts to move to a new form factor (BTX) has been quite unsuccessful so far. It is very hard to put two "hot" processors on an ATX motherboard in an ATX case. PC market is also driven by cut throat price pressure and low margins. There is a huge price difference between the prices of single processor motherboards and dual processor motherboards. Given the stagnation in the clock frequency, the only practical way for Intel and AMD to drive the mainstream PC to higher performance is the SMP model through dual-core chips. This way, all of the rest of the system components (motherboard, chipset, case, cooling system) can stay the same.
Apple does not have this constraint. Apple has been manufacturing mainstream multiprocessor desktops for manty years. Overall, it may actually be more cost effective for Apple to ship multiprocessor system. It may be a lot cheaper for IBM to manufacture two instances of a small die like the PPC970 FX (less than 60mm2) than a larger dual core die. As for Apple, having the source of the heat distributed accross two chips makes thermal management somewhat easier than dealing with one extremely hot dual core chip.
I am sure Apple will eventually move to dual core PPC970MP chips, potentially later this year, but this will most likely be in the context of being able to offer quad systems (two dual-core processors) for higher performance.
As for the choice of the base graphics card, the 9600 or 9650 is a perfectly reasonable choice. The primary driving force behind high end graphics cards in the PC world are 3D games. PowerMac G5 is obviously not the best 3D game platform. Most people buy PowerMacs to use in professional applications. Many pro applications do not require super-duper 3D performance. For those who are planning to do serious 3D work, the 6800 Ultra upgrade is the reasonable choice. There is no reason to burden all customers with an expensive (and potentially loud) graphics card.
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.
I'm surprised that this hasn't been brought up, but Apple is using a liquid cooling system on the 2.7Ghz model.
Details (including a cutsie animation) here.
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.
It's much cheaper to buy the memory elsewhere, like 50% cheaper, and dead easy to install if you aren't stoned
The point is, that you shouldn't have to. You are buying a very high-end 3000$ machine, and it comes with the same size of RAM 1000$ PC's do. You are also getting a 2 year old video card.
IMHO only the bottom line power mac should come with 512MB, the middle one perhaps 768 or more and so on, and they should come with GF6800 Ultras.
Open Source Java Web Forum with LDAP authentication
oh wait, no games....... :P
j/k, but seriously they can't even include the 9800 Pro if not the X800? For $3K+ I want a damn good card in there.....
"Apple is unhappy with the PowerPC production at IBM and will be switching to Intel-compatible chips this very year. ...seriously"
Actually, it was "Yeah, seriously," which makes the sarcasm more obvious.
At this point, it seems like nobody is using Intel compatible chips except people who are tied into Windows legacy code.
GameCube: PowerPC
Playstation3: fancy multicore PowerPC
TiVo: PowerPC
XBox2 (or is it XBox360?) PowerPC
I'd find it easier to believe a rumor that Microsoft was releasing a version of Windows for PowerPC, especially in the wake of XBox2.
He's probably a college student working at an Apple store who somehow feels qualified to outline the entire business strategy of the company.