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Intel Developer Macs Outperform G5s
bonch writes "Developers working with the new Intel-based, developer-only Macs are impressed with the performance. The machines take as little as 10 seconds to boot from Apple logo to desktop, and apparently run Windows XP at 'blazing speeds.' Rosetta tests demonstrate the PowerPC-native build of Firefox running just as fast as it does on a high-end G5."
Although, Firefox doesn't run particularly fast on my G5 compared to my run-of-the-mill XP box at work.
OS boot times are usually disk and network bound.
I don't see how even an order of magnitude increase in CPU power could shorten boot times to the extent described here.
There must be other factors.
--
Toby
Didn't you RTFA? It's not an "emulator", it's a dynamic binary translator. Duh...
ResidntGeek
The real question is, will their x86 Laptops maintain the four hour battery life Mac users have come to expect? Performance is nice, but it isn't always everything. Being able to work through a long car trip, plane flight, or train ride can be far MORE important to laptop users.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
The developer version of OS X can run on non-apple hardware, but only if you think troubleshooting is fun (read: not well). The versions that will reach consumers on Intel systems will be DRM'ed to prevent this. It will be crackable, but the 1% of the population that can do this isn't Apple's target market anyways.
The real litigious bastards...
For God's sake, will you please stop beating this issue to death? No, MacOS will not officially run on non-Apple hardware. Yes, l337 h4x0rs will probably find a way to make it happen. No, it will not be the rosy seamless computing experience MacOS provides on controlled hardware. Apple's success in OS development is in no small amount tied to their control of the hardware it runs on; don't expect that to go away anytime soon.
It'll require a Mac brand intel, this has been announced. Whether this is through some kind of magic BIOS trick or something, or just by only producing drivers for exactly one set of hardware isn't known for sure.
"The apps run at about 65 to 70 percent of their normal speed."
Doesn't sound like Rosetta is transparent for everything, then?
Intel outperforming PowerPC was kind of expected. However I am impressed with a technology behind Rosetta. Are ther any open source projects like that?
my sstream of consciousness
Not in any foreseeable future. Steve Jobs has stated repeatedly that Mac OS X will not run on non-Apple Intel machines.
Apple makes money by selling machines, not software. They are not going to stop doing this just because they're changing one chip on their mother boards. OS X will only run on Apple Macs, without some serious hacking. This hacking will likely be difficult enough that people who would buy a Mac anyways will still buy a Mac. Hardware monkeys may be able to get it working on commodity hardware but it'll likely be kinda' flakey.
I drank what? -- Socrates
That's a quite remarkable emulation feat. I wonder if this is on x64 with the added registers or if it's just plain x86. I imagine that the added registers in x64 (or whatever you want to call it without using an AMD or Intel moniker), combined with less restricted usage combinations, would make emulating the PowerPC ISA well easier.
Sometimes I have the need to develop on Mac environment for compatibility requirements, but I don't really want to buy a Mac just for that. For example I don't buy a TUX machine to run Linux.
You would if it was important enough to you. I bought mine so that I could support Apple users. i.e. I saw a very real use for the machine. (Best purchase I ever made, BTW.) With Linux, there's just too much noise and not enough signal to make anyone want to purchase a Linux-built Desktop machine.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
"does that mean that future Mac OS can run on any Intel (and AMD?) machine? Or will it only run on an Intel specifically built for Mac?"
Possibly the question of the year once the official x86 Macs hit the market. Apple says no - their hardware only. Many people feel that unless they do something funky there will be no way they can keep OSX86 off of generic hardware.
In a word, no
G5 runs floating point and vector operations faster than Intel chips, and can address more memory (without weird segment changes) than Pentiums of the same vintage. Thus they run scientific code and large media manipulations faster than Pentiums of the same vintage. They do not run branchy program logic code faster than Pentiums of the same vintage. Shockingly, most users spend most of their time browsing the web and writing emails, not running simulations or media transcodes; those that do are going to Opteron based systems.
I remember the first reports of benchmarks were a little less than desirable... This new feedback is music to my ears. I, for one, welcome our new Mactel overlords.
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
It could also mean that firefox's apparent speed is based more on network throughput than code execution. I'd like to see some more robust benchmarks than "it seems just as fast".
We can start by how long it takes to crunch a lot of floating point operations and integer math operations.
It's good to use your head, but not as a battering ram.
So simple stuff runs as fast or faster...
How does the Mactel box do on floating point, 64bit and/or vector based code? The main reason for getting a G5 was to improve performance of 64bit/floating/vector code like is used in video production and scientific apps.
Since Intel has always been shaky in floating point and probably doesn't really know the meaning of vector I'm wondering how those kinds of apps will fare on the Mactel boxes.
Clearly the speed boost comes from the amazing graphics capabilities of the Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 900. I mean, the 900 stands for 450 times better than their last integrated system which was numberd 2, right?
In addition to booting Windows XP at blazing speeds . . .
Seems like you could buy a Mactel (TM) box and then have a dual boot with WinXP, or some Linux distro, or maybe all three. Whether or not Mactels will be able to run WinXP in commercial release remains to be seen.
No. The version of OS X on the developer Macs may be compatible with other PCs, but the final product will be tied to an special Intel DRM chip that will prevent it from running on other machines.
The developer machines are loaners and will go back to Apple in two years, and will not continue to be supported.
omnia tua castra sunt nobis
In desktop applications yes, on actual apps (hard on CPU and using PPC options) not.
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Couldn't they work hard to reduce that to five seconds? Think how many lives would be saved.
So now that Apple is going to use Intel processors, Apple developers are allowed to note that Intel makes faster processors?
I should feel vindicated, I suppose.
So...the development Mac's run XP faster than other vendor's boxen? This is getting weird.
How is this little problem going to be resolved? I have to imagine the switch is going to cause a speed hit.
"I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence or insanity but they've always worked for me" - HST
"The machines take as little as 10 seconds to boot from Apple logo to desktop, and apparently run Windows XP at 'blazing speeds."
Isn't the dev machine just a normal Intel box? I don't see how fast Windows XP runs has anything to do with Mac OS X.
No, and you're missing the point. Apple is not a hardware company, nor are they a software company, the reason why Macs work so well is that Apple is a platform company. I wouldn't want to run MacOS on standard Intel motherboards because standard Intel motherboards are loaded with obsolete crap (floppy controllers, parallel ports, RS-232 serial, etc, etc, etc). I don't mind an Intel processor based system as long as we can leave behind all of the cruft and crap that has been dragging down the PC for the last 10 years or so. In fact it will be interesting to see what Intel can do on a more restricted platform.
Similarly I'm not interested in running Windows XP on a intel system designed for MacOS. The ability to do so via RedBox or dualboot is a nice feature and might help Apple get into some corporate environments but I already have an Intel box to run Windows XP and I can't see how putting it on the Mac would make the experience any better as the lame OS architecture and compromises driven by the MS marketing department would still be there.
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
Being able to run the current retail Windows XP on a Mac is a fluke, or more accurately a side effect of the temporary development systems using off-the-shelf PC hardware. Apple has a history of using one type of hardware during development of an OS and then requiring different hardware in the retail product. When the retail Apple hardware arrives I expect that it will be proprietary hardware that is not PC-compatible and a new version of Windows XP will be needed. I also expect that Mac OS X will be designed to only run on this proprietary hardware and will never be offered for generic PC compatible hardware. Mac hardware clones nearly killed Apple when they had some control over the cloners, letting Mac OS X run on generic hardware would be suicidal. Apple is largely a hardware company, their software exists to sell the hardware.
I think it's going to be great for Apple. They are probably going to get a lot of people who want to try out "this Apple thing" and it's probably going to cost a little extra than getting that that cheapo POS from Dell, but if they don't like the Apple OS, they can always just revert to Windows. Also, those crazy Linux guys :-) can also buy an Apple machine and dual boot, or even triple boot, or if they get MOL working as well for Intel as they did for PPC (I don't really know how well they got it working) they can just run OS X inside Linux for development, testing, or gaming(HOPES!).
I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with Intel Mac hard drive performance? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a Intel Mac for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. 20 minutes. At home, on my Pentium Pro 200 running NT 4, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this Mac, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.
In addition, during this file transfer, Safari will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even SubEthaEdit is straining to keep up as I type this.
I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on my Intel Mac, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a Intel Mac that has run faster than its Wintel counterpart, despite the Intel Mac's faster chip architecture. My 486/66 with 8 megs of ram runs faster than this 300 mhz machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that the Intel Mac is a superior machine.
Intel Mac addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use a Intel Mac over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.
We can start by how long it takes to crunch a lot of floating point operations and integer math operations.
That might show the opposite results - misleadingly slow instead of misleadingly fast.
Rosetta dynamically translates machine instructions in such a way that it can eliminate branches that aren't taken. Mispredicted branches wreak havoc on the long pipelines of the Pentium 4, so code that can run straight through runs much faster. You can even "translate" x86 code to x86 code this way and speed it up significantly.
It doesn't make floating point or integer math operations any faster, but most users run applications that are chock full of branches, not math benchmarks.
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
I've noticed the same. Any chance it's the version of firefox on Mac in addition to hardware issues? It also seems to me that Firefox on Mac has significantly more stability problems and, from my experience, memory leaks.
Of course, that won't take care of the PPC-build-on-Intel-with Rosetta argument, but it might mitigate the G5 vs. XP issues.
Anyone else, or is it just me?
Took long enough, but it looks like OS X will finally be 'snappy' ;)
dude, the article is reports from developers, who have the systems in their hands. Apple didn't make much hype after they announced it.
Yeah, ok but will Windows boot on the appl-Intel machines?
I remember when Apple switched from the 68040 to PPC, people were making claims that the emulated stuff ran about as fast as the native apps. Of course, they were all smoking crack - you could spot the difference between a native app and an emulated app a mile away. It would be nice if people told the truth this time - that you can run emulated app if you really need to, but it's basically going to suck, especially once you get used to the performance of native apps. If the developer doesn't care enough about my platform to at least recompile, then I'll take a pass on the app I think.
Tristan Yates
I think most of us expected the P4 to perform better for Integer like code on applications that don't effectively SMP. So that's not that surprising. I am surprised at the speed of Rosetta, although that will be a mixed bag once again depending upon the application.
What I'm really interested in is speed on stuff that really leveraged Altivec, like A/V programs. I'm curious about Quicktime 7 for instance. Now some of these programs can use some similar functions on the P4. But from what the Altivec folks were telling me some code ought differ by as much as 50%. (i.e. the PPC is twice as fast) A nice simple test is to compare programs like iMovie on both platforms.
the final product will be tied to an special Intel DRM chip that will prevent it from running on other machines.
That article about Apple using DRM/TCPM was just pure speculation.
Please don't repeat slashtdot headlines as fact until you've at least RTFC (read the fine comments).
just think of how cheap the next Intel chips will be!
...
oh, wait, no, that means the prices will be going up
um, darn. how was this good again?
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Promise: My next machine will be my first Mac purchase.
It must hoever use a non Intel CPU and be no more than 35% populated with Intel chips.
I am dead serious. I hope AMD is a choice.
--
Intel is the evil empire your momma warned you about.
So stop saying it like it's a fact, please.
Culture is more than commerce
So... good news for PC fanboys and Mac fanboys alike then, eh? Mac fanboys can claim that things are running well because of Apple's software which is simultaneously technically superior and like, super-cool, why would you waste your time with a crappy company like Microsoft? PC fanboys can claim that it was actually just the inherent superiority of Intel chips and that those mac fools have been using the wrong architecture all these years.
Actually, Apple's Phil Schiller stated flatly that a Mac/Intel machine will be able to dual-boot into Windows. Of course, as virtualization technologies advance in the next few years, you'd probably be just as well off to run a virtualized copy of Windows inside OS X.
However, there will be nothing to stop you from dual-booting into Windows from an Intel Mac.
When you control the compiler. http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/07/12/13 20202&tid=142&tid=118&tid=123
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
PowerPC CPUs are generally 25-30% faster than Intel x86 CPU of the same clockrate. However when you compare a G5 2.7GHz against a P4 3.6GHz the PowerPC advantage evaporates.
Aren't these Mac's using a 32-bit Intel proc? Does Apple really intend to replace a 64-bit machine with a 32-bit one?
Aren't there G4's that outpace G5's at the same clock speed? What does this comparison really say? Will it be faster at even the Altivec/dual proc enhanced apps (like filters filters for photoshop, rendering video, etc...)
The Admin and the Engineer
I'd like to see real benchmarks before considering such an assertion. Just because Firefox seems to open at the same speed whether emulated or not doesn't imply anything. PPC Firefox could be somewhere around 100 ms slower emulated and still seem like it is just as fast as running non-emulated.
And when I say benchmarks, I don't mean synthetic, my memory bandwidth is greater than yours type. I mean actual number crunching, for optimized and unoptimized code.
I know, a lot more goes into how fast something will run. Bus speeds notwithstanding, there's also HDD I/O times, memory latency, etc.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
The real answer is the big/little-endian is irrelevant performance wise, it is only on problem with respect to porting Mac-only code that never considered that binary data can have different formats. Unix code and code that targets PC and Mac will have a very easy time adjusting.
To boot up into XP on my latest WinTel kit takes very little time, and XP runs lightening quick on that box, expectedly faster than my one or two year old Macs, though not as expectedly fast as my 5 year old Mac. OTOH, my three year old WinTel laptop with XP is such a dog it is painful to use.
Which is to say there is no surprise that Apple shipped a fast computer, and no surprise that the latest machine can boot faster than my older machines. I expect MacOS will run faster, as Intel has been ramping up the cycles, damn the electricity, while IBM has not. The concern is, as always, no that Intel is in the picture, is there going to be a philosophy change that makes the computer less consumer friendly. Like more DRM, or more serial numbers, or b0rked math.
I mean, fundementally, the important thing to me is that the computer wakes up in 5 seconds, not that it takes a minute to get to the desktop. And that in five years I still have a usable computer with the latest OS.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Actually, Apple makes money selling iPods!
But seriously, I hate the "Apple makes money selling machines, not software" myth. Apple also makes a killing on software, and there's higher margins than hardware. Steve Jobs said Tiger had already sold a million boxed copies of Tiger at the WWDC. Multiply by $129? That's a lot of cash coming from just the OS. And don't forget about their stance in the professional media market. How much is Final Cut Pro selling for these days? What does Motion cost?
I believe it's plain old x86, which makes it even more impressive. Remember the first lines to have a brain transplant scheduled are the lower-end lines which are currently 32-bit. This makes the most sense if the transition is to a 32-bit platform.
Oh, we're supposed to use the comments as a source for facts? Even the ones crawling with Apple fanbois?
I must be new here, maybe that has always been the case.
"If reports are accurate, Mac users have a lot to look forward to in regards to web browsing under Mac OS X for Intel. According to sources, web browsing in general is much faster under Mac OS X for Intel than it is under the shipping version of Mac OS X for PowerPC. Web pages snap to the screen, the same way they do in Internet Explorer running on a new Pentium system, they say. "
Why would I want ANYTHING to work like internet explorer?
Bad Panda! No Bamboo for you! In matters of importance ACs will not be responded to. Want to say something critical,OK
I'm sure it already runs NetBSD
The Admin and the Engineer
You are misunderstanding. Being able to dual boot may very well be possible, it will just require a new version of Windows that is aware of Apple's proprietary hardware. It's only the current Windows that expects PC compatible hardware that will most likely have problems.
Apple said they won't prevent Windows from booting, so I take that as a yes.
RTFS. Apple aren't the ones claiming these machines are this fast - it's the developers (developers, developers!). Apple didn't choose Intel because of their current products, they chose them for what's in the pipeline. For all we know, there could be some kind of experimental chicanery inside the Developer Preview Macs that we've not yet seen in a shipping product.
And tomorrow the stock exchange will be the human race
I'm sure that the developers at the Mozilla Foundation will be pleased to hear that the various projects which they have spent countless hours toiling over are not actual applications by your standards.
College Humor at it's best
I am a former Mac person who has been running windoze since MacOS 9 days. I never did try MacOS X, although was thinking earlier this year about picking up a Mac since it has 'nix under the hood.
/. posting, I definitely won't be buying a PPC Mac. I'll wait for Intel Macs next year.
With performance reports like the one referenced by this
What overall effect will this have on Mac sales? I'm a programmer geek -- do folks think the desktop publishing / music crowds will also hold off on buying new Macs? Or will it make little difference to them?
At the time (June 2003) it was pretty decent -- slower for some things, faster for others. But it's been two years now with no significant progress (2.0 GHz-> 2.7 GHz), so yeah, it's pretty long in the tooth now.
It's also worth noting that most of the motherboard components have also stayed the same. Not much point in tuning that when the processor has changed so little.
Imagine what the difference will be like in late 2006 with the transition well underway.
We know that XP will run fine on the Dev boxes but they are not final product, we're not even sure if the final product will use BIOS (or did I miss something) I know Steve J. said they would not actively do anything intentionally to stop Windows from working, but he didn't say they were actively designing the machine to run windows, At least that's how I understood it, maybe I'm just wanting BIOS and some other stuff to get tossed out the window (no pun intended) someone please correct me if I missed something...
Pentium Ms are known for very nice battery lives, as others have posted 7+ hours is not unheard of. They also comfortably putperform G4s, and while a G5 laptop might be able to keep up it won't be able to do it at 1.6 ghz.
The new Yonah core chips Intel will be releasing early next year also have a dual-core version in the same power envelope...
I rarely criticize things I don't care about.
I believe the implication is that on a Mac G5 system, the boot process takes longer than 10 seconds. So if you powered up the Intel Dev system and a G5 system, the Intel will be at the desktop first. So it is because of Intel that it boots in 10 seconds.
To turn a popular meme:
Slashdot. It's Not For Common Sense
To all those people that say "Apples Mac OSX will never run on generic pc hardware", I say
...
Apple will never run on x86, oh wait
Come on people I think we have learned to stop saying "Apple" and "never" in the same sentence.
Someone else said that Apple is a platform company, let me tell you what Apple really is. Apple is a business and in the end they are responsible to the shareholders of Apple stock. So if the market demands OSX to support generic pc hardware then Apple will release it for generic pc hardware. My guess is that they will see how OSX x86 works out for the year then decide if Leopard will be released for generic pc hardware or just Apple hardware.
Time will tell, and please stop saying Apple/Mac and never in the same sentence.
How well does Windows run on these machines? How about Virtual PC? This is the only place where I see real lag in macs these days.
Just buy now. Not only will the x86 machines not be ready for general consumption for quite a while, you'll have a better software base on PowerPC (when speaking strictly about Macs) for years to come anyway.
Disconnect and self-destruct, one bullet at a time.
coming from developers, it could be just a pat on their own back.
yes, i've been screwed by developers all my life.
"This one is for you, all you lonely sysadmins sitting in a corner!"
"Don't let fools fool you. They are the clever ones."
Who cares about what'll be coming in n (for large values of n, probably since the PowerMac line was very recently updated) months? The box is good and the current software offering fits your needs. What more do you need? In other words, if the box isn't currently lacking, go for it, and give the finger to the upgrade threadmill.
Try Corewar @ www.koth.org - rec.games.corewar
Parent of my other comment response enlightened this a little bit. Actualy basic build you download is wrong one for G5 as it seems. Tried the one he suggested and it actualy performs much better.
I was seeing fullscreen redraw being done in four horizontal rectangles. I've got 1920x1200 and fullscreen. Not just redrawing in one piece as on any other than OSX machines.
That was slow for me unfortunately. It is much better, but still not there.
Signature Pro version 1.13.2-3 release 83.5 beta3try7 after-breakfast edition
Ot the app could be really light. Say it ran fine on a G3-300 mhz. The 30%,50% even 70% speed loss ain't gonna matter.
"Apple's success in OS development is in no small amount tied to their control of the hardware it runs on; don't expect that to go away anytime soon."
How do you know this? How do you know they wouldn't become wildly successful by implementing a strategy like WinNT, where there was an approved hardware list?
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
Of course, they were all smoking crack - you could spot the difference between a native app and an emulated app a mile away.
On the first generation, yes. But by the time PPCs were running at 100MHz, emulated 040 benchmarks were running faster than any 040 ever built.
-Z
You have violated Robot's Rules of Order and will be asked to leave the future immediately.
This report was bogus. They reported a threading problem in Apache 1.3, which isn't threaded. I tried duplicating the results, and found even the raw data reported suspicious.
Considering most everyday people are migrating from intel to amd for performance and price, that was a smart move from apple. Ofcourse intel first embeded the cpu id's as well... hmm, DRM in apple here we come...
Beta Sucks
This just means that the G5 crap being better performing than the Intel stuff was pure marketing BS
Maybe G5s are not so fast. But:
"It's fast," said one developer source of Mac OS X running on Intel's Pentium processors. "Faster than [Mac OS X] on my Dual 2GHz Power Mac G5."
So, uh, a 3.6 Ghz P4 is faster than two 2 Ghz G5 - 4 Ghz? - SMP, but 4 Ghz.
Sorry, I don't buy that. Even more if you take into account that Intel isn't exactly the performance/Hz leader - in fact it's the worst performer these days, Opteron and PM beats the sh*t out of that P4 at much lower speeds from what I've read.
There're lots of factors that can change things - freebsd algorithms, are, for one, optimized for i386 variants. Also, Mac OS X is compiled with -Os - optimized for size, no for speed. (Paranoic mode on=Hey, maybe this switch was planned and it's not a coincidence)
And then there's the Placebo effect. IOW: Show me numbers, don't tell me "it's fast", I don't trust you. In Linus' words: "If we can't measure it, it doesn't exists". Unless someone writes a decent comparative, I'll take this article as Apple Marketing - Apple has been very critized for this change, I wouldn't be suprised that Apple is interested in articles like that, showing how good move has been the switch to intel
This alone isn't that surprising...
A Pentium 3.6ghz (brand new) is almost twice the clock speed of a single G5 2.0ghz (rather old). On top of the G5's age, multiprocessing isn't a linear performance increase. Two 2.0ghz CPUs are slower than a single CPU at 4ghz. Yes, I know they don't match clock for clock, but Intel keeps optimizing (HT, for example).
What *IS* surprising is the PowerPC emulation. 70% native speed, even 50% is astonishing.
After Apple races out the Intel boxes, they'll be even faster. Remember, Apple is the ultimate modder. The lengths they went in CASE DESIGN and WATER COOLING just to get the G5 to run as fast as it does.
They're going to make some unreal boxes. Yeah, they'll be PC's, but Dell will have nothing on them.
This is encouraging. I wonder how native Photoshop compares. That's all I really care about... Photoshop and vim.
I'm all warm and fuzzy inside. If only they'd use Itanium2 chips also.
...which is: A type of emulator!!! Wheee!!!
Free Mac Mini Yeah, it's
The reported threading problems were not, in fact, threading problems at all. Instead, they are the result of F_FULLFSYNC fcntl. You will probably find this thread interesting.
5 seconds? I don't think saving 5 seconds of every month or two is really that important. I mean, unless it's saving lives like you said...
Yes Apple has already said this.
Steve Jobs also said that Apple had no plans to compete in the $500 computer market and then later Apple released the Mac mini.
Apple's stated plans can change if their market research indicates sufficient consumer demand. I'm not expecting this to happen with the first rev of the Intel switch but I've believed for a very long time that some kind of cloning or licensing would occur with Mac OS X.
Apple's been slowly moving away from a Mac hardware dependent revenue model for many years but the iPod has really changed the dynamics for them. When Mac hardware is no longer life support they will be free to take the big risks for the chance at making big payoffs.
So when will the DVD leak and I'll be able to see hackers working on getting it to run on regular x86-machines at http://www.osx86.classicbeta.com/ ? :)
"Yes, l337 h4x0rs will probably find a way to make it happen. No, it will not be the rosy seamless computing experience MacOS provides on controlled hardware. Apple's success in OS development is in no small amount tied to their control of the hardware it runs on; don't expect that to go away anytime soon."
These Apple boxes will use generic harware found in your standard hp or dell box. Home made pcs will run MacOS just fine. Apple is using a DRM to raise the barrier of entry to nearly infinity for competing hardware companies who want to sell mac clones to maintain a monopoly on selling hardware that runs MacOS. That way they can charge a premium on hardware to subsidize their OS development and make a healthy profit by choosing their own price without worrying about market forces. Apple knows their product is differentiated enough from an MS PC that these machines are not really competing head-to-head, so my monopoly arguement is valid.
Vote for Pedro
This is going to be a real problem for Mac software, because most of it isn't frame limited, and isn't designed to run this fast. You'll be typing a sentence in a word processor, and before you know it, the cursor will have zoomed off and crashed into the right hand edge of the window.
Not good.
Don't buy a Mac until you can get an Intel one; and of course you ought to wait six months after that release so vendors have had time to port their software over. A year to a year and a half in other words. Also, do not buy expensive software like Photoshop or Illustrator at this time, since you'll have to shell out all over for them again when you get an Intel Mac (and that can easily come to more than the cost of the machine itself).
It would be really fascinating to see what the sales figures will be like for the next year or two.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
Well I think that by transparent they mean that you can see through it. I mean, metaphorically speaking, if Rosetta was a person and it was wearing the apps that ran using it, it would be frightening to see those apps walking around with no body. Very frightening indeed, like a ghost. 65 to 70 percent of normal speed is definitely frightening, so this must be exactly what they mean.
My G4 Powerbook still boots faster than my new T43 Laptop.
Go ahead, buy the Mac. I'm not an insider but a real happy new Mac user (G5). I couldn't be happier (and bought it the week after the switch, in part, to prove the pundits who said Mac sales were going to fall off wrong).
Seven seconds. Trust me.
Seven chipmunks twirlin' on a branch, eatin' lots of sunflowers on my uncle's ranch. You know that old children's tale from the sea.
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
make sleep suck on a PC.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Already been answered a million times in other threads. OS X for x86 will only run on Mac hardware. They will use a checker that checks on install and boot, to make sure. It is unclear as of yet how different the Mac x86 will be from a standard PC. For all we know, the Mac may have some sort of special Apple chipset. Developement machines run XP just fine, though. The motherboard seems to be pretty standard ATX, althought I doutbt that will last.
Get rid of the unnecessary crap installed on your system to help improve your boot times. Have you seen the junk FC4 installs and starts at boot by default?
Deleted
Makes perfect sense to me. Am I missing something or did they say firefox compiled for PPC runs faster on an Intel(thus must have somehow emulated the PPC instruction set, unless I'm horribly mistaken) than on PPC. Either P4 kicks its ass in raw power or a P4 can now somehow run foreign instructions with almost 0 drop in speed. I don't see a problem with it. But then again, maybe I should have RTFA. oh well
Actually it's more like a JIT compiler you have in the Java world. Thus, it's not an emulator, it's a compiler that compiles non-native PPC binary instructions to native IA-32 code.
I'm just waiting for the enevitable Apple claim that a Mac running OSX will be 4 times faster than Windows or Linux even with absolutely identical identical hardware.
Contrary to popular belief, coding is not all free blow-jobs and beer. Those things cost MONEY!
Given a standard bios these machines should have an incompatable partition structure to current Macs (as has already been noted). Have to wonder if the Intel Macs will be able to still handle slices and read old disks. There were also some rumors that the endianness may be different on HFS for "Mactel" for internal binary structures (and therefore incompatable filesystems). I'm assuming not as it would create a problem for iPods as well as other firewire hard drives, but boot support for different partitioning schemes worries me a bit more.
I don't care if I can't run Forth in my bios any more (in fact, Intel's new BIOS scheme they did for the Itanium is nice) but I really hope that ease of integration with intel chipsets doesn't get in the way of legacy support.
Would you do it for some scoobie crack?
Dude, it totally is!! I ran iPhoto in OS X, then I ran it on the same box within PearPC from inside XP and it was INSANELY slow!! APPLE RULEZ!!!1
If I were AppleInsider, I'd be ashamed to print this. Of course, it's not likely that AppleInsider could be ashamed of anything, so there you go ;-)
Really, wake me up when there's an article where someone publishes comparative numbers of PostgeSQL inserts or NSImage composites or timed renders of Safari web pages.
And no, I'm not really interested in Rosetta performance as much as I'm interested in native app performance. I'm interested, don't get me wrong. Just not as interested.
In various interviews with Apple VP's that occured after the macworld announcement, they have officially stated they WILL NOT ALLOW MAC OSX TO RUN ON ANYTHING BUT THEIR DRM'D MACHINES.
This is a fact.
If you'd do a little googling, you'd have discovered this.
I remember way back Intel had this prototype system, it was in a pyramid shaped box and it had no legacy hardware whatsoever in it. They showed Windows booting on it in seconds and said this could be the future of where things were going, a sealed box that the user would never open up.. (Not a good idea in a lot of respects). What ever happened to that? There's no reason to put floppy controllers on most boards these days. You can get a USB floppy if you really really need one. Likewise, for 90% of the population they could get away with no serial/parallel ports. (There's way to much scientific equipment however that still relies on these interfaces... I'm so sick to death of parallel port dongles by companies too lazy to come up with a USB version)
What's the hurry?
:)
If it's hardware lust, that pleasure only lasts until the first upgrade is 'announced', let alone available. Plus I don't think anyone, anywhere really *needs* an iPod. You want an iPod.
Wait until the Intel boxes come along, then buy a dual G5. You'll get a great deal, because you'll be a buyer in a sellers market! There's a sweet-spot for hardware purchases - and It's different for every platform, it's up to you to do some research to find out what is real 'value for money' for what you intend to do with the box.
I wasted thousands before I realised that.
I feel an Osborne lesson coming. I actually thought about buying a new Mac, but the day I thought it would be a good idea, Apple had the guts to state they were going to Intel in a year or so. Since I don't like buying hardware that gets depreciated in a year, I waited.
If lots of people do that, Apple won't be amused....
Intel 3 GHz P4.. kinda in the midrange of PC hardware. I want to know how OS X86 would run on my new home system .. Athlon X2 4400+ SLI mobo.
So if you think about waiting for an Intel PowerMac, think 1.5 years. But even then, Apple is not reknown for getting the first revision right, plus they have a major platform shift to deal with. And it will take years to have an Intel-native software catalog the size of the current PPC one.
The MWSF refresh could bring dual core dual processors. Or maybe not. But anyway it won't be too much of a difference from the current line, so I think now's a good time to buy.
Tuff that Smatters.
"It is unclear as of yet how different the Mac x86 will be from a standard PC."
As such it is impossible to say that generic hardware + OSX couldn't be hacked to work together. While Apple claims that it won't work past experience with hacked Xboxes and such have shown that where there is a will there is a way.
I don't care one way or another, I'm just suggesting that since we don't have the hardware we can't discuss anything in absolutes.
what a roller coaster slashdot is. one post everyone has uptimes to be proud of, next post it's all about needing fast boot times.
But by the time they did that, the $500 market had become the $250 market...
Horseshit. They're running this stuff under Rosetta (oooh, a web browser is snappy on a 3.6ghz processor!), which does NOT run Altivec code. Altivec-enabled apps on a G5 will undoubtedly stomp a native Intel app on one of these developer rigs. That, and this is Appleinsider, so take it with a grain of salt. These guys are way off the mark so often that it isn't even funny.
That's why I qualified by saying "not in any foreseeable future".
"But it's been two years now with no significant progress (2.0 GHz-> 2.7 GHz), so yeah, it's pretty long in the tooth now."
Hm.
In two years, we saw a 35% increase in megahertz on the G5 (700MHz / 2GHz). In the same two years, we saw a 26% percent increase in Pentiums (800 MHz / 3GHz). So are you implying that the 3GHz Pentiums are "long in the tooth"?
By the way, the bus in the 2.7 GHz Mac is faster than the one in the 2 GHz (1.35GHz per CPU vs. 1GHz per CPU). So there is some tuning going on.
It says that Windows XP performs at "blazing speeds". Is that due to MS? ;)
Sleep mode has never really worked on Windows PCs, so most PC users and even recent switchers don't realize just how well sleep mode works on a Mac. *Certainly* Linux users don't generally know.
It is all about how well written the device drivers are. Many crappy ones on windows don't sleep right, etc.
Apple has a big win with such limited hardware support.
Um, maybe because you were running it in an emulator?
Technically, since this is Windows XP we are talking about (thus 10% processor usage in idle), and its running on a Pentium 4, then it IS running at "blazing" speeds.
Better put out that fire.
I'm with you! 100%! Bought my Dual 2.0 PowerMac after the announcement. Perfectly happy, and i will never buy another Windows/Dell/whatever. (read: non-mac) ever again.
I get 28s boot-time on an 800MHz Powerbook w/640M RAM and a 5400rpm disk. "10s" for a new(ish) desktop machine with more memory and a decent disk sounds about right, give or take. Especially if Apple have been building for x86 for the last eleventy frillion years, and, one would hope, have been able to optimize things a bit.
I'm meant to be, what, about this "news"? Surprised or something? This would be newsworthy if it mentioned '80286' and '640M' somewhere. Or OS X 10.9...
But I wasn't!! I wa srunning it in Windows XP HOme!!! Mybe I should upgrade to SP 2???
The machines are 3.6GHz, compared to the current 2.5GHz G5's. Also, the GUI part of OSX is still 32bit, because moving it to 32bit doesn't offer any significant advantages, and slows down the code some.
Yeah, as much as I'd love to believe this, the logical part of my brain says no way.
Plus with details from the article as technical as "it's fast," and "blazing speeds," you just know that's some newsworthy stuff there.
Also the opposite is also going to be true. An intel compiled binary is going to stomp all over a PPC binary run with Rosetta.
Why even bother making such a comparison, and even more so, why bother making such a claim?
If you absolutely have to run PPC code on Intel you will, and you're not going to be impressed at the speed.
And as for comparing the intel hardware to PPC hardware it's Apples and oranges as far as I'm concerned. It seemed like the article was going as far as to say an Intel osx machine is just as fast when running PPC binaries with an emulator than a top of the line dual processor G5 running native PPC binaries?
Come on! Give us a break. Those would be fine claims to make, as long as they were backed with something a little more concrete than "my web browser seemed to run about the same."
Like I said, I'd love to believe this, I'm no fanboy either way (intel/ppc), and I've never owned a Mac, but this whole article is trite.
If you've got some developers with access to the machines, just spend the 15 minutes and do a couple benchies.
Entering sleep mode even while compiling software is no problem. Picks up right where you left off and builds fine.
And if the end user notices nothing (or next to nothing) when using an Intel Mac, I am fine with it. I'll be happier if the end users notice increased performance, because we know that that is what the whole Intel switch is about.
As a technician, though, the notion of a BIOS in a Mac gives me some problems. I noticed that the developer Macs don't do booting over FireWire, though they do boot over USB. I think Apple should be able to work through these shortcomings by the time their first production-ready CPUs are shipping. Open Firmware allows for some cool stuff, and if those things can be accomplished with a BIOS (or an updated equivalent), I'll deal with it.
I just want to make sure the end users are happy and don't complain about weird things going on with their "cutting edge" Intel Macs.
You're referring to sleep mode, which shuts down most everything but keeps the RAM charged.
The poster was referring to "Hibernation" which dumps RAM to disk and completely shuts off the machine - no battery required.
PC's have been able to do both for quite some years now.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
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Bye!
SeqBox
As another poster noted, it's all about the drivers. Try a Thinkpad running Windows XP (Vaios are good too, I hear).
Go somewhere random
The difference now is that they have much better emulation. Rosetta isn't a basic emulator at all, it dynamically translates PPC opcodes to x86 while optimizing. The core technology can even be used to "translate" x86 code to x86 code and run it faster than the original, because it can do things like eliminate branches.
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
As has been said, that is merely rumor.
Consider that no one has gotten Mac OS X/86 running on anything but Apple's developer platform (although there've been some rumors). If you try to install the software on a regular PC, it pops up and says, "Nope. Sorry."
Essentially, Mac OS can figure out what kind of machine it's being booted from (ie, a PowerBook G4 made in 2003). Go check out "System Profile" on Mac OS X. It shows the machine's serial number. I assume this is in a ROM chip somewhere on the motherboard.
So once it has that info, I'd imagine it has a table that says, "Okay, I expect to have this kind of drive controller, this kind of USB chip, this kind of ethernet controller, etc.." It then checks to see if those components are there. If they aren't? Then something must be wrong with the machine. Tell the user to take it in for repair.
Your average Intel clone won't have that ROM. Even assuming someone figures that part out and fakes it to say, "Hey, I'm a PowerMac G6i", they'll still have to have the exact same chips as whatever Apple is selling in the mythical PowerMac G6i or the machine will assume something is wrong with it and not boot.
See? No DRM chip required.
Well let's see:
Word 5.1 (emulated) outperformed Word 6 (native) in any serious performance test (loading and saving files, search and replace, etc.)
WriteNow 4.0 (emulated) outperformed both.
Studio/32 (emulated) remained the best bitmap editor on the planet. I continued using it cheerfully for years.
Any true PC geek knows that AMD chips are better then Intel chips.
This solves nothing! hehe
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
Apple hasn't been keen on DRM until the music industry came along. OS X doesn't even have a key. In fact, i think Apple software has to cost $300 or more before they consider putting keys on it, even considering that the OS would be something everyone would want.
The more plausible situation is to have the Mac boot with OpenFirmware. No PCs with OpenFirmware == No Problem. They'll probably throw in a check for the UniNorth, where they connect all their I2C sensors, which is something nobody else would have.
I have yet to see the "new apple" do something that would indicate that they're going to "DRM" in the sense that you are thinking.
How long does it take to boot from the time the machine is powered on? Boot time from the Apple logo is irrelevant.
I have a website. It's about Macs.
Hey this is totally off-topic, but I read your Farmers sucks website and I'd just like to recommend that you speak with an attorney right away. You should have spoken with one right away, and yes, you are right, you should have had her take an ambulance to the hospital. The pain and suffering that your wife went through (and you to, for all the hassle and emotional distress you've put up with) are the reason why we have a tort system in the first place.
I know that ethical people like yourself are the least likely to want to sue someone, but believe me when I tell you that when a company treats you in this way, this is the only recourse you can have. I believe a lot of accident attorneys will give you an initial consultation free of charge. Good luck and I hope everything works out ok. I know I won't be choosing Farmer's insurance after reading the horror story that you went through.
"When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon
Ehh, Even apple has problems. Try unplugging a firewire hard drive while your computer is asleep. I've not done it, but I've seen the posts from people complaining about crashes in OSX as a consequence. I certainly have crashed my Powerbook unplugging a USB device while it was asleep. I haven't tried it in a while, so maybe it's been fixed in Tiger.
Network Security: It always comes down to a big guy with a gun.
Yeah. I'm working on prototyping some hardware ideas I have and it would cost me orders of magnitude more money to develop for USB instead of the serial port. Serial ports are extremely simple, reliable and straightforward to develop things for. The same goes for parallel ports. USB and Firewire have about 150 layers of engineer crap wrapped around them and you can't talk to a computer through them using regular mid-range microcontrollers, because they're not fast enough to clock onto them. Yeah, there are controllers with USB built-in but they're bigger and more expensive. The USB guys should've created an entry-level mode for simple devices.
I think it will impact sales per se, but not any more then it is already affecting sales. Let me explain.
I bought a 15" Powerbook in September 2003 - this system is a G4 at 1.25 GHz. I love it but I would really like something faster (and with a better graphics chip) so it could be a real desktop replacement. But, this simply doesn't exist. Today's fastest powerbooks are still G4s at 1.67 GHz - an increase of just 34% in nearly 2 years. This isn't enough to make me buy a new machine. The way it was looking, I was waiting for Powerbook G5s - but it wasn't happening (and now, of course, it won't happen).
I am guessing that the significantly faster machines (both desktops and notebooks) with significantly help Apple sales, but will not hurt them more than the lack of speed was already. Increases in performance will correlate to sales, and if IBM was unable to deliver but Intel can, than I think it will help Apple immensely. If people need an Apple box they'll buy one, but right now they're just too slow or too expensive for people to consider (i.e., the fast machines are too expensive).
I look forward to finally replacing my Powerbook with a nice speedy Intel-powered machine in a year or two, and I bet many Apple users will be with me. The new speed will then make it a lot easier to get new switchers on board.
The space unintentionally left unblank.
The reported threading problems were not, in fact, threading problems at all. Instead, they are the result of F_FULLFSYNC fcntl. You will probably find this thread interesting.
i n-dev/2005/F eb/msg00072.html)
I too read the Anandtech review of OS X server performance and decided right then and there that OS X server was not (yet) ready for primetime. As much as I love my PowerBook, I had to come to terms that an x86 Linux box was much better as a MySQL server. Anyone that can't come to terms with that plain and simple fact is a platform zealot.
From TFA that you linked to:
3. Some say that the performance problem may be related to the built-in F_FULLFSYNC fcntl which will ask the drive to flush all of its buffered data to disk.
This has been questioned and at the OS level it is always on. it is possible to turn this off if the app allows it. However this is a tradeoff between speed and data integrity.
(http://lists.apple.com/archives/darw
Written by the dev who wrote BeOS and now works for Apple - excellent thread.
That's not reassuring to hear that it's a tradeoff between speed and data integrity. The beauty of a Mac is that you shouldn't have to tune it. I should never have to modify kernel parameters on a Mac, much less operate in an unstable mode that might corrupt data just to get performance only half as good as a Linux box, instead of 1/10th. This, along with poor onsite support (we were told that in our area in the northeast, in one of the biggest tech hubs of the country, we couldn't expect same day service from Apple) is the reason why Apple hasn't made inroads into the enterprise computing market.
Believe me, I want them to. I use a PowerBook, and every other Unix sysadmin at my company has either an iBook or a PowerBook, plus we all have iPods, so we are big Apple fans, but we're just not willing to drink the kool-aid and put our jobs on the line out of platform zealotry.
"When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon
The biggest gotcha with Rosetta is that it will not translate opcodes for G4 or G5 processors. There are already some applications for Mac OS X that require a G4 processor.... these *will not* run via Rosetta and will require an x86 recompile to run under the new Mactel machines.
Damn. I've still got a stack of Intel Inside slug stickers
I guess I can't continue to stick them overtop all the Intel Inside plates I run across, so I need some creative ideas as to what I should do with them. Any ideas?
G4 Optimized Firefox 1.1 pre-alpha nightlies (fast!)
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There's no reason in principal that Altivec couldn't be emulated, but I strongly suspect it's not supported because because emulating it would be slower than forcing applications to use alternate code paths that don't require altivec.
Not all applications can do that, so it's a problem, but it's not like Apple to make things complicated by adding extra options.
I rarely criticize things I don't care about.
I am under the impression that it is -- excluding more esoteric PC hardware(Xeon, Opteron, etc...). Why should it be so shocking that a top of the line PC would perform on par with an older dual 2Ghz Mac?
It just seems sensible to me. Now the real argument would be a historical cost/performance one. But then again, most Mac users, myself included, have always paid more for hardware in order to use the Mac OS. It is really a win-win for us. Faster for less money.
We apologise for the fault in this post. Those responsible have been sacked. -- Signed RICHARD M. NIXON
You don't get the joke.
That would be a very short list considering that most of the MS approved hardware sucks ass when compared to Apple hardware. If Jobs decided to move to Intel, then you know that they must have some technology that DOESN'T SUCK. For instance, as ubiquitous as Creative Labs hardware is, Apple can't support it because it's really low quality compared to Apple's on board audio (designed by Bang Olufsen). Apple knows quality which is why they use all the highest quality chips culled from the very best of the industry. While many of you don't know this, the reason Apple (under Jobs' guidance) made the switch to Intel is because just this year Intel chips finally broke the performance barrier that existed between x86 and PPC. IBM was not abe to deliver a strong contender to even the 32-bit Pentiums that Intel made available to Apple this year.
A few more little known facts: Apple uses all Bose speakers even down to the smallest speakers in their systems. And Bose designs the case section where the s
peaker will be housed in order to provide high quality, room filling sound no matter what system you have. Digidesign and Mark of the Unicorn wrote the microcode for all music processing features on all Macs. The startup tone for Apple Macs were designed by: Wayne Shorter, Brian Eno, Aphex Twin, and the latest is from Black Tape for Blue Girl. There's a rumour that Plaid will be doing their next startup tone. Obviously, the highest of tastes and standards even for something as simple as the startup tone. I believe that a subsidiary of Volkswagen is responsible for the latest case shell designs. I've also heard that the system clock chip is made by Bulova for the highest level of accuracy. So why is it that Microsoft can't manage to get that calibre of quality behind it's OS. Christ! They don't even really make hardware. All they have to worry about is a freaking OS, right...? Trust me. It all comes down to the hardware control. That's why all those big names in the highest of the high art circles are involved.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
PC emulation software has existed on macs for a while, and while dual booting one of these things with XP would be neat, imo it will be even more interesting to run PC software directly under os x without the overhead of instruction translation. heck, maybe apple will help take wine to the next level...
and did your "clean" reboot, BOOM!
There is a spark in every single flame bait point.
No, I got it. But actually, I wouldn't be surprised if I hadn't because nobody has gotten any of my jokes today.
"Intel motherboards are loaded with obsolete crap (floppy controllers, parallel ports, RS-232 serial, etc, etc, etc)."
Ohh yea, I mean, floppy controllers and parallel ports really drag down my system. I can't believe how slow my FX-55 system is - and it's all because of that little chip in the corner of the board that provides backward compatibility with 20 years of hardware! Dammit!!
"I don't mind an Intel processor based system as long as we can leave behind all of the cruft and crap that has been dragging down the PC for the last 10 years or so."
Such as what? The aforementioned serial or floppy ports? These don't affect performance, and most people don't use them these days anyways. They're there for backwards compatibility and many boards and PC's shipping these days don't have them.
The only major thing left in a PC that's affecting the system at all is the old style BIOS they still use - and it doesn't affect performance at all, it just makes the bootstrap a bit less flexible then it should be.
"In fact it will be interesting to see what Intel can do on a more restricted platform."
Nothing. If the hardware configuration strayed too far from the development units, they wouldn't be very good development units would they be? The dev boxes run XP just fine.
Maybe they'll replace the BIOS with something like Openfirmware or maybe not. Maybe they'll put in a DRM chip. But it won't make a shits difference once the kernel loads.
"Similarly I'm not interested in running Windows XP on a intel system designed for MacOS."
Who cares what you're interested in. There's a lot MORE people interested in running their current OS on a flashy new Mac then there are people that are against it.
"The ability to do so via RedBox or dualboot is a nice feature and might help Apple get into some corporate environments "
Apple won't ship Macs with Windows, thus there would be just as much corporate interest as there is now. Which is not much.
"I already have an Intel box to run Windows XP "
Maybe there's people that don't? Or maybe some people do but they're old and need upgrading, like the Macs, but need to run some old software that only runs on Windows? Maybe they don't like VirtualPC, or the software won't run on VirtualPC?
There's a lot of reasons why dual booting into Windows could be beneficial.
" I can't see how putting it on the Mac would make the experience any better as the lame OS architecture"
Ahh, now we get to your real motive. You are anti-Microsoft and will say anything if it drives your point, albiet misguided.
The Windows NT architecture isn't that bad. Microsoft's implimentation of Windows could use some work, but it's not a bad performer and it's definately got a lot of strong points. I've got no love for Microsoft either, but I'm neutral enough to appreciate strengths and weaknesses of any system. You aren't.
To Apple's benefit, they've been pretty good about maintaining compatbility with old Mac software while maintaining a pretty secure system in OSX. But I dare say that Apple, put in the position of maintainign a compatible system on x86, would have had a much harder time since x86 has always been such a moving target, and Apple wouldn't have had complete control over it.
This isn't surprising though, since Apple has always maintained a closed system. If Microsoft had that same opportunity, we might not have had such gaffs as Windows 95 and Windows ME. Of course, they would be just another Apple, since some other company would have exploited the commodity x86 hardware.
Historically, x86 systems haven't been the best, they haven't been the fastest, and there's been a lot of little compatibility things that has held it back. But if you take a look at a modern x86 system (which you obviously haven't) they're extremely advanced, fast, and all that legacy stuff has been pushed aside far enough that they don't matter anymore.
Get a grip. Enjoy technology. You don't always have to pick a side and then fight for it.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
I just so happen to be reading Gravity's Rainbow...
big uptimes are easy :-) just don't turn your computer off or reboot it or have a power failure.
voila, big uptime!
sleeping on macs is nice, too
P-plate adventurer
i honestly can not remember if it was in the Mac OS or Windows but a few years ago i remember hearing about this as an upcoming feature. i think it was on a Mac rumors site.
iifc what made it cool was the idea to do it for laptops. kind of an extended sleep mode. when you went into hibernation it would save the current status to some flash memory kind of thing and then when you powered back up it would resume as is. i am guessing there was some major issue with this or we would have seen it get released.
in general i guess rebooting is good because it takes care of little maintenance tasks. memory leaks or secret processes get reset, a lot of systems scan for spyware or viruses at startup/login. that could be changed but yeah.
i honestly do not know enough about computer systems from an electrical engineering or programming standpoint to know if it is possible to freeze the software and restart it like that. i am guessing not. it need some sort of intermediate state where it goes to sleep then wakes back up.
The smaller figures were the differences, not the original speeds!
PPC: 2000MHz -> 2700MHz = 35% increase
x86: 3000HHz -> 3800MHz = 26.67% increase
"Apple uses all Bose speakers even down to the smallest speakers in their systems."
so apple is into innaccurate audio reproduction from highly overpriced and overrated equipment. hard to say i'm shocked. they probably design the speaker housings more for looks than for quality audio. or at least it wouldn't surprise me if that's what happened.
i'm not sure about the other brands you mentioned, but i'm quite positive that bose is not the brand to buy when you're talking sound reproduction. didn't altec lansing previuosly design drivers and enclosures for apple sound systems?
computer speakers aren't that great anyway though. nice headphones and full size stereos (it's much easier to design a good speaker when you have legitimate amounts of room to work with, especially with subs) are the way to go.
Well, there is a one in three chance that this study is nonsense.
For instance, as ubiquitous as Creative Labs hardware is, Apple can't support it because it's really low quality compared to Apple's on board audio (designed by Bang Olufsen)
I won't get into the debate about the quality (or lack therof) of Creative's products, except to say that there is a thriving market for aftermarket audio products for the Mac platform (M-Audio being one such vendor).
My point of contention with your post is your assertation that Apple employs the aid of Bang and Olufsen for its built-in audio. While searching on Google reveals others using superlatives that compare Apple's design to the afformentioned company's products, there is no evidence of collaboration. There are aftermarket products made for lines such as the iPod, but that's as close as it gets.
A few more little known facts: Apple uses all Bose speakers even down to the smallest speakers in their systems. And Bose designs the case section where the speaker will be housed in order to provide high quality, room filling sound no matter what system you have.
Furthermore, Bose has only had a limited relationship with Apple, starting and ending with the PowerMac 6400 family. And for the record, the logevity of this particular piece of design has been lacking. Apple has collaborated with other companies on their speaker design, such as utilizing Harman Kardon enclosures/speakers starting with the iMac DV.
Your references to startup tones are tangential, more a matter of taste and style than metrics. Apple succeeds in the the fields of arts primarily because of their decent first-party applications, and additionally because of their ISVs and aftermarket hardware. Many creative types still call the Mac home, and I don't think it's because of trendy start-up tones or hardware companies.
As to Apple's success and appeal, I wholly agree it is due in large part to the bottom-to-top control they have of the platform. I may have made mistakes in calling you out on some of these facts you are presenting. I have spent nearly 10 years working in and around Apple's various offerings, and have admired their industrial design (with a number of exceptions). That said, I would like to think that whatever zeal that I may have for them is grounded in reality. If you can find reference to any of your above claims, I would appreciate that they be presented for sake of perusal.
Apple has said that developers should not depend on the BIOS system being used in a release model. Apple likely threw these dev boxes together quickly and inexpensively, so they haven't had time to design all the extra stuff a final version would have, like Open Firmware.
As was stated earlier, the boxes are fast because they lack many things that would slow them down, things that are needed in a release version. Same goes for the developer's x86 OS X. An interesting point was made on Apple's overclocking to provide the speed needed for updated model releases. Case in point: As far as I know, there is no official 1.67 GHz G4, yet here I sit with a 1.67 GHz 17" Powerbook (the aluminum burns like hell if you try to play a game with it in your lap, but that sucks the battery dry anyway, otherwise it is great). Also, the x86 versions were created to ensure that x86 specific bugs were caught, and little x86 optimization exists in the developer versions of x86 OS X. Once they get the ball rolling, release versions will be better optimized. One point I think makes a difference is OS X and its open source base are well coded, with none of the insanity that is Windows code, and as such, they can be easily ported and run decently on anything (they are not specifically optimized for one architecture, until Apple does it for a release). The first couple of Intel Macs will likely be slower at (ported) existing Mac apps than the last PPC Macs until OS X is optimized better for x86. Games (as well as any app that is badly ported (read: not optimized or well coded), games just happen to be a great example) will likely run better on Intel Macs, as well as any new ports from Windows that were inspired by the switch to Intel.
Blah, blah, blah, PPC is a superior architecture, blah, blah, x86 is outmoded junk. It just happens that IBM doesn't really care about Apple as much as they should, and Intel has tons of cash to throw at x86 to make it faster. I'll be getting an Intel Mac, likely a desktop (I like to alternate, a desktop, a laptop, a desktop, etc.) when they are 64 bit, dual core, and properly optimized. That is, if their x86 laptops are anything like the Powerbooks compared to the Powermacs (way behind).
Oh, and I'm sure that Intel strong-armed their way into this deal, because I know Apple would have taken AMD's dual core 64 bit solutions in a heartbeat. What with the lawsuit from AMD and all, we may see Intel Macs only for a release or two, before swapping to AMD. Regardless, Apple keeps a tight platform with few processor variants, so I doubt Intel and AMD will coexist (at least not in the same model line). I would bet that Intel would hold Apple hostage if they tried to use AMD at the same time. I imagine that Intel will give its all for Apple, at least for a while, until Apple, and Mac users, are loyal to them alone.
Last Post!
This article is thin on everything. In fact, it's little more than a mutated form of the inevitable discussions of increased "snappiness" that occur every time Apple updates either hardware or system software. The information in the article is all vague: "as little as 10 seconds," "It's fast," etc. Most ludicrous of all is the claim that the PPC build of Firefox runs just as quickly on the x86 Mac as it does on native hardware. Bollocks, sez I. Rosetta's nice, but it's no replacement for native and never will be. Like Classic, it's value will diminish with time. It's intended to ease a transition, in this case to universal binaries. When Apple deems that transition complete, Rosetta will, I think, be deprecated, if not abandoned altogether, barring any decisions in Cupertino to switch to, say, sparc.
I've got access to a Mactel dev box, and the performance is good, but it's not so much better as to be revelatory. Compiling the source for several projects I work on is faster on the dual G5 2GHz machine than the Mactel (gcc4 on both machines). While not a great measure of performance, at least it's tangible. Of course, if you prefer to accept the nebulous claims from one of several notorious Mac rumor sites, be my guest.
If you want a Mac, why wait for several moths to a year or more?
Instead just buy whatever Mac you like now and enjoy it - after all you'll have to spend some time learning a new OS anyway. If the newer Intel macs are really a lot more powerful - then sell the current Mac, which is easy to do since used Macs hold value well. And yes PPC macs will hold value just as well as new softwrae will still be comiled for them for several years anyway.
If you want to maximize resale value consider an Apple laptop of some sort, even really old ones fetch quite a lot.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If you need it, buy it. If you can and want to wait, do so.
I have a Powerbook 12" with a G4 at 1.33 GHz. I have had it for almost a year and was considering moving up to the 15". For me, the speed bump would be even smaller right now.
because with a good MB, the same Intel processor would run, what, XP faster?
...
...
oh yes, we buy apples because we boycott Intel,
and for the posh design,
and for the fact it is a *nix based stable system
to play with Darwin
pretty sour apples then
And this is a good thing. Many of us keep PCs on hand for professional and gaming reasons. Being able to get rid of my PC?
That's value added, and enough to make me consider one of the new Intel-based machines. You can be damn sure Apple realizes as much.
There's no way a P4 will run a PPC emulation at 70% of the speed of native apps, unless there's something terribly wrong with native app performance. Optimization matters, and even if they're doing absolutely brilliant transcoding they're translating code optimized for a larger register file into the P4's tiny register set... if a native compiler can't beat that with one optimizer tied behind its back there's something seriously wrong with that compiler.
As part of that, when one does a software upgrade on these, I've been trying to talk to the developers (hardware) that fast boot times are actually important. Take a typical Juniper router for example. The "Routing Engine" is a Intel processor running their own flavor of OS. This means when the system boots, it still has to do all those booring POST checks, wait for the disks to seek, run any option roms, etc.. They generally know what the box is going to do, boot from one of the 3 media choices (LS, CF, Disk). If your network is down for a software upgrade of some routing/switching device, and you can't get to your local WoW server (unless it's during a maint window ;-) ) or dial 911 on your cool VoIP phone, it starts to make a difference. The OS can generally decide the best way to bring your hardware online these days, we're not dealing with IRQ conflicts anymore.
Saving 2-3 minutes in router boot time is valuable. While the individual value of a node within the network it may be hard to see where that 2 mins is, if your kernel panics or something else ReallyBad(tm) happens, those 2 mins help in getting the routing protocols back up that much faster..
Even so, they call it the cloud for a reason, and that reason is that when a packet goes in to the cloud you can't tell where it's going because the route possibilities provided by router redundancy is seemingly infinite. If I can't dial 911 on my VOIP phone because my ISP is rebooting one router, or even several routers at once because of something like a power failure, I need a new ISP. Redundancy is there to provide alternate methods of service in critical situations. And if it truly is because of something ReallyBad(tm), I doubt I'll give a shit about the internet, and attempting communication would most likely be futile even with a land line.
I mean, you're really comparing apples to apples...
wait a tick!
rhY
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
My Acorn RISC-PC boots in less than 2 seconds...
----- condisco quorumque...
Oh really? I guess you've never seen this ad then?
OK, so when is Apple going to become mainly an OS company? They should have done this decades ago, offering a better interface on the same damned hardware everyone is already using.
Attack him for not calling desktop applications "actual applications", but the point still remains valid.
Any CPU intensive program will still suffer greatly in the emulation process.
On the PearPC mailing-list, we had some discussion as to the performance of Rosetta and PearPC. For CPU intensive tasks, it's not really all that much better.
I am unamerican, and proud of it!
So Firefox will fail on most webforms (like /. login) just as fast as on a G5?
COOL!
Im more of a windows person my self but I may buy a mac because of all this. I also heard that they were going to be much cheaper too...
Technabyte - Read my tech news blog.
"Unix users" isn't synonymous with "people who'll try running OS X on unsupported hardware".
Exactly.... segmented memory was left behind with real mode (8086). Protected mode drop the segmentation.
-bc
You know, I've heard people say Windows XP is "fast" because it boots quickly. ;-) Furthermore, I've found it commonplace for people to want to think of boot-up time as a measure of their computer's performance. This, of course, is only among those people who actually shut off their computers ;) (excluding laptops here, because we all shut those off, or the battery dies in suspend mode after a week) Still remember back when even I would shut off my computer when not using it.
Of course now I never shut off most of my actively-used non-laptop computers. In fact, I think the only times I've ever shut down any of my main machines was to add/change hardware. (likewise, they only get rebooted for hardware changes or OS patches that require a reboot)
What a silly article. Of course the newer macs are going to be faster than the older generation. Why would Apple switch to Intel if they couldn't provide a faster chip? Imagine the headlines:
"New Intel-based Macs not as fast as the G5"
Yes, and it was reincarnated (to some degree) with PAE, which is the extension that allows your 32-bit processor to have (I believe) a 36-bit address space. This is generally necessary for machines with more than 3GB of physical RAM.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
This way of pricing makes MORE sense if you look at Apple as a hardware company that develops compelling software (so you'll buy the hardware) instead of just a software company.
Don't expect a kick in performance from the Intel switch.
Today's fastest powerbooks are still G4s at 1.67 GHz - an increase of just 34% in nearly 2 years.
2003 - Pentium M 1.7 GHz.
2005 - Pentium M 2.13 GHz.
Improvement: 25%.
Nobody is improving performance as fast as they used to, and the Power PC has actually done better than the Pentium over the same period.
Unless someone comes out with six seconds.
Step into my office.... because youre fucking fired!
I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Powermacs on fire on the Low End Mac swap list. iMacs for pickup just to save the postage. All these Macs will be lost in the switch, like Lisas in the landfill. Time to upgrade.
I think a lot of people also turn off their machines at night, and then fire them up as needed.
Given, I could send my machine into "Hibernate", but since my machine is fairly quick to start up, I don't worry about that. I have 2 Linux boxes up 24x7 (Firewall, File Server) using their power management features for the disks etc. As well, I have a SageTV box on 24x7 as a VCR replacement. (Oh yea, the wife never turns off her machine, unless I do it for her..... Sends me up the wall sometimes..)
So, from a Windows standpoint, I don't think that most people would leave their machines on all the time, and that's probably why boot time for them "seems" to be so important.
Karnal
If you continue reading, you'll discover this is not a Macintosh specific problem. This data integrity problem is part of the drive hardware -- every drive -- not part of the Macintosh.
Every operating system faces this tradeoff. If you pull a power plug, your odds are about 50% of reproducing an out-of-order, partial commit. Mac OS X is the only known operating system to pick data integrity over speed.
Personally, I think this tradeoff should be left up to the user. Seems a UPS would solve much of this. It also seems like the world needs a permanent solution, which would probably be for a capacitor every hard drive with enough power to commit whatever is in the cache.
Speaking as someone who owns three Macs, the built-in Mac audio is really crap. I use an M-Audio external USB audio interface, and the difference in sound quality, even using midrange Cambridge Soundworks speakers, is insane.
Mac audio may be less crap than the audio built in to many $300 PCs, but that doesn't make it good.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Replace
"If you did, the billions of dollars and millions of man-hours Microsoft has thrown at the problem in the last two decades would have figured out how."
with
"If you could, Microsoft would have figured out how by now-- they've thrown billions of dollars and millions of man-hours at the problem in the last two decades."
I wonder how good/bad it is for hard drives to be shutting off and spinning up so often... Laptop drives may be designed with that in mind, but not sure about desktop drives.
When I first got a desktop motherboard with such "power management" features, I suspect that the constant stop/start cycles on the hard drives eventually lead to one of the drives failing on me. (of course this was many years ago)
Nope.
...and iTunes is still running through Rosetta.
The shipping devkits only have iPhoto and iTunes installed.
iMovie an iDVD work nicely as PPC binaries loaded from a standard OS X/iLife install.
You probably meant to say "wrote the BeOS file system".
Maybe it's worth noting that the Twentieth Anniversary Mac had a Bose designed audio system. That said, as I recall it was poorly designed and had a persistent hum that some users never found a way to be rid of.
They are also praising how a PowrePC Firefox build starts as fast under Rosetta as a native version.
Now how much of a "cold" firefox startup (cold meaning disk files not yet paged into memory) goes into a cpu bottleneck? on my system there is only a small cpu spike when doing a cold firefox start while the disk happily rattles away for a few seconds.
with that lack of detail in the original article it sounds suspiciously like it's either empty hyping or apple distributing those developer boxes to not so technical people as well who would not see those details (unlikely, even for a company like apple).
[i have an opinion and i am not afraid to use it]
I know, I know, benchmarks are not everything, but it would be interesting if they could have run nbench on their new shiny macs so we had some reference to compare it with.
The G5 could never compete with high-end x86 hardware and this is now obvious even to the mac fanatics. Jobs is a smart guy and he realized that you can't polish a G5 anymore. This is going to be an eye-opening experience for the Mac crowd. On the other hand, there will be no more "mac" hardware... all apple components are now derived from the x86 market (GFX card, HD, RAM, CPU) with extra polishing and packing. Maybe this is what the world actually wants, instead of "alternative" but inferior hardware. After all, a large part of the mac experience has always been the "package" (meaning looks and ergonomics) instead of the contents.
The good news is that now that the playing field is actually "level", we can see whose appz are really faster/better. If OS X boots in 10" and Longhorn needs 10', this can no longer be attributed to the "mac hardware".
P.
They've been loading web pages to test *CPU* speed?
"MacIntel might have smaller lag sometimes". That's the result of this test.
And they praise Internet Explorer's speed. It must be that special Apple's "blazing Windows XP" version...
Your're assuming that just because Apple will be using Intel's CPU's that they are also obliged to use the chipsets. Who ever said that would be the case? From interviews with Intel, they are working with Apple to do whatever Apple needs to get the Intel mobos up to snuff. Remember, what the developers have now are hack boxes, not showroom.
...well, let's hope not.
Carry over Northbridge and Southbridge to Mac with the attendant bottlenecks? Please.
Also keep in mind that Apple has never blushed at doing something different with I/O in general, and buses in particular.
Try not to blink when the new MacTel boxes come out and the logic boards are nothing like what you Chipzilla types are accustomed to using.
No matter how many times you keep saying it is, it's not, in its entirety, included on the devkits.
Let's play Logic:
The Intel devkits come with one DVD. One 4GB DVD (1.8GB is filler).
iLife fits on one 3.6GB DVD. iDVD and GarageBand are space leeches.
Mac OS X Tiger and Xcode and the bootable install system take up 2.2GB.
2.2GB + 3.6GB (ignoring the 1.8 filler) > 4GB.
that sounds like bull. iDVD is one of the few apps that REQUIRE a G4 while Rosetta only emulates a G3. I'd be very VERY surprised if all the iLife apps weren't included with the shipping Intel Macs.
It IS crazy silly. Especially since the disc included with the devkits is a single layer disc (capacity of 4.4GB) only holding about 4GB of information.
And I'm not saying they're lying. I'm sure they saw what they saw on the demo boxes Apple set up at WWDC.
I'm talking about the devkits sent to developers.
Speakers?
Who cares about the speakers? They're platform neutral. If you must have high quality sound, you get the bet digital audio speakers you can afford and a sound card with a fiber digital out.
Of course, if you don't have the money, then you get the 10$ pair of speakers from Compusa and be perfectly content.
I see your logic for admiring who made the startup sound. But it doesn't neccicarily follow that "If they pay that much attention to the starting beep, imagine what they do with the rest of the system."
Art is easily outsourced to proven designers. All you have to do is throw money at them. Good tech takes a lot of work and research to do right.
And I'm still trying to sell my Mac mini, which is 1 month old, for more than 2/3rds of what I paid for it.
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
Yes. If you *rewire the computer* while it's asleep, it may give you problems. :P
Unfortunately, a common use case for a laptop is:
1. Close the lid when not in use.
2. Take it with you.
It is easy to train people to unplug devices before closing the laptop when they are about to leave, but it is very difficult to train people to open a closed laptop, then unplug the devices, then reclose it just to take it with them.
That means that a lot of people are going to unplug things from their laptops when they are asleep.
And it is possible to poll the bus upon waking back up, so it isn't quite as scary as a rewire.
Besides, there are operating systems that allow such things (even allowing the number of processors to change while asleep), so it shouldn't be asking too much. Besides, apple should support common human behavior.
Network Security: It always comes down to a big guy with a gun.