Ars Technica Reviews Intel iMacs

Milton Waddams writes "Ars kick off what I'm sure will be a torrent of reviews of the of the new Intel iMac. Overall it looks like it's a bit faster than the iMac G5 and a bit slower than the PowerMac G5 dual core. I'm sure it will surprise many slashdotters to find out that Jobs' statements about the new iMac being twice as fast as the iMac G5 as being slightly over optimistic. AND it doesn't run Windows...yet..." I'm still waiting for the most important benchmark: frames per second in molten core combat.

Comments

Benchmarks, accuracy, and choice

[Space cowboy]

To be fair, Steve's statements were absolutely 100% accurate (assuming the figures are accurate, which I expect them to be). For that benchmark, the intel machine is 2x-3x faster. If anyone really expected them to provide not-the-best-benchmark-results, can I have some of what you're smoking ? And I have several bridges to sell you too...

My point is that the story write-up makes it sound like SJ is lying, and he's not. He's just presenting the best set of benchmarks he can, which is pretty much what I expect from the CEO of the company...

As for the multimedia-style benchmarks presented in the review, I think you can expect those to improve as Apple gets its collective head around SSE3. I would have thought the G5/G4 implementations would have been altivec'd to hell and back, and SSE doesn't have the immensely useful 'permute' operation, so the transform operation will have to be rewritten to SSE's strengths - I doubt that has happened yet...

Simon.

Re:Benchmarks, accuracy, and choice

[conteXXt]

not to mention the intel GMA900 graphics processor isn't exactly the speediest thing around.

1000fps in glxgears? I can beat that by a good 50% with a 4 year old NV GE440 go in my compaq laptop

watch what happens when there are nvidia drivers and ATI drivers available.

P.S. ATI 800 series cards do work (fully accelerated) on the development platform.

I'd post a link but the lawyers are loose.

Re:Benchmarks, accuracy, and choice

[tpgp]

To be fair, Steve's statements were absolutely 100% accurate (assuming the figures are accurate , which I expect them to be). For that benchmark, the intel machine is 2x-3x faster. [emphasis mine]

You've really just shown your bias haven't you? Absolutely 100% accurate, oh, unless they're not accurate.

Steve Jobs may not have been lying, but he was most certainly being deliberately deceitful.

I don't see such a huge moral gap between the two.

Re:Benchmarks, accuracy, and choice

[AKAImBatman]

You've really just shown your bias haven't you? Absolutely 100% accurate, oh, unless they're not accurate.

I think you've missed his point. This is a common industry practice used for just about every piece of hardware and software on the market. To single Steve Jobs out for this practice rather than accepting it as the "norm" shows a distinct anti-Mac bias.

Steve Jobs may not have been lying, but he was most certainly being deliberately deceitful.

It's hard to be deceitful when it comes to something as nebulous as benchmarks. Every benchmark you run will tell a different story. The result is that you can pull a variety of different conclusions from the benchmarks depending on how you spin it. Given that Steve Jobs is the CEO of Apple, we can expect that he will spin the benchmarks positively. On the flip-side, we can expect that the Mac haters will spin the benchmarks negatively. The ones to really listen to are the moderates who tell us whether we're generally being delivered what we're promised or not.

Re:Benchmarks, accuracy, and choice

[EvilTwinSkippy]

Well Duh. They used the average rather than the peak because that rating is what made their stuff look better than Intel's. What, are they going to publish a stat they makes their stuff look bad? No you just keep changing the test parameters until your stuff looks better.

Re:Benchmarks, accuracy, and choice

[squiggleslash]

Steve Jobs wasn't "singled out" for this, he just happened to be the subject when the issue was raised.

The fact is that lies and deception are (a) common and (b) shouldn't be. It is completely legitimate to (a) criticise liars and decievers, even if you haven't done so and (b) (as the submitter did) highlight lies and deceptions to reduce their impact. If Joe Blow tells me that Blow Inc's Widgets are "99% plutonium free", by which he means that 1% of each widget is plutonium, rather than that they contain 100 times less plutonium than his competitors as would be the most likely initial reading, I'll tell people. I'll not sit there and say "Hey, there are probably a lot of people who think that his widgets contain less plutonium than everyone else's" simply because of some misplaced "moral code" that says I shouldn't be seen to be apparently critical of someone for doing something that a lot of other people do.

The Intel iMac isn't significantly faster than the iMac G5, despite Job's attempts to imply otherwise. Indeed, if the iMac G5 had undergone the same revisions that the PowerMac line had a few months ago, the chances are they'd be faster than the Pentium equivalents. I've written in my journal that I really don't understand why people reacted with such enthusiasm to the Stevenote this year: read between the lines Jobs spoke and you find that Apple actually was struggling to come up with convincing evidence that justifies the Intel switch. Nonetheless, Jobs used wording that implied massive (2-4X!) improvements in performance, which, surprise surprise, are clearly massive exaggerations and, in the context of comparing this year's Pentiums to last year's G5s, are actually covers for practical failure on their side.

If you're going to use wording that implies massive (and 2-4X really is massive) improvements in performance, don't expect your honesty and virtue to be unquestioned when we subsequently find that no such improvements have actually occurred. If Michael Dell does the same thing, we'll criticise him too. If Intel's CEO does, we'll do the same thing. Today it's Steve Jobs.

Re:Benchmarks, accuracy, and choice

[tpgp]

I think you've missed his point. This is a common industry practice used for just about every piece of hardware and software on the market. To single Steve Jobs out for this practice rather than accepting it as the "norm" shows a distinct anti-Mac bias.

Horse crap. Common industry practice or not, I think most slashdotters will call bullshit to these sort of claims whether it comes from Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs or Linus Torvalds.

It's hard to be deceitful when it comes to something as nebulous as benchmarks

Well I don't know about that - seems pretty easy to be deceitful and called for it if you ask me.

Re:Benchmarks, accuracy, and choice

[AKAImBatman]

EvilTwinSkippy is correct. AMD is practicing just as much deception with this scheme as the rest of the industy. I'd remind you that it was AMD who used started the MHz war by consistently clocking their CPUs higher than Intel's. Intel responded with the Pentium IV which was able to clock higher than the AMD chips even if the performance wasn't better. AMD responded with their "speed rating system" which is intended to trick consumers into believing that they are getting a faster clock rate than they are actually getting.

For example, an Athlon XP-M 2400+ is clocked at 1800 MHz, not 2400 as one would expect. The AMD Athlon XP-M 3000+ is clocked at 2200 MHz rather than 3000 MHz. Even more deceivingly, there is another chip called Athlon XP-M 3000+ ("Dublin") which is only clocked at 1600 MHz! How am I, as a consumer, supposed to sort all this nonsense out?

So you can keep your comments about "conservative" ratings. The industry is all about deceptive practices, and (most likely) always will be. Learn to deal with it.

Re:Benchmarks, accuracy, and choice

[Andy Dodd]

AMD set about dispelling the "myth of the megahertz", but they did it in a reasonable fashion. Let's face it - clock rate isn't everything (the Pentium 4 proves that without a doubt), and the public needs to stop thinking that the clockrate of the CPU is important. Yes, the AMDs are clocked lower. Despite that, they routinely kill P4s clocked at over 1.5x their clock rate in nearly all applications. Cases where Intel wins are the rare exception and not the norm. Hell, even Intel has had to move away from publishing actual clock rate in preparation for the Netburst architecture's imminent demise.

Average performance on a wide variety of applications is an excellent performance indicator. Raw clock rate and peak performance on a single app (the former being a favorite of Intel and the latter being classic Apple) are both crappy methods of measuring performance.

Re:Benchmarks, accuracy, and choice

[Basehart]

"I don't think you understand what parent said"

Who cares what the parent said! I never listen to them anyway (especially now I'm in my 40's :-)

Re:Benchmarks, accuracy, and choice

[Otter]

glxgears is a benchmark for graphics acceleration. You don't (unless you're insane) sit there and watch it spin at 1908 fps.

Re:Benchmarks, accuracy, and choice

[Cipster]

100% accurate yes but 100% deceptive too.

Re:Benchmarks, accuracy, and choice

[pi42]

This isn't entirely accurate -- most people can tell the difference between 25fps and 60fps in a computer game, while they can't on a film or video. I believe 3dfx released an infamous demo back in the day with a spinning cube at 30fps and 60fps and you could always tell the difference.

What's the difference? Video and film have motion blur, which makes for smooth transitions between frames whereas games display things in discrete frames with no blur whatsoever.

Ever tried waving your hand underneath a strobe light going at 30 cycles/sec? That's 30fps yet the motion still looks strange, since it's like you're seeing discrete frames and not continous motion burred between frames.

Re:Benchmarks, accuracy, and choice

[djohnsto]

While the dev systems uses intel GMA900 integrated graphics, both the MacBook and new iMac use ATI Radeon X1600 chips.

The iBook and mini may use integrated graphics, but they will probably use newer chipsets with graphics faster than the GMA900.

Re:Benchmarks, accuracy, and choice

[bnenning]

The Intel iMac isn't significantly faster than the iMac G5

There's not nearly enough evidence to reach a conclusion either way. QuickTime export is one of Altivec's strongest areas, and Xbench scores are notoriously bad at having any relationship to reality. Let's wait and see how they do in real life; perhaps you'll find Apple really does have a clue.

Indeed, if the iMac G5 had undergone the same revisions that the PowerMac line had a few months ago, the chances are they'd be faster than the Pentium equivalents.

Yeah, all they had to do was put quad G5s in the iMac and Powerbook enclosures...

I really don't understand why people reacted with such enthusiasm to the Stevenote this year:

Because we get faster Macs for the same cost, and in the case of Powerbooks, *much* faster. Desktop PPC is dead; deal with it. Yes, it's a fundamentally better architecture, but IBM and Freescale have repeatedly shown they have no interest in developing products suitable for Apple unless they're bribed heavily. I'd much rather have Apple focus on their software.

Re:Benchmarks, accuracy, and choice

[Andy Dodd]

How, pray tell, did AMD invent the "Myth of the Megahertz"?

Consistently, since even the early 486 and Pentium days, AMD (and in fact also Cyrix) CPUs routinely beat Intel CPUs running at somewhat higher clock rates. With a small exception near the end of the Pentium III's lifetime and prior to the introduction of the Pentium 4, AMD CPUs have almost never been available with equivalent or higher raw clock rates than Intel's finest. They HAVE been available with performance matching or beating Intel's finest in many cases, but AMD has rarely ever been the winner in terms of raw clock rate. The one time they were, Intel's Netburst (Pentium 4) architecture was already well along in the development phase, Netburst was NOT a direct response to raw clock rates from AMD.

Intel CPUs have consistently been near the bottom of the barrel in terms of performance per clock cycle, with the exception of specialized low-cost/low-power CPUs.

Re:Benchmarks, accuracy, and choice

[AKAImBatman]

Consistently, since even the early 486 and Pentium days, AMD (and in fact also Cyrix) CPUs routinely beat Intel CPUs running at somewhat higher clock rates.

Too far back in history, chief. In the 486 days, the AMD and Cyrixes were nothing more than a "cheap" upgrade for a 386. They simply didn't compete. Consumers were thus able to somewhat trust the MHz rating of Intel chips as a general performance indicator.

When the Pentium era arrived, AMD was still not a competitor, but they did manage to produce chips that were "good enough" to be considered cheap alternatives to the Intel processors. As a result, the PC industry did start producing AMD-based machines for their "low cost" product lines.

When the Athlon and PIII came to market, however, is when things got interesting. For the first time, AMD managed to put out an extremely capable chip in comparison to Intel's offerings. But far more interesting was that AMD started ramping their chips to exceptionally high MHz levels to pass up Intel's chips. This practice gave the AMD chips a reputation for high performance, but extreme heat levels and lower reliability. This left Intel with the server market as their chips proved more reliable over the long haul, and performed just as well in most non-gaming situations.

Long story short, Intel and AMD traded various blows in performance, each one gaining a slight lead for a short time only to be quickly shown up by their competitor. AMD, however, managed to keep the MHz trophy the entire time.

Intel got the bright idea to beat AMD at its own game and thus produced the Pentium IV chip. Now the PIV isn't a very good chip, but it can be ramped up in MHz in ways that AMD's Athlons couldn't. AMD struggled for awhile, but quickly realized that they could no longer win the MHz trophy. So they came up with a Jedi Marketing Trick to make consumers think that AMD's chips were running at the same clock levels. That trick was to assign an arbitrarily created "speed rating" that placed the direct competitors to Intel's chips right next to the Intel MHz rating. That way reviewers would pick up the slower AMD chip and compare it with the Intel chip, rather than look at the real MHz.

AMD got a lot of bad press for the decision, but it did eventually pay off. Consumers accepted the PR rating as the "real speed" of the chip, and Intel again started losing market share. AMD finally ripped the market away from Intel with their AMD64 platform, which proved to be much more popular with consumers than Intel's own Itanium line.

So to summarize, AMD started competing with Intel. Knowing that Intel customers used MHz to judge performance, they ramped up their chips to extreme levels. Intel responded with their PIV Northwood core and took the MHz trophy back. AMD got smart and skewed the market by printing a number on the box that wasn't actually a MHz rating, while convincing many consumers that it was.

Clear as mud?

Re:Benchmarks, accuracy, and choice

[Bun]

not to mention the intel GMA900 graphics processor isn't exactly the speediest thing around.

Don't mention it, then. Especially since the iMac Core Duo uses a PCI-Express ATI Radeon X1600.

Re:Benchmarks, accuracy, and choice

[ParisTG]

AMD was never really in a position where their chips were the clear MHz winners. Up until the K6/K6-2/K6-3 series, they were always lagging in MHz. The Althon changed that, and for the first time they could out perform the Intel equivalents.

There were brief moments where AMD did have the MHz advantage with the Athlon, but the advantage swapped often between Intel and AMD. Once the P4 was released, that MHz advantage disappeared forever... however the AMD chips could STILL compete in performance, in most cases, even at a lower frequency.

This timeline should clarify this somewhat.

Re:Benchmarks, accuracy, and choice

[gnasher719]

'' There's not nearly enough evidence to reach a conclusion either way. QuickTime export is one of Altivec's strongest areas, and Xbench scores are notoriously bad at having any relationship to reality. Let's wait and see how they do in real life; perhaps you'll find Apple really does have a clue. ''

One of the XBench tests where the iMac x86 gets "slaughtered" is the "User Interface" test.

It turns out that the iMac x86 runs this test at 67 frames per second. Which is quite consistent with some newer Apple technotes that tell you that screen updates are now coupled with the monitor's refresh rate. If you draw more frames per second then the monitor can display, you are just wasting your time. Seems that the other Macs tested run this test at several hundred frames per second.

Re:Benchmarks, accuracy, and choice

[GaryPatterson]

Jobs can't win.

He never claimed the new iMacs were 2-4 times as fast. Watch the keynote. He claimed that on the SPEC scores, which he said were key indicators of performance, they were 2-4 times as fast.

He then went on to say that the speed improvements won't be across the whole system, because other components (he singled out hard drives) aren't improved over the G5 models.

I say that he can't win because for years he put up Photoshop numbers, and many people around here said "show us the SPEC numbers!"

Now he puts up SPEC numbers and people miss the bit where he said that they weren't the whole story.

He didn't lie. He told the full picture, but so many people haven't watched the keynote and are rushing to judgement based on second-hand information.

Re:Benchmarks, accuracy, and choice

[Otter]

The only thing I use glxgears for is when I'm trying to get acceleration turned on in Linux and I check to see if glxgears has started running 100x faster. Obviously a 5% difference in its speed on two different systems is meaningless.

It's still a benchmark, though! It's certainly not a game, which is what the comment I responded to and the lengthy discussion spinning off it seemed to think. The debate of whether >60 fps in glxgears is meaningful is ridiculous -- nobody sits and watches glxgears.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Notable, regarding Windows

[daveschroeder]

http://arstechnica.com/reviews/hardware/imac-cored uo.ars/7

I tried to boot from a Windows XP installer CD. No dice. I then tried booting from a Vista installer DVD (Build 5270). Again, no dice. When holding down the Option key, the only icon that appeared was for the iMac's internal hard drive. Holding down the D key to try to force booting off of the optical drive failed as well. With the Vista DVD, the optical drive churned a bit and the iMac hesitated as though it were contemplating whether it wanted to boot the foreign OS. Soon afterwards, the familiar gray Apple logo appeared on screen and Mac OS X finished booting.

The new Intel Macs don't have an EFI shell, so there's no way to directly get at the EFI. Someone is ultimately going to have to write and/or use an existing EFI shell to tell the EFI to boot from alternate media to get things going. Naturally, running Windows under virtualization, with technologies like Intel's VT/Vanderpool, which the Core Duo in the new Macs does support, are going to be the way to go for most users anyway.

Watch boot video here.

[gasmonso]

YouTube.com has a video of both systems booting. So if you're in to computer drag racing here ya go: http://www.youtube.com/?v=zmaAZwkhYeQ

http://religiousfreaks.com/

Re:Watch boot video here.

[shippo]

There's obviously something seriously wrong with that G5 if it is taking that amount of time to boot. My G5 boots in roughly the same amount of time as that Intel iMac.

The G5 is still quite the chip

[maynard]

It doesn't surprise me that it still competes with Intel's latest offering. I wonder if it makes sense for Apple to continue supporting both x86 and PPC platforms long term. I'm sure Intel will -- in time -- crush the G5 in performance. But if Apple wants to dominate the HDTV editing workstation market, Cell looks like the most appropriate processor for that task. Are fat binaries really so obnoxious as to prevent permanent multi-arch support over the long term?

Re:The G5 is still quite the chip

[chipset]

The fat binaries (or Universal) has been around for a very long time. NeXT first introduced them in this exact same format. Knowing that Mac OS X is the current incarnation of NextStep (the OS for NeXT machines), I assumed the Intel move would be relatively easy, if the had been maintaining the code.

Now, in retrospect, it looks like they have for Mac OS X, but maybe not for all the other applications (iLife, FCP, etc).

Now, given that the OS has a long history of multi-platform support, it is only a piece of the puzzle.

Application level changes are a bit harder, especially in relying upon functions specific to a chip. Which, for some applications, is the case. Others should be able to do a direct recompile, if the application is still around in source form, the author is interested, etc.

Back when I had acess to NeXT Cubes, I didn't have to worry about it. However, when I later bought NeXTStep 486, I had to. There were lots of applications for the 680x0 systems, I sometimes had to search for those 486 applications. I assume we are headed back into that world.

So, can it happen? Yes. However, I suspect that Apple will move on with the Intel architecture. I assume the PowerMac G5 will be a well respected machine in the meantime, as it does great for video editing, something Widnows machines still work hard to do poorly.

I suspect it might be like the Amiga. While the Amiga didn't get a lot of respect, those in the video editing world used it much longer than people antipicated.

But, in the end, the new macs will be Intel. As a side note, I just sold my G5 DP to someone looking to do video editing with FCP. Even with them knowing the Intel systems were coming out, they still wanted it.

FireWire 800

[sg3000]

The benchmarks from the article are useful.

It sounds like from the review that Apple's pro apps aren't well suited for the Intel-based Macs until they have the Universal Binary versions (suggested to be in late March). Maybe that's why they left FireWire 800 off the initial MacBook Pro -- if you need FireWire 800, you're probably doing pro work. So Apple left it out to reduce costs until they have a complete system for pros.

Re:Why?

[TooMuchEspressoGuy]

But what about if someone wants to run games (and perhaps other software that runs only on Windows) *and* still get the superior OS/apps found in Macs? Why should they be forced to buy two computers just so that they can preserve their "entire Mac experience"?

Out of topic but somewhat in topic though

[Arthur B.]

Have you seen the new apple commercial? "...for years it's been trapped in a PC, dull little boxes doing dull little tasks"... Honestly I felt down the whole evening... How many people know the new macs actually ARE pc's? Of course they aren't, cuz there are macs and pcs right?... macs have this apple thingie on the top of the screen and ya now the pc's come with this colored flag and it says windows. Of course in the public mind, mac and pc's are opposed on the operating system side... this is really Mac OS Versus Windows, no one gives a shit about the internal architecture... but people don't make the difference between a machine and an OS... so Apple is doing a good job, bashing PC's, it's still there concurrent...but it really makes me sad that this commercial will deepen public confusion... shame shame shame on them. Shame on people for being easy marketting prays. Fortunately, porting OS X to standard PC will maybe awaken some puzzling among the general audience.

Re:Out of topic but somewhat in topic though

[MindStalker]

Think their point are that modern PCs are very powerful but their potential is not tapped by the Windows operating system.

Re:Out of topic but somewhat in topic though

[poot_rootbeer]

How many people know the new macs actually ARE pc's?

How do you define a PC? Is it the CPU architecture? Is it the manufacturer of the CPU? Is it the company that wrote the prevalent operating system? Is is the company that first called its product a 'PC', 25 years ago?

Why make things so hard when the answer is right in front of us?

PC = personal computer. All Macs ever produced have been PC's. For that matter, so were the Apple 8-bit computers.

Shut up!

[Anonymous Coward]

Haven't you heard? It's cool to hate Apple now. It makes you '1337.

Anybody who says anything remotely positive about Apple, or especially about Steve Jobs, is a "fanboy." You don't want to be called a fanbody, do you? Then get with the program. Talk about how cheaply you can get a Gateway that's just as good as the new iMac or something, and insist that Woz is the only person who ever had anything to do with Apple worthy of any respect at all.

Oh... and maybe Tog, if you are a UI nerd.

Re:Shut up!

[NanoGator]

"Haven't you heard? It's cool to hate Apple now. It makes you '1337."

[Warning: This is an OT rant, no hard feelings if modded down.]

Wish I had known that before I made a not-so-nice comment about Apple which resulted in several mods going well out of their way to mod me down until I couldn't post on Slashdot for a couple of weeks. (From a certain IP, anyway. At least now you understand the origins of my sig.)

If it has suddenly become a little too cool to hate Apple now, I blame extremist mods for it. Over the years I've made silly little quips about Apple that nobody on Earth should have taken too seriously and have been mod-bombed over it. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if, out of anger, they were finally M2'd out and the replacements came in to even up the balance by shifting over to the extreme opposite view. (i.e. over-modding anti-Apple sentiment.) Too much zealotry will always lead to people with too much opposition to your view.

This has already happened with regards to Microsoft. Go back a few years and ANY comment ridiculing or insulting MS would be modded up, but polite criticisms of Linux would be modded down. Even uninformed posts (i.e. there still seems to be some impression that Win2K was built on the same kernel that Windows 98 was) would get modded up. 2K is nearly 6 years old now, XP is 4, and the BSOD is virtually gone. Yet, the blue screen jokes STILL fly with full karma around here. The result? People stand up and say "uh, you guys need to get with the 21st century." People whinge about MS fanboys flooding Slashdot. Sorry, can't see that from my point of view. Fire is being fought with fire. My advice? Don't give Apple praise for being wrong or Microsoft scorn for being right.

No, I'm not pro-MS or anti-Apple, I'm just tired of these karma-fueled battles happening every year. I appreciate Taco's desire to keep Slashdot 'democratic', but it's irritating that ordinary Homer Simpson'ish people are allowed to be cops.

Re:Shut up!

[nathanh]

Wish I had known that before I made a not-so-nice comment about Apple which resulted in several mods going well out of their way to mod me down until I couldn't post on Slashdot for a couple of weeks.

You hit the nail on the head, Nanogator.

I have also noticed extremist Apple fanboy moderation around here lately. My Mac credentials extend back to the late 80s on System 6 and I've owned a half dozen Macs over the years. I'm even typing this from a Powerbook (running Linux admittedly). I'm a strong supporter of Apple and I love to read books about their history. Yet even the most mild criticism of Apple or MacOS on /. will result in my comments being moderated down as Flamebait, Troll and Overrated. I never get similar mistreatment for negative comments about Linux or Windows. It seems Apple fanboys have no qualms abusing the moderation system to ensure that only positive Apple comments are seen.

Unfortunately this isn't new behaviour for Apple fanboys. As far back as I can remember - including the glory days of Usenet - the Apple fanboys have been the most intolerant, the least receptive to criticism, the most judgemental and often the least educated of all the enthusiast groups. The negative moderation of any criticism of the latest Macs is yet another example of this behaviour. Anybody who thinks Linux fanatics can be over the top has never seen an Apple fanboy in full swing. Even the Amiga users were never so extreme. That sort of stupid fanatacism is what led to one of my earlier sigs: "I love Apple hardware but goddamn I hate Apple users".

The example at the start of this thread epitomizes everything I hate about Apple fanboyism. Steve said something that deservedly should be called out for being deceitful bullshit. If any other CEO - Gates, McNealy, Ellison - had said something similar we'd have people throwing figures around and using datasheets to prove that the CEO was a lying bastard. Even when a relative nobody from GNOME or Xorg attempts to massage the figures there will be 100s of /. comments crying "Bullshit". Yet when Steve does the same thing the Apple fanboys are rallying behind him, providing him with excuses, apologising for his behaviour, rationalising the lies, and moderating or shouting down anybody who points out that the emperor has no clothes. Apple gets "special treatment" and I find that despicable.

Re:Shut up!

[strikethree]

hm. I just deleted a long rant that I had typed in. Let's make this more concise:

I metamod twice a day, every day. I metamod as unfair many negative mods, one or more of which, you have been a victim of.

I get mod points only about once every two weeks nowadays. I have had one of my moderations overturned. I have only negatively mod'ed goatse and gnaa posts. All other moderations I perform are positive mods. I have probably positively mod'ed you when you have levelled reasonable criticism against Apple.

The moderations system should NOT be used to further someones personal agenda. I dislike Microsoft and most of their products intensely. I am strong enough to not attempt to prevent others from displaying their enjoyment of Microsoft products. I have a 17 inch Powerbook. I like it a lot, but I am secure enough in myself to allow others to expose the warts that do exist in that Apple product.

Honestly, you sound like a reasonable person. I am writing this so you will feel comfortable knowing that their are other reasonable people who are working within the moderation system. If you have metamoderated, you should see that the majority of mods are reasonable as well.

The intense amount of noise created by the small minority who are haters (of whatever camp) is incredibly annoying. It gets so loud, that it can persuade you to believe that almost everyone is a hater. Don't fall for it. Be positive and I will be positive with you. Be negative, and you will be negative by yourself.

respect.

strike

It's Called A 'Lie'

[Anonymous Coward]

"being slightly over optimistic"

In the real world that is called a Lie.

Jobs doesn't look like he even remotely concerned about even making -plausible- performance claims about the Intel stuff.

Looks like Jobs is going to be doing a 'optimistic' spinning this year with the mess Intel's Roadmap(tm) looks to be in. He should have been less of a pain in the ass to IBM he wouldn't be in the mess Apple is in with their hardware.

Re:It's Called A 'Lie'

[Jewdass]

Who here actually watched the keynote? Show of hands? I know I did. Let's all go to www.apple.com/quicktime/qtv/mwsf06/ and load the keynote up to 1:07:00. Steve Jobs is completely up front about which testsproduced the numbers (SPECint_rate2000 and SPEC_fp2000) and outright says "Now, everything is not going to run 2-3x, the discs aren't 2-3x faster, etc." He makes it very clear that his numbers are based off of these two benchmarks. He claims they are the most important benchmarks of performance, which is debatable, but they are certainly a fair test of raw cpu power. Other than the chip and motherboard, the only other significant component that has changed is the GPU, going from a Radeon x600 to an x1600. Does anyone disagree that this is in the 2-3x faster range? All in all, people are making a mountain out of a molehill rather than checking the source of the numbers. god bless the internet. -justinb

OC?

[TubeSteak]

Can it be OCed?

And by OC, I don't mean "The O.C."
I mean Over Clocked.

I realize it isn't in exactly the best form factor to start pushing out extra heat, but someone's going to try it.

Re:Can't Boot Windows

[oberondarksoul]

Holding down Option when booting does do something - on Open Firmware-based Macs, it presents a graphical list of the volumes you can boot from. (For example, with my iBook with the Mac OS X DVD in the drive, it shows I can boot from the hard disc, from the install partition on the DVD, or the Apple Hardware Test partition on the DVD). As the review says, it did a similar thing on the new EFI iMac, only it only showed his hard disc as bootable.

Also, apparently on the new Intel-based Macs, one holds 'D' instead of 'C' to boot from the optical drive - presumably because Mac OS X ships on DVDs by default.

Re:Why?

[Qubit]

I am a geek. I work on computers. A more flexible computer is better for me.

During the day I work on a multimedia engine that is currently Windows-only, but will soon be cross-platform. At night I hack on my linux boxes, surf the web on whatever webbrowser is on my couch, and laugh along with my friends at the Flash animations they show me. Generally speaking, it doesn't matter what OS I'm running as long as I can browse the web and ssh places.

But when someone asks me a question about OSX, I don't have a test machine to poke at. My lappy can dual-boot Linux and Windows, so if I need to I can switch from one to the other and poke at things. If I could just run one OS and emulate the others on top of it, that would be awesome, but I can't make that work (fast enough) on a laptop today (at least not one I could buy on my budget). So what if I had a triple-boot machine? That would be cool. Of course, being able to run OSX on stock hardware would be even cooler, but maybe Apple just can't handle that much coolness right now. Maybe soon... soon they will be able to be that awesome.

Though I still am wary of Apple's power cords. Too much breakage/sparking of them in the past to forgive and forget this soon. :-(

Best Features of the iMac

[Luke PiWalker]

1) Doubles as reading lamp
2) Automatically emails fan letter to Steve Jobs during start up
3) If you cup your palms over the domed base, your hair will rise in air
4) Sprouts set of cybernetic insectoid legs and scutters away when threatened
5) Perfectly matches the iBlouse
6) Screen is flat, which is good for some reason
7) Special drool tray catches saliva from enthralled technogeeks
8) Communications directly with human pineal gland by firing information-rich beam of pink light
9) Wuvs you

Stolen from The Onion of about 4 years ago but still true today.

Waiting for the second generation

[G4from128k]

Look at the history of Apple's processor switches. The first generation PPC machines (6100/7100/8100) were nice, but the second generation PPC machines (7500/8500/9500) were much better. The 2nd gen PPC machines had PCI instead of NuBus, a faster interleaved memory architecture, and a much improved dual-SCSI bus. With the first Macintel, it's obvious that Apple worked very quickly to put Intel Inside and I'm sure that some parts of the design represent a borrowing from PPC designs. I bet that second generation Intel machines are both faster, less likely to have flaws, and more likely to enjoy longer-term OS upgrades.

I know its ungeek of me not to want to be on the bleeding edge, but I'm waiting for the second generation machines.

Re:Waiting for the second generation

[djohnsto]

By all accounts, the new machine's insides are practically designed by Intel. Intel CPU's, Intel chipsets, probably Intel motherboards. While the SW for Intel will definitely get better over time, I doubt the HW will be less bug-prone (it's already very solid).

The only big change on the horizon is the switch to Merom/Conroe/Woodcrest in the second half. This will bring the eventual switch to a fully 64-bit OS X.

Re:Waiting for the second generation

[Moby Cock]

Of course the second generation of Intel Macs are going to bet better than this generation. The third generation will be better than the second. Maybe you should wait for them instead...

Re:Waiting for the second generation

[geoff2]

I think the 68k-PowerPC transition is not quite apt. You are correct that the first generation of PPC boxes were not nearly as nice as the second generation boxes, which had much more extensive changes than just the processor. But I think there was a lot more room for improvement in the last 68K boxes versus the PC state of the art at the time than there is in the last PPC boxes versus the PC state of the art. The NuBus expansion card bus versus the PCI bus is just one example. Both the last PPC boxes and the first Intel boxes have the latest and greatest interfaces such as USB2 and PCI Express.

In addition, the first Intel box is not a motherboard that Apple slapped together on its own, like it did for the first PPC boxes. It is a state-of-the-art Intel motherboard with all the latest doodads. Sure, Apple could stick in a fastre graphics card or hard drive, but the motherboard support chips are all modern. I think the next rev of the MacBook Pro will include Firewire 800, which I assume Apple couldn't integrate into the MacBook Pro motherboard in time to meet their ship date, but that's more of an incremental change than was included in the second-generation PPC boxes. (And don't forget the problems with the then-new PCI-bus Macs. Networking was so broken -- remember the Open Transport fiasco? The brand-new networking architecture that wasn't ready at the time the 7200/7500/8500 were released and which those new machines relied on, MacTCP having been deliberately obsoleted? It took several months after the boxes were shipped for *any* PPP dialing software to work at all with the Mac, and it took more than a year after that until most of the more significant networking bugs to be quashed.)

Re:Same Good looks

[oberondarksoul]

It's not a Power Mac, nor has it ever tried to be - one wouldn't have bought the original bondi blue iMac when it first came out if they needed the power of the Power Mac G3 then, either. Also, Jobs admitted that Rosetta wasn't really professional-level yet - Photoshop and the like are usable, but professionals will want to wait for the x86-native releases. They'll come, and so will an Intel-based Power Mac - until then, the G5 Quad will be more than sufficient and will last a long time to come.

Cell isn't a desktop processor

[Andy Dodd]

It has insane floating point throughput capability which will help on some apps, but for most desktop apps the Cell is extremely slow. It was designed for a very specific set of tasks.

Existing PPC binaries won't run fast on the Cell. In fact, they most likely won't run at all.

There is no way we'll see a general purpose desktop system based on the Cell - it's just not designed for that kind of purpose. We might see some sort of Cell coprocessor board become available though.

Re:Cell isn't a desktop processor

[maynard]

It has Alivec, using the IBM name: VMX. Same thing though. What the other guy said about it lacking instruction reordering is true though. It also lacks cache locking instructions (that the Xenon has) due to it being a single core. It would be plenty fast enough on its own as long as one optimized for reduced branching though. And, of course, there are those SPEs - which are silly fast as long as you have a parallel single precision FP problem, easily vectorized. Like HD video editing, for example! :)

Re:Why?

[tgd]

Thats a bad analogy. Its more like buying a race car and deciding you really want to have turn signals, seat belts, emergency brake and other stuff you need to drive your vehicle once in a while on the same roads everyone else is on.

molten core

[poot_rootbeer]

the most important benchmark: frames per second in molten core combat.

I'm pretty sure that if you overclock your Dual Core to the point where it becomes "molten", your FPS rate is going to be Zero.

Steve doesn't lie

[palad1]

He just momentarily bends reality to his will.

He's Q, with a turtleneck and a pair of jeans.

Re:No AMD macs?

[man_of_mr_e]

Actually, the new Yonah processor is significantly faster than the Turion. Check out these benchmarks:

http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/01/16/will_core_d uo_notebooks_trade_battery_life_for_quicker_respon se/

the specs will not change drastically

[asv108]

That was my thought initially too, wait for the second generation. Its probably still good advice, but I think they fact they are using a widely implemented Intel product will increase the reliability of these first generation Intel macs. My first generation pentium-m is still a good performer today. Apple will be using the standard processors, boards, and components of the Centrino duo, which will have a long a lifespan. There is not going to be some earth shattering change in the Macbook components a year from now. Apple will be using the same Intel specs that every other major pc laptop manufacturer will be using, so we can probably through all the first-gen history out the window.

Re:No AMD macs? Excuse me!!

[Nom du Keyboard]

MD can't produce the volume of chips that Apple need.

Excuse me, but while Apple is big on noise, they're not big on production. I'm sure AMD could have given them all the chips they need. They might not have been so forthcoming with the Marketing Money however.

For Intel, getting Apple is a coup worth paying enough for that even if they never make a cent from Steve Jobs, they've still silenced the biggest critic of the i86 architecture.

Their problem right now is keeping Dell/HP happy, both of whom sell a lot more systems than Apple will, and who aren't very pleased about Apple being allowed to announce the newest, latest and greatest systems first.

Re:Molten Core Combat?

[Theaetetus]

Molten Core Combat? Is that another one of those games that came out for the PC 6 years ago and just got ported to the Mac?

It's an inside joke, referring to an area in the most popular MMORPG around, World of Warcraft. That's by this company called "Blizzard", and it runs on things called "computers". It comes on a couple of "CDs", which is short for "Compact Disc". Someday, when you get electricity in your cave, you might be able to try it too!

To get it in the door.

[Shawn Parr]

A lot of people don't seem to see why you would really want to do this. Many businesses and universities are very PC only, even though they are curious about using/integrating Macs.

When I worked for a satellite campus of Indiana University, I was directly in charge of 2 Mac labs and 6 PC labs. One of the departments seriously was discussing moving their 3 PC only labs to Intel Mac if they could dual boot.

Why?

Because then they could still have all the software they already use, and the faculty and students could reboot into Mac OS to play around and see what was up with it. Surprisingly it was the most hard core PC only faculty that was really excited about this option. A chance for them to work in the same room(s) they always work in, but try out the other side.

Many of the students we encouraged to work on both ended up purchasing a Mac, but that is only because they had the ability to get exposed to them. In many universities this isn't the case anymore.

Most of the students where using Adobe and Macromedia products, but the fastest to consider switching where the Maya students. Showing them a lower spec'ed Mac easily outperforming our PC's (Opterons BTW) was very interesting. The only way we got better performance was on the PC's under Linux, which after trying that most students found they did not like dealing with Linux (sorry, I'll probably get mod'ed down for that, but it was truthfully what I saw).

Apple not hindering the ability to run windows, which they have stated they haven't done, and I have no reason to believe they have, in some cases could actually net them quite a few sales they would not have been able to get otherwise.

Yes, 32-bit...

[SuperKendall]

The 64-bit version are out later this year.

Not that many people actually need 64-bit capabilitity, mostly for programs that need very large memory access. iMac users certainly will not, Macbook Pro users is more questionable - my guess is they will upgrade that line with the 64-bit chip at the same time they release the Intel Powermac equivilent.

Hmm, that leads me to wonder what the new name for the Powermac will be... MacMac?

Spanning

[ronanbear]

The intel iMac supports spanning! I'm surprised Steve didn't make a big deal about this. There goes one more major reason for people to buy a powermac. Kudos for Ars for mentioning that on the first page.

Re:Spanning

[Scudsucker]

Spanning between what and what?

Monitors. He's talking about "spanning" your desktop across multiple monitors, something not allowed with iBooks and older iMacs. They had video ports, but only for mirroring your display. This was not a limitation of the graphics hardware, but a limitation created by Apple to provide a reason to get a Powerbook or G5 tower. There are firmware hacks around to renable this ability; I hacked my G3 iBook and it can use a second monitor at up to 1600x1200.

Re:Spanning

[777film]

The intel iMac supports spanning! I'm surprised Steve didn't make a big deal about this. There goes one more major reason for people to buy a powermac. Kudos for Ars for mentioning that on the first page.

I could be wrong, but I bet it only supports spanning because they didn't have time (or it wasn't worth the trouble) to cripple it.

I'd lay odds on the next generation of iMacs losing that feature. Which may explain why the Apple publicity machine is mum about it...

No way, that's a myth.

[cbreaker]

That's entirely untrue. You can easily spot the difference in smoothness between video captured in 24FPS and video captured in 60iFPS.

Try playing a video game at 25FPS, and then at 60FPS. Can't tell the difference? If you can't, you've got to be full of it.

Maybe your brain can't absorb all the information on each frame past a certian point, but *anyone* sure as hell can see the difference when it comes to smoothness and fluidness of movement.

And a note about GLXGears - the higher the number, the better chances of getting more complex objects on the screen at a decent frame rate. If you haven't noticed, games are a little more detailed then GLXGears. So while you can spin a few objects at 2000FPS, you might only see 20FPS in the latest game title. But if you get 10,000FPS in GLXGears, you'll probably see much higher performance in the game. It's a BENCHMARK. Seriously.

And what does this mean: "a lot of resources are wasted computing and rendering"? Explain to me what else you want the computer doing when you're running a graphics benchmark? I want mine running the damned benchmark, what else? It's not like everyone's machines are attempting to cure cancer and we should let that happen at all costs. I buy fast computers because I want to use all of the speed, not have an abundance unused in the background.

Re:No way, that's a myth.

[mjg59]

glxgears is not a benchmark. Differences in the way the drivers handle synchronisation between frames mean that the limiting factor may be the number of frames per second, not the complexity of the objects drawn. Going from Xorg 6.7 to 6.8, my glxgears FPS values dropped. My UT ones went up. This ought to tell you something.

Re:No way, that's a myth.

[LetterRip]

[QUOTE]That's entirely untrue. You can easily spot the difference in smoothness between video captured in 24FPS and video captured in 60iFPS.

Try playing a video game at 25FPS, and then at 60FPS. Can't tell the difference? If you can't, you've got to be full of it.[/QUOTE]

You have confused video and video game - videos will tend to have good (or real) motion blur and hence can be percieved as smooth even at lower frame rates. Games tend to have poor if any motion blur, and thus need a much higher frame rate to appear smooth.

LetterRip

Re:No way, that's a myth.

[cbreaker]

I'm not confusing them at all - there's no real difference between the two. You certainly notice low frame rates in video games more then a video, however - and it's not just motion blur. Some of it is response time and the fact that you control it, some of it is the fact that you sit very close to a screen when you play video games as a general rule. Another factor is that video games are still not life-like enough to pass as "real" and smoother video helps offset the lack of realism in graphics by adding more immersion.

Next time you watch a movie, pay attention to pans across landscapes and such. Usually a DVD is sourced from 24FPS film, so it applies here too. You can usually easily see the jerkiness of the video when it pans. Then, watch some panning video from a home camcorder which usually records at 60 interlaced frames a second. The difference is immediately noticeable.

My point is, the human eye is perfectly capable of perceiving well over 25FPS. 24FPS is the standard for movie film, and it's really the minimum you can use and still have it seem fluid enough. Any lower and it's distracting. Any higher and it looks strange because we're so conditioned to 24/25FPS. That's why home video tends to look like exactly that (cheesy) - it's a much higher frame rate.

Video games exasperate the issue, and frame rates mean even more. 60FPS is smooth enough for most people that it seems perfectly fluid, which is why the industry has pretty much standardized on it as a base-line.

Re:No AMD macs? Excuse me!!

[Anonymous Coward]

At something on the order of 80 million chips per year (counting dual-proc, dual-core machines as two, obviously) Apple would instantly become AMD's largest customer, by far. There's no way AMD could hope to keep the pipeline full, and Apple's biggest constraint to growth has always been supply-chain issues.

you forgot...

[Run4yourlives]

...it's played in seemingly neverending, all encompassing, life sucking fashion by these people called "loosers".

"D" key?

[jscotta44]

Using the "D" key to force a boot from an internal optical device on a Mac is new to me. I have been using the machines for many years and never heard of that, nor I can get my current Macs to boot from the optical by holding down the "D".

The "C" key, is a horse of another color. That is the traditional key and it works fine under every version of the Mac operating system that I have ever used since the advent of optical drives for computers up through now OS X.4.4.

Interesting that the author didn't mention the "C" key. And no, I did not read the story. Just looking at your quote. :-)

Re:"D" key?

[daveschroeder]

The "D" key is the new key for booting optical media on Intel-based Macs:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=303 081

Re:"D" key?

[coldcup]

No, it is not.

Holding the D key is for booting Apple Hardware Test only. You cannot boot from a CD normally in this way.

C is still the correct way of booting from CD on intel.

Re:"D" key?

[commodoresloat]

"D" is the new "C".

Re:"D" key?

[daveschroeder]

Right you are! I just verified myself with Apple Enterprise Support:

D - diagnostic partitions only (Apple Hardware Test)

C - optical media

I stand corrected. Thank you.

Memory Anyone?

[puppetluva]

These benchmarks don't seem entirely objective.

The older imac was sporting twice the memory, and the g5 desktop had 9 times the memory.

Clearly the memory disparity was a factor in many of the tests.

I would give more credence to a test where all three machines had the same amount of memory so that paging/swapping/caching would be more at parity.

Re:Memory Anyone?

[2megs]

Clearly the memory disparity was a factor in many of the tests.

Why?

Seriously, what makes it so clear to you that this was a major factor? If all the tests run could fit in 512 MB without swapping, going to 1 GB wouldn't gain anything, right? Is there something about current Mac platforms that I don't know?

There were many differences between the machines. I'd be more inclined to point out that a significant minority of the benchmarks tested the graphics chips more than the CPU.

Rosetta in same thread as app or not?

[yabos]

The guy seems to be a bit confused in what he writes.

"Rosetta runs in the same thread as the application, and translates blocks of code as they come up. "
Then
"...That allows the translation to run on one core while the application thread executes on the other core, meaning that the translated code will have a short distance to travel."

So, which is it? Does Rosetta run in a separate thread or not? Maybe he meant it runs in the same process, I don't know.

Re:Fat Binaries

[Carthag]

Jobs cleared that up when he made the announcement last year. XCode can make universal ("fat") binaries outta the box. You don't need two computers to do it, only if you want to run extensive testing.

we know photoshop is a little pokey

[johnpaul191]

Jobs ran photoshop in the keynote, and Adobe has not yet released a "universal" binary (built for intel and PPC chips) of anything so it is run through rosetta(PPC chip emulation). it works, but it is not zippy. i guess some of it was that it took a little time to start up (also loading rosetta), maybe how classic would load in OS X. i know the keynote was done on Intel chipped machines, but i am not sure what kind of machine? these user reports are done on iMacs, and as decent as they seem, they are still considered consumer level machines.

i do agree though, it would be interesting to see some side by side tests of what the iMac is made for, on software that is universal. like an iLife06 shootout of a new iMac versus what they were selling at Christmas. that would be pretty real world comparisons for the average iMac user.

Multi-Monitor Spanning

[Betelgeuse on Ice]

One note I haven't seen anywhere else that was mentioned in the Ars review is that the new Intel iMac supports monitor spanning, and has a mini-DVI connector. AFAIK, the iMac G5 only supported mini-VGA and mirroring. (Well, there is that hack to enable spanning, but with only an analog video-out, it isn't that that useful for me...) It always seemed like a trivial crippling of iMac to force users who want/need desktop spanning to upgrade to a PowerMac.

Don't people WTFK??? Speed claims were qualified!

[Jewdass]

Who here actually watched the keynote? Show of hands? I know I did.

Let's all go to www.apple.com/quicktime/qtv/mwsf06/ and load the keynote up to 1:07:00.

Steve Jobs is completely up front about which testsproduced the numbers (SPECint_rate2000 and SPEC_fp2000) and outright says "Now, everything is not going to run 2-3x, the discs aren't 2-3x faster, etc." He makes it very clear that his numbers are based off of these two benchmarks. He claims they are the most important benchmarks of performance, which is debatable, but they are certainly a fair test of raw cpu power. Other than the chip and motherboard, the only other significant component that has changed is the GPU, going from a Radeon x600 to an x1600. Does anyone disagree that this is in the 2-3x faster range?

All in all, people are making a mountain out of a molehill rather than checking the source of the numbers. god bless the internet.

-justinb

Re:Why?

[filesiteguy]

Watch out - you're gonna get slapped as a troll for that kind of remark.

As one who agrees with the OP - why indeed? I am seriously considereing this new Mac (aka Unix) platform for my home PC as an upgrade to my Win2K desktop. I can't imagine dual-booting to something as lame as XP or that future hog, Vista.

For those of use who need to test stuff under Wintendo - such as Java apps or PHP scripts, there's a lot to be said for Virtual PC or VM Ware. Even on my Linux laptop I only run Windows apps in a Crossover Office (Wine) session when I need to test compatibility.

amount of ram in benchmark

[DietFluffy]

What is the significance of arstechnica benchmarking the 3 macs with the following ram configurations:

iMac Core Duo: 512MB
iMac G5: 1GB
PowerMac G5: 4.5GB

Wouldn't such a large difference in the ammount of ram have a significant impact on benchmarks?

Re:amount of ram in benchmark

[ottffssent]

That would depend on the working set size for the given app.

512MB may be slightly cramping the style of the new imac, but it didn't look like any of Ars' benchmarks would need much more than that. Certainly 4.5GB isn't going to make any difference, and if you've been following Ars' articles, you'd know why that particular machine is so loaded. The CPU-bound, disk-bound, or graphics-bound benchmarks aren't going to notice the change in RAM amount. The photoshop test, being done on a fairly large image, might have seen some impact from the difference in available memory.

Given how heterogenous the systems are already, I'm not too concerned with a slight difference in memory size. Given the different instruction sets, execution hardware, cache layout, and memory controller, I think having only 512MB rather than a gig is unlikely to show up in the benchmarks or in most users' usage.

Re:amount of ram in benchmark

[Steve Cowan]

I have to disagree. OS X 10.4, as wonderful an OS as it is, uses LOTS of memory. Dashboard is a notorious hog, as is the core OS.

My G4/1.4 GHz is definitely much snappier at everything with a gig than 512.

I think these benchmarks are a little off, because nobody in their right mind would leave this machine at 512 MB in this day and age.

Re:No AMD macs?

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Apple chose the same processor that Dell so heavily rely on. Of all the reasons, I just don't believe AMD can't manufacture enough chips. I think Steve Jobs always wanted to use Dell as the model to follow whether his mouth admits it or not.

Are you trolling or just slow in the head? Apple went with Intel for laptops. They needed a fast portable. AMD has nothing useful for laptops right now. their top chip uses 15-60% more power and is slightly slower than the Intel Duo. It uses more power idle than the Intel does at 100%. Choosing between going from a 6 hour battery with the g4 to a 3 hour battery with the Intel or a 2 hour battery with the AMD. Gee, tough choice. Apple may very well ship AMD chips some day, but not in portables or all-in-ones until they get their power consumption under control (AMD 65nm is due Q4). As for business models, Dell is about cheap, cheap, cheap with little inventory and interchangable supply. Apple is about grabbing the high end with innovative tech as a differentiator. The business models are very different.

Re:Why?

[gstoddart]

But what about if someone wants to run games (and perhaps other software that runs only on Windows) *and* still get the superior OS/apps found in Macs? Why should they be forced to buy two computers just so that they can preserve their "entire Mac experience"?

IT's not Apple's job to help you run Windows software. Least of all on their hardware.

As the OP said, if I bought a new Mac, the last thing I'd want to do is try to figure out how to run software for Windows on it. Period.

Nobody is forcing you to buy a second machine to do anything. You can do without that software, buy a second machine, or (possibly) void your warranty by trying to get Windows to run on it. That doesn't mean you should expect Apple to roll over and give you a machine which it is easy to make run both OS's. They want to give you a good user experience if you bought their stuff.

If I buy a Honda Accord, is it reasonable to expect Honda to ensure that the turbo-kit I got for my Ford Escort runs on that Honda? Of course not. What does Honda care? And it's not about "the full Honda experience", I'll tell you that.

Apple would probably prefer you leave them out of the equation when it comes to running your Windows games. Specifically so they don't get calls from people who have either bodged their systems together from spare parts, or generally done stupid things with them.

You have complete freedom to buy, or not buy an Apple computer, and all that implies. Whining about being 'forced' to own a second computer to be able to have another platform is a completely specious argument in my opinion -- how is this any different than from when the computers were on completely different platforms?

Re:Shut up! (Not the only one)

[mkiwi]

I criticized CmdrTaco the other day and I got blasted for it.... so much for that +5 informative I got earlier in the month about a very similar subject, which happens to be my research field at my college- something few people on slashdot even understand.

--
I'm suprised Steve lets the mods talk with their mouth full.

I think I am on sig revision 5 now, still trying to get something that is intellectually provocative yet appealing to slashdot moderators. I never post as an AC, maybe that is my problem.

Re:Watch boot video & Incompetent Benchmarking

[DECS]

MacWorld demo people, although trained not to demonstrate or allow rebooting the new Macs on display, did remark that they booted up really fast.

In the video, the G5 likely had more RAM installed, which would make it POST considerably slower. The boot time, however, is probably very representative of how much faster the Intel iMac is at booting. Other reasons the Core Duo may have booted so fast compared to the G5:

- Two processor cores!

- Mac OS X is expressly designed to boot fast by bringing up as much as possible in parallel. That's part of the point of launchd: to identify dependancies and kickstart multiple things at once. This is also why Apple gave up on displaying what was being booted in 10.4, and now just shows a progress bar (which is unrelated to what's actually happening, and only timed to match the previous boot time as a relative indicator). Reporting what servers are being launched would take longer than actually starting them. This parallelism would clearly benefit from multiple processor cores in the Core Duo.

- the G5 may have been booting for the first time, or they may have deleted the cache in an attempt to make the test "fair," not realizing that the cache has a huge impact on boot times. Among other things, Mac OS X caches the kernel extensions so that the next boot only stops to numerate which kexts to load if something in hardware has changed. If you wipe your cache files (/Library/Cache, ~/Library/Cache and System/Library/Cache), the next boot will take a lot longer while boot performance caching is rebuilt.

- other hardware may have been unfairly compared: how fast was the G5's drive? was something wrong with it? was the G5's drive full, and struggling to find space for cache files? was it bound to a directory server, and stalling on boot while looking for the server? was it full of 3rd party software, kexts, startup items, etc?

The video doesn't reveal anything about the demonstrators competence at setting up fair comparison, or their motivation, so we don't know.

Recall the comparison of database servers running on OS X server vs Linux, where they intended to be fair but their assumptions about how to do so were actually really bad?

Or look at the Ars review and benchmarks of the new iMac Core Duo vs the iMac G5. He does an array of benchmarks where the G5 has 1 GB of RAM, and the Intel iMac has 512MB! Sorry Ars, but that's just plain incompetent. Your benchmarks are WORTHLESS to even skim over. How about benchmarking the G5 iMac with 512 and 1 GB installed, and reporting if that makes any difference?!

Re:Missing 1 piece of information

[level_headed_midwest]

All of Intel's Core chips are 32-bit. The *next* generation (a.k.a. Merom) will be 64-bits and comes out in September. I hope this helps.

Experimental Error?

[pyite]

I get so annoyed everytime someone supposedly benchmarks something on a PC and includes no experimental error figures, no mean, no standard deviation. Maybe that's because when you only test things once, the sample standard deviation is infinite! Doing this in an engineering or scientific paper would get you laughed out of the journal or conference. Reading the following in the Ars discussion forum just reinforced my thoughts:

XBench is not great for benchmarking unless you repeat it's tests about 10 times or more each... its results vary too much (even from one run to another on the same machine, never mind when comparing two different ones).

Come on people, do many tests, compute the data, adjust with Student's t-distribution. This is elementary stuff yet no one does it.

Four years ago the lampshade model was out...

[ianscot]

but still true today.

The "desk lamp" iMac design hasn't been around for a long while now. Yeah, boy, that flat screen sure is novel; nobody sees the advantages of that...

The G5 model has no tray to catch drool in, even. Slot loading drive, on the side.

PowerMac Replacement?

[fupeg]

This comparison really makes me wonder about the Intel-based PowerMac replacement. What kind of processor are they going to put into that? The logical choice would seem to be the Conroe. There are rumors of a 3.3 GHz dual-cores being sent out later this month. Intel claims that Conroe will outperform Core Duo 2-1 on a performance-per-watt basis. So a 3.3 GHz Conroe might be as much as 3.6 times as fast (pure performance, it's ok for a desktop chip to consume twice as much juice as a laptop, right?) as a Core Duo. So if you take the iMac comparisons against the current G5s and extrapolate... well a PowerMac based on a Conroe could be a mighty beast. Give it 4 GB of RAM like the PowerMac in the comparison, and it should easily outperform the PowerMac (at least on non-Altivec tasks, but that's a different story.) Of course it's still going to have the stupid front side bus, albeit running at 1.0+ GHz with 4 MB of L2 cache.

Another possibility would be for Apple to wait for the Extreme Edition of the Conroe, the Kentsfield. That would give them four cores, like the current PowerMacs. It won't be out until 2007, and Apple seems anxious to switch everything over ASAP. So they could go with Woodcrest, basically Conroe for servers. This might let them put together a dual-cpu/dual-core setup like they have with the current PowerMacs. This kind of setup was demonstrated by Intel last fall. There were also rumors last year of Apple pressuring Intel to give them Woodcrest chips ahead of schedule.

And of course there's the more mundane question of what will they call the PowerMac replacement? They seem to want to get away from the Power prefix, while stressing the Pro tie-in to their Pro apps. So maybe Mac Pro? Seems too short. Maybe bring out the whole name, Macintosh Pro. Whatever it is, can it make people as upset as "MacBook" did?

Re:PowerMac Replacement?

[ZombieRoboNinja]

I'm guessing they changed the "PowerBook" designation for two reasons: first, because "Power" is somewhat associated with IBM (PowerPCs, etc), and second, because "PowerBook" doesn't make it clear to the non-geek that it's a Mac. Even on Slashdot, I've had people tell me that I should reboot my PowerBook more often if I don't want Windows XP to get laggy... that name confusion won't be a problem with the MacBook.

If they want to change the name of the line, now's the best time available. I can understand why they didn't change the iMac brand, though - the less geeky Mac users might be distressed if they could no longer buy an "iMac," regardless of what's under the hood. I imagine that the Intel iBook won't get a name change for the same reason.

Now, "PowerMac" does still have that IBM connotation, but it's also got the "Mac" right there in the name. I'd guess that they WILL change the designation, because (a) "power"-users are probably more likely to embrace change as a positive thing, and (b) screw IBM with their Power-whatsits.

SO, a new name. Maybe MacDesk Pro? Mac Pro, like you said? MacMac? Lucy 2? Heck, I dunno.

Re:That's a fallacy carried over from film

[ls -la]

The average human can see at 60 fps. What happens is that your eyes average what they see over 1/60 of a second, so if you start the 60 fps in time with your eyes, you could theoretically make out all 60 frames. What's likely to happen is that you see a blur at 60 fps because the show is out of time with your eyes. At 30fps, you have reliable vision of every frame. At any frame rate above 60, whether your monitor can show it or not (unlikely, and I haven't seen above 90) you will not be able to see each frame.

Re:No AMD macs? Excuse me!!

[evilviper]

AMD competes very well in the desktop processor arena, and pretty well in the desktop-replacement notebook segment. However, they don't have a great answer in the thin-n'-light laptop segment.

I'm afraid that your information is several years out-of-date...

AMD's mobile CPUs are now commonly lower power than even the best of the Pentium-Ms to-date. That's in-addition to being cheaper, and higher performance at the same time.

For example:
    mSempron 2800+ (1.6GHz) 25W
    mTurion MT-34 (1.8GHz) 25W
    mTurion ML-37 (2.0GHz) 35W
    mAthlon 64-3000+ (2.0GHz) 35W
vs.
    mCel-2.5G 35W
    Solo-T1300 (1.66GHz) 37W
    Pentium M-780 (2.26GHz) 27W

And that's as fair of a comparison as possible.

While I'm sure the marketing dollars are nice, I think that's not the primary reason for Apple to choose Intel over AMD.

Since we've debunked the notebook justification, what alternatives are there?

this

[everphilski]

Yonah

Comparable to a Athlon 64 X2 (that's a desktop chip) with way less power draw (both idle and peak load).

Other factors exist too... AMD used to have a reputation for poor QA on the line, and while they seem to have overcome it, hey history is a stinger when you are dealing with companies like Apple.

true that - and another thing

[nobodyman]

Parent is absolutely right. I'm certain that the vast majority of viewers could tell the difference between a video captured at 24fps vs 60 fps.

And the claim that the blurryness of video offsets ths framerate is also debateable. I'd argue the opposite, in fact - 60fps video is much, much more sharp than 24fps because the motion blur obscures the detail(you only notice it on the edges, but it affects the entire frame).

Re:true that - and another thing

[geenome]

I read somewhere that they tried shooting the second season of the original Twilight Zone in 60 fps video, over 24 fps film, in order to save money. The experiment lasted six episodes, the result being so bad that they eventually ditched the idea and went back to 24 fps. It depends entirely on what mood the movie tries to create. Yes, frame rate matters. No, one isn't always better than the other.