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Meet Max, the G4 PowerPC processor
Arto Stimms sent us
a rather nice
compilation of facts and tidbits about the G4 processor,
aka Max. Main features:
Altivec, MERSI SMP, 2Mb L2, and a 128 bit
data path running at 100Mhz. At 1.8 Volts, a 400Mhz G4 will
only consume 8 Watts.
...finally showing that 400MHz is possible without
trying to fry a chicken.
Correct me if I am wrong, but arent the new p3's going to run at 1.8v? Just a smaller chip, probably a .18micron die, so what is so special.
Great development...now we just need someone else
besides Apple to make G3/G4 boxes or commodity motherboards.
We'll know that the PPC has arrived when you have a selection of a dozen different non-apple motherboards, that you can buy seperately w/o processor, memory, power supply, or case. And the
processors have a listing on Pricewatch with 2 dozen mail order companies selling them.
Right now, it looks as though Apples the only game in town for PPC's...and that's unacceptable to me.
I wouldnt get locked into one vendor again, particularly THAT vendor.
Tell us, when are you finally going to wake up
and see the huge market for selling simple ATX
style PowerPC motherboards with CPU's (at comparable x86 prices)????
> I don't give a rat's ass how "easy" the MacOS GUI is to use...
> from a support perspective its a goddamned nightmare!
How odd that every study for the last decade on support costs have shown that the Mac costs less to maintain. Could it possibly be that you don't have the necessary skill set and knowledge base to effectively administer a network of Macs? Nahhh...they must just suck.
Later
Then where's the competition in the PowerPC
market?
Apple is playing it's own little monopoly in
PPC-world. Just as bad as M$.
Would you like to be able to buy a non-Apple ATX board and run Linux?
Then please help getting CHRP systems out by
visiting TransAMour agian
Well, the initiative is about BeOS, but the system is meant for Linux and BeOS.
I can only agree. Apple is not to be trusted.
If only someone would start selling CHRP systems.
Linux runs great on CHRP.
btw, it seems to me that the "Max" is not the real
G4 processor. I think Apple just got so fond of the G3 name that they went ahead with G4. According to the powerPC roardmap we will probably see the real G4 (new core) later.
Sure, my Honda Civic cost more than a Dodge Neon, but the Neon sucks. That's because the Neon feels cheap and flimsy, the ergonomics are horrendous, and the controls are in weird, hard to see/reach places. The Civic feels solid and smooth, everything very carefully considered in it's placement, a monument to clean, elegant, unpretentious design. Remind you of any other companies we know?
I wasnt saying that Apple's the only one in the entire world using PPC's. However, you wouldnt call a RS6000 or a AS/400 a consumer, or even hobbyist system, by any stretch of the imagination. Too 'spensive.
You can get the Motorola Yellowknife board seperately...and supposedly it does run PowerPC 750's up to 300 MHz or so...but even so, this board is pretty spartan. A bit like an old Socket 7 board in terms of features.
I wish someone would produce some PPC motherboards or systems. I would love to buy a G4 and run linux on it!
and relax.
IBM/Motorola might come up with a PPC board, sure. But at comparable x86 prices? Two words, NO WAY. Remembere that the x86 platform is a virtually stolen from IBM. There are about as many manufacturers as users of these boards, that's why they are so cheap. IBM would never allow the same thing to happen again. If they do come up with a PPC board that we all want, it will be propriatary and very expensive.
What we need is an open HW plattform that any company freely (or with a reasonable licensing fee) can manufacture. With need companies like ASUS, Abit, Aopen, Gigabyte, etc to join this business otherwise the prices never will come down to reasonable levels.
I don't think this will happen any time soon. We are all stuck in the x86 swamp for another 5 - 10 years or more.
It sound great, sure. But is this platform open for companies other then PIOS?
We desperately need Asus, Abit, Aopen and other boardmakers to join this, otherwise the price tag for this system will never be comparable with the x86 famine.
Their head hardware guy is Dave Haynie, a legendary Amiga hardware designer, so he's got a pretty good track record and you can also count on him to deliver that complete spec book he's promised...
I'll take an Alpha anyday for pure speed and when
:-)
I worry about power I use a StrongARM. PowerPC
seems to be crud that nobody really wants.
(Diving into the pool to avoid the flames
/A.Coward
True enough. For your MPEGs and JPEGs and Gaussian Blurs, and to a lesser extent your 3D Geometry and Radiosity, AltiVec will rock. But I don't think we'll see its full capability until Motorola brings out a 128-bit bus. Particularly with multi-processor systems, that system bus will saturate fast.
A dual or quad-processor G4 system running NextStep would make a great workstation. It's a pity that Apple are pulling all the good bits out of NextStep to make macosx.
SQL Error
I want to see other companies than Apple making PPCs
mainly so that BeOS will be able to run on them.
Be can't port to the newer Apple computers because Apple
won't tell them how to program some of the chips.
Or actually they probably could, but only by
reverse-engineering, which could get them in trouble.
It would be a pity if BeOS moved completely away from
PPC because AltiVec would allow it to *really* kick ass
as a "Media OS".
I wonder... would it affect the legality of
reverse-engineering Apple's machines if Be used the
information already reverse-engineered by the
LinuxPPC team?
I support more then 100 PPC Macs at my work (we are 95% mac/ 5% Sun, and have three personal Apple Machines, a 5300ce, a 5260 (yuk), and a G3. If any of them crash more than once every two weeks I am amazed. My G3 has not crashed since I took it out of the box in August. You need to understand how prefs and extensions work top keep the system stable. Norton disk doctor is what morons use thinking it will tell them anything about an error, when in fact it just looks at the file structure of your hard drive which will tell you nothing about a software related error (you really need to learn more about what that horrid program does - I will not run it on any Mac, and erase all copies I find). In fact all those crappy Norton extensions are a common cause of what make Macs crash (and FileSaver ruins hard drives as well). Those little numbers that come after the error messages are what tell you what happened in the error state (you need to look them upo, though), and if they are not specific enough get a copy of MacsBug and learn about how to use it. If you get good with it get a copy of Nosey, and you will be able to support those machines properly. It's support people like you who give Macs a bad name for stability...
they all drain loads of juice when running 1.0 load. Need a _real_ cooler? Lot of PII coolers use more power to cool than the frickin PII alone...
if you like quiet operating system, and want the CPU to remain at lower operating temperature than with those huge scrap of metal, get a Tennmax Lasagna for Voodoo II, but K6-2 also work here.
Apple has no monopoly on PowerPC.
Apple has monopoly in PPC-world because nobody else has a clue of how sell PPC to consumers.
Is Apple going to be the death of PowerPC, or is PowerPC going to be the death of Apple?
The PII is already on par with the G3. The bytemarks are crap, and the PII outperforms the G3 at FP anyway.
A large number of power and ground pins are not provided for power supply. They are provided as return paths for the very sharp rising edge signals in digital electronic circuits.
The high bandwidth product of modern digital circuits generate the follwoing problems:
1)Crosstalk
2)High bandwidth (sharp edge) signal degredation due mainly to inductance
3)Changing signal path impedence (as opposed to resistance) for the signal transmission lines causes signal reflections, reducing operating frequency of the circuits.
As a result of the above factors, don't expect the new chips to have a lower quotient of power/signal pins.
Regards
Nick.
Get lmbench and run it yourself. Don't belieave Motorola/Intel ... SPEC ratings. In fact don't belieave SPEC.org. SPEC ratings has little in common with real `program' performance.
Or is it enough with a fat heatsink?
The noise x86 computers normally generate is unacceptable. This could be yet another reason for abandoning the x86 platform...
Going for a target price of $300USD, how many boards would have to sell to amortize off the the design time, PCB layout, film, stencils and assembly setup costs? A board like this would cost about 50K, even if it was reusing a lot of the Yellowknife X4.1 design. Thats a lot of boards even assuming you can get them built for $150, remember most part prices you are are Qty1000, parts and assembly costs go way up for short board runs. If this was feasable, you think someone would have already done it. MOT and IBM's Marketing Depts have funded several reference designs, but no 3rd party manufacterer has stepped up to build the boards.
If you talk about troubleshooting Macs and the words "extensions conflict" don't cross your lips, then you obviously don't know what you're talking about. The five Macs I use at work or at home run for weeks or months without a hiccup.
What constantly amazes me is that Windows users will go to special courses, buy books, and read magazine articles just to keep a Wintel box running, but won't learn the first thing about Macs before pronouncing them as useless or unreliable. Why are any of your machines running 7.5.3? Any 68030 will run 7.6.1, and any 68040 will run 8.1. If the machine in question is a PowerPC, then you are a good five or six OS releases behind (7.5.5, 7.6, 7.6.1, 8.0, 8.1, 8.5, 8.5.1). Sheesh.
Certainly the MacOS is not without its shortcomings, which is why I've tried BeOS, MkLinux and LinuxPPC, and I look forward to MacOS X. However, lots of folks like prepress and graphics shops -- who have hard deadlines and for whom time really is money -- use Macs reliably and with very little tech support. Of course, they actually bothered to learn something about them...
I don't know if StrongARM is cheaper than PPC after Intel started to license and influence. Yet PPC 740, or G3, is easy to buy from Motorola. PPC 740 is also faster even without the 750's cache - according to SPECfp results floating point is only a little lower than 750 and it tops StrongARM easy, and SPECint is also beating the StrongARM.
Well, I'll agree with BeOS. It is the fastest OS out there on any hardware. Linux, though... Linux is definately NOT faster than MacOS or BeOS on the same hardware. I have my G3/250 at work dual bootable into LinuxPPC and it didn't blow me away with speed. Nevermind the fact that it has no apps for it that I use daily (ie, FileMaker Pro) so I saw no benefit to using it. BeOS suffers the same fate. They want people to use their OS and yet every program that's out for it costs $50 w/out a shareware version? Please.
MacOS may suck, but it sucks less than anything else out there. Especially Win95/98. I'm counting the days till OS X Server is released.
What? Are you going by those ZD benchmarks, the same people howget major investments from Intel and MS. I'm sure those tests are bias. Bytemarks in my experience are pretty damn good it showing actual performance.
Obviously you haven't bothered to find out what AltiVec really is about. The example mentioned - a 3x3 median filter that runs at 1.23 cycles/pixel on AltiVec vs. 415 cycles/pixel on MMX - demonstrates that many image/video/audio processing operations can benefit way more than 200%.
Asolutely, I would buy a PPC system running Linux in a heart beat! Nothing would make me happier than running a dual G4 Linux box.
IBM hasn't announced support for AltiVec because IBM is more concerned about server-side issues for PowerPC, whereas AltiVec is considered a client-side technology. Maybe it would be useful on the server-side, but IBM's focusing on issues like throughput.
I accused Apple of abusing it's monopoly in the
PowerPC-world. And I stand by it.
Look at how they killed the clones and CHRP.
Maybe Mot and IBM are just easily scared, but
never the less, Apple used it's OS to monopolize
the PowerPC Desktop.
Where's the StarMax Pro 6000?????
Yes, there RS/6000 and embedded systems, but that's
a completely different market.
Can you imagine that anyone would start
making Mac-clones or base a business om
MacOS systems if Apple did ask?
Well, we can hope, anyway.
How much would it take? Couldn't IBM/Motorola fabricate the chipsets and BIOS and sell them to the Taiwanese x86 motherboard manufacturers?
If the price point were around what Alpha motherboards (which use standard PC parts; 32/64 bit PCI slots and SDRAM DIMMS) are right now, they would sell like hotcakes.
Ooh, can we get back into CLASSIC PII (or now PIII) vs PowerPC arguments? RISC vs a pipelined-FPU CISC. Addition loops? RISC wins. Multiplication loops (the stuff that MATTERS for 3D games).. Whoops, look at that.. The PIII wins. And while I haven't taken the time to totally disect the difference between KNI and Altivec, I'm sure they compare in some areas. From what I've heard, KNI focuses on areas needed for 3D calculations, and Altivec for multimedia aspects.
Also, the K7 will NEVER ship, AMD has NEVER made a ship date to save their life (at least not a volume ship) and the K7's specs.. If you want multiple megs of full speed L2 cache, prepare to be shelling out the big bucks.
Don't trust the vertical integration that Apple offers.
Heck, MacOS is a piece of **** in low level operations. That's why they're jumping to OS X, cuz they can't dig themselves out of the hole they made.
Perhaps folks have wasted money on Apple's totally-closed hardware-OS combo based on glorious promises but then got burned. Of course, real Believers never get burned since one must first realize...
Imagine a world with Apple monopoly...
Was I the only one that looked at the source for that site? What a mess.
I'd be excited if Apple didn't have a bug up their ass about Be developing for their shit.
Moto already makes the one key chip, the 106,
it does the Processor to SDRAM, ROM, PCI interface,
all you need is a superIO chip to do IDE and IO, ISA and maybe a PCI bridge if you want more than 3 PCI slots. All the other chips on YK4.1 are pretty common, there are no Apple Custom parts anymore since Apple pulled support for CHRP.
The problem is that Apple wants all the 106's and IBM doesnt make them. Max really needed its own support chip(s) to fully take advantage of the 'Max' bus instead of having to run in 750 emulation mode. Until(if) that comes out, dont expect to see much in SMP Max performance using 750 bus protocols.
The BIOS already exists, OpenFirmware works, it may need some tweaks to update it, but if the IBMOTO marketing departments could put a little of the budget into supporting Linux/CHRP this could happen. The problem is, the tiny Linux market really doesnt mean anything to them, it's all driven by Apple and a few big OEM embedded customers. They dont run Linux, they run VxWorks and PSOS and other Realtime OSes. Linux is something the engineers play with in the labs. We all know how much say the engineers have in corporate roadmaps and budgets (zilch).
Why buy a G3 (or G4) for $3K when you can get a PII for $1.5K?
Sure, buy a PC system pieced together from cheap Taiwanese parts, save a few dollars. I will point and laugh at you when you try go get the thing running reliably, or add some simple peripheral, or...heaven forbid...go back to the dealer and actually try to get some service.
I've seen this countless times. Watched friends or co-workers "saving lots of money!" on no-name clone crap that never works quite right, then being stranded with nobody taking accountability or solving their problems.
Try buying a brand-name PII system from a company that can first provide a wholly-built and reliable system, then back it up with a warranty and technical support...as would happen if you bought a G3 system from Apple. You'll quickly find that this "PC's cost half as much!" argument holds no water.
In fact...here's a little science experiment. I just now went to Apple's on-line store and configured a nice new G3 system. Total price, as configured, was just shy of $3100.
Then I tried the same with some brand-name PC's...Compaq, Dell, Gateway and IBM...and tried to find or configure the closest matching system.
Dell was indeed cheaper. By about $250.
IBM was within a few dollars.
Compaq was ~$50 more expensive.
Gateway was ~$100 more expensive.
Try it yourself.
A few years ago, yes, there was a premium price attached to Macs when compared to reputable PC's. It's 1999 now and this is no longer the case. The difference is negligible. Get over it.
I saw a presentation from Corel that mentioned this last fall. The strongARM does not use logical addressing, it uses absolute addressing. Which makes the design that much simpler. Which means that that instruction by instruction they are a lot faster. But context-switching is very slow.
You were not planning on multi-tasking?
Cheers,
Ben
Heh,
Just wanted you let some of you none Mac users know what I consider to be great news. One person complained that the MacOS is unstable, blah blah, etc. Yeah, ok. The MacOS does slow down the incredible G3s a good deal, depending on what you're doing.
However, Apple's coming out with MacOS X, a Mach/BSD based Unixish OS with an Apple UI on top. Full symmetic multiprocessing, and all that great geekish stuff. Stable, fast, secure. ****The OS will no longer be slowing down the processor, and should most definitely be available when the G4s begin being sold.****
Now, I could go on forever about how incorrect many of these posts are, but I don't care to at the moment.
Ross
ross@ctol.net
I hear that it can take das to run a full SPEC benchmark, which could lead me tthink that it tests quite a few things to be sure that the numbers are not skewed by faster cache/delay loops or whatever.
>I don't give a rat's ass how "easy" the MacOS GUI
>is to use... from a support perspective its a goddamned nightmare!
Well, I thought 'support perspective' was to serve the users...
How odd that every study for the last decade on support costs have shown that the Mac costs less to maintain. Could it possibly be that you don't have the necessary skill set and knowledge base to effectively administer a network of Macs? Nahhh...they must just suck. No that's because 1) they use better hardware (&more expensive) 2) they don't have that much applications [so DLL aren't overwritten for instance; but also 20 applications on 10 PCs are harder to administrate than 5 applications on 10 Macs, intrinsequely) 3) since nobody can do anything when there is an error, users quickly stop bugging the support people (just reboot, or ask for a reinstall). 4) the reference point, Windows, is a greater nightmare to administrate (Windows sucks so bad, that sucking less than Windows isn't a great feat).
if you want to know what your errors are... most people don't care because they wouldn't know how to fix it anyway so it's not included in the default install of the os (not even on the cd - they should fix this). but anyway, install macsbug (it's called something like that) and everytime your mac crashes you should get a nice screen remeniscent of of every windows user's best friend (or at least most seen).
if you don't know what the error types are (1, 2, 3, etc.) then that's your own fault.
of course they have a monopoly. They killed off all the clones and refuse to give Be the specs for G3. In the pc world I can buy Dell,Compaq, Gateway-I can even build my own PC and can run linux,BeOS, BSD and yes even MS Windows.
Yes.. that is why I am still able to use my old i486 66 machine as a Linux server! But you can't even run MacOS 8 on some not so older Macintoshes! Erm, if im not mistaken these older macintosh systemsuse an entirely different chipset than the powerpc macs do, and apple has been replacing the 68k code with powerpc native code so half the cpu power wouldnt be wasted emulating 68k.
Hmm...
I thought osx server already *was* released?
www.apple.com/mscosx
-SONET
If you knew how to set up a Mac, you wouldn't have this problem.
Basic setup instructions:
1) Plug it in.
2) Turn it on.
3) Don't load Norton Utilities or any other stupid-ass utility.
4) Avoid loading 500 useless extentions.
5) Enjoy a crash-free MacOS.
Anyone who can follow the above 5 rules won't have problems. Everyone else might have some trouble.
It's a Mac for God's sake. How difficult can this be? It scares me to imagine that you might be experimenting with *NIX.
The original source for the 415 cycles/pixel figure is this Apple document...
What a pile of shit..
If the Linux kernel folks can code sufficiently well for the G3 architecture (as can the MkLinux folks) what's stopping the Be folks from looking at their code (no, not copying it)?
The answer? Nothing whatsoever.
Jean-Louis Gassee is just as ignorant and pigheaded as he was years ago at Apple. It's just that all these years later he's refined the art of NIH (Not Invented Here) to hold back another group of loyal users.
Finger John Carmak by typing
finger johnc@idsoftware.com
And see what he says about those silly bytemarks.
And Apple quotes just one half of a bytemark, their marketing sucks, they don't get things right, just like MS....
Those are cycle accurate figures off of test units. Those are *real* world numbers not estimates. Theoretical performance estimates are in factors not percents.
Anyone running mac should have macbugs installed. I mean it is free and can dump a log of your crash and tell so much info that you can choke on. Ever since I installed macbugs and learned how to use its abilities our macs have 2 week runtimes until I reboot. Notice the users that complain don't try and don't think or they just have no clue which means get the info and the tools and learn them. Also useful is super resedit with forker, now you can hack data and resource forks. Conflict catcher's reports are invaluable.
Altivec looks to me to be a pretty ass-kicking addition to the PowerPC chips.
It is a whole new set of instructions, on a whole new block of silicon and doesn't rely on stupid mode-switching to get around the lack of registers in the parent CPU architecture.
The K7 is just another x86 clone. While i commend AMD for coming up with something that Intel will have a hard time competing with, it's hardly going to make anything that wasn't possible with x86 chips before possible now.
Also i think core CPU speed is becoming somewhat irrelevant. 3D accelerators and Multi-channel soundcards sell so well because CPUs can't perform these functions quickly enough, no matter what their clock speed.
IBM's Power3 chips, which probably run faster than anything else on the planet for I/O performance are only clocked at around 200 mHz or less.
AltiVec actually puts some useful processing power back onto the core CPU.
I too would love to see cheaper supporting hardware for these chips, as I for one will never, ever use MacOS 7.x/8.x again.
Microsoft bought NON-VOTING shares in Apple as a vote of confidence. The whole "browser of choice" arm twisting stems from "pointy haired bosses" wanting to run Microsoft Office on Macs, and the ass kissing Microsoft forced Apple to do to get Mac office 98 out.
Mac OS 8.6 will use an updated version of the NuKernal that was a gem of Copland. Memory protection as good or better than Windows, modern memory management.
IBM demoed a 1.1 GHz powerpc core. Motorola has created Altivec. Apple is finishing up Mac OS X. Add a dash of salt and fear nothing.
Rumors are the G4's systems running at 650 to 800 MHz.
IBM and Motorola allow their customers to customize the G4's they order. If only Apple had BTO G4 processors in their BTO Power Macs when they come out. With Mac OS X and G4's the bottle neck will be the bridge chip. Motorola damn well deliever an overspec bridge chip.
StrongARM require software emulation of floating point and if you need threads, and reliable task switching, or run a compile (gcc -O2) it' _slow_ and _slowing_ other processes. On the other hand if company made multi processor notebook with a fast disk subsystem, mobile sized, innovative features, it could be a success not just because it runs a free unix - i'm interested in who would buy it...
>Apple doesn't know anything about hardware.
Before Apple settled on PPC, they were working on other all RISC designs in house. But chip fabing is VERY expensive and financially
risky, so the Processor alliance between Apple Moto and IBM was formed.
AltiVec is an Apple designed technology. The former Apple employee who developed it is now an editor at Microprocessor Review mag.
Apple is now company run by ex NeXT people. Not the mid nineties bozos and idiots who have been put out to pasture. Hell some of 'em work at Microsoft now. Get used to it.
Stop quoting figures on Pentium's from Apple.
It'll run about 50 cycles a pixel, using no optimization whatsoever, on any p2.
I have no fucking clue what idiot at apple or motorola is taking 415 cycles.
Must be the same idiot who quoted specmarks on super optimized apple compilers vs a debug build with optimization DISABLED on a p2.
Read credible.
I've *done* it in 50 cycles without any effort.
I've *done* it in about 20 cycles with a little effort put into scheduling.
I could do it in even less with KNI or 3DNow!.
I don't want to quote a figure because i don't have anything sitting on my puter i can calculate the time of with VTune or something (even with just a pencil and paper), using 3Dnow or KNI.
How bout the fact that while your precious G4 will beat a P3 in addition loops, it gets bonked in multiply loops. Can we guess what 3d games and such use?
That's right, multiply loops.
If you are trying to crack DES, get a G4.
If you want to get real work done or play games, get something else
Yeah, we've all heard the yadda-yadda about Apple not giving their box schematics to Be. But explain to me how the guys at LinuxPPC have managed to crank out an OS with (I assume) no support from Apple. I know the MkLinux people got help from Apple, but I was under the impression that the LinuxPPC guys were on their own.
>Because they reverse engineered it.
>Why can't Be?
>They could.
Why the fuck didn't they? It would be great to have continued support for the hardware platform that has the mose Be software written for it. DUH!
>They have most of it done.
BS
>But why should they support an architecture where >the only company that produces computers sold to >consumers hates them with a passion?
This could Be backwards, it's Jean-leaus and he was "spurned" by not being bought out.
>Already the G4 will require all kinds of new
>chipsets. So great. Not only would they have to
>reverse engineer the G3 (and, BTW, apple changes >the specs on the computers not infrequently),
>they've got to do the G4 as well. And supports
>it.
What Be can't keep up with a free ware OS or even Apple? Damm Be don't fall so far behind.
> Avoid lawsuits too (they are still small, apple >could still wipe them out or put them in a very
>bad financial situation)
For What? Stop Hallucinating.
> Did i mention they have about 50-100 people
>there (i believe it's 50, but they have been
>expanding recently)?
Really they still need engeneers? I thought they just mooched them from sponsors like intel and hatachi?
> And they want to produce an OS for a platform
>with vendors that WANT them to produce it, not a > platform where the only vendor of consumer
>computers is your competitor. And run by a
> meglomaniac as well
You your a psychiatrist and have actually gotten some face time with Jobs?
There is a reason why macos8 doesn't work with not so new macs. Not so new macs have nubus and 68k processors or nubus and ppc. Apple dumped nubus and went with pci. Most pci macs should run os8, so macs made for the last 4 years should work. If you have anything older you probably don't want to switch anyway.
Gumber sez:
Yeah, right. There is more to a processor than the system interface.
Sounds like a dead battery to me. I had a problem with my 6100 where I would have to turn it on and off a few times to get it to boot. I bought a $10 battery (nobody but Apple had them) and the problem went away.
The above linked website does appear to sell a 'commodity' PPC-based CHRP system.
http://www.sci.fi/~saffron/transamour/transam.h
The 'single vendor' argument is a little thin, by the way, because CHRP is a public spec and is supported by a number of OSs (including Linux). You can even run MacOS on CHRP systems, although not without breaking the licence.
The problem is that there is almost no market for non-MacOS PPC systems.
Your talking out of your ass! I've never heard of something so stupid. I wonder how someone could possibly be so dumb as to call MacOS superior to LINUX!! AHHHH, it makes my blood boild when I think of such a comment. I wish you were here so I could kick the crap out of you.
Shit!
.... Linux beats MacOS as server. To a programmer, Linux beats MacOS on desktop because most of its components are open source.
Linux beats MacOS in cost effectiveness because it runs on Intel, AMD, Cyrix,
To a casual end user, who needs MacOS if they can stand Windows crashing?
Most of the time, I use Linux for programming, net surfing, sometimes image editing, word processing. Windows occasionaly for gaming though I'm waiting to reformat this partition. MacOS has no impact on my life.
"Motorola, Apple and IBM banded teogther to make the PowerPC alliance and now Apple has benefited greatly from this.
Exactly! Apple has benefited. But what about the consumer?"
Are you really that pea brained? When I said Apple benefited from this, I said it because Macintosh users in general benefitted from this. The only benefit Apple got out of this was sales... and a faster processor to wave in front of people's faces...
Steve Jobs hasnt been stealing from people, if he did he'd have a lot of patent infrigment lawsuits on him... and if he did, he did the right thing, he took technology which had prompise and used it. the mouse for example. everyone, wintel users and mac users alike use it. And next time, please make sure your accusations can hold water...
Steve Jobs isnt out to rule the known world, just help it. And plus, Gate's reign of terror is nearing a impetus now....
Macos 8 can boot on 68030 computers which i believe is around ten years old now, and 8.5 works on 68040 computers both which i believe predates the 486 processor... linux may be pretty nice on a 486 processor, but any other modern os would suck on it. Apple had a business decision to make, and i support thier decisions...
Apple does not force people to upgrade thier software and hardware constantly, others do. The boom the internet has made has forced software companies to come out with new releases faster than they did before, altough hardware has pretty much stayed the same. Right now, Apple is only catching up, to make up for the time they lost when they were goin g through thier dark ages...before thier dark ages, apple has supported every computer they ever made for the past 14 or so years, assured total compatibility. Once they stabilize, they will tget a lot better. And plus, macintosh computers have a service and design span which is considerably longer than those of wintel based computers.
The PowerPC has great prompise, in later years it will become even more important as others look for alternatives to INTEL's aging x86 processors...
Fret no more, the upcoming Apple Consumer Portable code named P1 is quite a speed demon given it's size. It uses a 300 mhz G3 processor max of 340 mb of ram huge hard drive and a small but fitting screen size 11 inches. YOu can even write on the screen (rumor not yet confirmed) this will be a cool looking laptop. It was made to be used by kids and is very hard, made of ploycarbonate, the same stuff as bulletproof glass. (maybe save you from a stray round on the field eh? It's nopt REALLY bulletproof not thick enough.. ) It will last you maybe 8-10 hours becuz kids're going to be using them, the teacher cant stop the class and ask everyone to put in fresh batteries. They're made to last the day. This laptop will beat the pants off any wintel laptop/desptop at comparable clock speeds. best of all, you can go with either macos X which is 100% POSIX compatible but Apple doesnt want to pursue certififcation ebcuz of all the red tape. Or you can install Linux PPC...
Mac tech support is so easy on the software side. It's invariably an extension conflict or a corrupted file. I work at the help desk at a small liberal arts college, and I typically spend half of my day working on troublesome Macs (ranging from brand new G3's to IIsi's, LCIII's, and evberything in between), and rarely is there a work order where I can't figure out what went wrong. Admittedly, stupid things go wrong that shouldn't go wrong on a computer, and sometimes, just like with the Windows machines I work on as well, the only fix is to wipe off the OS and re-install it. But they are not difficult machines to support from a software point of view, and despite the idiot things I've seen people do to them (would you belive a second copy of the OS sitting inside the system folder, or an OS built out of the parts of four different releases of the MacOS?), they are actually very durable.
mwegner@cs.oberlin.edu
Things have become so fast nowadays that it's pretty damn hard to tell the difference between a 400MHz this or 400MHz that while composing an email, surfing the web, or balancing your checkbook. What really matters is how easy your computer is to use to get sh*t done. And believe me, in my experience supporting the average Joe here at work, Macs far more easily become a functional extention of the user.
Apple has always had the right idea. Whine if you like (there's plenty to read here), but I'd buy my mother a Mac.
You guys sure do know alot. You talk about doing this that and the other in this many cycles. Thats cool stuff. There is only one thing that confuses me. If all you guys are so smart why aren't you making programs that are worth a shit? You talk about what you know and how everyone BUT you is full of shit, yet, I still haven't seen any apps worth a damn.
Maybe you should trade in your A+ certs and get a real degree. The world has too many BSers.
The PowerPC chips're the best thing to happen to Apple in years and to the computing world in general that uses it. I'm a diehard mac user and would stikk stay with the macos even if it was still running 680x0 processors. Motorola, Apple and IBM banded teogther to make the PowerPC alliance and now Apple has benefited greatly from this. I think, in theory, if Apple did not have it's troubles to drag it behind, it would have left the rest behind in the dust. Apple fell behind, and they've been working hard to catch up. But then again, if they didnt fall behind, they would have gotten lazy andstopped trying to stay in the lead and giving us good new products. Now apple will once again reap the fruit of it's labors.
I think the PowerPC is proably the best all around processor out here, it has advantage in nearly everything wxcept for market share. Sure there may be a few other processors faster or better than it but at what price? Intel Gambled too much and now they're jumping over walls, but one day, that wall will just be too tall for them to simply jump over.
K7 sounds great. but it still uses x86 instructions and such to make it work. It might be a much better processor if it werent burdened with legacy code... And the rest of the other better and faster processors are simply out of the reach of everyone except for big companies, Bill Gates (now i hafta wash my keyboard...), and every other damn rich and dumb fools...
Got PowerPC?
Motorola Document Beware, it's a 1.2MB PDF file.
only with no extraneous spaces. No spaces at all, in fact. Augh!
Anyway:
The diagram on page 22 shows that both the system bus and backside bus are still 64-bit. The 128-bit bus is (for now) restricted to the L1 caches (page 28).
MERSI stands for Modified, Exclusive, Reserved, Shared, Invalid (page 27).
It is pin-compatible with the 750/G3 processor (page 29).
Estimated performance is 18 SpecInt95 and 16 SpecFP95 at 400MHz with 2MB of 200MHz cache and a 100MHz system bus (page 31). That's healthy, but not astounding.
It's interesting to compare the die photo (page 24) with the QED RM7000. About 3/4 of the RM7000 die area is cache compared to 1/4 of the G4. The RM7000 delivers 14 SpecInt95 and 16 SpecFP95 at 300MHz using about 5W of power. But the RM7000 doesn't have a vector unit.
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I would buy a ppc motherboard in a heartbeat for $200 if it used standard pc type peripherials, cards, and memory. The only I've seen are $500 or more. I might as well get the dual G4 rs/6k clone. Please IBM listen to the linuxppc lists, give us motherboards.
Do you have any idea how much free software is available, just waiting to run on the ppc? Imagine a tail -f that can run on multiple files, a dbx that doesn't crash if the targets stack frame is corrupted, and numerous other utilities that cause me to shudder in revulsion at the utilities packaged with AIX 4.2. Tap into this power, support affordable personal ppc's by producing or releasing affordable pc-compatible motherboards. You can maintain control of your corporate market, while gaining the foundational support of thousands of active developers, hundred of active ppc specific developers for free. There are so many x86's in the business world simply because so many purchasers and their friends own one at home. Regain the world's confidence by allowing the end user to see the power of your chips. Don't cripple yourselves by depending on microsoft with its inetentionally slowed down NT for ppc. When ppc users write the ppc OS, they write it for performance.
It is said, never trust a bald barber, since he can have no respect for your hair. IBM you should be trusting ppc users, since we are the ones with a vested interest in seeing you succeed. Even though we may not be corporations, we could be the next person to decide whether the site needs a few thousand wintel's or a few thousand ppc's.
I agree that the k7 will have it's work cut out to match the PPC, but that is only because the PPC is RISC. You're argument is talking about added instruction sets (MMX, 3DNow, KNI) which of course, we all know only add a little help to the poorer fp performance of all x86 chips if the software takes advantage of it. The K7 is *much* more a difference than what introducing MMX or KNI. If AMD happens to deliver on it's promises, the fp will be fixed and the other architechtural changes (such as the pipelining) prove to be as useful as everyone says then the PPC, even the G4, may see the K7 being quite the competitor (plus it's a faster clock rate, so what they lack in finess they will try to make some of that up with sheer power). But then again the K7 is the way to go if you want x86 compatability. If you don't care about that and want the fastest processor on the block then just get an Alpha.
My next machine is going to be a Laptop. I'm getting my commission in the U.S. Army soon and don't want to ship a desktop around :)
:).
I've had a 486 laptop running Linux and have loved it. It's been great even though it's extremely slow due to the fact that it has a 486 and 20mb of RAM. I use it mainly for network utilities and some limited coding projects and find it incredibly useful. Would like to get something that could replace a desktop, though.
The thing is, I don't want another x86 laptop. Some of them have decent (4 hour lifetime with a LiIon battery), but the x86 CPU is just sucking juice at an amazing rate.
What I want is a power optimized laptop. A strongARM or PowerPC laptop would be great in this area. I'm not opposed to getting a PowerBook G3 or G4, but they are rather spendy.
I wish that Mickysoft would continue to support PowerPC based NT systems and that some other vendor would realize the potential of a nicely optimized NT based G3/G4 laptop. That might make the price come down. Then I could format the hard drive and put Linux on it
A strongARM based laptop running a preinstalled LInux would also be nice. Hear me HCC and Corel?
Current Laptops are basically very portable computers that can run on batteries for a limitied amount of time. Let's hope someone builds one that lasts 10-12 hours without a huge battery!
There is no way that Altivec (or 3D now! or MMX) can improve speed of general applications like Mozilla, Word Perfect, etc... The main problem of G4 will be their price (and that's why I have a super-cheap K6-300 instead of a PII-300, PII-450: I prefered to buy a [second-hand] laptop).
Certainly BE the "media" os will be altivec optimized won't it? Hell no. The only othat will have quicktime 4, preemptive and protected (insert buzzword here) will be Mac OS X (Mac OS X server is not Mac OS X). Multicore G4's with Altivec will run it also. Apple is getting full media systems ready and all these items are parts of the whole machine. Apple went from 68k to PowerPC. Intel is still stuck with x86 20 years later. Apple tried Copland then figured out how to make the OS transition with Mac OS X. Copland was to system 7 as win 95 is to win 3.1. Apple jumped architecture with PowerPC for future gains in processor technology and Mac OS X is the OS transition to compliment the PowerPC's power effectively. Also Mac OS X allows all programs the power of 64 bit pci G4 processor cards let alone G4 multicore chips too. Instead of buying a new G4 system one would be able to for instance just by a quad G4 processor card and more than eclipse a new system with single or even dual chips. You can for instance max out a PowerPC system with 126 processors, but only Mac OS X with handle it invisibly. Intel or the other x86 companies will never make anything like this because it would cut into Xeon, upgrades, and server sales. Apple doesn't sell hardcore servers atm so it doesn't have anything to lose by delivering overspec. One example is the G3.
Remember one thing, MS lives by copying other technology. When Apple releases OS X with G4's with Altivec later this year it will the easiest and most powerful media system an average consumer can afford. It would be about 2 - 3 years for MS to play catch up if Intel drops x86 with a consumer ia64 (laugh) or MS gets a clue and redesigns windows (again) for media handling. Apple has to and is dropping as much legacy crud as possible to leapfrog MS and grab the lead again. IBM and Motorola are doing there part to leapfrog Intel with Altivec and multicore G4's and efficient SMP.
After win 95 MS didn't know what the next evolution is. Well the marketplace is going to find out when MS releases their first clueless and directionless OS. Happy computing
Not if it has the same crappy interface as OS N nX.
Not if it doesn't have pre-emptive multitasking.
Not if it doesn't have memory management and protection.
Not if it boots into a single-user mode.
Not if it doesn't have X builtin.
In short, if Apple really puts a Unix in MacOS, I might look at it. If they basterdize it then I'm going right back to where I claim that MacOS is worthless to me.
-- Erich
Slashdot reader since 1997
Not to mention I don't see many multi-terrabyte disk solutions for the Mac.
-- Erich
Slashdot reader since 1997
But you want to talk about bad parts? Well, I bought a AMD K5-90 on a no-name motherboard for $120 three years ago. It has a generic 256k isa video card in it, along with two $15 PCI NE2000 controllers. Oh, and a $10 sound card. 32 megs of generic RAM. The only quality parts were my two Western Digital hard drives (and I guess that's debatable). Let's see how it's doing:
3:30pm up 133 days, 5:13, 4 users, load average: 1.00, 1.00, 1.00
Yup, looks like it's doing OK. It runs everything from matlab to rc5des to amp. Had to take it down a while ago, the power went out for more than half an hour. Previous uptime was about 120 days, and that was because I had to move it. I can't remember the last time it stopped working was...
I don't think it's usually crappy parts that make things crash, I think it's crappy OS's.
And besides, don't give me crap about how Mac hardware is great. I got 8 megs of the correct type of memory to put in my Centris 650. Put in the SIMM. The computer recognised it fine... and two hours later turned off for no reason. So I took it out -- and the random-turnoffs continued. It won't even turn on at all now. I tried swapping the battery, no help. The Apple guy said he couldn't do anything besides sell me a new Mac.
No thanks.
-- Erich
Slashdot reader since 1997
I just built my new box in December, Its a AMD K-6.2 350, with the 100mhz bus, 4.3 Gig Ultra IDE HD, STB velocity 128 8meg agp, Voodoo2 car, 64 megs of ram, Sound Blaster AWE 64, NE2000 KTI pci network car, 56k Modem, 32x CDROM,floppy and full tower case for under 1000. (All parts where wholesale.) Add my monitor to that and it cost the same as my best friends new IMac. Even he agrees that my system is a hell of alot faster and the graphics look better then his Imac and all for the same price.
Macs are great people, their hardware kicks ass, its just way to expensive and after you run BE and MacOS you will see a diffrence. It like watching Windows compaired to Linux on a x86 machine. MacOS either dosen't take full advantage of the hardware or just isn't optmized as well.
If macs ever get comparable to x86 prices and I can build my own I will and I'll run BE and Linux, but right now I don't have that kind of money to waste.
Unless your a insane speed demon you don't need a 4,000 to 5,000 dollar G4 laptop. Yes x86 laptops run hot as hell so thats why you sould by a strong arm laptop, a AMD laptop or for 5,000 dollars you might as well just by a Net Winde, a Flat Color LCD monitor and hook it up to a small recharagable battery pack. That would probably only cost you around $3,000. I can't think of any practicle reason for having that much power in a laptop and spending that much money on it.
Sure Apple's processors err IBM and Motorola's process are better then x86's but price/preformance ratio they don't even come close.
No, it owes a lot to a certain engineer who was a designer of the Alpha, among other things.
Brian Fundakowski Feldman
Posted by Mr. Assembly:
when the AMD's K7 comes out with 200 MHZ bus it will kick the G4 out of the water.
Posted by Lord Kano-The Gangster Of Love:
-Heck, MacOS is a piece of **** in low level
- operations. That's why they're jumping to OS X, cuz
- they can't dig themselves out of the hole they
- made.
You need to re-check your facts. Appleshare IP does file transfers over fast ethernet at twice the speed of Win NT.
Ever compile code on a Mac and a Windows Box? The only areas where windows has the mac beat are gaming (which is changing) and the ability to use more than one floppy drive (whoopie f*cking doo).
LK
Posted by Lord Kano-The Gangster Of Love:
You're not comparing (for lack of a better term) apples to apples.
The fastest Mac on the market goes for 2999. At 400 mhz it'll smoke any simgle PII system on the market.
Yeah, maybe you can get a PII 450 from Joe Schmuckatelli's discount computer warehouse for under 2k. Big deal, it'll still not be able to touch the G3 400. When apple was was using the PPC604, a 180 mhz 604 outperformed a 200mhz Pentium Pro by about 15%.
The number one cause of errors on the MacOS is old applications. I'm sorry if you still want to run MS Word 3.02, upgrade. A computer related purchase isn't like a house purchase. You WILL need to upgrade. A computer isn't supposed to last 50+ years.
If you think that the blue screen of death is any more helpful than the cryptic system bombs that a Mac will show you, then you must be smoking crack.
LK
on the desktop, server, etc your right about the
alpha. but when power consumption is important,
like in an embedded system or a notebook id rather
have a PPC. as nice as the strong arm is, for some
reason there is relatiely little software for it.
i like the fact that people can come over and use the mac sitting next to my real computer, if i had
a laptop, for the same purpose, id like to be able
to also boot into the macOS. (of course i would be
using sheepshaver if i really wanted to run any mac apps) i dont know how strongARM compares to PPC. anyone with experiene on both?
Median filter 3x3 at 415 cycles/pixel ... Are you talking about Microsoft optimized code here ???
... Did you know that a K6-2 with 3DNow has 4x the peak FP performance of a Pentium 2 ? In real world and with well optimized software, You'll see that the K6-2 is just almost as fast as the P2 (with a few exceptions where it's a bit faster).
... well .. it's Apple hype!
...
It can be done in less than 15 cycles with 3DNow (I don't know for KNI and MMX doesn't interest me)
And I guess your 1.23 cycles/pixel doesn't include the memory writes.
It's very easy to hype with hard numbers like this
Remember, Apple hype is
Do you remember their claims about the iMac 40% faster than a P2/400 ?? I'm still laughing
I have been thinking about the same issue for nearly a year now, since LinuxPPC managed to get their distro up and running on the new motherboards in nearly no time.
Is this Be's idea of a good marketing strategy? To openly admit that they are dumping a large majority of their original userbase over technical documentation that seems as if its trivial to begin with... to conceit inferiority of their large-capital, corporate operation to a small, loosely-banded group of PPC hacks...
I cannot imagine that Apple would sue, though it also comes as little suprise that in this period they arent forthcoming aboout hardware specs... given their position as an alt-OS, and their relative fraternity amongst others (what other major propriety platform has sponsored a Linux port, even one as curious as mkLinux??)
To Jean Louis Gassee and your Beboppers: stop your whining, Linux developers have for years dealt with a lacking of hardware documentation, vendor suport, and the like, and with your experience the only thing preventing you from continuing the PPC port (hard to say port since it was the original platform) is your infamously clouded ego.
For those not in the know, JLG was the VP of Product Engineering I believe for many years at Apple Inc., having been (once again from mem) a high ranking exec of Apple France before... a nearly psychotic leather-clad Frenchman, he was known to strike terror into anyone at Apple who opposed his vision of the Macintosh, and was apparantly responsible for so many of the wrong-turms Apple made in terms of product direction, including the destruction of several infamous, Intel-oriented Mac projects. Such battles included a functional MacOS running on top of an Intel driver layer many years ago, and the many vaporware OS projects that consumed so much of Apple's resources in the past. He may have great ideas of his, but he sure has never been able to deal with those of others.
I wonder whether this will be available as an upgrade for owners of G3 Power Macintoshes.
I wouldn't mind a PCI card that gave me USB and FireWire either...
How can you run Netscape without the TCP/IP control panel and extention loaded? Sounds like BS to me.
BTW, Netscape is notoriously crash prone. You can't blame Apple for that. You can blame Apple for unprotected memory though...
well... i also had an apple iigs. and i was also bitter. the iivx that i got a couple months before the centri appeared didn't help.
but my last machine was handbuilt. i got a board, power supply, generic ATX case (which the mb fit, thanks), drives and memories and cards from half a dozen different places. without a bundled copy of macos. but having recently sold it off, i am now going to get a new g3 minitower.
i don't have any problems really, at the moment with apple, and i must say that it's nice to see steve kicking ass and taking names. macos x should certainly increase the mac cool factor, and i cant wait to get it.
id suggest waiting for the new os to come along, running it on the g4s and reapprasing your opinion. if you still don't go for the mac, thats cool too.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Sounds like a dead battery or a faulty motherboard connection. the 61xx mac are notorious for this.
I don't think this is a cheapness issue.
I totally agree about the keyboard and mouse from a usage point of view... ak. Brutal.
But they look great on a poster - the whole iMac package was designed to look great. And the users who buy them don't use them enough to care.
They don't sell iMacs on specs, any more than they sell microwaves by specs - it's a matter of how they sell them. I don't see Compaq (currently Apple's main competitor) putting this sort of thought or effort into their hardware design.
Kev.
--- Just make it crash, I want to see.
It doesnt matter if it's a PIII or K7.
o ad-map.shtml
The G4 enebled with AltiVec will kick butt anyway.
Running at 400 will outperform the P3/500 with 25-200% in everything where Math is used like Speech, Image/MPEG, 3D Graph and Encryption.
For example:
-128bit permutation - very important in DES and other encryption schemes.
Altivec - 20cycles
MMX - 4cycles/bit = 512cycles.
-Median Filter (3x3) Replaces center pixel in a 3x3 window by median of sorted pixels
Altivec - 1.23cycles/pixel
MMX - 415cycles/pixel
AltiVec will rule!
Read more about it:
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/9812/pcc-r
An alpha will get you several times the fp95 performance of either x86 or PPC, but will cost you far too much for the time being. Compaq finally sent me price figures. Prices may vary from manufacturer to manufacturer, but not by enough, they won't.
One thing I've noticed is that most Mac users do a pretty good job of supporting their own computers, including upgrading the OS and installing hardware.
This of course drives tech support people nuts -- Imagine a graphic artist doing the hidden mysteries that only they can do! The only logical conclusion is that the funky Apple computer is shit.
Of course this is due to the fact that the MacOS was designed from the ground up to be easy to support.
Those of you who believe that Linux+KDE/Gnome, with a little more work, can be as easy to adminster as Macs are kidding yourselves. Essentially that's what they tried to do with Windows, and failed. I don't have very much faith that the very qualified Linux programmers or even MacOS-X project can put a pretty face on the UNIX mess and expect it as supportable as the MacOS.
(Of course many Linux users don't want Linux to be easy, but that's not "world domination"!)
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
People don't hate Apple, they FEAR it!! :)
To begin, Winblows users have nothing against the Mac or the MacOS. I get so tired from people callling me up and asking me about their Pc's crashing. I am still runing system 8.1 on a 68k mac. I push it to the limit, on boot up the extensions fill up half the screen, I get up to 6 or 7 netscape windows open at one time, playing a game in the background, while rendering graphics in the front... and I don't get more than one crash every 2 to 4 weeks if that! I am sorry but Windows looks horrible, it sux! It makes PII 450's preform like trash. Give me one thing that a Winblows user can do that a Mac user can't do better on a less powerfull machine. PC's should be used for Linux, or BeOS or even maybe SunOS. But come on people don't spend alll this money on a PII system and run Winblows 95/98. Have a Linux box networked with a Mac, have your Linux box do the Network jobs and programing, have your Mac do the gaming and multimedia jobs and your set for life. And when OSX comes out you can drop Linux as well if you want. So Winblows users get used to it Macs are here and they are here to stay "FO EVA"
Paul.
Apple isn't the only game in town. I don't remember the source but 90%, or more, of the embedded computers in the automotive industry are PPC based. (I am not sure what Altivec will do for them.) In spite of the majority of the postings on /. the desktop/server market is not the only use for processors.
If you want to run Win3/9X/NT/CE run Intel, or it's clones. If you don't and need to optimize power run motorola.
A good example is that little car thingy that NASA sent to Mars.
Like the "Blue Screen of Bill" is so informative!
Oh, to hell with it..... why can't M$ just die?
Between yesterday's article on the Alpha and now this on the G4, I'm approaching a siezure trying to decide what computer to buy this summer. (either way it probably won't be x86. I'm finding that CISC is ready to die now) Hopefully Maya or Lightwave will be out for linux by then. 3DSMax and their dumbass marketing department refuses to port to anything other than WinTel.
Rich
I'm not sure if any PC laptops support this or not, but on the latest Apple laptops you can put 2 batteries in it and run it for 7hours.
"A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep." --Saul Belloe
The new G4 chip: Jazzy new MERSI mode for super-efficient SMP, and AltiVec instruction set for killer real-time multimedia. Oh yeah, and the only consumer-level hardware that will support it is from a company that refuses to give out any specs to Be, Inc. There is no God!
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
1)Most of the posts here seem to be addressing which chip is "fastest." We've got people calling x86 CISC outdated (probably), and saying that G3s'4s are faster because they are RISCian. These arguments just don't hold up. Why? Because the G3/4 design is RISCian, but the instruction set is not. The same holds true with x86, be it Intel or AMD. Check out this article at Ars-Technica for greater explanation of RISC vs. CISC.
2)It's not just about the speed!!! If it was, why not argue that someone buy and SGI MIPS box and get all the great FPU performance? Because it costs too much. Sure, at clock speed, the G3/4 kicks x86 (at least integer wise, not sure about fpu). AMD and Cyrix also beat Intel at clock speed. But Intel just ups MHz. Now, the G3/4, probably not only beat Intel chips at clock speed, but at one or two higher clock speeds as well. Here's the thing: you can still get a faster x86 system for much cheaper (note: since we're just talking about speed here, we don't care about friendliness. That's the usual explanation for Mac prices, that you pay for the easiness and friendliness of the system). In october, I put together a Dual P2-350 system, with UW SCSI card, and UW SCSI hard drive, and 64 MB RAM, Matrox G200 vidcard, SB AWE 64, PCI ethernet, and a 12x SCSI cdrom, for $1000. No monitor. But with a monitor, that would have cost the same as an iMac. And there's just no way that the 233 MHz G3 running on a 66MHz bus was gonna beat that system.
So, when the K7, G4, and P3 are all out later this year, if I (a power user), feel like upgrading for more speed, it will most likely be to another x86 chip because speed/$ is much greater.
NOTE: I'm no x86 fanatic (I'm the guy who posted about cheap alphas yesterday), and this discussion does not apply to normal computer users, because to them speed is not all that is important, and they don't understand what makes a computer fast. Fast is not what sells, marketing and gimmicks sell.
He said, "You'll be able to tell your grandchildren that you helped assemble the first NT supercomputer," and I cringed.
The CHRP platform is not monopolized by Apple, at least not in the way MS does it.
Apple writes the only OS in widespread use, but it does not have a stranglehold on the market (ie, it doesn't punish companies for shipping CHRP systems with other OS's on it, a la MS) Apple ended it's OS license to the cloners not because they were shipping other OS's, but because it wanted to. Mot and IBM could have shipped the systems with Linux or god-knows-what-else, but they didn't because they didn't look far enough ahead.
The independant desktop PowerPC market exists, the only thing that doesn't exist (anymore) is the Mac OS-clone market.
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
Looking at the responses to this thread so far, it looks like the reasons both for and against are highly emotional ("joke of an OS", etc...)
I'd wager that over 90% of the computing world has strongly feelings about the MacOS (or Apple) one way or another.
Apple has gone through several phases and transitions in its history. Unfortunately, no transition is possible without "die-hards" or other people getting burned. Some people are mad that Apple dropped support for Apple ]['s a decade ago (although way that bothers them still befuddles me), while some are mad that Apple has completely moved to its PowerPC-based RISC systems.
Frankly people like this need to grow up. Face it, change happens. It hurts, but there's no way around it. The Apple ][ was a great computer... 2 decades ago!
Also, Apple went through some quality problems between 1995-97. (Any Mac administrator can give you horror stories about Systems 7.5-7.5.3, or the infamous flaming 5300's). But able has made an amazing turnaround recently in virtually all aspects of its operations. Mac OS 8.5 has none of the quality problems (slow, crashing, unexplained errors) that plagued its predecessors. Many people who cite these "problems" with the Mac OS simply haven't used any recent hardware or the current OS rev.
Also, I'd be remiss if i didn't point out that much of the infrastructure of the computing industry is built around supporting and maintaining Windows-based computers. Any competitior to Windows (ie, Linux, Mac OS, BeOS, etc...) poses a direct threat to the livelihood of most IT departments out there. That can't be discounted as a barrier to acceptance of the Mac OS. (It's after my Job!)
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
ahmm.. I've bought a clone about 8 months ago. The only parts that are not so "clone" are the 233 Pentium processor, Diamond Video card and the SoundBlaster 64.
You talk about reliability? Check this out:
5:51pm up 153 days, 20:04, 3 users, load average: 0.00, 0.01, 0.00
Let me see any other non-Unix OS do similar?
About only time I reboot/shutdown my Linux boxes is when I have to either upgrade my kernel or install new memory/board on the motherboard! Oh yea.. and it was that other time when I moved out of my parents home to my own place ;-)
sidster--
Linux rox ...
--sidster
Play lotto? Try http://www.alottofun.com/
As if the current crop of G3's aren't expensive enough..... My employee is shelling out close to $3K each for fully loaded 333-G3's. A typical PII with a similar config would cost little over half that.
And people are saying that MS has a monopoly?
This is insanity! Sure, the G4 might be a fast computer..... But who gives a sh*t if nobody can afford the damned thing? Until Apple figures out that this proprietary bullsh*t isn't going to cut it, most people will stick with Intel/AMD.
Why buy a G3 (or G4) for $3K when you can get a PII for $1.5K?
And to top it off, you get MacOS. The OS that doesn't even have the sense to tell you what the hell its errors mean. We constantly get random errors with all of our Macs -- 7.5.3 all the way up to 8.5.
"Gee, why did my Mac lock up?"
"I haven't the slightest clue."
I run DiskDoctor, rebuild the desktop, reboot... and now it works? WTF? What was wrong in the first place? Can it be prevented? Beats me, since the damned thing won't tell me what the _real_ problem is. I don't give a rat's ass how "easy" the MacOS GUI is to use... from a support perspective its a goddamned nightmare! At least windows will tell you what's wrong! (and in most cases, it can be easily fixed)
Oh, to hell with it..... why can't Apple just die?
Not really. I have reasons for my hatred. MacOS is a joke of an OS, especially when you consider the quality of their hardware. Anyone running Linux/BeOS on a PowerPC will tell you there is a hugh performace difference. If MacOS-X and MacOS perform to the level that they should, then I will start respecting Apple.
I proably shouldn't ask this.. but why is there so much hatred against Apple? It just seems people tear it apart because it is there.
-- four