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Apple announces the G4
Roger wrote to us with the news that Apple has announced the G4. Apple's website has all the news. This is /really/ fast. Anyone wanna let me test one? It's got up to a 500 mhz G4, one meg of L2 cache @ 1/2 processing speed, 100mhz system bus. And check out the 22 inch display that can be ordered along with it.
"The future is already here - it's just not evenly distributed yet" - William Gibson
"The future is already here,
it's just not evenly distributed yet"
"The future is already here,
it's just not evenly distributed yet"
- William Gibson
>
... it is a great OS, and I like the OperSource idea. I am getting ready to install LinuxPPC on my "piece of crap" G3. I just don't like some of the PEOPLE who use Linux.
... but only if you use the "cool" operating system like us (whatever).
.....
But make sure you criticise the Mac the most because it's uncool to those who use a "REAL" operating system right?
Well, I've HAD it.
I am absofreakinglutly SICK of people telling me that Apple is dead and that people who use MAcs are a bunch of freaks. Get off you goddamn high horse and stop telling us how we're idiots. WE like the Mac, that's all, and WE ARE NOT GOING AWAY.
I'm sorry for being a hypocrite, do you forgive me, computer god? Or should I just throw away my "piece of crap computer" and forget that I even bothered learning C and C++ and trying to be a part of some "great society" circle of gurus.
Excuse me for actually giving a sh*t about a platform.
You know, I am VERY happy for Linux
OSes are great for whatever you use them for
i feel like Im in high school again.
But if you want to go ahead and tell me how my IDIOTIC OPERATING SYSTEM is not memory protected, go ahead. Chances are, I've heard the line before
Try rendering. Try rc5, seti and des for the hell of it. Try 100 more things. After all that trying, then lets Talk. And the winner is...place your bets.
:)
Sadly 'if at first you suceed, try, try again' doesn't play well in the computer world.
Quake3 was just a suggestion. Its gameplay is pathetic anyway (HL/TF'er here) but the graphics are perfect for stressing new hardware (and now smp)
Anonymous Coward, get it?
Anonymous Coward, get it?
Not bad spelling, bad typing
Apple bending the truth in press releases...yeah, everyone knows that press releases are a reporter's first source of objective factual information. You'd never hear of Microsoft bending the truth in a press release, that's for sure...can we talk about something else now?
It's not 2.94%, but 2.94 TIMES faster.
spoken like a true techno-fascist. what, may i ask, is wrong with appealing to newbies?
2) The rage128 is ssssssssllllllllloooooooowwwwwwww by any desktop standard.
:)
:) Apple sez 4 its G3 'My toy! Hands off! [Closed specs]' At least the G4 has a good chance of more specs coming from Motorola, as they did more of the design and have more rights to it this time.
:)
3) Marketing? Um no, this is equivilent to a papal mandate. This one is all opinion unless you happen to be one of the weasels, so cut the list to 3
4) Any the $64,000 question is...WHY? Guess why? Hint: first letter A, ryhmes with Snapple
Anonymous Coward, get it?
Anonymous Coward, get it?
Not bad spelling, bad typing
Actually 7.1 was my favorite version. It only used 800K of RAM.
With advocates like you Linux doesn't need any enemies.
PPC users don't need to compile everything themselves, and if you don't like RedHat use Debian PPC.
According to what I've read, optimizing for Altivec will consist of checking off one box in codewarrior. Hey, I can do that!
Linux is a great platform, if you have an inferiority complex and a lot of time on your hands. How long will it be before the masses start talking about Linux because they want to be "different"? Yeah, right. Most Linux losers can't afford a Mac anyway.
No. It's not. You've obviously never installed Solaris.
...
Bitchslapped? Give Rob a bitchslap from bitchslapped.com.
At my old job, I loaded a math program for kids which wouldn't load because of this. Had I not known (since the OS didn't point out the problem), and been there to help, it would have been a problem since the app was needed.
However, lack of true multitasking and good memory protection are my greatest concerns. (My machine crashes and freezes up too much.)
They still have some OS magic to perform with OS X Final. If they can extend the BSD and Mach foundation with Finder-like magic and some of that new fairy dust they've been sprinkling around the last few months, I'll buy in. Otherwise, I'll just upgrade my LinuxPPC software. :-)
(I'm still using OS 8.0 because 8.6 is bloated and slow. I've got LinuxPPC on a second partition.)
Jobs kept saying they were comparing against "the fastest 600MHz Pentium III box". Really indicative of a typical marketing trick. In this case, apparently: NOT benchmarking against an SGI VW (AFAIK, they only go upto 550 yet). It would be interesting to see how much and for what benchmarks the 3.2 GB/sec of bandwidth would help.
Obviously you have no idea what you're babbling about. Did you forget your medication today? AMD processors don't over heat, Cyrix CPU's on the other hand get very hot but since I doubt you've used either you wouldn't know that.
I have BeOS, but it doesn't run on my machine. And since they've switched to PCs, I know there's no hope for us anymore. :-]
I can't be seen in public with an orange "toilet seat," (or a blue one) however, so I'll be saving for a "normal" PowerBook, or whatever succeeds it--just something good and classy.
10e6 / (10e9 / 2500) = 2.5 So with 10 billion dollars, I could buy enough to crack it in 2.5 years?
Because USparc and Alpha really have no market outside of servers. I don't know how well the G4 stacks up against the other guys mhz for mhz, but a G4 would make a kickass server but you could also play games on it.
A G3/300 will crunch out a SETI block in just under 14hrs. The G3/400 will do it about 9... And the G4; well we'll have to wait and see. However the idea behind the vector processing units, such as the G4's Altivec unit, is to speed up signal processing tasks (among other things), so I imagine the G4 WILL RIP through SETI blocks...
Emulation in the OS code is unfortunately always there.
Because G3 and G4 have much more marketing appeal than meaningless numbers- 601, 603e, 604 etc.
The graphical clients are WAAAY slower. My friend runs the client on his Gateway with a 400mhz Celeron and it takes him about 40 hours. His G3 was taking about 15 hours on the graphical client (don't know if there's a non-graphical client for Mac).
Eventually the markets they're making all this headway in (the exact same markets they were focusing on in the late 80's, early 90's) are going to dry up, like they did last time. Unless apple leadership has some magic plan up their collective sleeve that will either a) multiply the number of computer needing consumers in those channels by a factor of two or b) lower the infamous mac obscelence (god help me i can't spell) cycle by about a year and a half (to on par with wintel machines) they're really only managing to push themselves farther up dung creek without a paddle.
Just from what I've heard recently, I'd guess they're going with option b (crippled yos', wonderfully proprietary product patterning, etc.). They're darn lucky they have the superior chip this time, otherwise we'd be seeing the same spiraling pattern sooner.
Well, I can't lie, I'm an Apple fan but I'm more of a PPC fan. I have 4 machines that I consider mine (even if some are work machines): PPC-mac, PPC-LinuxPPC, PC(half assembled with a video card Linux doesn't support well), and G3-mac. ;-)
:-( I think that if you stripped away the Altivec you would have a very nice processor that was on par or very slightly better than Athlon. But it does have Altivec and if it can be used for more than just encryption or manipulating pixels, it will in fact be an all around screaming chip. That is the 'truth' that Apple doesn't want you to hear... the G4 won't really blaze till apps are recompiled.
;-) Steven.
So I was riding a little high on the G4 buzz, can you blame me? And anyway, a little bitting is half the fun isn't it?
Now seriously, It's been my impression receintly that Apple is planning to utilize the Altivec extensions more than previously thought. I _believe_ that the ability to pass multiple integer or Float operations through Altivec simultaniously will be utilized whenever possible. This would mean that applications that don't render or crack encryption may still see a significant boost with just a recompile. If this is the plan, then the Altivec favored benchmarks have more validity than most people would expect.
As for the Core of the processor, from all the sources I've seen (spec and other) the G4 won't beat the pants off of G3 or PIII by interger units alone. The G4 is only slightly faster at integer math than the G3 and that was only somewhat faster than PII/III. It will, however, be faster at floating point math. Probably 40-50% faster than G3 (which I personally believe was on par or sometimes below Intel
As for a lack of benchmarks, if you look at the benchmarks provided for Pentium and Athlon, you will notice that they are PC benchmarks. The PIII page at Intel.com lists: CPUmark99, Wintune98, SPECint95, SYSmark98, High End Winstone 99, and Business Winstone99. SPEC is the only benchmark that the PPC camp can run in comparison, all the other ones are designed for Windows systems. I believe all the others use windows application code to run the tests. How is Apple supposed to provide a diverse set of benchmarks if there isn't a diverse set of benchmarks to run. They could always run MacBench but that only compares macs to macs. It would absolutly useless to anyone except a mac owner. BTW, http://www.powerlogix.com/news/press.html#G4 is reporting a Mac bench of 1630 on a 500mhz G4 (w/ very slow 166mhz L2 cache) upgrade in a 4 year old Macintosh. Macbench processor scores are integer based and rely on Cache so this is actually a bad reflection of the performance the shipping machines will see. The base measurement of 100 is for a 60 mhz 601 processor, ie. the slowest ppc to ship in a mac. Not too helpful is it? Ok, I found a better number... A 500mhz G3 (1 Mb 250mhz cache) upgrade card scored a 1,683 in macbench. Still doesn't compare Apples to Intels though does it? This is why apple has to rely on other benches, like application demonstrations.
Also, I personally like Photoshop benchs for a couple of reasons. First, Adobe optimises the crap out of photoshop. It is after all Intel that sends their engineers over to Adobe before every new CPU is released to insure top tier performance with Photoshop. The other thing is that Photoshop provides a very processor and/or memory intensive test on the machine. If you really want to compare processors or the System bus, photoshop is the way to go. If you can blaze through photoshop, you can calculate a Bazillion polygons in QIII. the problem with Photoshop is that different filters can be and are often a relatively simple algorithm that is repeated over and over across the image. The benefit is that you get a nice average of how the machine handles that algorithm, the detriment is that since the algorithm is often simple it may run significantly different on one machine vs. another. This is why most Photoshop shootouts are generally conducted over 15-20 filters. Many times, the tests are done by scripting many filters one after another. So, the problem is Photoshop tests are only as reliable as the group performing them. Thank god for PPC fans that PC magazine published a number of articles where the G3 beat faster PII's and PIII's (even in SIMD enhanced filters). If I recall correctly, the 400mhz G3 beat the 500mhz PIII in 10 of 13 tests with Katmai accelerated Photoshop.
As for the bytemarks, Yes I agree that they are a poor reflection of system performance but I still believe that they are a good indication of pure and raw processor performance. After all, they simply take a routine task like Malloc'ing memory and they repeat it over an over. Sure this isn't a real world test because how many programs call malloc 10k times and then stop? But it does give you an indication of how fast the processor can pass those instructions through it's core doesn't it?
Also, I don't think the bytemarks have been updated for a long time on the mac side either. The fact is they have always strongly favored the PPC platform (my 66mhz 601 rates multiples faster than a P90 in some tests even though it is a slower system overall). This is to be expected however because of the nature of Bytemark running on RISC. RISC machines are, after all meant to pass simple instructions through the processor more quickly than the more complex instructions of CISC chips. The hope is that it can pass so many simple instructions that is makes up for the complexity of the CISC instructions in the competition. (ok, I concede this is a flaw with bytemark when comparing CISC vs. RISC but Intel chips to have a very RISC like core don't they.
Huh? Did not know that... Who make this boards? Why Apple do no sell them?
Anyway.. why does not Apple compare there new G4 to a 800Mhz Kriotech Athlon (which cost $2200, can use much better video cards and other hardware)
Sure G4 is a fine processor. But Apple's marketing drivel is annoying. It is so clearly exploits people without a slightest clue about computer usage, its sickening.
<^>_<(ô ô)>_<^>
It's true that a machine acting as a file server rarely crashes, and OS 8.x is a lot better than previous OSes, but you must not be doing very much if your machines never crash.
Write software, use Communicator, open apps: Bugs happen; Communicator happens; memory problems happen.
Thank you. I'm glad to see a calm, rational discussion come out of this.
I'm still trying to find a good way to compare the G4. Intel does have a halfway decent set of benchmarks at http://www.intel.com/procs/perf/ But as you pointed out, most are strictly Wintel so I can't expect Apple to use them all.
The other thing I have noticed is that there are several HW review sites like Shary Extreme, Tom's Hardware, Anand, etc. that do a lot of benchmarking of x86 processors but not PPC offerings. I do wish there were other benchmarks to compare the G3 and G4 systems with x86 systems besides Photoshop and SPEC benchmarks. The SPEC benchmarks give me a good indication of CPU performance but I'm still a little skeptical since Motorola put them on their web site seemingly without submitting them to SPEC for review and publication on the SPEC site.
Actually, I've always been a big fan of the PPC architecture, even before the first PPC Mac. I'd love to see a complete set of benchmarks from Apple. But even more than that I'd like to buy just a G4 CPU and MB separately. I assume Motorola got stuck in some kind of exclusive relationship with Apple that prevents that from ever happening, which is really too bad.
Pretty small font. Pretty much at the bottom of the page. Now I might be missing something here... But these benchmarks seems to be a couple of integer algorithms. My points regarding this are:
The BYTEmarks are totally bogus. There is one test in which the G4 "performed" 100x faster than the PII, in a way that implied that the compiler "optimised" the code by removing it (less than a fraction of cycle per loop). This test is biasing totally the results yielding "Mac is twice as fast as a PC".
There was a page at Apple, that showed the individual results of the BYTEmark, making the fraud apparent, but unsurprisingly, it disappeared when I linked it on Slashdot in the previous "Mac absolutly rulez" flameware.
i'm averaging about 12 hours with version 1.06 (compared to about 36 hours with 1.0 or whatever) of the seti GUI client, on a pII-450, not overclocked, running in winblows 98. that's not too horrible, is it?
SuPz.orG
yes. totally. If I remember correctly, Sun helped them do it back when their processors were so slow they had to resort to multi-processor machines to try to keep up with HP, IBM, and DEC. I remember the result being some photoshop results that showed pretty close to 1 to 1 scaling (i.e., on a 4 proc sparc it was virtually 4 times as fast).
It was many moons ago, and the dust in my brain may be clouding the facts a little, but rest assured that photoshop is well tuned for multiple processors.
A really good friend of mine is also an Apple fanatic. I'm pretty sure that Apple packs some type of neuro-toxin into their boxes, that gives them 100% mind control over their users, because this kid is insanely sick with convincing me that Macintrashes are SOOO much better than "PC's" that I sometimes just hang up on him, or walk away during a conversation. Now I want to know, are ALL mac users like that?
SuPz.orG
My P3 500Mhz Intellistation does it at 8-9hours a unit. Nyah.
I would hope so, since his CPU is at least two years old and you have 200 mhz on him. It also depends on what OS you're using; Unix is a lot faster than the Mac OS or NT.
I haven't seen the cinema display, but I assume they're using the same kind of LCD tech that's in their existing flat-panel displays, and boy are they ever sweet. Anyone who lives near a computer store, get down there and look at Apple's new flat-panel screens. They just totally blow away any ideas you may have had about LCD's being blurry and dark. This thing looked better than my sony CRT. And then go wander over to the wintel section and look at (for example) Viewsonics flat-screen. Doesn't look so cool anymore, all of a sudden. If only Apple would stop crippling all their great hardware with MacOS... if only... sigh.
There is no K5 cabal.
I am not the real rusty.
Permedia III
Don't get me wrong - I'm not shitting on Linux. Linux is a wonderful operating system, one that I've used in the past. If somebody asked me about setting up a server, I would certainly recommend one of the Unices (Linux, *BSD, or one of the commerical Unices), the specific one being dependent on their needs. If anybody told me they were running BeOS as a server for more than a handful of home users, I'd probably laugh at them.
I've simply found that *I*, personally, can get things done faster and with less hassle using BeOS as opposed to Linux, contradicting the original poster who claimed (paraphrasing) that no one could ever find BeOS more productive than Linux.
Well... g3;s didn't have mp support, so apple isn't habitually making those suckers yet. Hell, make one with that free motherboard design (if thats possible, dunno the limits on that thing) And stfu about apple's marketing. It is a single slogan. They don't even use the people anymore. Look at intel's bs. "This way in" and using Homer Simpson and saying it has a "better internet expieience" (well html renders faster anytime you up the speed on yer computer, so thatz kinda pointless) Plus, I'm sure intel's spending a whole load more on advertising than apple is (apple has relatively little advertising in fact) And nowadays apple's commercials are just kinda for a laugh or two. iBook's commercial talks about "falling in love" with a commercial with like barry white singing or soomething like that. (hehe) The AirPort (hmm software basestation steve said) has a commercial with it floating around like an alien ship with the same theme of musice. (hehe) No worrds in that commercial, just the standard apple slogan. People recognize the apple stuff and now they make commercials that are kinda funny. While intel has some complex commercials with weird fx talking about a better internet expierience. Or popular cartoon characters getting a Pentium put in their head (overheating! aggh!) Hmmph. Which is more drivel?
PPC chips were never the problem, the problem is getting new G3 chips to work. And what did IBM do??? They released specs to PPC so people can build new PPC computers? Is there a major manufacturer that just suddenly sprang up out of nowhere and mass produced and sold these new PPC computers? No, there wasn't, and we have yet to see if there ever will be. So don't say that Be's claims are invalid because IBM did something that has so far caused no effect on the PPC market. That's just kind of silly. I like the BeOS, and I hope that there is a place for it in the current market. I understand that it doesn't have the userbase or strength of linux yet, but as long as Be Inc. continues to work on it, I will support it. Although I would really love to use BeOS on one of those pretty new G4's. =(
Must have hurt when they sewed your mind shut. The G4 is SMP capable. Did you see dual-PIII's on the market before the first PIII shipped? I think not.
Meanwhile, you can call me "Rip" if you like. At least my user name doesn't profess to perform fellatio on theater-range ballistic missiles. ;)
:)
:) Actually, it comes from my early Quake days when I played with the keyboard becuase my mouse wouldn't work. So I got beat up. A lot.
The G4 is about 10-15% faster than PIII at the same frequency (and usually the fastest PII(PIII) available has higher frequency than the fastest Gx available).
and another undisclosed sum to settle a lawsuit. However, Apple had over a billion in cash sitting around at the time, plus assets that could have been liquified.
The 150 mill didn't do squat. It didn't change anything one way or the other.
When Apple last posted Intel-busting performance results, they were for the integer BYTEmarks, whereas for real benchmarks like SPECfp, Intel beat G3, and Alpha destroyed them both.
I'll wait for some real benchmarks to emerge, and for AltiVec support in gcc, before going to G4.
...buy a shaker of salt. Maybe even a 5lb bag.
:)
Now, if the specs can get out so Linux and Be can make their oses *fully support* the g4, great. But of course, Apple won't share its toys. They have a burning bridge mentality. Sad.
As for "8X faster!" or whatever ridiculous claim they're making (I don't even have to check, its up there for sure a la G3) you don't think that'll show up in any app that means shit? One filter for photoshop or a looped benchmark all in risc microcode doth not count. Try something like...o...quake3 when its finished? Among other things
Anonymous Coward, get it?
Anonymous Coward, get it?
Not bad spelling, bad typing
G4 is not merely a motorola processor - the chip was developed under the joint efforts of Motorola, Apple, and IBM via the PPC umm.."treaty".. from a few years back, the one that was going to lead the world into CHRP - also, apple gives all of their products cleaner "apple branded" names that smack of some weird kind of capital futurism - they are obsessed with Apple corporate identity. this is sad because it tends to confuse the shit out of most imac buying folks, who really do just want to make an informed decision before sinking 1500 into a computer..1394 --> fire wire 802.11-->airport..what ever..i would leave the mac os if there was nything i liked better...
Enough of your own benchmarks! 1. Can it boot up at 1/10 of a second?? 2. Can it start and run Photoshop with all the plugins known to man at 1/25 of second? 3. Other apps should be less than 1/100 of a second. If not, it's still so slooooowwwww...
WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT!!! "today speed depends on RAM/Cache-Speed and not internal bellsnwhistles"??? You are obviously NOT a hardware engineer! RAM and cache have NOTHING to do with the speed of the machine, they are ONLY storage areas!!! they ARE "bellsnwhistles" to store up data that is waiting to process or may be proced multiple times and thus be needed again. What good is this if that data doesn't get PROCESSED expeditiously? The RAM and cache in this machine are FINE, Being the FASTEST on the consumer market helps too. You will find that not many caches that run at over 200mhz nor will you find RAM much higher than 100mhz on the market as the current standard is PC 100. There has NEVER been hype to push the RAM standard because it has never been important, it's only that you have enough. This machine processes data at gigaflop speeds and the bus supports 800-megabytes-per-second data throughput, believe me friend, this is new in the bandwidth arena. Why? Because all of the bells and whistles are in harmony. Here are the tests, the Intel specs were taken from Intel's own website, advertised as "Real World" testes (oops.) tests. Intel Signal Processing Library Performance Specification Test Pentium III Clock Cycles G4 Clock Cycles G4 Performance G4 Performance (Adjusted for MHz) 1. 1024 dim. Square (bsqr1) 1.30 0.50 2.60 x faster 2.17 x faster 2. 1024 dim. Multiply (bMpy2) 1.33 0.75 1.77 x faster 1.48 x faster 3. 1024 dim. Dot Prod (DotProd) 2.21 0.50 4.42 x faster 3.68 x faster 4. 256 Pt. Complex FFT (FFT) 6.94 4.00 1.74 x faster 1.45 x faster 5. 32 tap X 1024 dim. FIR Filter (bFir) 0.95 0.33 2.88 x faster 2.40 x faster 6. 32 tap x 1024 dim. Convolution 85.00 11.00 7.73 x faster 6.44 x faster Average 16.29 2.85 3.52 x faster 2.94 x faster The 500MHz G4 Processor, with Velocity Engine, is an average of 2.94 times as fast as the fastest Pentium III (600MHz) in tests published by Intel to demonstrate Pentium's speed. ...Meanwhile, back at the doughnut shoppe...
...g400.
:)
You didn't compre it to that. It would make all your points, and more. Plus, it has higher image quality in 2D and 3D.
The rage is the oldest 'newest' card from any 3D OEM. All the other guys have come out with new stuff, and then some. (nv10 and v4 on horizon)
Anonymous Coward, get it?
Anonymous Coward, get it?
Not bad spelling, bad typing
Originally they were supposed to be 64 bit with 4 processor cores on each chip. This has been delayerd until the introduction of the G5 or whatever they end up calling it at some unspecified. Intel's inability to get Merced out was most likely at least a part of the reason.
Score: -1 (Flamebait)
:P
Don't be so sure... Mac OS X (yet to be released) and Mac OS X Server (already shipping), as well as Darwin OS (the open source basis of OS X) are based on BSD Unix, which would most likely make it very easy to port it. I have read that some Unix programs could even be run under OS X with a simple recompile. So if they did it under Mac OS X Server or Darwin OS, it would have been possible for them to use those tests.
Why on earth would you waste silicon translating CISC instructions to RISC instructions? Use that space for somethign valuable like cache.
"Let him go, Ralph. He knows what he's doing." --Otto Mann (simpsons)
I personally dislike MacOS, so this would instantly become a Linux box. As such, does anyone know if they're good for that? Any glaring software deficiencies?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
This is a link to the cinema display......
This thing looks SOOOO awesome... I might die of envy right now...
RateVegas.com - Vegas Reviews
Was Apple just /.ed? I think so. Perfect timing.
__ While you sleep, I creep... gaining ground by the week.
Is it just me or is Apple's site about the slowest site on the net? I think it's only been up about half the times I've tried to go there...
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
The G4s aren't the only thing apple announced at Seybold SanFran. The also unvailed their Cinema Display [22 inch LCD] as well as OS9 shipping in October.
Cool stuff: New Colours! The G4s are "silver and graphite"
Also bundled in Airport functionality [actually a card]
It's like christmas in August!!!
Blocklevel: Practical Information Architecture
I've sold my soul to intel, but I want one of those displays!
"...America's great minds of today, teaching America's great minds of tomorrow. Poor bastards." -- A Beautiful Min
Mmmmmmm......new Be machine
Quit your whinin'. Since when is "there's a new processor available for the Mac, and it's fast" equitable to "Gee whiz, the case sure looks neat!"
Negative knee-jerk reactions to everything with the word "Apple" in it doesn't make you look too smart.
TheRegister has an article comparing the specs of the different boxes. The 400 Mhz machine will not support some of the key features of the 450 or 500. That is why it is available now and price competive with Pentiums and G3s.
They are still getting the bugs out of the SawTooth Mobo, maybe when they have produces enough of them they will come out with a SawTooth based G4/400.
Work for Change & GET PAID!
All in all, they're a happier group at the moment than most Amiga users. :-(
TedC
Agree. Intel has even worse drivel..
But as for SMP support, my original comment was that with PC architecture we have it HERE and NOW. It there is also some pretty good competition in this area. So Apple's bragging about "supercomputer on a slice of silicon" is what it is - irresponsible bragging.
<^>_<(ô ô)>_<^>
You saved me alot of typing =)
Not significantly.
$1507 vs $1599 is the difference in price of a USB mouse and keyboard vs non USB, or name brand over cheap, or the difference in price due to hard disk manufacturers.
A $200 difference is cheaper; $1307.
A $92 difference is not big enough for me to put up with making a system from scratch when Apple has already done it for me.
-AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
Quick corrections:
DVD-RAM is standard on the faster models.
The standard Ultra2SCSI on those faster machines is much faster than Firewire. Firewire is capable of 400Mbs, but that doesnt mean the drives are. =)
Secondly - MacOS has one advantage over UN*X-like OSs, BeOS and Windoze and that is ease of use and elegance in the UI. It walks over the competition in size 13 hob-nailed boots in that respect. MacOS users don't really care about the core OS, as long as their machine is relatively stable and reasonably speedy. Things may get better with OS X but time will tell.
You have NEVER used BeOS then have you?! The UI ion BeOS BLOWS AWAY the MacOS and _any_ OS in userfriendly and just plain common sense ideas on how a GUI should work. It takes every GUI to date and 'fixes' them, and if you still don't like it, you can choose which GUI style you like best and use it (Mac, Windows, or Amiga) - Take that!
OK... G3/350 B&W... SETI 1.06... 7h 10min on average... Aparently there will be a SETI client that has been optimised for the G4. Can't wait!
Actually, I don't have a desk chair at home right now, so I'm using an old tower case instead. Works pretty well.
"Be Happy or Die." -- AoN
I like my dual boot Win95/Linux box I get the best of both worlds games and somethin to learn about. I may have just started off using Linux and have used PC's almost exclusively and haven't touched an Apple in forever. I don't flame on about your choice of OS or hardware. BTW I like the new Mac it looks like it would be a good computer if only Apple management wasn't so screwed up.
it's funny to read through these posts and discover people arguing the exact same vaguely anti-apple senitments, with totally oppositional "evidence" - eg "MacOS sucks because they spent so much time and energy obsessing over 680X0 compatibility" vs "Mac sucks because they dropped ADB without so much as a thought concerning apple compatibility" so what ? does this unit perform the tasks you need to perform ? are we adding any value to this process with our scandalous mutterings/oddly disproportionate passions ? does it occur to anybody that Apple Computer, Inc. is not a government agency, bound to serve the public in any way ? They are a private enterprise, selling hardware to people who want it..buy it or dont. it seems like any plaform bias, that would cause a person to type an exclaimation point is an indication that some-where, some-body is smiling about a very successful marketing operation. "the bastards who buy them, they know what they've been sold " Crass, major general despair
This machine isn't for you! It's for me! They aren't marketing it with you in mind, as well they shouldn't!
If they claim to be twice as fast as the fastest PIII and if they hide the fact that this is restricted to Photoshop, they are doing marketing with all PC users in mind. It's as simple as that - period. Nobody (including the original poster) denies they have a fast machine, it's their extremely wrong-leading type of advertising one can criticize.
Umm....the voodoo3 does support 32 bit color.....if it only supported 16 bit color that would be kind of extreme.....it doesn't support 32 bit TEXTURES!!!! much less important....its still rendered in 32 bit color....
"The SPEC suite only runs on UNIX boxes" False. Intel's reported SPEC numbers are for Windows NT4. "Although you can quote the SPECint95 for a particular processor, those are the souped-up hotboxes." False. The data are for real shipping systems. In fact, the numbers Intel quotes are often lower than those reported by Dell for their shipping systems. "I have yet to hear on Slashdot a list of specific problems about Bytemark." (1) The compiled versions for the Mac OS is 3 years newer than the compiled version for Windows. (2) Even if you don't use the compiled versions, BYTEmarks are highly susceptible to differences in compilers and compiler optomizations. (3) SPEC is backed by an organization that publishes specific rules for the use of its benchmarks, is subject to peer review and updates, and is widely understood and used in the entire industry (except Apple). (4) BYTEmarks are not used by anyone in the entire industry except Apple. Not even what's left of BYTE continues to actively support BYTEmarks, since they only continue to provide the old binaries and source code, and don't publish results. "Basically, the processor manufacture makes a motherboard with the best components possible (8MB L2 caches are not uncommon). While you're supposed to be able to buy these motherboards in the market, they are not produced in mass quantities." False. The data reported are from systems that are shipping or will soon ship. The L2 cache used is reported in the data and must be on shipping or soon to be shipping systems. If the SPEC results show an 8 MB L2 cache, you can be certain that such a system is available. The only systems with 8 MB L2 cache I can recall seeing in recent history are the SGI Origin 2000s and they ship with that amount. If you don't believe this, go to http://www.spec.org and look at the information. The SPECint95/fp95 data are at: http://www.spec.org/osg/cpu95/results/
I'd sayed "based on" is rather vague, and possibly misleading. The "outside", or decoder stage, is certainly modern in design but is an interface to an somewhat old instruction set.
:-)
Basically your processor looks something like this (superscalar):
Instruction Fetch (get instructions from memory)
| | | |
Instruction Decode(figure out what instructions are)
| | | |
Reservation Stations (queue instructions before sending to execution units)
| | | |
Execution Units (perform integer, FP, load/store, etc)
| | | |
Commit Unit (put instructions back in order)
| | | |
What happens in the above processor (which could be a PPC, x86, Sparc, whatever) is that the CPU fetches upcoming instructions in the Instruction Fetch stage. How many instructions it fetches at once depends on the processor. Once it has fetched a batch, it sends them to the decoder (and starts fetching the next batch simultaneously). The decoder figures out what the instructions are, and what reservation station/exectution unit pair it requires. The reservation stations are simply holding places where the instructions wait for the execution unit to get to doing it. The execution units are things like your FPU, integer units, MMX, SSE, AltiVec, etc. Since the execution units do the instructions out-of-order, the commit unit puts them back in proper order before finishing execution (ie, writing memory/registers).
Note in some processors there are individual reservation stations for each execution unit, some have one big station that serves all units (I *think* the P3 and family do it as one big station, PPC as individual stations). In any case, the actions are essentially the same.
In any case, the difference between the current x86 and pure RISC CPUs is in the Instruction Decode stage of the CPU pipeline. In RISC processors, this stage is usually very simple (less complex instructions), and so may only take one clock cycle. In x86, the decoding to interal RISC ops (known as mu-ops or R-ops, depending on if you're at AMD or Intel...I think that Intel calls it mu-ops, AMD R-ops) is quite complex and may require several pipe stages - thus several clock cycles. This isn't actually as bad as it might seem, since due to the pipelining as soon as an instruction passes the first of the decode stages, another incoming instruction starts using the first decode stage. But it is a bit of overhead. So your pipe would look like this:
Fetch
||||
Decode 1
||||
Decode 2
||||
Decode 3
||||
etc.
||||
Reservation Stations
||||
all the rest as above
So hopefully that clears *that* part up (in probably more detail than anyone wanted
As for the core being based on that of the Pentium Pro, this is definitely true. The core being the so-called P6 core. Now, the PII and P3 were essentially architectural and clock speed improvements upon that core, with the P3 adding an extra processor mode (first time since the 386) and the SSE instructions, in addition to pure performance enhancements.
Intel's next "new" IA-32 core will be the P7, code named "Willamette", which should be coming in the the beginning of 2000. They're not exactly resting on their laurels, AMD just beat them to the 7th generation. (*Go AMD!!!!*)
Actually, my Mac mouse has four buttons. *grin*
-The Cheese
That's one more reason Linux is great, if Linux becomes the dominant OS for the average user it would most likely be one of the bigger distrobutions, like RedHat or Caldera, in which case the die hard underdogs will simply side with smaller distros or *BSD or build their own thereby keeping them in an elite group.
Hey, it runs MacOS better and faster!
Stop complaining about what it doesn't do because it was never meant to do it.
the pro towers were changed to graphite color for color management.
. shtml
"With the turquoise Blue G3s, you needed to look directly at the monitor screen when dealing with color workflow and color management or the very bright color of the G3 and Studio Display casing would throw you off."
http://www.maccentral.com/news/9909/01.graphite
my guess is if there wasn't this legitamate complaint then all the pro macs would still be in gay colors.
Yes, I realized that. But honestly, would Apple *really* want to release benchmarks with OS X. I'd suspect that functionality has been more important than tuning. At least at this stage of development. Not to mention that there's probably plenty of debug trace code still in there.
Taking OS X's benchmarks and putting them up against an established Unix (take your pick) - may not be a good idea at the moment.
Its people like you that make my day just a little better than it was before.
well... an easy reply is that if you get oem pricing for nt while buying all that hardware you can get it for around $100... plus, ars technica lists a dual processor Tyan S1832 Tiger 100 for $157. throw those two options together and you've saved about $300, which goes a long way (256Mbytes of memory is one option...)
spoken like a true techno-fascist. what, may i ask, is wrong with appealing to newbies?
Nothing wrong with appealing to newbies. However more than a few of my Mac friends have a real dislike for the iMac. They think it's a poor design and limiting. So I'm not alone in that assessment. The G3 is another story though, great box.
BTW I'm not anti-Mac I happen to like them, I just think Apple could have done better than the iMac.
Well, then there is the top performer Alpha processor as well. Today you can get an Alphaserver DS10 from Compaq for around US$2500.
:-)
(AXP 21264 @466MHz)
SpecInt 24.6
SpecFP 47.9
Once again, Alpha just doesn't play in the same ballpark. And it runs Linux quite well too (not like those PowerMac which are hard to support). Alpha Processors Inc. and Compaq even seem to have a support service for running Linux on those beasts.
If you don't want to shell out the cash, you can still find AXP 21164 from 533MHz to 667MHz:
533HMz: 16.1 SPECint95, 22.5 SPECfp95
600MHz: 18.0 SPECint95, 27.0 SPECfp95
667MHz: 20.8 SPECint95, 32.4 SPECfp95
OK, integer is a lot less sexy, but it's the same price as a Pentium II (at least for the 533MHz version) and noone can touch the floating-point performance, yet.
Moreover, if you insist on having the fastest double-processors micro-computer ever on earth, you can still buy the all-new UP2000 from Alpha Processor Inc (a fully configured system costs around US $6000).
SpecInt 31.8
SpecFP 49.0
...and wait for the coming upgrade to 750MHz, which should have top perfs at around 45 SpecInt and 60 SpecFP
Who cares? I've got a 69 350 ss with a dual quad setup, 10 to 1 compression, positraction and headers and it'll beat a third gen 99 SS (with or without an overdrive chip) any day.
"It's all numbers..." Jimmy da Greek
it gets me where I want to go, and then if it smokes your ass, so be it.
You ARE rambling about numbers... You don't need a better accellerator, you need a better machine!
just great, I buy a really fast Intel based platform then Apple and AMD decide to release their new uber-chips. Thats ok, maybe I can play with one of these at school. I really do enjoy the PPC chipset and can't wait until IBM releases to someone besides Apple. But even so, the G4 450 is 1,599$ (US) which is about the same price as a 400mhz G3 was going for about a month ago. I really like what Apple has done this time with giving you alot of options for the box, something that Gateway and Dell learned to do a long time ago. An optional DVD-RAM is great for anyone doing multimedia anything. Lots of extra space for your rendered movies and source video. Then if you want a really fast drive you pick up a FireWire hard drive to plug into it. I really don't think 1,599 is too much to pay for one of these considering the kind of power you're getting, the equivilent P3 system hasn't even been released yet. I am hoping maybe they will up the main bus to 133mhz for a higher memory throughput, 100mhz is fine but it wouldn't be terribly difficult to go a little faster. Apple is really doing things right this time, Steve Jobs had his work cut out for him and I think has performed well, about a year ago I expected Apple to be ready to go out of business by now but they're recording massive revenue.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
>Most of the serious Mac users are graphic
>professionals, like myself. Photoshop, 3D
>modelers, video software and such run much
>better in G4 than in any other platform
>right now
Wow, you have already tried it! you must be
an Apple insider.
Have you compared to a Dual Celeron, or Dual
Xeon situation? I would never comment G4 is slower
than these without strong evidence, how about
you?
We are NOT talking about how fast PowerPC run,
there is no doubt PPC 603e/750 can outrun PPro
and PII/III/celeron. We are talking about how
stable these softwares can run relying on
MacOS 8.6.x. These softwares could be running faster on MacOS based G3/4 Mac, but how stable
it is? Just like a car which can run as fast as
200Mile/hr doesn't mean it won't crash frequently.
It is the same of MacOS 8.x.x.
>(similar price point for hardware AND software), I really like to hear more detail about these.
>with very comfortable lead. And all those can >benefit hugely from a real vector unit. As now,
You must an Apple insider who has already
tried the G4 and the upcoming G4 optimzied
applications!! If not , how can you know
these can benefit hugely from a real vector unit!
>MacOs is crap in memory handling and scheduling, >but my estimate is that with state of the art >scheduler you could get MAX 10% speedup for >graphic work. Poor memory handling, not dynamic,
Yeah, "Type 1 error", "Type 2 error", "Type 25
error"...... This is the result of "poor memomry
handling"?
If you do not carry out your job smoothly, even
an 100% speedup is useless.
Every time I start up the blue G3 at my working
desk, I need to think about how to arrange different program to starts. If not, closed
applications will steal the memory unless you
restart machine. Funny Huh? Fastest desktop
computer on earth with such an OS.
>doesn't affect execution times. And in your case >it seems you really care more howthings LOOK, not
No matter how fast the execution time it is,
you have to have a workable environment, in which
you can have your "graphic professional" output
to be done. Right?
These kind of funny advocate will soon kill
the remaining Apple users.
When Apple paired up with ATI, the rage 128 was the fastest accelerator on the market, period. There was no Voodoo 3. Apple could have picked any of your PUNY PC card vendors, instead they picked the largest one ATI(it still is.). Now they have Open GL support as well, so they should be happy since they have targeted the professional market, not the gamer market. Oh and the motherboard has AGP2 so if the other companies would like to sell some more cards, they can spend a few damn afternoons writing a driver. When were they supposed to write these drivers? BEFORE Apple introduced the G4?
Oh yeah, you're right I was smoking something.
Shouldn't mix SlashDot and HashPot...
Yeah, I'm a Mac programmer. You got a problem with that?
-- thinkyhead software and media
In case that was too cryptic for you, Mac OS X is based on FreeBSD ported from x86. This is what Apple/NeXT have been working on these past 3 years.
=td=
The Rage128 is decently fast, has excellent 32-bit color output (only the G400MAX looks better from what I hear), is made by a reputable OEM supplier who can deliver, and is already well supported on the Mac platform. Also throw in that it is one of few video cards out there with near full DVD acceleration (TNT2 and Voodoo3 have *none*). It's probably the best choice for OEM graphics.
QD3D/RAVE has been put to bed in favor of OpenGL.
=td=
A few business moves that piss off some people, and somehow that justifies the elimination of competetion? If people dislike certain moves, they move to one of their competitors. The company therefore suffers and has to learn. The other poster addressed the clone situation, plus IBM is releasing non Mac specific PPC boards sometime soon (if not already...I vaguely heard about this but didn't actually read up and follow it). I think there's more to the Be situation than meets the eye...especially since they seem to be trying to play the underdog game so badly. "We're being oppressed by the big bad Apple! We CAN'T develop for their platform because they won't do this." Seeing as how APple isn't a heavy software company, it seems odd they'd be so destined to stamp out OS competetion when it would only lead to more hardware sales. Hell, they (Apple) even messed with Linux (MkLinux) for some time before it was even on the radar screen of mass media. If they were so afraid of OS competetion, I'm sure they could go to other measures to make it impossible for LinuxPPC (or any distribution of Linux on the Mac), *BSD, etc. to be able to run on their computers.
Since Be seems so destined to smear Apple's image, plus they got a nice investment from Intel, who is a major competitor to the Apple platform, I'd be very skeptical of what you hear from their side of the camp. The company was even found on bitterness towards Apple if I'm not mistaken...I've heard rumors, not sure if they're true, that the CEO of Be was basically rubbing it in Apple's face they had a better OS and they (Apple) needed them to survive.
I think $1000 and $1999 are within the same
order of magnitude as well... but I'd rather pay
$1000. What's your point?
The choice of OS is not the point. It's the
cost of hardware. If anything, I wouldn't bring
up the OS issue here... it just shows how many
more flavors run on x86 than on PPC, and goes
further to show the value of a cheaper system.
Doink.
-WW
--
Why are there so many Unix-using Star Trek fans?
When was the last time Picard said, "Computer, bring
The slogan of complaint is "Fastest Personal Computers" correct? Now, Alphas are NOT sold, or meant to be, personal computers (as in computers Joe and Joanna Average would use to check their email and look at porn). So, therefore this advertising slogan is still correct.
So, what do you do? You jump off that subject to Apple saying the machines can be used as servers. Is this included in the slogan being discussed? No. It has nothing to do with it. They do not make the claim they're the fastest servers on earth, therefore they have not committed any lies, nor even mislead anyone. The only people who would think that are people who are trying very hard to find faults to nitpick and support their diehard stance or hatred towards, one side.
it can't be exported to certain countries.
Opinionated Law Student Strikes Again!
There are ADB to USB converters available I do believe. Just buy one (or some...I'm not famaliar with it or Mac/Apple related material whatsoever) and use the keyboard you're using now.
Please ignore this post and all replies; I'm trying to push the Iraq story off the HOF list.
>>(who whether they were good or not, sapped apple's money, especially since how is apple supposed to compete with companies that apple is paying for the R&D budget of, leaving the other companies with little to spend money on besides advertising and tweaking?)
Increase the licensing fee to the cloners. Problem solved. The ones who can pay it will, the ones who can't pay it won't. I'm not concerned with what's good for "Apple" I'm conscerned with what's good for the platform. Steve Jobs is definately not that.
Getting rid of the floppy doesn't bother me, it's obsolete anyway, but eliminating ADB and SCSI are the two things that have caused me to decide not to buy a new mac system. I'll buy my old mac from work and put a G3/4 card into it before I buy one of the new Blue and White or Charcoal and Graphite macs.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
ASASSDAADS
You're saying they should design their computers around making Quake 3 the fastest on their computers? Yup, that's why most people buy computers...to play Quake 3. And Quake 3 is the best benchmark for computers too since it's so often used and needed for graphic design/video professionals.
This is SEYBOLD not E3. Jesus Christ.
asdasddsa
If stock perfomance is all your concerned with, think about buying into Micro$oft. If ethics don't matter to you Apple isn't the only company that does well.
While I'm at it, Hitler did a wonderful job of building the German economy, many people loved him too. As long as you don't mind sacrificing a few Jews along the way, I suppose that you can side with anyone to make a buck.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
asdasddasdafdsaf
and you know that would never happen. Which is why you feel safe making that claim. Not like it's so hard to install LinuxPPC on Macs...nor does them including their own OS on their own hardware package (most of the hardware is not made by Apple of course) dramatically increase the price of the product.
People always say "if Apple would only do this I would be all for them." This usually being something they'd expect they wouldn't do. They've done many of those things, yet people still complain. If they had a buy one get one free deal, ended homeless and poverty around the world, and stopped ethnic and national conflicts, people would still find something to complain about. "Yeah, but man, the box is too fancy. I want my computer case to be coated in vomit and cow intestines with shards of broken class and razor blades all over it. that's what really matters to me, what the case looks like."
There is a pretty good reason why there a no AGP drivers yet for Macintosh AGP cards... There aren't any currently shipping Macs with AGP.
Don't you think a couple companies will write drivers when Macs have AGP?
G4(450, 500+)= AGP
8Ball iMac= AGP
iBook= AGP
Next Rev of Powerbook= AGP
Next Rev of Servers(the multiprocessor ones)= AGP
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
fggfddf565
32443234243423
Hey it worked for SUN
Opinionated Law Student Strikes Again!
Me and a buddy of mine just had a similar conversation. If the G4-500 runs at 2.9 times a P3-600, then a single G4 proc will beat a dual or even quad proc P3 anyhow. 4 processors does NOT mean you'll be running four times faster, as everyone knows. And since OSX's SMP threading will, Im sure, be far superior to NT's, a dual proc G4 would stomp everything else within $5k.
Officially, Apple doesn't plan to make dual or quad G4s, but I think the G4 server will have to have at least a dual option. Even if they dont, Ive heard it wouldnt be that hard to hack together, so 3rd party addon cards are a distinct possibility.
Of course, multi-proc Athlons are a different story altogether. We'll just have to wait and see.
I can't fault BeOS for not supporting G3s. Apple pulled the rug out from under them by keeping motherboard specs private. Sure, they could reverse engineer them, but Be Inc. is a very small company with limited resources. It is probably a better time investment for them to work on better Intel compatibility. Be's advantages over Linux are still quite distinct. I'm not a big believer in an all-purpose OS. BeOS and Linux were designed differently to perform different tasks. As far as hardware support is concerned, you are absolutely right. Be's future is far from certain, while Linux's future is almost guaranteed.
I'll ignore the obvious troll-like qualities to your response and attempt to engage in some sort of meaningful dialoge.
LinuxPPC is not in the same boat as Be. LinuxPPC has the excuse in the event of a lawsuit that they are simply repackaging an existing operating system, that they are only contributing to a community-designed operating system. Be doesn't have that excuse. If they reverse-engineer the specs, they could conceivably be held legally accountable. Further, unofficial specs also leave them at the whim of Apple (as is the case with LinuxPPC as well) - if Apple decides to change something that the MacOS understands, but screws all alternative OSes... oops.
The common complaint is, why doesn't BeOS just use the Linux base? Because most likely that would contaminate the BeOS source base with GPL code. Be doesn't want to open-source their operating system yet, so they can't incorporate GPL source into the underlying operating system.
As for BeOS has on Linux, ease of use, ease of installation, ease of configuration, GUI speed (after trying both GNOME and KDE, BeOS is by far the more responsive performer - although non-DEs, like the "basic" window managers, are on par with it), the SMP tricks (some of which you simply can't do on the Linux kernel, because of the differences in kernel architecture), pervasive multithreading, a clean, intelligent, and simple C++ API, built-in GUI scripting, built-in standard , powerful messenging system, the MIME-based file system (of which GNOME has, been virtually no applications use), and lastly, a 64-bit journalled file system with attributes that can handle very significantly larger file and volume sizes than even XFS.
Yes, however, hardware support is lacking. On the other hand, my machine (as listed below) works perfectly with absolutely no problems. The situation is analogous to how Linux used to be a few years ago - you'd have to buy Linux-compatible hardware, instead of buying hardware and pretty much knowing it would work.
Dual Pentium-II/400
384M PC100 Memory
Matrox G200 8Mb AGP
Creative Labs Voodoo2
SB Live! Value
3Com 3C905B-TX Fast Ethernet adapter
Intel PRO/100+ Fast Ethernet adapter
10.2G Maxtor UDMA HDD
8.4G Western Digital UDMA HDD
Iomega Internal Zip Drive (100M)
40x UDMA CD-ROM Drive (generic)
"While the rest of the world Slumbers"... are you referring to the fact that all Apple boxes since 1984 have been Y2K compliant? Or the fact that eventually Apple won't need the "monotonous wheezing" that is Micro$oft and move on?
BTW: It wasn't Bill Gates that made Apple arise from its ashes... it was the buyout of Power Computing's kickass 604e & the return of der führer, Herr Jobs.
No, the ATI's are infact lowend gamming & consumer OEM cards. They are not the sort of thing Apple should be subjecting it's high end graphics customers to. It's simply not that sort of product.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
http://www.mackido.com/Hardware/AltiVecVsKNI.html
'nuff said.
Not true. *() implies a method call since it implies paramaters; so this is definetly the form object.method(), and the original poster is right, this is obviously fake code written by someone who wasn't thinking about how real code is written.
You are dumb, aren't you? Sure I have seen
dual PIII boards BEFORE PIII shipped. It uses the same MB that PII.
Any ETA for dual G4 from Apple, wise ass? And what about OS support for it? It will take a while. PC will have i64 and SMP 1Ghz Athlons long before that.
<^>_<(ô ô)>_<^>
sheesh, ye mac freaks are such... freaks! i said i liked the hardware, is that not enough for you?! i have a friend who is a TOTAL mac fanatic and works in testing at Apple so i probably know more about COOL MAC STUFF than the average Linux punter and have put up with his ranting for years because i like the guy. i was seriously thinking about buying an imacII and making it dual boot yellow dog linux but with snide remarks like the one from your fawning sub-poster compatriot I may not bother. believe it or not i would not use it for "color correction, proofing, pre-production, graphics arts, and desktop publishing" i would use it for coding and surfing. cheers mac fans, its been swell
Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas.
The discussion that follows this thread is nice....people stopped flaming (mostly)...
I'm lucky enough that I had to wait to get the loan for My new computer. I was going to get a 350MHz G3, but I managed to get everything I wanted AND a 400MHz G4.
There is another "real-world" bench toted on the site...or maybe an article. At the unveiling of the system, Jobs ran SETI-at-home on both the 600 PIII and the 500 G4...the G4 was makeing 3 to 4 graphs per every one of the PIII...Not bad I'd say.
~Donald / Just RTFM
Relax man. You Apple fans are so damn defensive.
First of all, don't assume that anybody who criticizes Apple is automatically a Wintel fan. I'm the guy who started this whole thread, and no I don't use or like Intel processors. I'm actually a big Alpha/Linux fan, and I'm now starting to like AMD after they released the Athlon.
Thanks for the SPEC benchmarks. That was what I was looking for. I can't imagine why Apple wouldn't have them on their web site in the first place.
I do disagree with you on a couple of points though. First of all, I really don't care that much for MacOS (to each his own - no flames), so if I ever buy a G4 it will be to run LinuxPPC. I don't really care much about Altivec since it probably won't be supported. Providing only a handful of carefully selected benchmarks that show off Altivec to the maximum degree, and then making wild performance claims based on those benchmarks is plainly misleading.
I never said that Altivec benchmarks weren't valid. However, they only show one aspect of processor performance over a narrow range of applications. Benchmarking should cover the entire spectrum: raw integer and fp, graphics and I/O system performance, business applications, high end applications, games, etc. Other companies (Intel, AMD, Compaq) provide a relatively complete set of benchmarks.
Also, BYTEmarks are definately not a good benchmark. Another poster in this thread covered the reasons why quite nicely, so I won't repeat all of it. BYTEmarks are ONLY used by Apple, and only updated and optimized for PPC. The x86 BYTEmark tests haven't been updated since before the PII was released. SPEC benchmarks, on the other hand, come from a neutral source, they're peer reviewed to ensure they aren't baised to one architecture, and they have rules that ensure fairness.
Also, Photoshop filters are a somewhat interesting benchmark, but really narrow focus, don't you think? Not everybody who is interested in a G4 is a graphic artist who spends all day running Photoshop filters. Maybe a relatively large number of Apple owners do use Photoshop as their primary application, but those people are already in the fold. What about the majority of us who don't use Photoshop all the time? I really don't care if a G4 smokes in Photoshop. Is it faster in other sorts of applications too? Does Altivec provide an advantage in things other than digital filters and Photoshop? If so, Apple should show us.
Finally, I'm not complaining because benchmarks don't go the way I want them to. I always like to see faster benchmarks and better performance no matter where it is from. I'm complaining because Apple won't provide a diverse set of benchmarks like the other manufacturers do. If the G4 is indeed faster at other things besides Photoshop and DSP, why shouldn't Apple show it off?
For some reason, Apple doesn't want to show that it is 5% faster than a PIII at some things, 50% faster at others, 200% faster at a few things, and maybe 10% slower at a few others. They would rather make unsubstantiated claims that it is twice as fast and drop a few misleading benchmarks. Then all the Apple fans in full flamethrower mode can bombard the net with "the G4 is twice as fast as the PIII", "Intel's own benchmarks proved the G4 is 2.94 times faster", and so on.
Hmmmm. Didn't realize I was "falling for the pro-Linux hype," just bemoaning the state of software bloat in general -- I detest having to buy faster, bigger processing and disk hardware to support the latest applications. Meanwhile, I'm never getting the kind of display technology I need at an affordable price.
By the time I'm ready to take a deep breath and plunge into Linux for a productivity platform, I figure OpenLinux et al. will be mature & robust enough that I won't be beating my brains out as long as my hardware's nothing too exotic.
"How many light bulbs does it take to change a person?" --BMcC-->
I stand corrected, *if* they've begun consolidating all those damned add-ons into the System and Finder executables themselves. Trying to keep track of all them pieces-parts is major distraction, too.
"How many light bulbs does it take to change a person?" --BMcC-->
I stand corrected, *if* they've begun consolidating all those damned add-ons into the System and Finder executables themselves. Trying to keep track of all them pieces-parts is major distraction, too.
Meanwhile, you can call me "Rip" if you like. At least my user name doesn't profess to perform fellatio on theater-range ballistic missiles. ;)
"How many light bulbs does it take to change a person?" --BMcC-->
As for OS X, that's going to be BSD Unix (free), gcc for G4 (free) with a Mac GUI ($) and an updated version of the NextStep API. I suspect the full development tools will not appear in the OS X Client release, I hope they'll be free (in the best possible sense), but I'll settle for cheap with source code available (if not Open Source in some form).
Mac OS 8.6 (the current shipping version) is very stable. I just finished a support contract with a Fortune 100 company, and I had our 8.6 machines running perfectly (with the exception of the occaisonal packet storm on the network and of course well all know Lotus Notes isn't (very) stable on the Mac (although 4.57b cuts the random crashes to a minimum, and those probably reflect insufficient error checking given the unstable TCP/IP environment at that site).
A few notes on the 'benchmarks' shown during the keynote. Photoshop is a valid single-app benchmark, since tens of thousands of people spend all day using it. I expect the G4 acceleration to be similar in scope to the MMX or PIII acceleration. Watch the canned video of the tests, they show marked superiority in Photoshop, QT video compression (admittedly an Apple technology and almost certainly more optimized for a G4 than a PII), SETI@HOME and some scientific analysis (3D rendering of Mars Observer data).
I'm looking forward to Intel's rebuttal of these tests, and I'd also like to see someone run some of Intel's tests in the PIII performance area (PIII benchmarks). Speaking of whom, Apple does have the specs of Intels' tests online here. Note that without the Convolve test, their average is 2.24 times faster than a PIII (adjusted for MHz) instead of 2.94. Still...
Intel's explanation of the tests Apple ran are available here.
Interestingly (and some will find suspiciously), these tests aren't in the PIII benchmark area. Of course, most of those that are use Microsoft software and so aren't really suitable for testing Apple systems. If anyone optimized the test suite for the G4, it would have been Motorolla, since AltiVec is their baby.
Veteran, Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force, 1992-1951
"So, if you compare Apple to their closest commercial OS competitors (Microsoft and Be), they've made further steps than them. The problem with open source is for a company to not end up losing sales with movement to it, especially if they begin releasing the product for free."
Very true, but it is always important to remember that Apple makes its money selling hardware, not software. The first 6 system releases were free. It was only 8 years ago that Apple started charging for new versions of the OS, and the latest version is always included with a new Mac.
The software market could 'die' an open-source death tomorrow, and Apple would probably just sell even more boxes as a result. Microsoft, on the other hand...
Mike van Lammeren
It will challenge your head, your brain, and your mind.
Most powermacs (except the really old low end performas) can be upgraded to G3, just by adding a processor upgrade/zif-thing/whatever. No need to change the whole motherboard. As easy as installing more RAM.
Check out the xlr8yourmac for info on upgrading macs.
Here's a Motorola link with spec scores, MIPS, and lots of other G4 info:
d uctor/cpu/7400.html
http://www.mot.com/SPS/PowerPC/products/semicon
Not really. The machine I have my eye on is a dual P-III 450 MHz, 128 MB RAM, 20 GB HD, G400 AGP, etc etc.
Price? about $1300 from here. Of course, this place doesn't give you snazy colored boxes.
uh huh... so lack of adb and scsi prevents you from upgrading to a new G3/G4.
According to the Apple store, you can add scsi for 50 bucks. If it's that important to you, there is a nice option.
And how many ADB devices do you have? I can count 3 that I have, keyboard, mouse, and joystick. But I'll gladly take USB over ADB any day of the week.
Oh, and if ADB is important, buy a B&W G3. It still has a ADB port.
By the way, this sort of nit-picking is bordering on insane. Were you one of those who complained that there wasn't a 680x0 chip in your new fang-dangled PPC Mac? Or how about that your new Mac II made your investments in Monochrome monitors go bad?
It's progress. Thank god we don't have to keep every obsolete piece of technology ever pursued at Apple. We'd probally still be on 680x0 machines with NuBus and the old style keyboard connector from the original Mac. Apple has done a wonderful job in moving the platform forward. You can't satisfy everyone with every decision, but Apple has tried to make the best of it anyway.
dennis
Actually, if you are going to pay the extra money for a G4, doesn't a G400 make more sense? They have much better 3D speed (almost that of a TNT 2 Ultra plus the latest GL drivers make it faster than a TNT 2 Ultra in GL) , much better quality (3D and 2D on the Matrox are unmatched) and at only a slight price increase ($100 at most) The Rage 128 doesn't even outperform a TNT for most things, and the GL driver doesn't seem to support AGP.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Millions of computers sold this year, with the stock price going from 15 to 65+ in less than two. Oh, by the way, they have 36 BILLION in cash, I guess that isn't enough.
>>uh huh... so lack of adb and scsi prevents you from upgrading to a new G3/G4.
Yes. Apple has just lost another customer. I'll buy an old PowerMac with a G3/G4 upgrade, but I'm not buying a blue and white. Or I'll get one of those generic PPC MBs and get a CPU to run Mac OS 8.0, I think I still have a copy around here somewhere that was designed for CHRP machines.
>>According to the Apple store, you can add scsi for 50 bucks. If it's that important to you, there is a nice option.
Great, a way for Apple to milk more money out of their loyal supporters.
>>And how many ADB devices do you have? I can count 3 that I have, keyboard, mouse, and joystick. But I'll gladly take USB over ADB any day of the week.
Unimportant. Some dongled software products need an ADB dongle to run, not everyone wants to run out and pay $1000 for the new version of the software when the old version still gets the job done. USB doesn't have the kind of integration that ADB had. It was a hardware reset to three finger salute a mac with an ADB keyboard. A tight lockup on a USB keyboard equipped mac means that you have to reach down and hit the interrupt button.
On an Imac it's easier to unplug it than to hit that button.
So we've got Keyboard, Mouse, Joystick, Dongle, Wacom Tablets, Bar Code readers, and even though I don't remember the name there is a home automoation device that used ADB.
>>By the way, this sort of nit-picking is bordering on insane.
Insanity is believe that Apple can do no wrong. That every boneheaded decision that the Apple executives make is insanely great.
>>Were you one of those who complained that there wasn't a 680x0 chip in your new fang-dangled PPC Mac?
No, I was just pissed off that the Machine that Apple told me was PowerPC upgradeable really wasn't. Yes, I was an original Performa 550 owner, I got rid of the thing before the FTC and apple settled on a remedy.
>>It's progress. Thank god we don't have to keep every obsolete piece of technology ever pursued at Apple. We'd probally still be on 680x0 machines with NuBus and the old style keyboard connector from the original Mac.
The 68060 was supposedly a pretty sweet chip. If 680x0 technology had been persued there'd have been advances in that platform. I don't fault Apple for taking the PPC path, because they included an '0x0 emulator.
There was and is nothing wrong with the nubus architecture. A G3 equipped 8100 can (under certain circumstances) outperform a factory configured beige G3.
>>Apple has done a wonderful job in moving the platform forward. You can't satisfy everyone with every decision, but Apple has tried to make the best of it anyway.
Even though I understand that one man can't make adifference in this case, I'm done buying Apple hardware. (you're talking to someone who has been a part of a one man boycott of nintendo since 1994)
When Steve Jobs is ousted, maybe I'll reconsider.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
You didn't even read my post, did you? I specifically mentioned those benchmarks in my post. All six are FP vector multiplication tests. They show off Altivec, but that's it. There is mention of % differences in photoshop based on filters that are similar to similar processing operations, but no numbers. Again, they just show off Altivec. I know now that if I want to use my computer to implement digital filters or perform FFTs, I'll buy a G4. But where are the general purpose CPU or application benchmarks?
Throw things like Beowulf into the mix and the sorts of things that Apple has been showing off no longer really need a single box to be that powerful. Even without Beowulf, rendering is the sort of thing that parallelizes quite well with a collection of cheaper, less powerful machines.
$3500 buys a lot of machine for a PII based renderfarm these days.
Cool! That sounds great! Has Adobe released Photoshop for Beowulf yet? Oh, the Gimp, that does CMYK right? Can I edit & composit digital video on it?
Today's lesson is: Use the right tool for the job.
cheers,
Matthew Reilly
"duuuhhhhhhh...i could make a WICKED awesome beowulf cluster with THAT sheeot! yeah, boyyyyyyyyyyyy! word!"
(was a joke - moderate away)
"There is no spoon" - Neo, The Matrix
OS X server is already out, and OS X client will be out within 6 months. Preemptive multitasking, fast modern memory management, SMP... with all the advantages of the current Mac OS GUI and API's. By early 2000, we can expect multi-processor boxen running 600 MHz+ G4's, running OS X. They're gonna be the fastest desktops on the planet. If I had some money to invest, I'd buy Apple stock.
from one AC to another, I think that's damn funny :)
Poor assumption. Real chips can retire more than one operation/cycle. That's one of the things that makes a superscalar chip superscalar...
-jon
Remember Amalek.
which is why they're calling it a supercomputer - it meets or exceeds the qualifications for a 'supercomputer' by the us gov't, so it can't be exported to 'sensitive' countries. anyone have the exact specs/requirements for this dubious honor? and are there any other shipping desktop machines that meet it?
as the new tv commercial (watch ABC tonight) says - "pentium-based systems.. they're harmless"
- Entertaining Bits from the Ancient Kernel Tree
These machines are still playing catchup with x86 machines, AND they come at a hefty price premium.
???
$1599 for G4/400 that at least matches a PIII/600 in performance? What the hell price premium are you talking about?
bah. it can do 4 at a time, but each one still takes one cycle.
KMFDM Sucks
I'm sure the G4 is an excellent processor, but there must be some drug Apple users take that makes them believe benchmarks. Nobody in the short history of computing has flaunted inflated benchmarks as shamelessly as Apple.
TedC
While maybe a little crude, there is a reasonable point here. The hardware looks promising (mainly, the processor since the other components aren't really unique to Apple machines). I wish I had the choice of hardware platform and OS. Yes, there's LinuxPPC. But, I can't (yet) use Linux to do everything I do. Nor do i want to be forced to use Linux. It's all about choice. The problem is, the software has to exist. It would be nice to pair your choie of OS with hardware.
GET OVER THE FLOPPY WOULD YA!!!!!
If you love legacy hardware soooo much, go get yourself a nice XT with a 8 1/2 floppy drive and 2400 baud modem.
GET OVER THE FLOPPY!
That's not benchmarking. The fact that it runs 2x as fast in certain photoshop filters that make good use of the Altivec technology doesn't tell me much. Show me SPEC_int and SPEC_fp for CPU performance, application suite benchmarks for system level performance, and a few game benchmarks. What are they trying to hide?
I've been messing with OSX for the past week trying to get MySQL to compile on it... The front end is actually pretty neat. Looks like a MAC and stuff.. but the OS behind it is a javla mess! The directory structure is disgusting! And nothing compiles on the damn thing.. they put this crappy ass cc (some hacked up version of old gcc) and some crappy linker that isn't compatible with the GNU version... If you enjoy screwing with someone elses source code to get the little things (such as pthreads) to compile and mysql and everything else that doesn't just work, then get OSX.. HAVE FUN!! ------ "Ska vi alska, sa ska vi alska till Buddy Holly..."
If Apple wants to market to the top end of the PC user market, they'll have to sacrifice some "friendliness" for utility.
How do you PPC Linux people get anything done, anyway?
I'll wait for linux to run on the G4 first thank you very much. That, or MacOS X
Hasdi
Take a good look at the windows registry and tell me again about Apple's "OS incompetence". Apple's main problem is that Steve Jobs and most of it's big cheeses have been absolute dickheads. Apple's engineers are some of the best in the industry.
Apple has always brought new technology to the forefront and delivered it to the masses before the others. Namely the indroduction of the new 3.5" floppy in the 80's, the CD Rom, power management, RISC processors in computers for consumers, the GUI, Apple was supporting MKlinux before the media blitz, the elimination of the obsolete 3.5" floppy in the 90's, multiple monitors on one comuputer,,,,,, the list goes on and on.
Apple is run by a group of mental midgets no doubt, but their technology is and has always been top notch. They should have their advertising exec lined up against a brick wall and machinegunned, they've been screwing the pooch ever since the "1984" ad.
Even though I'm using an Apple machine right now, I'm not planning to purchase another one again because of the changes Steve Jobs has made to the core technology. Maybe he's on another acid flashback.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
The entire computer industry does this; get used to it.
1 - Emulation went away in OS8... They re-wrote the chunks of the OS that were still being handled in emulation in either 8 or 8.1... Yes, there is still an emulator as part of the OS, but that's there only to support 680x0 apps... If you're using native applications, you're not at all involved in emulation
2 - The ATI Rage 128 is a very fast chip... Probably not as fast as that other thing announced here today, but it's still damn fast.
3 - They're marketing it to their core audience: creative professionals, scientists, etc...
4 - Be's mostly (if not entirely) pulled away from developing future versions of the BeOS for PowerPC's...
IBM recently released specs on motherboards capable of handling a G4. G4 + Linux = Cray kicker?
BTW, MacOS Rumors quotes Steve Jobs from his keynote, mentioning that a G4 machine running a CD fresh copy of MacOS 9 can process a block of SETI data in 6 hours. That's a lot of power in a US$1500 machine.----
Am I the only one who thinks Microsoft is a misnomer? Perhaps Macrosoft would be a better fit?
bla
Hmmm, I wonder how much that screen will cost.
Or maybe I just missed it on the web site.
-CausticPuppy "Of all the people I know, you're certainly one of them." -Somebody I don't know
Or wait, haven't you ever seen those cardstock inserts Intel sticks in almost every computer weekly?
. . . geez, talk about selective memory . . .
again, business schmisness.. there's a reason they announced this at a publishing convention. these are for the apple-niche: publishing/creative/graphics professionals.
i agree, the os leaves something to be desired, but what can you do?
"realistically, i can build a machine cheaper and more efficiently for 1/3 the cost"
i assume you meant one that's faster, rather than being redundant. i'll challenge you to do that. maybe with a nice fat cluster of cheapo celerons.. unless you get the new ones that won't let you SMP.. or a beowulf cluster..
but are those really the solutions that the "business market is looking for" either?
- Entertaining Bits from the Ancient Kernel Tree
Whoa, that was hard to figure out, wasn't it?
***Apple offers DVD-RAM out of the box and you're still whining for a *ing floppy? What the hell is wrong with you? *** I find myself having to move 3 or 4 files between computers on a regular basis. Floppies rock for that. Spending the money on a blank dvd so I can burn 500 k onto it and then toss it is just silly
If you were following standard practice, you should have used worksFor
:)
but it's your program.
Civ CTP is awesome! Thanks Loki!
Romans 10:9-10
will it run linuxppc? because, no matter how fast os8 or 9 are, the real processing power won't be accessible until osX or linux are pumping it for all it's got.
/. apple icon have to change? now that the systems are 'graphite' instead of blueberry...
It almost certainly will. The LinuxPPC folks typically get new machines running in a matter of weeks. It might take a little longer to get decent AltiVec support, but even without that, these machines can hold their own against x86 boxen. And OS X server is out NOW, and I'd guess that Apple's already got it running on these machines. Again, altiVec support might not be ready quite yet, but it will come.
2: will the
They use a variety of colors. The iMac is five different flavors, the iBook have two of the same flavors, and the Powerbooks have white Apple logos. I say stick with blue.
Does anyone else think this architecture sounds kind of hacked-together? A PowerPC (read: polluted RISC design) and a vector processing unit with, what, 160 new instructions? It makes the Pentium III look like a StrongARM.
I'd rather see an array of small RISC chips doing vector processing than a hack like this.
Arrghh, just as my cards were about payed off, I want one of these BAD!!!
Can you really get a K7 motherboard? I thought they weren't on sale to the public yet (despite the availability of the processors).
Just get yourself a G4 upgrade, the 400MHZ models are just blue and white G3 with another color cases, and with a G4 instead of a G3 on the motherboard. The 450MHz and 500MHz models have an entirely new motherboard, thats surely why they are not yet available. Friendly, Sven LUTHER
What you don't understand is that for the target audience of this machine, artists, 3D modellers, publishing folks, web designers, Photoshop tests *are* usefull benchmarks. I spend all day in Photoshop, and let me tell you, I don't care ONE BIT about SEPCthis or ThatMark, those don't tell me anything about it. But doing Photoshop filters twice as fast, addressing 1.5 gigs of memory, now THAT's usefull data!
This machine isn't for you! It's for me! They aren't marketing it with you in mind, as well they shouldn't! You won't buy one no matter what, but I might! I personally don't care if it runs BeOS, LinuxPPC, or whatever. I want a machine that runs Photoshop. (and a handfull of other high end apps)
I hope this helps you understand this machine (and Apple in general) a bit.
Rejemy, last survivor of the Nostromo, signing off.
how did this get score 1? because it's long? your post says nothing. you don't knwo if they're fast but you don't think so. WOW GOOD POINT! you can't judge a computer on it's advertising, especially if you don't even begin to understand what the target market for it is. and especially if you make fun of people who judge a computer on it's case.
all lusers are created equal.
The apple store says "400 Mb/s memory bandwidth for the cheapest system. Sounds crazy to me. Is that sdram at 50 MHz or what????!!!!!!!!!
Also about this crap about the processor being many times faster than other is only valid for applications specifically suited for AltiVec, but o.k. that is good for something. F.ex. memory bandwidth intensive applications will suffer under the 800 Mb/s limitation (i assume the 400 Mb/s is bogus).
A year ago I thought getting an alpha would be great. Run linux on the thing and everything runs just fine... nope. All you people saying you are going to go out and get one of these things and just run linux are going to have a big surprise. First problem is alot of source will not compile or if it does it won't work correctly on your system (alpha still doesn't have a web browsers yet), next when you go out and get your copy of wordperfect or star office for linux, its not going to work for you. So you'll be sitting there with a computer that doesn't even have a decent word processor. If you people want a real computer get a real computer, Ever heard of Solaris? beats the hell out of linux any day. Linux is written by a bunch of kids all over the place, Solaris is written by compitent programmers getting paid to program. If you want a real computer don't waste your money on a Apple, go out and get a Sparc. Or at least an alpha, people at least make binaries for alpha. ok.. flame away for me making fun of your baby linux operating system, becuase we all know linux is great, linux is wounderfull, linux is.... blah blah blah
Hate to think of where that would put WinDOS
Looks help, but there's a lot that get's done...namely a buttload of Web development.
Says zdnet.
Well, integer and fp performance are likely to be about the same as on the G3, because from what I read about Altivec on Motorola's website(no link, sorry, but it was on /. not long ago), it would appear that the G4 is a G3 and a vector processor on the same die, with two different instruction sets. The Velocity Engine/Altivec part of the chip won't speed up existing applications at all. That's what they're trying to hide - it's only 2x as fast for certain applications (those suited to vector processing), and only if they are recompiled to use the Altivec/Velocity Engine instructions.
Give me a RISC processor any day...
Or maybe you're another loser with a wheezing, rustbucket PC who has to trashmouth any other computing platform's advancements because they cause you insecurity in your follow-the-herd choice. You should resist that urge --it reveals many bad things about you.
at : http://store.apple.com/1-800-795-1000/WebObjects/A ppleStore.woa/82161337413138289070034262 43307071/CoverPage.wo/99861757916071/1.6.1.0.3.0.0 .0/2/order18.apple.com?98,61 you can see the G4 models starting at 1499$, must be a typo, because if you follow the links you see it is 1599$. Or are a price drop expected soon ? Sven LUTHER
That's just syntax, nothing to do with OO.
The 400 shipping now is Yikes, the 450 and 500 available in october will be Sawtooth. Definatly wait for Sawtooth!
We just cancelled the order. Turns out that, even though we ordered first, we don't get it until *October*. WTF? Jobs said that these systems are available today. We were bummed enough that we didn't feel we that it was worth buying one yet.
Ah, well.
There are TWO new G4 boxes coming. The one you can buy now does not have a AGP slot in it. The ones coming in a couple of months do (450 and 500) versions.
The details are kind of short at the moment but take a gander at: http://til.info.apple.com/techinfo.nsf/artnum/n584 18 for some official info and http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/9908/power-ma c-g4.shtml for some higher level commentary.
Once again Jobs et. al. are oversimplifying the model descriptions so there is only one name for two different boxes. I imagine the PCI box will quickly die off once the AGP box is in full production.
As for as ATI cards go, you can't look at the G4 boxes in isolation from the iMac. Since Apple is usingATI chips there, they'll go with ATI chips in G4. Simply for purchasing economies of scale. Secondly, it is a two way street. If these other graphics makers made Apple an offer they couldn't refuse they'd probably switch. Apple isn't trying to market the ultimate gamer's box.
[ Hopefully that isn't a "winmodem" in the new models. I wouldn't get one of those internals anyway. ]
Actually, they do quote ByteMarks on the page. And now there's new tactic of taking Intel's benchmarks, and throwing out the scores that don't show what they want them to show.
Taken from the bottom of the page:
"The 500MHz G4 Processor, with Velocity Engine, is an average of 2.94 times as fast as the fastest Pentium III (600MHz)
Based on BYTEmark integer index processor scores."
I sincerely doubt that the G4 SpecInt and SpecFP (which they don't quote strangely enough) is twice as fast as the Pentium III's.
OTOH, that LCD monitor sure looks great. I wonder where and when I can get one of those - and more importantly how much will it cost.
And of course, the pipeline depth comes into play as well. The time it takes to execute any particular instruction is like 5-16X as long as a clock cycle. Of course, we shouldn't try to confuse marketing with facts.
Low-end $1500, Mid-range, $2500, high-end, if memory serves, $3500. Low-end comes with 64MB of RAM. Mid-range, a DVD-ROM and 128MB. High-end, a DVD-RAM and 256MB. All of them have obscenely large hard drives.
Who is working on this?
Actually, the assumption is poor because it is an orev-estimation, not an under-estimation.
G4s can DELIVER up to 4 FP ops per cycle, but each operation takes more than a cycle to execute.
This might look like playing around words, but the fact that you can calculate more than one operation in a cycle doesn't mean that any one operation gets executed faster.
the only parameters to the execution time are clock speed and pipeline depth (assuming the latter is constant).
If it's anything like the G3, it'll be great at integer math (which I don't use that much) and kinda mediocre at floating point (which I do). If I were given one, it would instantly be loaded with the most convenient Linux distro at hand.
If you have the gumption to put together a renderfarm then more power to you. Find the best bang/buck and buy all you can afford. My guess is that you'll be buying some of the soon to be announced G4 clone systems. Especially if IBM/Moto (Or whoever it is now) partners up with Cygnus and get's altivec support into gcc.
Davo -- Free speech, free software, AND free beer.
I guess you never attended a Computer Architecture class???
Polluted RISC??? err didn't you mean PA-RISC? hacked together? Err, again... look at the Pentium class processors for clues about how to keep hacking the same old architecture until it looks like they put it together glueing pieces of Cadence designs with magic glue...
Array of small RISC chips==Very huge board...
Come on, I don't have a G3/G4 but the architecture is CLEARLY superior to the x86 architecture...
ZoeSch
I hate to agree with davecrazy but...
It sounds like AMD and Intel just got their pants pulled down and paddled!
Can you say Hackintosh ? The G4 is made for cracking long encryption keys. Anybody have an estimate for how fast this thing will crack 128-bit keys ?
Veteran, Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force, 1992-1951
I run a 200 node LAN for a large music marketing Company in NYC. Everything we do is time sensitive and mission critical. I would never even think of doing an important job on NT or Linux. And I'm not talking about art jobs either. I'm taking about web, database, e-mail, list serv, routing, and communication services. I may be a nerd but I'm smart enough to know how to work smart, not hard. Randy Roberts IS Manager The Music Zone
Silly MacVocate, only seeing that part of the argument or those contemporary aspects of the competition that don't threaten your rather skewed view of your pet OS.
Photoshop isn't the only graphics package available. Others will parallelize quite well on NT and Maya has even announced their renderer for Linux.
You also ignored the bit about Beowulf not being necessary for a renderfarm, even a serious one that renders for film.
The fact remains that people have been using loosely coupled collections of less powerful machines to do SERIOUS rendering without Apple for quite some time.
This machine likely wont send those who actually do run renderfarms running to Apple.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Jobs said Apple had the biggest(I'm assuming the deal with Samsung helped them out).
It sure does suck to have that ethernet speed wireless networking! And Firewire! And USB! And 2XAGP!... Come on apple give us legacy hardware! If you can't make the first supercomputer speed PC backward compatible with a Mac II I won't buy you stuff anymore! Why doesn't LinuxPPC come on floppy anyway? Damn!
I can't believe that in this day and age, people just don't make a cross-over cable, especially if they have a mac. It's just too easy and too fast. floppy disks and sneakernet is just too much hassle. And for the price of the floppeis and the drive, I can get a hub and cables. Hook up even more computers. This floppy arguement must really stop. The only thing a floppy is good for anymore is to boot that windows computer when it's crapping out...and even that use is fading. Try a zip even, or an imation superdrive, still I argue the network is the way to go.
Oh the humanity...let it die in peace.
The prevailing thought is that Macs suck. However, the G4 is being dragged into unfairly. The G4 is not married to the mac architecture. In any other case you guys would be drooling over the specs. AltiVec kicks SSE's ass all over the place. The PIII can issue 4 but only process 2 FPs per sucond using SSE. But it looks as if the G4 should be able to process the 4 floats granted by its 128 bit vector unit, in one cycle. (128/32=4) Add to this a RISC architecture, that is good at spliting ops between multiple pipes (great for matrix math AKA 3D) and a good FPU (descendant of the 604e instead of the 603 that the G3 was based on.) The 604e was and still is an FP powerhouse. The 603 was a cheap consumer chip while the 604 was used in the high end. In any case, these chips look to kick ass, and remember MacOS X is just around the corner. Besides, this time they actuall used real programs. Go to Motorola's website, G4 with AltiVec blows x86 away. My last comment is that I am not a mac users, in fact I can't stand apple. But if I had the jingle, I would buy a G4 right away. (And load what? this great chip has a choice of LinuxPPC (no media support), MacOS (buggy as hell and half emulated), and MacOS X beta (a server OS and still in beta).
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
I think I saw something like $3999 when it ships later. look here as I think it was on MacCentral that I saw that.
ROFL!!!!!!! Well done!!!
why is it that so many people are 'anti-appleist'? anyone have a link to a site that explains why? ( i dont care if its pro-apple or anti-apple )
"some people have too much freedom" - george dubya bush, facist, err republican presidential hopeful and domain name squ
Why do they have to make the case look so ugly? Is there a rackmount version available instead?
And what about SMP? They claim it blows away a Pentium 3... Does it also blow away a Quad Xeon?
I watched Steve Job's keynote via quicktime from the Seybold conference. It looks like they continue to repackage/"reskin" their products. But, did you note the more refined looked of the G4, unlike the girly-looking ibooks. I suppose it's to appeal more to the sedate high-end publishing world that Apple decided to tone it down a bit.
UCLA built a cluster of Macs. Check it out here .
I never thought I would see the day when people would be crying foul for not benchmarking a single processor PPC system with a SMP x86 system. As far as cost is concerened, reading some of these posts makes me wonder if /.'ers aren't some of the cheapest bastards on the planet. Oh well, I guess computers are like the automobile industry. I mean, Ford is still selling Escorts.
Wakko Warner wrote:
..his original point, that the Mac OS sucks, is still valid.
Only in so far as all operating systems suck.
Nothing's good at everything, MacOS isn't good for what you want, that doesn't make it universally bad. Even in a web production company I know well, where everything's done in ASP and served on NT (the 17/6 server!), all three graphics guys use Photoshop on macs for a good reason. They're better for that.
Quibbling about an absolute that is inherently impossible is silly.
Do you have a
$1,499 is the base price for a custom configuring the model. Basically it's the same specs as the $1,599 G4 but without the Zip drive... -n
Well well, apple says G4 kicks ass... apperantly not with macos, which I would even kick away for win3.11 - but I hope for some real Operating-Systems :-)
:-/
I hope the G4 will continue the earlier success of the PPC-CPU, because the G3 terribly SUCKS.
My standard-tests (bzip2, make-ing and using, pov-ray) showed a Celeron-433 to be ca. two times faster than a G3-266) - a ppc604e-180 was faster than a G3-266
But the independent benchmarks for the G4 do not look to powerfull at all. Not bad, hey, even very nice, but not kicking ass. Apple may state that the fastet G4 quite beats the fastest PentiumIII-Xeon, but they shouldn`t compete with others, like K7, Alpha.
"Life is short and in most cases it ends with death." Sir Sinclair
Yes, I also noticed the Apple site was a lot slower than usual for a short period of time. Fine now though. And even then, it was still more responsive than Slashdot itself; as is usually the case. Of course, Slashdot doesn't have as much money behind it, don't get me wrong, I don't mind...
"These are my principles. If you don't like them, I have others." --Groucho Marx
"Grandmas, children, or artists"
Do you know how _huge_ that market is?
-awc
You have no taste in music.
It also costs slightly more than what 2 pre-built Dual PIII/500 systems would set you back.
The 500Mhz G4 costs the same as 2Ghz worth of PIII.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
a really fast machine, and i can run: netscape, framemaker, linux, photoshop, acrobat, illustrator, studio-vision, archicad, ms-office, wireless 11Mb/sec network, quark xpress, soundedit16, and filemaker pro on this -- steve, you know what i like... :-)
now THAT is sad.
You are judging the book by it's cover. Just because it's purple don't mean what's inside ain't good. You f**king Linux users are what's sad! Everytime I see my roommate's Linux I want to stick my finger in my mouth. Talk about sad looking user interface!
Linux may or may not run on the high end. There are really two new motherboards. http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/9908/power-ma c-g4.shtml and http://til.info.apple.com/techinfo.nsf/artnum/n584 18
I'd suspect that LinuxPPC would probably run fine on Yikes! (the currently avaialbe one), but Sawtooth is likely a different story. It quite likely there is different CPU bus/glue logic on that board. However, you can't buy a Sawtooth board up anytime soon either. I don't think that Apple seeds boxes for LinuxPPC development so it may take a while.
I can't believe Jobs stated that they are available TODAY! Wait, yes I can. He's done it before. Duh. What a crock. If they aren't available for 30 days then f*cking SAY SO. Then again, resellers may have them before then, so who knows. Ah, doesn't matter to me. I'm broke. = )
I agree with you that it could use more expansion bays and PCI slots, but I think I'd have a difficult time filling it up, at least for my personal use.
Of course, for Apple's market, many were upset with the release of the G3 because it didn't come with SCSI (though it was optional) and they were running out of room to hook in their legacy hardware. But how often is that going to happen? With the daisy-chain functionality of USB and FireWire, I doubt we'll see much of this happening in the future.
As far as floppies, the only use they get now is serving as boot disks on my PC. A floppy-drive-less Macintosh would be just fine with me.
The power of the G3/G4 is in FPU performance, roughly 1.3 to 1.5x (in the real world) faster than the Pentium family equivalents, depending on whose numbers you subscribe to.
This is why Photoshop filtering is faster on PowerPC processors, they're an FPU intensive process. Thus,
Where PPC, through the G3 falls behind the Pentium slightly is interger performance. This, other than secret Os tuning, is likely why non FPU intesive applications get slightly better performance on Intel than PPC at otherwise equivalent clock speeds, IMHO.
Where Intel has fallen behind, is with the G4's Altivec graphics instructions.
--Humpty Dumpty was pushed!
CausticPuppy wrote:
"The G4 will probably be king for publishing, like you said, although that's about ALL it will be best at. That's fine.
With an ATI 3D card, the G4 will never be good at real-time 3D rendering, the video subsystem just doesn't have the horsepower"
Of course, the PC hardware isn't any good for that either. If you want real-time 3D rendering get a nice Unix workstation with a high-end 3D graphics card.
This must be the most beautiful case design I've ever seen. The translucent grey is awesome, especially when compared with the flashy G3.
Is Apple the only hardware company left with a sense of aestethics?
As reported on http://appleinsider.com I'd just like to inform /.'s that the 400 mHz "currently available" model is based on the same motherboard as current G3's, and that the delayed 450, 500mHz configurations are based on the next gen motherboard, Sawtooth.
I'll get one as soon as they get into Canada (1 month).
Question: Did they revamp the keyboard/mouse? Outlook not so good....
This is a 1600x1024 display selling for $4000. SGI has had one of these out for a while now, selling around $2500. It's called the 1600SW flatpanel. So far only works with a NumberNine video card that's not great for 3D, but hey.. if you have $2500 to burn, just use it as your second display. :-)
See the SGI Flatpanel page , and check out places like shopper.com for the best price deal.
I would say... go for it! As long as your willing to deal with having to compile almost everything for yourself, and you don't mind LinuxPPC's RedHatishness.
:D It may be a while, or never, before they do that. Of course, it would still be fast as hell, but Altivec would make it faster than hell. (Oh, would they have to modify GCC? Hmm. That could definitely be a problem...)
Oh, and they optimize it for Altivec.
Still, it looks like a fucking righteous computer!
Moo.
First of all, unlike the case with MMX, applications do not have to be modified or recompiled to take advantage of AltiVec. Programs that use QuickTime (which includes just about every graphics program on the Mac) automatically get a performance boost.
Second of all, the PPC is a RISC processor.
For a machine whose performance no PIII or Athlon can touch at any price?
You can't get an SGI with a screen as nice as that 22" LCD.
--
This space unintentionally left unblank.
. . . and good riddance.
"The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Makes keeping the kind of specs needed to get Linux running on high end gear hard to keep secret... SoupIsGood Food
Hehe.. my brother just bought a G4 yesterday... now he might just send it back and pick up a G4 =)
now a valid argument for why a machine (and OS and company) sucks? I don't know if you have noticed, but computers aren't invisible yet. You can see them. They exist and take up space. Therefore, wouldn't be nice if that visible object actually was visually appealing?
You're a hyopcrit if you don't complain equally about car designs, TVs, VCRs, microwaves, or any piece of electronics that are typically introduced as clunky and ugly...but become more eye pleasing with time.
You're stereotypes are ridiculous. You forgot to say they wear Gap clothing too! Mr. Non conformity in a capitalist world. Since non conforming is all about buying the product everyone else doesn't right? It's all a matter of what you consume.
Hmmm...petty name calling. That's a sign of intellegint arguing.
Apple is a company. They must appeal to Joe Average. This is how capitalism works. Therefore, they can't make their site in basic HTML and only listing technical details. Their ads can't be a list of specs. It just doesn't work that way. It's bad advertising. The world doesn't revolve around a certain very small portion of the population which is extremely computer literate.
Professionals does not equal business guys. Professionals in this case means graphic design people (among other image and video related fields). Sorry the world isn't perfectly black and white like your brain wishes it was.
No one is going to dispute that the Mac OS doesn't have excellent multitasking and virtual memory, but that's going to change very soon. Mac OS 9 is getting closer, but Mac OS X should be a killer.
It's BSD with a pretty face!
It's a nice piece of hardware. It's pretty, well-designed, and has a fast CPU. It's also a closed architecture. Apple is making the same mistake it made back in the 80's. I won't buy a new computer that can only run MacOS just because it looks nice. Good luck Apple.
Integer performance is likely about the same, as that was the big strength of the G3's. The FP, performance, however has been substantially improved. I saw a description of this on Apple's web page, which I can't find now, but this is interesting...
The secret of the G4's revolutionary performance is its aptly named Velocity Engine. It's the heart of a supercomputer miniaturized onto a sliver of silicon. The Velocity Engine can process data in 128-bit chunks, instead of the smaller 32-bit or 64-bit chunks used in traditional processors (it's the 128-bit vector processing technology used in scientific supercomputers--except that we've added 162 new instructions to speed up computations). In addition, it can perform four (in some cases eight) 32-bit floating-point calculations in a single cycle--two to four times faster than traditional processors.
Aside from the stupid name change (the "Velocity Engine" is Altivec) That sounds very impressive.
Keep in mind that Apple is re-writing OpenGL, Quickdraw, Quicktime, and other OS components to take advantage of Altivec. So once that code gets out (probably with OS X if not sooner) it will provide dramatic speed-ups of all apps that do intensive graphics operations.
And the non-Alitvec FP unit has also been improved, although I don't remember offhand what was changed.
Give me a RISC processor any day...
Um... The G4 is RISC.
You made a lot of negative comments, but you never actually refuted anything. You never said what was wrong with the machines.
-awc
nopes. sorry. correct installations of *every* mac os upto 8.1 (last one i tried) have btree problems that slowly corrupt the filesystem, bad disk labels, freezes etc etc. its not a 24 x 7 system and will never be (unless you consider mac os x which looks pretty good on paper)..ive had macs since 92 and they *all* crash consistantly..less than windoze but much more than any unix system.
I venerate you, sir! You embody my dream...
;>
Enough to sell a sh*tload of iMacs.
;)
Why, oh why did they decide to call AltiVec the "velocity engine" ? -- that makes it sounds like a victorian era mechanical technology. But aside from that, I can only drool and dream of OSX Client. I want.
Most of Apple's G4 speed claims this time come from (I believe) the fact that these apps were AltiVec enabled (esp. that Pshop demo), and because the G4's FP kicks ass over the G3. Those apps that aren't optimized would probably see a 50% speed boost at best.
I've been waiting for this chip for a while (still have a 604ev). Maybe when I get back from my honeymoon I can convince the (future) missus that we need one of these
just my blog and pix
An anonymous coward wrote:
"The customer is
always right, and the customers immediately hated the lack of support for floppies in the iMac."
Which neatly explains why Apple has sold over 2 million iMacs, right???
...that's perfect! A complete (and pretty damned high end) video/multimedia workstation that can handle *EVERYTHING* straight from the desktop. Apple is friggin' brilliant! -ad
A SPEC_fp number would be interesting, not some integer benchmarks from a computer magazine. I'd use a FFT for a DSP benchmark not for a state of the art microprocessor.
thank you. you make sense. i use win for the stuff it's good for, mac for art and general goofing around and linux for learning about OSes.
nowadays, you need to know how to use all OSes.
This happens every quarter. Whenever The Steve stands before the troops, the site turns into cold molasass.
Just wait for those G4 chips to hit the laptops. From what I read, they run even cooler than the G3 chip. A 500MHZ Powerbook running LinuxPPC, surfing wireless using the airport, while you are sitting on your roof, catching a breeze. Now that is how it is done.
Al
photosMy Photostream
Was the half the time comment meant to imply that Apple is inferior? I visit the site quite often and it responds extremely fast for me. Even at this time, ~2:57 it's fine. I'm sure it was probably bogged down to hell when it was announced a while ago as they wouldn't over-build their resources just because of rare circumastances. "Well, we could get hit by 20 million people in 20 minutes in rare cases, so we should invest several million dollars into computers, networking, and connection costs so we can handle that extremely rare brief ~30 minutes of time where our current reources would be overwhelmed!"
OS.SwitchTo(Linux);
registered user = automatic 1
Hmm? Can't be an intel test suite running on a G4... and ``32 tap X 1024 dim. FIR Filter (bFir)'' doesn't mean anything to me. But what's this?
``Based on BYTEmark integer index processor scores.''
Pretty small font. Pretty much at the bottom of the page. Now I might be missing something here...
But these benchmarks seems to be a couple of integer algorithms. My points regarding this are:
I don't doubt that the G4 is damn fast, but Apple seems to have a preference for beautifying the truth somewhat in these press releases.
ZZ
I swear that company has two heads, a hardware head and a software head. And their software head has no brain. They put out this beautiful hardware and they still you a POS antiquated OS. And don't say 8.6 is "Modern" or "just wait for OS X". Hello people, wake up and smell the MMUs, 8.6 still doesn't have hardware memory protection, and still doesn't have dynamic memory allocation. You need some more memory in the middle of your program, too damn bad since you can't malloc more. Apple should get a clue and just be a hardware company, they make awesome hardware. They need to get a life and get out of the OS business. Tweaker
You speak as if x86 architecture doesn't exist. I've never heard a valid arguement for why an x86 isn't a good work stations. And dispite what you say, linux is a perfectly good desktop operating system.
Maybe linux isn't developed enough for alpha, I can accept that. I highly doubt that you've even investigated Linux on a Mac (which *is* what his article is about).
You obviously have way too much money at your disposal, seriously suggesting that people go out and buy an Alpha or a Sparc for desktop use. I've never seen a "decent word processor" for Solaris, yet you praise it so faithfully.
Maybe you should think about what you're saying before you go out flaming linux.
...
Bitchslapped? Give Rob a bitchslap from bitchslapped.com.
> They grabed all the tests Intel used on the PIII
:-)
> to make it look good, ported 'em to G4, ran them
> and beat the shit outta Intel...
You are dreaming.
They didn`t use intels tests, because they don't have access to intels sourcecodes and intel wouldn`t port em either
And while the G4 is not bad, it is NOT twice as fast all the day. Basicly today speed depends on RAM/Cache-Speed and not internal bellsnwhistles.
But the G4 doesn`t bring something new to the bandwidth-arena: half-speed-2nd-Level Cache, 100Mhz-RAM-Access.
And even AV will not widen the RAM-Bottleneck - a P3 fills its 100Mhz/64Bit-Bus to 80% in general.
As the G4 uses a similiar bus - 100Mhz/64Bit - even AV can`t push more data through the bus.
Nothings gets eaten as hot as it was cooked.
"Life is short and in most cases it ends with death." Sir Sinclair
They did use Intel's tests. Nothing in "Intel's tests" says anything about code written by Intel for Intel.
When the G3 first came out and there was all the controversy about the BYTEmark tests that Apple ran showing them to be faster than the P-2, Intel countered that what really mattered was real-world tests and not benchmarks.
So this time they did real-world tests just like Intel said they should. I don't know exactly what apps Intel used in theirs (and I don't care enough to go look for the info), but they've been known in the past to do Photoshop demos that have been set up just right to work well with MMX. I'm guessing that the Photoshop demo pitting the G4 against the P-3 was probably using Intel's settings. But with the ass-whooping Intel got, I wouldn't bet too much on that.
"And the non-Alitvec FP unit has also been improved, although I don't remember offhand what was changed." The FPU was pushed up from a 32-bit to a 64-bit dual precision unit. In that unit alone speed is improved by 50 - 85%, now add AltiVec to that equation and we have a mighty fast CPU!!
What I would like is more slots. The thing just doesn't have enough.
-awc
...not "web sight."
If you think 30,000 stars is impressive, wait till you see what a $1200 PC with a GeForce-256 can do.
Granted, nVidia's GPU won't do much for calculating the trajectories of stars. But just think what 2000 shiny, environment-mapped space gerbils would look like, instead of 30,000 stars!
The G4 will probably be king for publishing, like you said, although that's about ALL it will be best at. That's fine.
With an ATI 3D card, the G4 will never be good at real-time 3D rendering, the video subsystem just doesn't have the horsepower-- it'll be 2 generations behind the PC hardware coming out in a month! Only AGP 2X?
I'm seriously considering the G4 for Linux in the future though... kickass floating point performance, without the backward technology in the current macOS.
Oh... and I *WANT* that 22-inch screen. Now.
-CausticPuppy "Of all the people I know, you're certainly one of them." -Somebody I don't know
Both.
The 400 MHz model available now is Yikes!, which is basically a Yosemite mobo with the ABD port blocked of. The 450 & 500 MHz models will be Sawtooth.
I got in just fine, and the pricing for the 400 MHz model with Zip/modem/128MB/SCSI was $2100-$2200 or thereabouts. You can custom build academic versions with lower options than otherwise. Comparable configs are slightly cheaper on the academic pricing, of course. Base academic config was $1450 or something.
CT
Uhhh...It's because it's Apple right? "Apple sux d00dz!"
the right tool is an SGI.
Actually, it's a Rage 128, not a Rage 3D. The Rage 128 isn't as fast as a TNT2 Ultra or G400 MAX, but it's not a POS either.
Toting a file from home to office to classroom and legacy machines is a whole lot easier with a floppy.
Easier? I have such bad luck with floppies that I have to carry three of them with me, and copy the file three times. It's much easier for me to email the file to myself (if it's small enough) and read my email at work.
They don't have to do it, but wouldn't it be nice if they did for a change. The customer is always right, and the customers immediately hated the lack of support for floppies in the iMac.
You're right; the iMac sold horribly. Apple still hasn't recovered from that fiasco. And those new Blue and White G3s? Those were a flop as well.
Raise your hand if the lack of a built-in floppy drive (and unwillingness and/or inability to purchase one of the cheap USB drives) was the main factor preventing you from buying any non-floppy Mac.
I can understand that with Linux, you can built a "root/boot" floppy setup to resurrect a crashed machine, but I think System 7 was the last Mac OS that could fit a System Folder and Disk First Aid (or something comparable) onto a 1.4 MB floppy. Every piece of software I've bought for my Mac in the past two years has come on a CD-ROM.
Sure, Apple was bold in saying "no more floppy drive" but in an increasingly wired world, where disk requirements for software keep growing (well, for most non-open software anyways) the floppy is going the way of the cassette drive.
And good riddance.
Jay (=
The G4 ships with an Ultra ATA 66 hard drive.
I wonder if more manufacturers are going to follow suit and start implementing the faster protocols?
So yes, as usual, Apple's selling hardware before it's ready. Amazingly enough, it doesn't seem to hurt them. According to the Seybold keynote, there are 140k pre-orders for the iBook in the United States alone. This is the iBook which was announced at Macworld NY in July, and isn't due to ship until September 15th.
SPEC numbers can be had at here.
SPECint95(est.): 21.4 @ 450Mhz
SPECfp95(est.): 20.4 @ 450Mhz
Those are numbers without counting "Velocity Engine" aka AltiVec, however.
From Motorola:
l eases/7400_pr.html
350MHz: $210
400MHz: $275
450MHz: $355
500MHz: $475
Can someone post P3 and K7 prices in comparison? They must be cheaper, but these look better than I thought.
Here's the document:
http://www.mot.com/SPS/PowerPC/library/press_re
Here's AltiVec info:
http://www.motorola.com/AltiVec/
Sounds real spiffy..... but I have only one question... can it render a webpage faster than an intel based box??? My 400MHZ Mac I hate to say is slower than my 200MHZ pentium at that task........
We can argue endlessly how the G4 stacks up price/performance wise with Intel or AMD chips. One area where the G4 will dominate is in laptop computers. The drastically lower power requirements of the PPC chips vs any of the x86 chips, and the associated decreased demand for heat dissipation, will lead to longer battery life and smaller hardware packages for the same performance.
When can we expect these in either the PowerBooks or any other portable system?
Excuse me while I wipe the drool off of my shirt.
Although my heart burns for a new G4, monetary concerns limit me to the prospect of a nice used G3...and I'm sure others are in the same boat...how much you want for it?
--"You can lead a man to knowledge, but you can't make him think."
Probably quite a bit of demand, since all you have to do is drop in a new processor and you have the same machine.
The new motherboard isn't coming out for 1 to 2 months. They have to sell off the rest of the old ones first
Cool! That sounds great! Has Adobe released Photoshop for Beowulf yet? Oh, the Gimp, that does CMYK right? Can I edit & composit digital video on it?
Today's lesson is: Use the right tool for the job
umm, maybe a obscure OS named NT might run Photoshop on a dual processor Pentium III?
I know this is /., but Beowolf isn't the only SMP solution. And NT definately not worse buggy than Mac OS, though they both might be bad compared to everyone's favorite zealot trip.
Apple offers DVD-RAM out of the box and you're still whining for a *ing floppy? What the hell is wrong with you?
/. readers are of above-average intellegence. Keep clinging to those 3.5ers, they'll be worth a lot of money on eBay one day, trust me.
Niiiiice to know that
YF
I agree with your comments. It's kind of hard for people to defend Be's claims now because of what IBM did recently (related to PPC).
BeOS was supposed to be the next big thing for Apple...but they had a change of plans and ditched them and pursued Rhapsody...now Mac OS X. I think Be is wise enough they don't have much of a chance in this market...not to mention may have been a bit upset they were ditched, and so they went to the PC market. Now they have Intel patting their backs...they have a larger audience to sell to, so a better chance.
There are quite a few things I like about Be, but nothing mind blowing...so much better than the other OSs...that I'd actually use it as my primary OS. It's fun to tinker with, but blah. In a way I feel bad for Be. I'm not a psychic, but the future, from my point of view, doesn't look to good for them. Oh well, that's how capitalism works. Companies come, companies go. Products come, products go.
Yes, this is marketing hype. Apple relies on really screwed up benchmarks and worse, they post them partitially. The only CPU benchmark I trust is spec95, and for some reason they haven't posted that.
I disagree with you regarding the iMac comment.
:-)
I think most people didn't care because floppies are less and less relevant for today. The fuss was not made by customers, but rather by the media and the kind of people that read slashdot. If the customer didn't like it, then Apple wouldn't have sold iMacs as well as they have.
Yes, it would be nice to see a floppy drive as an option for the G4, but I think that floppies would be rather irrelevant to the people to which the G4 is being marketed. Graphic design and video editing professionals aren't going to fit much on a floppy disk. If they need to take something home, they can use a Zip drive. (And they most likely already have one.)
But seriously -- not having a floppy drive would be a great excuse NOT to work at home.
You have all missed something really important!
These Sawtooth-based PowerMac G4's (450 and 500 flavour) have RAGE 128-cards with two ports.. one analog as usual, and a digital one specially made for the Cinama Display which is all digital.
I guess that this card can drive 2 separate displays simultaneously, not mirroring.
Give me anon ATI-carn with those specs in high volume at low price. Think not.
- Henrik
- Henrik
- Henrik
- when the Shadows descend -
rofl
AltiVec is what Apple calls the Velocity Engine. I like AltiVec better, but however Apple wants to do it. I'm surprised more aren't discussing AltiVec, it is maybe the G4s most amazing feature.
I'm really amazed that there's not more of a backlash against the pre-order concept. To be fair, the *concept* isn't a problem, but when it's disguised as an available product...that's what gets me.
It seems like a classic Tantalus story: We've got this great new product but you can't have it!
I'd hoped that, since Jobs explicitly said that it was available, that this wouldn't be the case with the G4. Ah, well.
Gotta agree with you. For half the price I can get a K7 MB, equal the G4 performance, and have a wider choice in operating systems and application software. Until PPC does commodity pricing, I'm not interested.
I would think that this would be more "bolting a saddle to a rocket" -- the underlying hardware has generally been pretty good. The OS, however, despite what is arguably the best UI for the average user and despite the fact that it is both more stable and more reliable than NT, is old and crufty, and not for good reasons either. I am aware than you can go 200:1 machines:help desk staff with Macs. You can do 4x that with UNIX (Solaris, AIX, to name two that I am familiar with)(I was even the sole admin for 600 HP boxen about two years ago, but a lot of those weren't user boxes). It is time for Apple to evolve. This is not to say that I mind Apples -- I don't. Whenever I have had Apples on my network, I have never heard a peep out of the users and the Apples tend to be well behaved. This actually applies to OS/2, too. It has only been when Windows boxes were dropped on that all hell broke loose ...
One with "Web sight" is one who can view the web with his or her own eyes. That would be pretty cool. I wouldn't have to worry about netscape being lame or anything because i'd have built in web vision..... but how fast would my connection be?
Which one, in the end, is faster, a K7 or G4????????????????
Complaint ca. 1988 - "If you need a mouse, you're a wuss."
Complaint ca. 1995 - "If you don't need a 2-button mouse, you're a wuss."
Complaint ca. 1999 - "If you don't need a 3-button mouse, you're a wuss."
Like others, I have been using a 4-button mouse for years, but...
If this makes you more comfortable, try this 3 button Mac mouse from a well known PC vendor.... Yes, it's Microsoft. Yes, it's 3 buttons, and yes, before you add it to your list of must-haves, it scrolls.
And yes, you can buy a Unix-like MacOS to run on a G4 today, or you can wait for the baby version in January. Or you can download an open-source Unix-like OS for a G4 today for free.
And the hardware costs $1600.
Sounds more like standard anti-Apple FUD.
while (os.worksfor(user)) { user.use(os) }
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
Gee, imagine that Steve Jobs talks about creating digial media on a Mac when doing the keynote at a conference on digital media...
-jon
Remember Amalek.
If we look at apples reasons for choesing the rage 128 rather than just comparing it with all of the other cards on the market i think it will be a little bit easier to see why it was used
good reason 1) ATI put a lot of effort into the OEM market they dont do fast they dont do big scary bastard cards they do well made easy to install cards at a very good price for system builders
good reason 2) Apple currently only has one target market for these computers, the graphics profesional not the hardcore gamer and for photoshop work (or gimp or Xres or even PSP) nothing comes close to touching the rage 128 for pure image quality for the money
good reason 3) ATI are willing to help apple how many other card companys are willing to spend time with apple to make there products better
**** lying is wrong even for sleeping dogs
Actually, the modern x86 chips are based on a RISC *core* and a CISC outside. In other words, the x86 chips take x86 (CISC) instructions, decode them into internal RISC instructions, then process those RISC instructions.
:-)
Thus, if the G4 is crunchy all the way through, the P3 is crunchy on the inside and chewy on the outside.
Thus, your claim that the insides of the P3 "are based on a 20 year old concept" (ie, CISC) is not accurate. The insides are based on the exact same RISC concepts as those of PowerPC (ie G3, G4, etc) chips. The only difference in design principles is that x86 chips have to have an outer layer to translate CISC to internal RISC, thus maintaining backwards compatibility.
A lot of people seem to have a lot of misconceptions about the whole CISC versus RISC thing. The main benefit of RISC is that it makes pipelining the processor a much easier task, and in theory you should be able to get higher clock rates this way. However, by x86 CPUs moving to a RISC core, you gain the same benefits while keeping the old CISC-ish instruction set (and thus, you can still run your old apps). This is one of the big reasons why x86 chips are still competitive with strictly-RISC chips.
Take a computer architecture course sometime, you'll learn a lot about this sort of stuff
As for AltiVec, it certainly looks pretty good. It remains to be seen if AltiVec is worth the extra costs. It costs more to add that extra silicon, and it might make it harder to push the clock rates on the chips. Intel has taken the more cautious approach by doing a limited SIMD implementation, limiting the additional cost while taking care of common SIMD tasks. It has proven fairly decent so far, so AltiVec has the potential to kick ass...but we don't know yet whether it will offset the cost. In a year or so we'll probably have enough apps out there supporting it to know.
Really?
When did MkLinux become FreeBSD?
And, why site a project Apple dumped...over a year ago?
(Oh and a machine with Beauty is the 20th Annv Mac)
Thank god Apple isn't still using that fucked up Byte CPU benchmark.
Can you tell me where to get them, and exactly what flavor they are?
Sorry, no cigar. The G4 has FPU performance the G3 has nothing. I'll elaborate. The G3 is based on the PPC 603. It was a cheap, consumer processor used in early PowerMacs. The G4 is based on the 604e, a powerhouse of a CPU used in some high end PowerMacs. The 604e makes the fpu of the 603 eat dirt. (Some versions of the 603 don't even have FPUs.) The G4 inherits the awesome FPU of the 604e, instead of the crappy FPU of the 603.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
I could image running PPCLinux on the machine. Now if only I could upgrade my Mac IIfx to G4 status...
fear... and stuff
AHA... I could even imagine running a BSD on the machine. No offense of course to the Mac OS... But its too BeOS'y for me
Want Root?
Anyone who buys a G4 for the "Lifesaver" factor is either stupid or super-rich.
IBM recently released specs for a PPC motherboard for use with the G3. Does anyone know if it will work with the G4 processor? Or is that going to require a whole new mobo design?
Come on, a Rage 3d in 1999-2000 ? If not a new generation card, like the newly announced NVidia offering, why didn't apple include at least something with a decent speed, like a Matrox G400 ?
No flames, but the G400 has better 2d quality (note -2d-, meaning 1600x1200@75Hz that looks really crisp) and this would go hand in hand with Apple's users main priorities (i.e. Photoshop et al) as well as provide some more juice for Mac gamers.
Oh well
-- the cake is a lie
Mac OS X has been out for a while. Mac OS 9 is fun (but, technically, not too much 'better' although it does have CarbonLib, allowing for all the wonders of a modern OS..) but it's not out.
OK... I had my heart set on AMD Athlon. Was gonna get one around christmas time... but this thing is amazing.... obviously Linux will be optimized for it sooner or later... so I'm thinking.... G4?
Whadya think? Linux on a G4....
Eddy.WriteLinux.Com
The object doesn't have to be linux centric (like most of slashdot seems to be.) Could just be a swither object. If you want to switch between os's, what makes more sense, a switch object, with members for each OS, or OS objects, with one member for the switch? And you could always use some ASM code, to reboot into different OSs.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
That's why Motorola's fabs are outside the USA.
And Apple assembles Mac's in Ireland and Singapore.
No problems with exportlaws in those countries.
It is absolutely true that object code will not take advantage of AltiVec until it is rewritten and recompiled. As of yet, I know of no AltiVec-ready QuickTime, because it needs to be rewritten.
Photoshop is one example of a program that does _not_ depend on QuickTime for its functionality. Warnock has made it clear that Adobe takes great pride in the fact that the Photoshop engine is homemade as a portable, in-house platform for graphics.
The AltiVec situation has been hyped more than enough. Application developers are currently performing updates to make use of AltiVec; we'll soon see the actual performance benefits it provides. Until then, it will only be more nauseating to hear so much unfounded speculation.
The best indicator of AltiVec's impact comes from the strategies of Motorola and IBM. The former has shifted PowerPC focus to embedded uses (where AltiVec will be more than marginally useful) and IBM all but ignored the technology for the sake of higher clock speeds, which it says will have a more cost-effective impact than AltiVec at lower clocks.
MJP
Don't try that "protecting the children" shit you people use to keep the tits and bad words off my TV. --Seanbaby
This .sig is now officially Open Source.
I've known about the G4 for a year...I've been saving my money for that long.
The facts are this: The P3 is a souped-up pentium pro. It's a 4 year old core, whose insides are based on a 20 year old concept. There is RISC stuff on the outside. X86 is a crunchy outside with a chewy center...the G4 is crunchy all the way through.
Not only is the G4 made with copper, but the core is newer, runs cooler, and just plain has more registers to work with. KNI/MMX and 3dNow are ok SIMD implementations which are hobbled by the x86's lack of enough registers. AltiVec has lots of registers, and is 128 bits wide.
Regardless of the OS you run on it; and regardless of how fast it is compared to other processors, it is better hardware based on newer concepts. I would take a G4 over an x86 right now simply because it isn't an implementation who's core growth strategy is to work around the limits of a 2 decade old concept.
I don't care what you think of Apple or the MacOS, the G4 is simply superoir CPU tecnology compared to the kluge that is known as the modern x86.
dan
"Let him go, Ralph. He knows what he's doing." --Otto Mann (simpsons)
Bungie's demonstration of Halo was on lesser hardware.
I fail to see a reason to be overly concerned about the graphics card in the machine at this point.
Gosh, I think we need a Slashdot for Mac zealots.
I've never been a big fan of Apple, but I also hate x86 hardware with a passion. My next computer will probably be a PowerPC in some form, but I expect this G4 is out of my budget at present (and Apple's online store appears to be slashdotted at the moment). Still, it's a nice-looking machine.
no, your post makes you look frustrated. this all comes down to money. step 1 - apple makes box step 2 - apple sells box to many many people step 3 - people like box step 4 - more people come and buy more boxes. pay attention, apple moves merchandise at an impressive rate. people like their product. so what if you dont like the "type" of person that is attracted to one. i use a mac everyday and dont have any complaints. why do you have a problem with a company selling a product that turns a profit? all these "negative" points brought forth dont seem to deter people from wanting their products. go buy an intel box of your choosing and quit complaining...even if you alternative is the "better choice" why would a maretplace without apple's products be any better for you?
Apple claims that the a 500 Mhz G4 is 2.94 times as fast as a 600Mhz PIII.
What you have to realize is you should compare performance for price, not raw cpu performance. I'm sure a sun workstation could run circles around everybody, but it is obviously in another price range.
The 400Mhz G4 with 64mbytes of RAM costs $1499. Let's assume that it will run Photoshop 3 times as fast as a PentiumIII 500Mhz. For competition, let us look at the Ars Technica Hot Rod, picking the dual overclocked celerons. This system costs $1287, and includes much better peripherals (20gb harddrive, 128mb ram, tnt2 video).
According to Ars's benchmarks, dual processor systems are significantly faster than single processor systems at performing Photoshop tasks. You could make a dual processer PIII 450 for the same price as the 400Mhz G4 (PIII 450 = 2x cost of Celeron 366). That's a bench mark I'd like to see, and one which might reflect the true cost/performance comparisons between a high end mac and a high end x86.
What does this mean? Apple claims that the G4 Velocity engine complete 2-4 times the computation of standard CPUs. But single processor x86 boxes are not the competition for the g4 (except maybe the Athlon, but Apple didn't benchmark that, did they?), since you can easily afford smp systems for the prices that they are charging.
Furthermore, this is hardware optimized for graphics production work only. Apple servers are a long way away. LinuxPPC is probably your best option, but since apple has been stingy about releasing the details of their architecture in the past, you probably wouldn't get a Linux box as optimized for the G4 as the Apple OS is. If you could get similar (and more flexible) performance on another box, why else would you want to deal with the only OS more fubared than MS?
Is anyone else having a problem with seeing this page on netscape? I get a blank black page! It dls the info but seems to barf when it comes to rendering.
Who can tell me if this new G4 runs on the Yikes! or Sawtooth motherboard?
Several vendors make inexpensive floppy drives that plug into the USB port. Then there's the sweet USB Imation Superdrive, that reads traditional 1.44 MB floppies as well as 120 MB disks.
As for the display, it's amazing. The only thing is that due to the limited quantities they can make (for now), you can only buy it with a G4 right now.
-Rafi
-Rafi Remove the Spanish to email me.
Watchthe keynote here:
y bold99/
http://www.apple.com/quicktime/showcase/live/se
and then go to www.apple.com and look at the pics
HOLY SHIT
BTW, you can only get a cinema display w/ a G4, not separate. What will PC users do?
yes, you could. the processor daughter cards with cache are in a ZIF socket. However, I still can't go to Fry's and buy a PPC processor. I would like to able to do this. Maybe those new IBM based PPC CHRP boxes will help out.
Of course, I was planning on running my current G3/233 as a Linux PPC IP masquerade/apache server at some point anyway. Just waiting til they hit the 650 MHz range with dual processors.
--Humpty Dumpty was pushed!
Ya, ATI bites ass, but next month MacTell will be selling Voodoo3 boards for the Mac. I can't imagine they won't do an AGP version considering that's the way Apple is moving (The non-AGP mobo is just something to get them out the door until the AGP mobo is ready).
Also, if the GeForce is that superior, and NVIDIA continues to reinvent themselves as a company that sells chips instead of boards, we'll probably see a GeForce board from some enterprising 3rd party for the Mac as well. God I hope so. A G4 + that LCD monitor + a GeForce, the mind just boggles...
Listen, I've been using my iMac for almost 6 months now and I can tell you it's the best computer I've ever own. Maybe it's you who's sad!
You have GOT to be joking! These machines are for people who MAKE movies, no bootleg them. Just because you spend all your time downloading mp3s and quicktimes of star wars doesn't mean EVERYONE does, get out of your 15yr old mindset.
The G4 also inherits the 604e's fpu. That means that even without the Altivec...err Velocity Engine...the G4 would have nearly twice the fpu performance of the G3 (at the same mhz). Personally, I've been waiting for the G4's fpu. Altivec is just icing on the cake.
Looks like October according to the Apple Store... Linux(PPC or YD or otherwise) you might have to wait longer for.
-nicole
Dude, you are about 6 years behind. How do you figure an LCIII looks the same as a G3?
:)
The last time I checked I couldn't get a pci card in my pizzabox LCIII
The 7400 is based off of the 750. Not the 604e. It does take advantage of the work done on the 604e's FPU, but most of the base design is the 750.
the PPC is a RISC processor.
IS NOT> I"M A ELECTRICAL ENGI(NEER AT LUNIX EXPERT IT"S NOT A RISK PROCESSER> ITS A STUPID SLOW MAC>
MAC SUCK LUNIX RULES YOU FUCKEN MORON YOU SUCK.
This is laughable, do you understand benchmarking? Do you understand that benchmarking is usually pretty pointless? Benchmarks are really poor for comparisons across architectures. That's why you need to use actual applications. Why do you think MIPS means so little?
That's why their tests focused on apps. I'm not saying they showed a wide variety of applications, but what they did show were VALID differences. Not some silly benchmark. If they tried to get more apps to benchmark they'd be as stuck as intel was when their SIMD instructions came out. No one had optimized apps for those. Luckily Metrowerks has at least some support for AltiVec already, shouldn't be too hard for developers to start including AltiVec optimizations.
Learn about benchmarking before you claim it to be reliable and useful.
Cameroon
Most of the serious Mac users are graphic professionals, like myself. Photoshop, 3D modelers, video software and such run much better in G4 than in any other platform right now (similar price point for hardware AND software), with very comfortable lead. And all those can benefit hugely from a real vector unit. As now, MacOs is crap in memory handling and scheduling, but my estimate is that with state of the art scheduler you could get MAX 10% speedup for graphic work. Poor memory handling, ie. not dynamic, doesn't affect execution times. And in your case it seems you really care more how things LOOK, not how they are ;)
I think his point is that a fast processor is useless without adequate software.
The question is, when is Apple going to stop putting bigger rockets behind wooden buggies?
Hey, kid. School's already started. Have you done your homework?
Here at WAM! we just ordered one. We called the moment it was announced.
... could you hold on?" He came back 10 seconds later and said "Um...we just released that. Just now. You're the first person to order one."
:)
Max, my business partner is on the phone with Apple ordering a G4. The sales rep was like "Huh? We haven't released that ye-
God, that feels good.
Please. Aside from the fact that x86 is the ugliest architecture in any sort of wide use today*, and PPC is a very nice RISC one, the G4 is simply better. Apple is simply better at building good computers. And, of course, Mac OS X has a strong UNIX engine under the hood.
I can't imagine any reason except compatibility for sticking with x86, for those that haven't already left it. All you get is Windows NT and decades of baggage.
--Matthew
I thought the Cork, Ireland, plant was closed earlier this year. Hmm. Does anyone know for sure?
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
1. BeOS kicks MacOS's ass, and they are just now gaining steam. Studio Pro is being ported to BeOS, and its only in its 2 or 3rd year on x86. In Linux's third year, I doubt they had a word Professional word processor.
2. BeOS kicks Linux's ass for speed. BeOS lightweight threads have 10 times less overhead that Linux threads. The API is a dream, there is a consistant programming interface, SMP is ingrained into the kernel from the beginning, ease of use is a fundemental part of the OS, etc etc. So what if there is no multi user support? It will be in R5. I can say the same thing about Linux and 3D. Where is the good OpenGL HW acceleration? Where is the USB and Firewire support? Where are the 3D sound APIs? Where is the OO Api? where is the consistant interface.
Sure they are coming, but are they here NOW. BeOS many of those NOW, and is working on making the TCP stack better. Final point. When Intel wanted to show of it's PII and PIII, what did they use? NT, no, Linux, no, BeOS, yea.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Well... I don't know about the average of 2.94 percent faster but I have read much about this chip design. It is very interesting because the main disavantage of the G3 was the floating point. The G4 now has a real floating point unit and that makes a world of difference. If you consider that the G3 was faster overall over the PII. So my take is if they were to do a a good overall speedup of the chips operation and add a real floating point unit... these nunber should be more realistic than the ones they were giving about the G3. And of course tehre is what they call the "Velocity Engine" have no doubt.. this is the AltaVect vector unit. Anyone doing matrix operations should get a huge advantage there. The rest is just icing (yeah sure that is a nice monitor and at last a great looking case). That machine should be extremely interesting for scientific uses... As many have pointed out... they just lack an appropriate Operating System... The current MacOS is alright (8.5 that is... before 8 it is plain crap) for common users only. Anyone doing research or anything advanced needs something better like NT or some flavor of Unix... (Notice I didn't mention Win98). If Apple releases MacOS X anytime soon The G4 could be the right machine for scientific work. MacOS X is just better to develop custom applications Period! I think this would be the true democratisation of workstations. SGI didn't really do it with it's intel units... Well... let's see now if it can run Linux (Or BSD) meanwhile....
I just bought a G3! What is Apple trying to do with this price competive BS?!?! My machine just dropped in resale value LIKE A ROCK.
Of course, it runs Linux really ducky, so it ain't wothless.
Damn, DAMN DAMN!!!!!
-K
One day, you'll learn to watch what you post...
Finally, someone with an IQ above 80. It is obvious hype.
This is true, if perhaps not all that relevant for most Mac users, but there are expansion chassis with up to eight slots available. That should be enough for pretty much anyone.
"You're not a cyber-warrior surfing the Net, you're alone in your room, typing."
It's just another typical Apple screw-job... What would it cost them to put a floppy in the case, $15? Toting a file from home to office to classroom and legacy machines is a whole lot easier with a floppy. They don't have to do it, but wouldn't it be nice if they did for a change. The customer is always right, and the customers immediately hated the lack of support for floppies in the iMac.
Or wait, haven't you ever seen those cardstock inserts Intel sticks in almost every computer weekly?
I haven't read (paper) computer mags for years, and I don't watch TV, so I'm not sure what you're talking about. If it's not on slashdot, Linux Today, or LWN, chances are I don't know about it...
TedC
If you people don't think the MacOS is good enough for the PowerPC 7400, then why don't you start advocating the Open PowerPC Platform?
Anybody can get IBM's motherboard design and do what they want with it. I can imagine some dream configurations using such hardware, and the speed would be great for any OS you choose. Even Mac OS X might be able to run on this open motherboard spec.
It would be extremly cool to tear out the motherboard in the my Dell and replace it with a kick butt board with a G4 on it. How about 2 G4s instead of one?
I am a BeOS user, and let me tell you, a tweaked up BeOS would fly on this thing. Optimize for Velocity Engine, and you will see some amazing stuff out of this OS.
Linux would kick butt too, especially if you are doing a lot of server-side multimedia processing (streaming video, music, etc). Isn't Quicktime Streaming Server supposed to be available for Linux?
I believe that the PowerPC is going to become something bigger than what Apple can control. It is time for Apple to share the PowerPC, and I thank IBM for taking the first step in making it happen.
EverCode
Yes it sucks, but now that the G4 has AGP, you can toss it for a TNT2 or what not.
how can you say it's playing catch-up? that's totally unsubstantiated.
the G4 processor, which has a sustained speed of 1 gigaflops and a peak speed of 4 gigaflops.
Apple's new systems are available in 400 Mhz, 450 Mhz, 500 Mhz speeds. The 500 Mhz version will include a DVD-RAM drive, which can record several gigs of data to a CD-sized disk.
The 400 Mhz system will be priced at $1599, the 450 Mhz system at $2499, the 500 Mhz at $3,499.
Apple will be immediately shipping the 400 Mhz system, with the other two systems shipping in a "few weeks."
Jobs said that the new systems will ship with a Photoshop plug-in that will recognize the G4 processor.
In a head-to-head race against a Pentium III system, the PowerMac G4 handily blew away the Pentium III system, rendering a scene with Buzz Lightyear from Toy Story more than twice as fast as the Pentium machine, which was running at 600 Mhz.
The next demo tested memory bandwidth. Again facing the fastest Pentium III currently available, the PowerMac G4 crushed the Pentium system.
Next came a QuickTime encoding demo, where the trailer for the James Bond movie was compressed in real time on the PowerMac G4, but took about twice as long on the Pentium system. In fact, the PowerMac G4 could actually compress the James Bond movie and play it back before the Pentium system could encode the clip.
A college professor then took the reins to demonstrate the supercomputer capabilities of the G4.He demonstrated the popular SETI@Home project, where a G4 was able to process in 6 hours the same amount of information that a Pentium III could process in 25 hours.
To demonstrate encryption speed, a 1000 bit encryption key was decoded on both a G4 and G3, where the G4 was almost seven times faster. Standard cryptography applications run at 3 to 8 times the speed of Pentium III systems, according to the professor.
The last demo showed actual data from the Mars Pathfinder mission. A G4 and a Pentium II system set up head-to-head showed the rendering of data from a probe flying through a valley on Mars. The G4 played like a movie, while the Pentium III played more like a slide-show.
--------------------------------------
--------------------------------------
in a world without bounderies or fences, who needs Gates anyway?
Here's some Photoshop benchmarks from a Mac site. Got G3s, overclocked G3s, P3s, Dual P3s, etc.
h tml
http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/tips/photoshop5perf.
But does anyone know why only whining Wintel advocates who used a Mac LCII in pre-school and think they're an expert ever post to Macintosh discussions?
--- Apparently I have an old
My iMac is the best looking piece of funiture I own! And I know I'll get flame from you Linux biggots, but fact is Mac OS is still king! Linux look so trashy it's the trailer park of OS!
Okay. For one, the PPC 7400 chip is not based off the PPC 750 chip. It was based off of the PPC 604 chip, and the PPC 750 was based off the 603.. Reasons why AIM (The PowerPC Alliance... Apple, Motorola, and IBM) didn't decide to just use the 604 when making the 750 are unknown to me. Probably dealing with Price/Temperature concerns. AltiVec is not your ordinary add on to a processor. Unlike MMX, a program can be optimized for AltiVec with a single click of a checkbox in Codewarrior, yet still run on machines that do not have AltiVec.
The Floating Point preformance has been at least doubled on the chip, and with the addition of the vector unit (which normally has only resided on high end supercomputers), this processor has really shown the others up.
Oh yeah, don't be stupid anymore... all PowerPC processors are 100% RISC. Always have been, always will be.
IF x86 == SLOW THEN BUY PowerPC
(see subject) I know PPC 6*** has always used RISC, but I heard somewhere that this is supposed to be a 64-bit processor w/ a 128-bit FPU and multiple core technologies...? anyone? anyone?
The weird multitasking model is called cooperative multitasking.... and it sucks. Dont get me wrong I love macs though and I am posting this message with my personal b&w g3 and it rocks. But, if you run rc5 or other stuff in the backround that like to either a) eat up cpu or b) eat up memory they will not perform well with the coop multitasking model if you ARE actually multitasking:) macOS likes to dedicate all its resources to whatever application is in front or is currently being called (like an http server) Ex. I have rc5des running in front I get a get request to my http server and suddenly rc5 goes from 1.4mkeys/sec to 50k/sec. Now I realize you can set rc5 to not be as responsive to other app resource requests but if you set it that way your system runs slow as hell. I mean slow where it takes 30 seconds to pull down a menu. Macs just plain dont multitask as well as windows or linux boxes. They are actually pretty horrible in some setups.
>>if (nt == unstable) { switchTo.linux() }
I prefer:
if (nt = unstable) { switchTo.linux() }
;o)
Things get moderated up because people login. It has nothing to do with intelligence :)
I for one like the new mac. I'm glad they dropped the colour thing in the g3 line. That blue was nauseating to me. This is more like the silver powerbooks, and i likes it!
Lowmag.net
i'm disappointed-- there would be rumors that an extended keyboard would be an option with the new gray G4s.
:P
please note that i'm probably just nitpicking through sour grapes, as i have been sitting and waiting for the G4s to come all year, and yet will probably wind up continuing to use this here 7200/75. I don't have the money for a new computer.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Uh, where did you get OS X Client? I thought Apple hadn't released it yet.
Now only if the LinuxPPC peop;e used this computer for their "little" challenge :)
Damn, that's a nice screen...
"...America's great minds of today, teaching America's great minds of tomorrow. Poor bastards." -- A Beautiful Min
Well, there are many people with semi-decent reasons...and then the many many more with no reasons whatsoever, or strecthing it.
One decent reason is Apple's past. They screwed many developers over and die-hard fans of certain platforms...but they were/are a small company (larger now than in the 80s), and they had to compete with the goliath IBM+MS (which of course wasn't a goliath in the early, mid, or even late 80s...but was under IBM's wing) plus IBM clones. They were a new compant, personal computers was a whole new thing, the market wasn't as big then as it is now...so the changes were just kind of expected, if you ask me.
I feel bad for those people, but those same people aren't the ones you'll see with petty flames and name calling. They may be more reasonable, but still hold some bitterness towards Apple for something that hurt them in the past. If there wasn't Linux (or any of the other free Unix-spin offs) on the PC, there would probably be a group of bitter PC users mad that DOS was being phased out to be completly replaced by Windows. Instead, those people just migrated to Linux or any of the other choices.
Most of the stuff, I think, can be traced back to Apple's past. Being a new company compared to IBM, and taking on a huge task in a completly new market...through my own reasoning, I understand this. I mean, if Apple didn't change anything, we could still be using the OS based on BASIC (MAJOR brain fart...my computer history prior to Lisa has just disappeared). In the process of "evolving" in the computer market, you'll have to piss off some people...unless you have the money and resources to keep up production of older OSs.
With the new open source/free software band wagon (which I think is a "good" thing for the consumer, not SO good for corporations, despite the arguments you could make money from support...truthfully, I'd rather have working software closed, than shitty software open), people now complain about Apple being a "closed" company, and the software being "closed." Right now...this matters to very few people. Plus the recent news with IBM, the closed hardware argument is basically no longer valid, and as for software, there is Linux and *BSD on the Apple platform, plus Mac OS X Server is semi-open source (the main part of it at least), and the quicktime server software. So, if you compare Apple to their closest commercial OS competitors (Microsoft and Be), they've made further steps than them. The problem with open source is for a company to not end up losing sales with movement to it, especially if they begin releasing the product for free. This doesn't matter for non-corporations (a collective of a community of people) because they don't need to survive in the same manner, economically. They have a day job (or night) and come home and code on their free time. The coding they do on the side isn't the source for the money they need to survive...nor is the collective of people working on software employed under a corporation. The survival of the software is dependent on it's demand (how necessary it is) and that at least SOMEONE is working on it. If a piece of software was no longer being developed for, and had no use to anyone, it would die. It isn't quite the same for a company. They need employees. They need money to pay the employees and conduct research, and advertise. The survival of the software is dependent on the survival of the company...which needs money to survive. If it dies, so does all of it's software. Giving away their main product for free isn't wise because they need money from the sell of that product to keep the company alive. Only if the software they created was loaded with bugs, and they charged a hefty price for support, could they survive mainly on technical support. Opening the source partially isn't as bif of a prolem. Nor opening the source, but still charging for the software. But this alienates the die-hard free software people.
So, Apple, among other software companies (although Apple isn't really a major one), is stuck in a tough spot. They have a growing group of people demanding the source code to their products under specific licensing...and some of them demanding the software be completly free...and they have the problem of making money. Sure, they can hope they'll get enough money from tech. support due to shitty software...but that's EXTREMELY unwise for a company since that is incredibly unpredictable. That may also prove bad for Joe Average because the company is dependent on problematic, unfriendly software for the survival and groth of their company. It's sort of that way today, but now due to Linux and the popularity of more crash/problem resistant OSs and software, software companies will have to get their act together.
So, in short...the 2 main reasons I see for reasonale Anti-Apple feelings is problems in their history, and not being completly open source/free software friendly. The rest is usually petty nitpicking, or childish behaviour ("My toy is better than yours! Na-na-na-na-na")
Let's take it from the top.
Firstly - yeah, Apple aren't the best marketers in the world. This should be a given by now, surely?
Secondly - MacOS has one advantage over UN*X-like OSs, BeOS and Windoze and that is ease of use and elegance in the UI. It walks over the competition in size 13 hob-nailed boots in that respect. MacOS users don't really care about the core OS, as long as their machine is relatively stable and reasonably speedy. Things may get better with OS X but time will tell.
Thirdly - Apple may be making the wrong choice about graphics cards but I am unsure as to the existence of drivers for other hardware under MacOS 8.x/9. At present, there is no graphics acceleration support under OS X Server but this should change with X Client.
Apple have always made the mistake of believing that because they have the best product they will win market share. Microsloth have proven this assumption utterly invalid.
Mr Q. Z. D.
Systems admin, drinker, musician and all-round bastard. "Now we see the violence inherent in the sysadmin."
FWIW here are the numbers for a 300 MHz SGI Octane (MIPS R12000). SPECint95=17.3, SPECfp95=27.4. (Place standard disclaimer about benchmarks here). The SGI does have a faster memory i/o bandwidth, and of course, the graphic capabilities are not too shabby. Of course, for the price of the various SGI development licences, I could buy one of the new G4's.
Well, it's darn near impossible to talk facts about anything involving computers, but here's my take on it.
1. I don't like Apple's philosophy. (closed hardware, closed software)
2. RISC is superior to CISC. We've known this for a long time. Intel continues to use a CISC design for backwards compatibility. This is why my heatsink is twice as big as my PII 350. But I can still run wordstar 1.0!
3. If i manage to wean myself off of windows completely (yes, i'm writing this in IE 5.0), and switch to linux, my next computer will be a G4 running LinuxPPC. A dual if they exist. CISC will die someday, i hope not to own anything CISC when that day comes.
guacamole wrote:
"The only CPU benchmark I trust is spec95,"
Don't you also trust the results of tests with the applications you use on a daily basis? Those should be a lot more useful to you than SPEC.
"and for some reason they haven't posted that."
Well, I don't know if there are numbers available for them to quote. I can't find any G4 SPEC numbers at www.motorola.com, and the PPC SPEC results at www.specbench.org are woefully dated.
I have a hard time taking specbench.org seriously these days given that they don't even have ANY results for the PowerPC 750 (aka G3) let alone the G4. The most recent numbers they have are some ~333 Mhz 604e numbers submitted by IBM, and those numbers are getting pretty old. If major CPU manufacturers quit submitting SPEC results SPEC will not be very useful any more.
at least, that's how the definition goes, and that's what the G4's do. JEALOUSY ANYONE??? =)
You sound _scared_ that people will be able to get one of these and run Linux on it.
P'raps you _should_ be. >;)
Who cares?..I mean obviously you do, but spare me the MacOS is crap line. The fact is, that even though I do have a Linux box and am using it right now, Linux does_not_meet_all of my requirements (GASP). I don't want to use the GIMP..I want Photoshop. I don't wan't koffice,staroffice,or wordperfect, or any other wordprocessor (as good as some of them may be). I want MS Word, so shoot me. The selection of entertainment titles for Linux isn't_good_enough for me right now. Maybe all that will change soon. I hope so. But right now I would rather use one of 2 other platforms for most of these things (MacOS or WinNT/95/98). I prefer MacOS. 8.6 is easily as stable as 95/98. Its easier to manage over the long term. And it multitasks as well as I do (probably better). And when I need to write some Perl, or muck around with PL/SQL, I boot my Linux Box. I guess some people can't get over the underlying technology and just use the friggin tools or loose sleep over the lach of HW MMU. If you can't, then "just wait for OSX" I'm glad I have a choice at least.
It's Rage 128, not Rage Pro or Rage II or any of the others.
Rage 128 is actually pretty decent. Depending on what you're looking for in a card, it can be the best one out there. Here's the thing: Voodoo3 has the fastest renderer, but there's a reason for that: it can't do any more than 16-bit color (and yes, I've read that little excuse^H^H^H^H^H^Harticle from that 3Dfx guy; I've seen the cards back to back and I don't buy it in the least). In other words, each frame won't look as good as one from a Rage 128. Then there are NVidia's offerings; reasonably good framerate, but the renderer is still of pretty low quality. Rage 128 has a relatively slow renderer (key word "relatively"; it beats Voodoo2 handily and I've never seen it more than five FPS slower than a Voodoo3) but its frames look better than the others do.
Personally, I'll sacrifice a few FPS for better-looking graphics. Then again, that's just me; some people can't tell the differences between the three renderers, just as some people (myself included)_can't tell the difference between an MP3 and the original CD recording.
Besides which, 3Dfx and Matrox are still flaky with MacOS support. The cards do work, but I don't think either is OF-compliant at this point. ATI, on the other hand, is (and has been since Apple started including their chips, which is probably why Apple did it).
Standard Apple fare. Make big performance claims, don't back it up with benchmarks. The only benchmark numbers on their site are a set of special purpose signal processing benchmarks that show off what used to be called Altivec (now called "Velocity Engine"). And the line below them says "Based on BYTEmark integer index processor scores." even though the listed benchmarks appear to be FP (i.e. Complex FFT and FIR filter).
Come on Apple, stop being so deliberately deceptive. If you're going to claim that "G4 is up to a stunning 100% to 200% faster than the fastest Pentium III-based PCs" in CPU and Photoshop tests, show us the benchmarks! Either that or I'll have to assume that the performance claims for the G4 are just a bogus as those for the G3.
That furniture you are referring to has a CPU head and shoulder over your garbage Intel sh*t! I wouldn't buy Intel if you pay me! I wouldn't buy AMD sh*t if you pay me. Damn sh*t overheats! I wouldn't buy Cyrix if you pay me and I wouldn't buy a Windose box if you pay me. On the subject of sh*t, Linux is sh*t. Mac G3 anyday!!!!!
If you aren't, there is no way in hell you can know what relations Be had with intel prior to the "Apple thing." It's not like they sat down, and in one day Intel decided to invest in them. There had to be some relations beforehand...this is business.
32 128 bit registers running in parallel. Imagine how they can be used to pipeline operations that would otherwise require a bunch of instruction cycles... The possibilities are staggering. Want to optimize an app for G4 - Just recompile it for Altivec.
Let's not forget who uses the Mac-only app Mathematica - the gods of our industry, that's who!
Yeah, I'm a Mac programmer. You got a problem with that?
-- thinkyhead software and media
You couldn't be more wrong. I can configure a linux system on 400 megs that could easily match your MacOS system. I think you should actually try LinuxPPC before complaining about how bloated it is.
Try it before you bash it. Those 1gig installs are complete installs.
...
Bitchslapped? Give Rob a bitchslap from bitchslapped.com.
unclefucker unclefucker.
this was obviously the Facade pattern coupled with some delegation.
i wonder how the folks at apple feel knowing that they put their heart and soul into programming macos, yet as soon as it hits a linux users desktop it's fried off there as fast as the head on their hard drive can fly?
I especially liked it when Apple killed the clone builders and refused to give BeOS the the information needed to bring BeOS to Mac Hardware. That was so cool of Apple. You got to love that Steve Jobs! Who needs competition.
As if you were really going to install more than a gig of ram.
dillrod
Ten million years or so...
-
Actually, the previous G3s had a 100MHz FSB, it's the other Apple models that have the 66MHz one.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
People actually buy computers base on the color of their favorite Life Savers candy. Just plain sad! It's a computer people not funiture!
Correct me if I'm wrong... but they ship these with the MacOS 8. That is braindead. If they shipped it with LinuxPPC or something NOT MacOS, i would have no qualms.
Patrick Barrett
Yebyen@adelphia.net
Restating the obvious since nineteen aught five.
Hey! I bought my G3/400 back in March for $2400! I'm all upset now! Seriously, while I didn't expect this to happen so soon (WWDC heavily implied that the G4 machines would be out in 2000), I tend to agree with the above. I'm still more than happy with my G3/400 (it compiles nice and fast)! However, I also hedged my bets: at work, I use an 8600/300 and gave away a G3/266 to Quality Assurance so that when the G4s came out, I could convince my boss to buy one ("Look at this old machine I'm developing on!"). So in a couple months, the purchase requisition goes through. Yow.
Run Norton once in a blue moon and fix all you're B-tree problems if you think that is the source of your problems.
I agree with the earlier comment that once properly configured (read all the useless and buggy 3rd party extensions removed) and the OS almost never crashes. In fact I can't remember the last time my 8.6 B&W350 crashed where I needed a forced reboot. I do have apps crash, but a cmd-opt-esc almost always saves me from a reboot.
I do however realize there a number of inherent problems with the MacOS, but crashing is the least of them. The fact that clicking on a menu brings the system to a grinding halt, for example, is simply inexcusable.
Yo
http://www.mot. com/SPS/PowerPC/products/semiconductor/cpu/7400.ht ml
This machine is being positioned as the ulitmate boot legger. Apple's page is talking about dvd-ram and digital camera's and the ultimate cimematic experience.
I can just see it now, an army of people in theatres with their digital camera's going home and uploading it directly to their computer and burning it on vcd or better yet(for Apple that is)onto a dvd-ram in Quick Time format.
---- aut viam inveniam aut faciam
We could *always* rely on apple overpricing...thi is...is...an OUTRAGE!!!
:)
-K
One day, you'll learn to watch what you post...
Crap - it was ONLY the highest volume selling personal computer model on the market. If it was so lame, why are we being treated to 1. Intel's Design Forum? 2. Several PC case manufacturers now offering colors other than beige. 3. Several clone manufacturers copying (and getting sued for it) Apple's design????
As a technical writer and admittedly one of the less technically adept of the posters around here...
This display is a step in the right direction -- what we TWs and DTPers crave is something an eensy bit bigger, say, able to show an 11 x 17 spread actual size, plus a little bit o' desktop/windowframe/menu area. And to be that big, it'd have to be a concave display to keep the user from constantly craning his/her neck port and starboard.
I'm unreconstructed Macophile -- they've been good to me since 1984 -- but somehow I can't get too excited anymore about a merely faster, more powerful Mac. From where I sit, it seems like Cupertino just keeps on coming up with these great technological innovations (Publish and Subscribe, CyberDog) that somehow wind up withering on the vine. Their designs are to die for and their marketing's bitchin', but I'm beginning to appreciate why they get dissed so much around here.
Their bloatware problem rivals a Certain Other Notorious OS Vendor's: The last time I bothered to look into upgrading a Mac, I realized that if I turned on half the extra inits that shipped with System 7.5, I'd never get any production work done without getting a faster Mac with twice the RAM. To stay at the cutting edge of Mac technology is to be constantly buying newer, faster boxen to keep up with the spiraling demand for raw thruput.
When I can run FrameMaker, PageMaker, Quark, and all the Acrobat tools on a Linux box without really much caring what platform it was originally compiled for and without going through hell first, that'll be something. Gearheads take note (God love ya).
"How many light bulbs does it take to change a person?" --BMcC-->
Absolutely not! Computers are computers and furniture are furniture! The reason why Jobs made his sh*tting iMacs look like furniture is because Apple can't sell those garbage G3 as a computer. So he paint them purple and lemon and whatever stupid color to trick idiots who don't know a god damn thing about computers into thinking "Hey, that's cool. It'll look nice in my living room". Fu*k, computers are meant to be functional, not sit pretty in a corner with bogus processor. Jobs claimed his G3 Macs are faster than Pentium II at the same speed. What a fu*king lie! Have you ever used an iMac? Piece of sh*t. I mean what a boat anchor. A Celeron system at half the price running Linux is twice as fast. Fu*k, maybe Jobs is right to paint those iMac fruit colors, anything so slow should be a piece of furniture!
A sniveling groveler says: I have a black G3 for anyone who wants to buy one... please buy it... I wanna buy one of these new things...
*sigh* Expect to see mine on eBay or uBid sometime in the next couple of weeks... considering how badass these new machines are gonna be, I'm not sure how much demand there'll be for used G3's...
pissing contests about OS's are infantile.
have you had your bottle?
switchTo.linux() indicates that switchTo is an object, and linux() is the memberfunction on that object - doesn't make much sense from an OOP point of view, or does it ? linux.switchTo() makes already much more sense. But how can a linux object know what OS it was running, and how to reboot into it ? Maybe replace it by: enum { dos, windows, nt, linux, BeOS, FreeBSD } os; if (operatingsystem.os() == nt) { operatingsystem.switchTo(linux); } look, much better, uh ? :)
Don't slashdotters have any concept about what the PowerPC OS situation is? This box can run at least 3 different OS's, ONE of which is the legacy MacOS. Mac OS X server is NOT brain dead, and niether is PPC Linux. Get real folks, this box is FAST and supports some cool operating systems.
Apple is making the same mistake it made back in the 80's. I won't buy a new computer that can only run MacOS just because it looks nice.
I don't know about anyone else, but my Power Mac runs Linux/PPC. It may take a while to get the bugs worked out, but these new machines will run it as well...
Jay (=
(Out of curiosity, what color is the G4 machine? Ice and what?)
actually, it begs two obvios questions:
/. apple icon have to change? now that the systems are 'graphite' instead of blueberry...
1: will it run linuxppc? because, no matter how fast os8 or 9 are, the real processing power won't be accessible until osX or linux are pumping it for all it's got
2: will the
- Entertaining Bits from the Ancient Kernel Tree
I've seen this many times, starting with Apple ][
Stage 1. Incredibly cool, innovative idea with lots of experimental features. Sell for many $$$, but no support at all for legacy machines.
Stage 2. Customer base discovers weakest link in hardware (e.g. old Mac video flyback). In retrospect, customers wish they had bought AppleCare policy.
Stage 3. Third party sells fix/enhancement for weakest link (e.g. external floppies for iMac, external hard drive for old Macs, printer card for Apple ][).
Stage 4. Apple discounts original model. Customers rush to stores.
Stage 5. Two weeks later, Apple fixes most problems, releases new version as Product Plus, all new programs and peripherals require Product Plus.
Stage 6. Three months later, based on popularity of Product Plus, Apple releases Product GS, Product 2000CL, Product 4000/40Xi, Product CsL, and ten other similarly named products. In fact, they are not at all like the original Product, and all have different design flaws.
Stage 7. Fed up and broke, customers swear up and down they'll never buy another G.D. Apple. Apple releases Product 6000GD at a deep discount. It has all the features the earlier models should have had.
Stage 1. repeats
Is the G4 really that fast or is it fud? 3x faster than a Pentium III means faster than an Alpha etc. Is this for real? If you were running Linux would it be 3x faster? Can you get G4s from other companies not Apple?
That's a horrible thing to say, I wouldn't wish windows on my worst enemy or his best friend.
Patrick Barrett
Yebyen@adelphia.net
Restating the obvious since nineteen aught five.
Well, personally I think this was almost a no brainer for Mac. Now ATI is known amoung most design professionals to be THE chip to go with since the Mach64. WHY? Well the truth is: color calabration. The ATI line of products offers more options for color calibration and color management than any other line of chips out there. This includes both hardware support (your windows drivers doesn't even SCRATCH the surface of the color support embedded into those chips) and software support. EFI (de facto in meduim sized color print production) has long used ATI gear, and STILL uses its Mach64 in some of its top of the line material. Now MOST users using MacOS are NOT intrested in gaming OR 3d rendering. Lets face it, there isn't MUCH of a market for EITHER. MOST high level 3d work is UNIX work. Most games have windows. Being IN the industry myself, Macs are used for PhotoShop, Quark, and things of the like which require VERY little 3d rendering. And if you know anything about RGB to CMYK conversion for printing, then using an ATI chip is the only real way to go. Despite any person opinion, EFI, Splash, Xerox, Dell's 2d design stations, IBM's own RS6000 2d design stations are packed with SOME variant of an ATI chip. If you are using a Mac for 3d redering, chances are you have a different OS, and then you probably are going to pack it with a different card and so fourth. But since Mac design work goes for 2d work (including film) and COLOR is critical: ATI, hands down, holds the market for entry level-to mid level price range color calibration. BortBox
Alright, I concede. However, to get that high end server I'm sure you will be paying through the nose. And quite certainly you will be paying more than you would with an open architecture. I'm sure for 3000+ you could get a dual Zeon, matching peripherals, etc.
I don't have experience with servers, so I have to admit that you may have me here. I am a graphic designer. When I was shopping for a home graphics workstation some time back, I got a Cyrix with 256MB of RAM, zip, a scanner, and a large Wacom Tablet for the same cost as a G3 box. These are significant upgrades for Apple's targeted niche of designers. I doubt if Apple's price line plateaus as you reach the top end.
I don't think that the G4 hardware wouldn't make a good (and overpriced) server, I just don't think that the OS's available for the mac seem to be suitable. I'll trust mac os x when I see major servers running it. Where I work, we used to be a mac (including servers) house, and now we run a combination of nt, linux, and irix for our servers and most of the desktops, with macs being used by the designer.
I don't think that a line of above average performance computers that starts at $300 more than a computer with comparable performance as giving away gold.
NT is thrown in for the desktop publishing/graphics arts/proofing software, which doesn't exist for Linux yet.
Darn but I wished formatting was kept.
But subtract the $309 for NT and you do get a cheaper SMP system, Be or Linux.
Be *might* be able to function in a similar manner to a G4 in terms of graphics and multimedia.
-AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
True.
[Mike Meyers Mode On]
Because if it's not Linux, it's crap!
[Mike Meyers Mode Off]
Yeah, right. What accelerator beats the Rage 128 AND has digital video out, 32 bit color support and working Mac drivers and is shipping now? All this talk about Nvidia, Voodoo, etc. is B.S. because those cards just don't have the features Apple needs for the people who are going to buy this machine.
IMHO the quality of the Rage128 chipset is quite good. I have PIII/500's and Blue and White G3/300-450's in and out of my office and every "pc" person that works with me agrees that the G3's look _much_ nicer than the TNT cards in the PIII machines (Velocity 4400's). The performance is actually similar even though it's 66mhz PCI vs. 2x AGP on the PCs. Over all, I would have to give the nod to the Mac though when it comes to playability AND quality in QIII (so would Carmak since he admitted in a Gaming Mag Article that he only plays on a Mac now
The AGP card has digital out. This means that the signal doesn't have to go through a digital to analog converter, lowering a bottleneck on the graphics card. Also, a digital signal doesn't refresh in the typical sense. It only refreshes the pixels that need to be refreshed. While your TNT2 cards are redrawing EVERY pixel at 75hz, the ATI card only has to redraw the pixel that change from frame to frame. This should provide much better performance.
There are faster cards out there. Much faster in fact, but I wouldn't compromise quality when the 'quality card' is fast enough (ie. at least 30-40 frames per second). Who cares if the card runs Q3 at 80fps if it doesn't look realistic. Personally I wouldn't mind seeing Apple get G400 cards but their mac support is if-y right now and their GL support sucks.
If you read the last flurry of vapor Amiga stuff (if you can still call it an Amiga) and you looked at the new Amiga info you would have noticed that the Graphics subsystem of choice for the new Amiga is the next generation ATI chipset. It is possible that ATI has something impressive around the corner that we don't know about. Apple did, after all, lead everyone to believe that the new sawtooth motherboard will not be available till much later this year and it's shipping in a "couple weeks" according to Jobs.
3dfx has already announced support for the G4 and they have drivers and bios available for the pci Voodoo3 and Voodoo2 cards already. If you really don't like ATI, you should be able to get a V3 by the time the 500mhz G4 ships (in a month according to SteveJ)
There will never be a Nvidia TNT or TNT2 card for the G3 or G4. Nvidia has explained to the Mac faithful that there are design issues with those processors that prevent them from running on the Macintosh. Most of what I read was somewhat over my head so I won't butcher it in a poor recitial. In short, TNT is not an Apple alternative so don't bother asking why Apple didn't ship them in G4.
Now a bit off topic... Here are the specs for those interested...
new macs (sawtooth motherboard-450 and 500models, old yosemite on 400mhz model)
400-500mhz G4 128 bit memory bus for 800MB/sec transfer at 100mhz
2-12Mb USB ports, each on seperate USB bus (24Mb total bandwith)
3-400Mb/s Firewire ports, one internal (that's faster than UW SCSI and it's hot plugable with power included in bus
UDMA 66 - Intel doesn't even support that yet
2x AGP for 16Mb Rage 128 card. First, the card should have been 32mb, second... it has digital out for flat panel but you can't run 2 seperate displays off of the same chipset.
Now the cool stuff...
The MB supports 133mhz bus and...
The CPU STILL doesn't require a fan
Steven
But how much will it cost for the Linux machine to do color correction, proofing, pre-production, graphics arts, and desktop publishing?
For those fields(under which the G4 was released, at Seybold) there is no comparable machine in the market. DIYers can cobble together the above/previously mentioned SMP PIII, but not at a significantly lower price point.
-AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
>I had the silly impression that they were for servers, thanks for correcting me.
And given your assine nature, perhaps YOU missed how Apple referes to the G3 tower/G4 Towers as SERVER class machines.
Try posting a MEANINGFUL reply next time.
look, i know this is going to be flamed from the get go. So for all you mac lovers, go jump in your 99 vw bug, watch zdtv, or go read wired. dont bother flaming. it just makes you look frustrated.
..."
first off, i cant even connect to their sight! this might be due to the hit rate, but still. it should be able to handle it. (?)
second, the g-4 sight , when i reached it, had the same "think different" campaign ideas. this includes explaining what mhz means!!
apple once again has claimed fastest machine. i dont know if its true or not, but i doubt it.
"So, if you're one of those professionals
what? its like they are trying to portray mac users to some sophisticated guy in a 3000 $ suit!
typical apple marketing.
"the first desktop with wireless computing"
uh huh, suuuure.
"We love building the fastest, best-designed computers in the world."
look apple boys and girls, read the news. please!! your just embarrasing yourself.
(who knows...i might be doing the same.)
yeah, the case is cool, (begin sarcasm) so i guess ill go out and buy it... isnt that the most important thing in a computer? (end sarcasm)
look, read and explore before you invest in fruit computing. let the crybaby "i love my mac and ill never bow to bill gates" flames begin.
-------------------------------------------------
Hm.
These machines are still playing catchup with x86 machines, AND they come at a hefty price premium...The G4 costs 1600$, to start, and tops off at 3400$. A PIII will start in the mid-two-grand range, and top off well above four thousand dollars.
The G4 is - and I am probably understating here - at least as fast as the PIII at comparable megahertz.
Case closed.
You are forgetting, the major speed increase is the AltiVec unit (128bit processor, to do my bidding =) ). Its like with good ole MMX, intel boasted a major speed improvement from a pent 166 to pent 166 with mmx if I remember properly, but the 200MMX wasnt a HUGE just. I mean, yeah the 1600 PowerMac G4 isn't as fast (nor does it have the internal airport/agp capabilities), but the 2.94 times faster is cpu cycle based, not video card based.
So yeah, the $1,600 version may have some bottlenecks in it, but those bottlenecks arent neverly as severe as in the Pentium Systems
-pfhor
(remember, a GIGAFLOP, apple would not shit you about something like that, and a possible 4 gigaflop peak proformance. Now all we need is a shirt saying "This shirt is a munition, on the front, and on the back, So is my computer!)
i'm surprised that someone here would fall prey to the good ol' MHz war. especially since you're talking about the athlon. even with the numbers, is there anything terribly wrong here?
500, alright that looks a little bit on the low side. 1 MB of L2 @ 1/2 bus speed, last i checked that trumps both the P3 and athlon. 100 MHz FSB, there with the P3, trumped by the athlon. so rattling off the advertisers numbers the G4 sits somewhere betwixt the P3, and athlon. well maybe not quite. but...isn't the important thing performance?
i watched the keynote, and i think the coolest spec to quote on the new g4 is that, in the time it takes to run one operation, the light from your monitor hasn't had time to reach your eyes.
gigaflops, baby...
- Entertaining Bits from the Ancient Kernel Tree
If anybody EXCEPT apple were managing this thing I would worry for Intel, but even though the G4 (yes it IS that fast) is fast as hell, apple shoves a half emulated piece of crap OS on it, make braindead graphics choices, the mismarkets it. Wonderful. But all I can think about is a dual G4 BeBox. ohhhh.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
As someone with a good amount of Linux, Macintosh, and Mac OS X experience, let me share the following insights.
1. LinuxPPC is one of the most used Linuces, but not the only for PowerPCs. Debian is quite good, even on the iMac, MkLinux is essentially a Linux version of Mac OS X's core components, and Yellow Dog/Black Lab Linux is alleged to be better configured than LinuxPPC. As someone currently running LinuxPPC R5 on my 7500, I can tell you that anyone looking to get a good Linux box should look into the PowerPC.
2. The G4 is available from Motorola for $475 in quantities of 1000+. The specs for a modern MB are available FREE from IBM. Now, if only someone with enough money and a good track record would take advantage of this...
3. The Mac OS X/G4 server might be the thing someday soon. Not quite as cool as an Alpha, but still much better than IA-32, the architecture formerly known as x86. IA-64, though a challenge, should it ever be implemented properly, is causing M$ headaches due to its 64 bit nature, just as Alpha did. Thus, unless you want to spring for an Alpha or wait on the Linux port to Merced (which I am sure is underway, but I don't recall hearing much on it), get a PPC or an Athlon.
4. The likely reason for Apple not going with a Matrox card is lack of drivers, if I am not terribly mistaken. ATI has drivers for Mac OS, Win32, and even Linux. I don't know that Matrox has drivers available for the Mac, not does it seem likely they would develop some if they did not. The G4 looks to be a milestone in computing, somewhere beneath the migration of Linux from the x86 to other platforms but somewhere above Billy boy getting pied.
5. This machine is beautiful, both externally and aesthetically, and internally and structurally. While there are still areas in need of improvement, this DieHard computer user is going to snatch one of these up, soon as OS X is available with them.
Flame away!
R_DH
Everybody wread the 2.94 times and stoped reading there. If you continued to read it says Intel did and published the testing and it wasent bytemark.
first, taken from a press release: So how does the G4 with its Velocity Engine stack up against Intel's brand-new Pentium III processor? To find out, we went right to the source: We used a set of Intel's own performance tests published on their web site. Using six of Intel's tests, the 500MHz G4 was, on average, almost three times as fast as the 600MHz Pentium III (2.94 times, to be exact). Now, why don't you head over to apple's site (yes, it's a bit busy. and no, it was busy all this morning, slashdot don't get all the credit) and click on the big shiny machine and then click on "specs". - e tutti pie eye
I am a hardcore Mac (I make my living supporting them), but even I have to admit that Apple blew it with the exaggerated G3 speed claims, especially since the thing was fast enough not to require that sort of marketing BS anyhow.
The G3 was optimized for integer operations, Apple/Motorola figuring that that was more important for the majority of the applilcations that people use a Mac for. However, with the G4, they've optimized floating point operations, so the claims may really be valid this time.
"You're not a cyber-warrior surfing the Net, you're alone in your room, typing."
It's on it's second developer seeding
--"In dreams begin responsibilities" - Delmore Schwartz
I just watched the keynote (thanks to QuickTime, a nother technology from Apple) and the scientific demo of real-time modeling of the motion of 30,000 stars was mind-boggling.
The G3 and Pentium III pretty much bog down at about 2,000 stars.
Call the OS whatever names you want, real people with actual jobs in publishing and digital content creation will save themselves so much time with this puppy.
And it starts at $1599!!
Whee-ha!
$1509 vs $1599 is within the same order of magnitude; it depends on the mouse and keyboard you buy, for example(USB or otherwise, name brand or not, etc).
Why NT? Because NT can do the same things, mostly, that Mac can do; desktop publishing, prepress, color correction, etc. If we are targetting different markets, then sure, throw in Linux or BeOS. For Seybold, I think NT would be appropriate.
-AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
what gives?
Just got back from Seybold. The Cinema display made the SGI Flat panel display look enemic. Easily the best looking monitor I've ever seen. I even watched some people playing Quake III on them- drool! However the 4000 price tag makes this just another "cool toy I'll never own" (tm)... and Jobs said something about how they would be limited in number cant say I'm crazy about the clear plastic molding though... Seems like that look might get dated pretty quickly... but who cares when it looks that good...
hmmmm...
In this same thread is a link to a site that is the ultra-techie site for Mac/Apple/PPC users. They give details and specs for overclocked G3s, etc.
I'm assuming you'll be able to with G4s as well....not to mention multi processor support.
It seems to me that every comment containing the wonderful three letter acronym "FUD" seems not to be worth my while. What part of Fear, Uncenrtainty, or Doubt have in *any* Slashdot story?
'bout all it's good for now...
I have a 486DX4-100 with 32M of RAM and a half full 1.6GB drive. I run Windows NT4.0 and Netscape Communicator. It works great and I can even listen to Real Audio and MP3's. Ok. If I'm listening to MP3's then I can't do anything else but other than that I have no reason to upgrade.
Be prepared to waste space and time maintaining a MacOS partition as OF on all translucent machines wont boot linux. it will partially boot a NetBSD kernel but not linux...
I would be nice if someone would fix the linux kernel and quik so OF will accept it, right now its like a machine that requires win95 to boot linux.
I'd still like to see a floppy, and how about adding some custom hardware to the box. Other than that, I'd grab one in a heartbeat. Software? I've got linux :-)
USB floppy drives are available .I think for about 60$, which is steep for a floppy drive. Or superdisc or zip it. It also has that "Airport" 11mps ieee something wireless as an option
Get the latest system software, update the hard disk drivers, run norton's on your disk, and throw away any crap 3rd party extensions -- you'll find your Mac is much more solid than you think.
Been there, done that, bought the T-shirt. Been supporting Macs at a top-10 ad agency for 6 years. Owned more Macs than you can shake a stick at. On my B&W G3, I've tried a) stock apple installation, b) minimal extension versions of (a), c) custom installation, and d) minimal extension version of (c).
It still doesn't make the overall OS more stable, and it will never overcome the weird multitasking model, bad memory management, etc etc. MacOS isn't linux, and it isn't even WinNT for memory or process management.
Further rant: Apple would be lightyears ahead of everyone else if they had made a decision to walk away from the 680x0 architecture when PPC was introduced. That they wasted too much time making 680x0 apps run on PPC instead of making a PPC-native OS with protected memory, preemptive multitasking, SMP and other taken-for-granted-on-Wintel features.
Instead they're locked into this never-ending, dead-end OS that they can't seem to shake, and I think it seriously undermines their growth potential.
Bro, that's the name of the game with computers. As soon as you buy one, there's always something better around the corner. Sorry.
I think you're all jealous 'cuz we macheads have much cooler machines than you all. Nyah.
I have a G2 8600 300mhz 604e and it rips apart SETI data at 24 hrs/unit! I think G3s were for home and school users so I'm waiting for late/evolved G4 with superior multimedia/server OS. Meanwhile, I'm kicking your Pentium asses!
I especially liked the smoky, neutral color of the G4 because it will appeal to professionals and uber-geeks alike. The screen is awesome! Imagine ripping dvds for your own private home letterbox theatre...drooooll...
Apple makes high-quality hardware and software in general, though I've had a particularly nasty experience with a G2 PowerBook design whose disk rattle caused the adjacently touching memory to pop out! They are beginning to open-source, and there is a hell of a lot of good freeware/shareware/etc mac software available. Besides, the new OS will run Java, Windows, etc, and everything is getting standardized and distributed, so shouldn't we all just use machines that express our style instead of bickering over details? ;)
a prophet on the burning shore
"Apple Unveils The Fastest Personal Computer On The Planet (With Immediate Availability)" Mac Observer
1 /g4announced.html
/. processor guru would weigh in on this)
http://www.macobserver.com/news/99/august/99083
Errr, does the G4 actually beat an Alpha?
(I am wondering if some
They used Intels OWN TESTS to benchmark the G4. They grabed all the tests Intel used on the PIII to make it look good, ported 'em to G4, ran them and beat the shit outta Intel...
;-)
Now thats funny.
Another thing about the G4... when typing it, if you give it a little SHIFT, you get G$
does Apple know something we dont
Fastest personal computer available...whatever. There's a vague claim, just like other vague crap that spills out of that clown's mouth. All the hype made it sound like you could pick up the phone and have one of these new Mac's shipped same day...30 day wait? 60 day wait? He's just as arrogant as Gates, only more obnoxious. Couple that imbecile frontman with too-many forthing Mac-Fanatics and the whole company makes me slightly nauseous....still, they sure are pretty boxes...
Blar.
Since when is a complaint about the crash-prone mid-80s MacOS equitable to "Macs suck"?
I like the Mac well enough, but it's pretty tiresome to have every Mac afficianado act like you've accused them of child molestation everytime there's a complaint about the OS.
Apple has gotten their hardware act together, but their OS is still a bad dream. I use both NT and MacOS side by side on a daily basis, and my NT machine (with a minimum of 6 apps, often nearly a dozen open) just doesn't die with the Mac's frequency.
not unless you beg apple for programming information about their chipset
...the Rage 128 currently has one of the nicest (most compliant, with the most consistent performance) OpenGL drivers out there. Definitely an underrated card.
Lets have a little dose of reality here. These machines are still playing catchup with x86 machines, AND they come at a hefty price premium. Unless you have a religious attachment to Mac (which I can understand, some people just like the Mac way of doing things), this is not the best bang for the buck.
You're missing the point, in much the same way that the mainframe guys missed the point of minicomputers and PCs . . .
The computer IS a piece of furniture. Heck, before long computers will be IN furniture. The days of computers as an end unto themselves are numbered.
Too bad it doesn't use all mine. All my hardware works on Linux, while BeOS does not support Advansys SCSI (someone correct me if this has changed). This is the obstacle that keeps me from trying Be.
Formidable! From this one posting, I have increased my knowledge of French curses and epithets by an order of magnitude!
OK - I'll be the first to admit it. In many ways the x86 platform is not the most elegant in the world. Looking back at various historical chips from both Motorola and Intel, Moto's get my vote everytime - their implementation is simply better. Don't fool yourself - the "G4" is a Motorola chip, why Apple insists on their own naming convention, I don't know. In any event, this is the new PPC with Altivec instructions. They are simply SIMD instructions for both floating point, and integer operations. A first for the PPC family of chips - the x86 has had these since MMX (in integer form) and with AMD's 3D-Now! instuctions on the K6-2 (for floating point), and later with Intel's own SSE instructions for the Pentium III. Oooh 128bit registers able to operate on multiple 32bit values. Ahhh vector processing like super computers do. Damn - Apple's buyers must be stupid. Yeah - it's true, but it's not revolutionary - and other CPUs were there first. Gotta love all those Cray references in there. OK - so their theoretical maximum thru-put is 4 GFLOPs - what they aren't telling you is that is on single precision floating point instructions. There are 2 Altivec instruction units, and if each is maximally processing a bunch of 32 bit values, You can mulitply the MHz of the chip by 8 (500MHz * 8 = 4000) to see the Millions of Floating point instructions it can do. Guess what The AMD Athlon has the same setup. 2 3D-Now! execution capable units - and these chips run faster, up to 650MHz, so theoretical maximum for one of them is 650*8 = 5200 Millions of Floating Point Instructions - or 5.2 GFLOPs. Yeah the new PPC is a good chip, and it's internal architecture is cleaner than just about any x86 chip on the market. But hey - don't let Apple's marketing hype fool ya. - Porter
The Motorola PowerPC prices are for just the processor, no L2 cache, no module. When you buy one, two, or a thousand PIIIs/Athlons you're buying the full processor module. In the case of the PowerMac, the modules are put together and sold by Apple, Newer, XLR8, and others.
DIE
Gee..and once again all the Linux trolls come rolling out brandishing overclocked celerons and calling for Apple's death. This is becoming quite predictable. Well anyway this looks pretty cool ;) although I'm not a fan of MacOS I would personally like to have an iBookish type notebook with a G4 processor running BeOS in the near future. It's always interesting to try out new things. Just my two cents.
I think the G5 is coming out with a multiple core on one die sharing common high speed cache. That should be really cool although when is anyones guess..
"The new PowerPC G4, architected by Apple, Motorola and IBM, is the first microprocessor that can deliver a sustained performance of over one gigaflop. In fact, it has a theoretical peak performance of four gigaflops."
You should have seen the Photoshop and scientific model demos.
If Apple keeps this up, I'm just going to start endorsing my paychecks checks to One Infinite Loop.
- Scott
------
Scott Stevenson
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
If you had ever learned to read you would have noticed that word "annually" which you pasted in. I wasn't aware that PIII's at any MHz were out a year ago.
So building a dual PIII 450 is cheaper or comparable? I don't believe it. Last I saw, a PIII 450 is $219; Here's a rough breakdown G4 + 64MB + ATI Rage 128 + 10GB 5400 ATA/33 + 32x CDROM + 2 Firewire ports + 10/100baseT + 56.6k = $1599 2xPIII 450 = $438 64MB memory = $65 ATI Rage 128 16mb = $79 10GB HD Western Digital = $135 Dual Motherboard(Microstar) = $239 40x CDROM = $35 Firewire card(Siiig) = $107 Ethernet = $45 Modem = $50 Case+PS = $85 WindowsNT = $309 That's $1507 That's not cheaper...(I won't argue power since I can't actually benchmark either setup!)
-AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
The latest 8.6 is very stable, although still no great shakes at multitasking. osX is what everyone is waiting for...
To everyone: I'm sorry about this, but I'm feeling vaguely bitchy today.
---Flame On---
"If Apple wants to market to the top end of the PC user market, they'll have to sacrifice some "friendliness" for utility."
First off, we must assume that you, in your egotistical mind, are "the top end of the PC user market." I guess that I must bow to you because I PREFER a one button mouse. Get off your egotistical high horse and join the rest of us human beings.
Show me one study--ONE--which clearly demonstrates a three button mouse is faster than a one button mouse. Give me the URL where a study of actual human beings used both mice and the results clearly showed that a one button mouse is a detriment to computer use.
Personally, I hate two button and despise three button mice because, as Apple says, I find myself having to interrupt my train of thought to remember which button does what. Either that, or I end up pressing the wrong one and bizarre things start happening. Or I never use the other button(s) and use some other method (going to a menu, double-clicking, etc.) to perform an operation.
You love three button mice. Fine. No problem. I have nothing against you. But until you can actually PROVE--with real numbers, statistics, and all that nasty scientific method stuff--that a three button is faster than a one button mouse, don't try to elevate yourself and feed your ego by putting down other people who don't share your PREFERENCE.
---Flame Off--
Again, apologies to everyone. This is just one of those things that sticks in my craw.
Yes, another typical slashdot session.
...
;)
:)
:)
Apple introduces a new machine which is aimed right at the professional markets, and someone has to bring up the iMac and it's lack of a floppy.
Or that the Bytemark isn't worth crap.
Or that it's overpriced.
Or
I could really go on forever. But let's look at the facts:
Power Macintosh G4 - 400, 450, 500mhz Motorola 7400 processor with AltiVec/Velocity Engine.
2 different motherboard designs available: one is the standard B&W G3 mobo with a G4 and other minor revisions (no adb). the other is a completely new design with 2xAGP, higher PCI and memory bandwidth, unified design shared with iBook and other future products, wireless capability, internal 400mbit firewire port.
ships with standard MacOS 8.6 (or 9.0 for the 450 and 500mhz models)
Good bye blueberry, hello graphite.
Same hockey puck for a mouse. (hey, you can't please everybody at once)
Ok, and for speculation's sake:
no, be probally still won't update BeOS to run on this. We've had quite a few generations of G3 machines for Be to take up the chance. Don't think Be is going to hop out of bed with Intel for a chance to go round with Steve and crew.
DVD/RAM should be probally won't shut everyone up who complains about a lack of floppies. Get over it. My floppy drive has been broke on my machine here at home for over a year. It took me 6 months to even notice it was broke, and that's because I noticed that my kid had shoved crackers into it. All PPC macs (and some 68k ones) can boot off CD. Most files that I would want to move from work to home and vis-versa won't fit on floppy. Floppies can be easily erased. 600 floppies can fit on one CD, and even if you get your floppies for 1 cent each, that $1.50 blank CDR is still a better deal. E-mail.
LinuxPPC will probally run mostly unchanged on the 400mhz model. Same mobo anyway, so the only thing left will be G4 specifics. As for the 450/500 models, there will be some growing pains, but probally not too many. AGP support will have to be added, and some of the internals will have to be changed for Sawtooth (new mobo name).
BTW, while I'm wondering, isn't Sawtooth supposed to have SMP support built in? Multiple G4's.... I'm drooling over it right now...
No, Apple will not bundle LinuxPPC on it. Apple is a hardware company, but it depends on the usability of the MacOS and it's hardwared designs to sell machines. As shown, lot's of companies can knock off the iMac/G3/G4/iBook/PowerBook designs. If apple sells a machine without MacOS, it isn't that much different (in the eyes of the buyer) from a pretty PC box. But, a G4 will show off Linux in ways that Intel could only dream of.
Yeah, you could use it in a Beowulf cluster, but why?
AirPort... this makes a lot more sense for a school to purchase than the base station if they are in the market for a server. For an additional $100, they can make the server act as the base station. Cool. It was surprising to see Apple actually mention this, cause it would seem like they would rather get the 300 from you than the 100. But it's nice to see them support it.
Finally, there is a machine that can actually run MS Office and Explorer at a usable speed. Until MS updates them again, that is.
AltiVec will do more for the Mac market than Intel could've dreamed of for MMX and the PC market. Why? Cause Apple will make damn sure that MacOS has AltiVec support in everything that can make use of it.
Actually, AltiVec is probally one of the really neat things that has come out on the PPC for a long time. There is a real and true 128-bit unit in the cpu core. Add this to the 64-bit floating point and 32-bit integer and you have a hell of a processor. And while they were at it, they tossed in 32 registers for this unit, bringing total number of general purpose registers up to a whooping 96.
And if you think AltiVec is limited to graphics, you're in for a surprise. Many of the common tasks that a program performs can be sped up with AltiVec. Memory copies can now be done with 128-bits at a time instead of 64-bits. Though, the bus still might be limited to 64-bits at a time.... have to check into that.
Motorola did a demonstration of a machine handling the functionality of 128 28.8(56k?) modems all in software and the other two units weren't even being used. AltiVec was handling it all. There is a lot of application for this, and it is looking great.
I can also bet that when VirtualPC comes out optimized for the G4, the gap between a emulated PC on a Mac and a real PC will be narrowed a bunch. For everyday tasks under windows, the two will be almost identical. Except that windows doesn't usually get to run in such a cool looking box
The other really cool thing about the new G4 is AGP. Finally (you can sneer all you want), the mac is starting to get some of the really good hardware that has been available for sometime now on the PC. Apple is beginning to show signs of having a clue.
I've seen quite a few comments that the MacOS is bloated, that it's too slow, and so on. That may be true, but for 99% of your tasks on a G4, the CPU will be mostly idle, waiting for you. And those that need the full power of the CPU, the app can pretty much kick out the OS by not making any calls that would cause the app to be switched out. This gives the majority of the CPU time to the app, minus overhead for low-level OS routines. Can't really do that on a multi-user os, but on a single user os, who cares if the app that you are currently using sucks up all of the CPU? I'm sure that most users would prefer that as much as the CPU that can be used is used for the task at hand.
So to wrap it up, there is my rant and rave. I just wanted to highlite some of the info about this machine. Which, no matter how you look at it, is one sweet machine.
BTW, with that new cinema display, Apple is going to take what little ground Be has taken and the remaining ground from Windows/Solaris/whatever for the DV content creation arena. And with the built in DVD drive, I just may never buy that DVD player for the tv. I'll just use the G4
dennis
(too lazy to log in, too dumb to remember the passwd)
>It's got up to a 500 mhz G4, one meg of L2 cache >@ 1/2 processing speed, 100mhz system bus. Is this supposed to be impressive ? How weak. Benchmark this against the Athlon. I'll take the Athlon.
604e fp faster than g3? sure, at the same MHz. 604e MHz > g3 MHz? no.
603/603e no fp? no. every ppc has an fp.
603 cheap? yes. poor performing, well no worse or better than a pentium.
Can anyone argue me when i say that one thing Apple has always had in THE coolest logo. Come on..nerds care about these kind of things sometimes! We're not all one sided!
-brandon-
-"hacking for the kiddies that need scripts"
"when i needed you most, when i needed a friend, you let me down now, like i let you down then."
i'm gonna have to agree. if we're talking about talked on hack architecture, we need look no further than the pentium class.
speaking of arrays. the g4 is purported to support multiple processors on a single die a la the power4. that'd still come out smaller than a merced, k7, and probably marginally bigger than a p3.
Hey It always has been. That what multimeda computers should do in apple's opinion. They should be able to CREATE multimedia, not much emphisis has been but on consuming multimedia (buying CD's CD roms and DVD) as making it. I know everyone is not creative but quite a few are. A mac is not a bad choice for them. Yes I can turn on MTV and snag some music videos. But I can also produce my owen. I'm happy the G4 will let me do that faster. I'm dying waiting to see 1:1 speed for sorenson video compression.
The U.S. Government has approached Apple and has let them know that Apple can not export the new G4's to sensitive countries because the speed of the new G4 falls under the supercomputer catagory.
If you don't like the MacOS, run Linux/PPC on it. Better yet - wait for MacOS X.
But I'm still waiting for Copeland, er, Rhapsody, er, wait, what am I waiting for? I can buy a dual processor Wintel box for less than a G4 today and get an operating system with at least a 1990s design to it.
I'm not a linux user. But I've researched Linux PPC quite a bit, I think, and other intel-based distros seem to present the same problem: the friggin' things seem to require about a gig of disk space!! (Yes I know I'm a troll.) I'm not saying that the funtionality of a Unix-like system should be compromised - but, come on, which OS would you consider to be more bloated - I still run MacOS 8.0 (which incidentally NEVER crashes, contrary to what many people bitch about), and it only takes up about 650 to 700 megs of disk space (and that's INCLUDING the space taken by many large apps like Pro-Tools, Sudio Vision Pro, Sound Designer II, Director 5, Navigator, etc., etc.). And as far as your claim that Mac users constantly need to upgrade hardware is concerned: well, you're basically right! But I feel that this very tendency is what enables Apple to raise the performance standard on their products, as they have demonstrated here. By contrast, if you (or someone like you) were in Steve Jobs' position, I would imagine that Firewire and USB would never have seen the light of day. As well as HFS+. These people have a set of iron balls, and we really shouldn't forget that!!!! Praise be unto Apple!!! -ad
If the damned thing is fast, show me *useful data saying so*, not some bullshit Specmark and one-singular-application tests. That'll never happen, though, because then they wouldn't be able to make such ridiculous "200% faster!!" claims.
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
The problem is that no one has DRIVERS for any othe AGP card than ATI. As far as ATI is concerned, they can kiss my butt. They are Vaporware-sellers and never deliver. hell, the freakin' V3 using BETA drivers kicks its ass in games like Unreal. Hopefully, we can use a TNT in these things soon.... Until then, get used to old ATI garbage.
I still think it's great that others are now following mac news enough to know our codenames ... but *i'm* still waiting on the next version of windows to be shipped tomarrow ... i mean next week ... i mean definatly next month ... imean , hell, just wait for windows 2095 ... x | x thalooser
The keynote is available in streaming Quicktime from Apple's site, although it's probably overwhelmed right now. They have a G4 and a P3/600 side by side, and the G4 is at least twice as fast as the P3 in every single test: Photoshop, movie encoding, SETI@home, encryption, 3D rendering.
And remember: It's not the case this time, it's the processor!
Megahertz, a popular (but simplistic) measure of performance, usually increases around 35% annually.
Rather than being just 35% faster, the new Power Mac G4 is up to a stunning 100% to 200% faster than the fastest Pentium III-based PCs.
I mean... the P3s are at 550 MHz IIRC... The 64 is at 500 MHz... and there's a 35% increase? Gimme a break.
o/~ All God's children shall be free in Pirates of the Caribbean, when we reach that Magic Kingdom in the sky... o/~
If you don't like the MacOS, run Linux/PPC on it. Better yet - wait for MacOS X. If the MacOS over a *BSD variant on the Mach 3 microkernal isn't 'modern' enough for you, you're just another biased mac hater. I appreciate macs for their good points, I appreciate linux for it's good points. The point of the article was the _awesome_ G4 hardware - not to give you another excuse to whine about the MacOS. If you don't like it, don't use it - just quit bitching about it. I don't bitch about linux's shortcomings to you.
Check out DRM-free movies at http://www.bside.com
For a list of available motherboards for AMD K7 Athlon CLICK HERE.
So, it faster than Intel pentiumIII so are 10 year old sgi's,current athlons, sega dreamcast, credit card readers ,etc.. I have no idea why people think that the first third generation PPC chip can't SMOKE a warmed over PII. It's not Apple designing the stuff. It's IBM and it's doing so almost unburdened by legacy support. People flame about one computer or another. The point is they ALL SUCK. There is no good OS just less crappy ones.
Pauvre Con!
Triste Enflure!
Tu n'es qu'un "Sys Admin" parmis une tétrachiée d'autres insiginifiants de ton genre.
Va apprendre à penser d'abord, avant de t'exprimer:
ça aide, d'avoir plus d'une demi-idée
Tëte Creuse!
Andouille Pathétique!
Mais tu ne peux même pas comprendre que si une chaussure t'aide à marcher, une bécane t'aide à penser?
Malheureux Crétin!
Tu croyais que c'était pour devenir cordonnier?
Triste Imbécile!
À ton niveau de stupidité, je ne vois plus qu'une seule solution: à ta place, j'essayerais le Gaz!
Quadruple Connard!
Quintuple Illettré
Pauvre hacker qu'a pas compris que les gens normaux, ça existe aussi, et ça possède les mëmes droits que ce minus abens!
Affligeant Troglodyte!
Consternant Trou-du-cul!
Désolant Écervelé!
Piteux Codeur!
Qui as élevé l'addition binaire au rang de philosophie!
Qui confonds les "man" pages avec Victor Hugo
Qui crois encore que les machines sont faites pour étre programmées
Qui pense que la vérité est ailleurs...
Tu n'es qu'un déchêt de l'humanité.
--
Jean-Francois Brouillet
> you're just another biased mac hater
Very funny indeed :-)
An 80's consumer OS over technology from the early 70's on the greatest hype from the 80's.
How old-fashioned can you get?
Flame on bro!
:)
The problem there is convention, Moto and Apple talk about different things when they mention G4, for Apple is their Line of PPC-740 machines. For Moto is a different version of the PPC-740 whith a MCM packaging (The 740 is a direct descendant of the Power4)
Damn! yeah sue me guys I loved computer architecture @ college
ZoeSch
I hate to agree with davecrazy but...
Its not about what OS, it just plain interesting and great hardware. And I want one...
My P3 500Mhz Intellistation does it at 8-9hours a unit. Nyah.
Blar.
Some models (or a custom-built machine, if you choose that option) can have DVD-RAM and/or a Zip drive.
I'm sure you've heard this before, but in today's world floppies are not very useful - they're slow and small. They seem insufficient even on this old 33MHz Mac I'm using with a 250meg (yes, 250meg) hard disk. Many files you'll find on the internet are far larger than a floppy anyway, so it is much easier to transfer files over my LAN than to put them on a disk.
Take my word for it... this will be the last major announcement from Apple before they begin to slide away.
The SPEC suite only runs on UNIX boxes (although I heard once that they are porting to NT). So Apple will have some trouble running it under MacOS 9. Then again, PC manufacturers don't quote SPECint either (Ooooh, Winbench - now THERE'S a winning benchmark). Although you can quote the SPECint95 for a particular processor, those are the souped-up hotboxes. Basically, the processor manufacture makes a motherboard with the best components possible (8MB L2 caches are not uncommon). While you're supposed to be able to buy these motherboards in the market, they are not produced in mass quantities. I have yet to hear on Slashdot a list of specific problems about Bytemark. It is a cross-platform benchmark that seems to implement some commonplace algorithms. The ONLY real complaint is that Apple does exceptionally well in it (so it must be rigged). But with any benchmark, take with salt and always test with the applications that you run with most. For the Seybold crowd, having the Adobe CEO come out and flat out say this was the fastest box by far - probably won more than a FEW people over. Tom
So I think this means everyting that this computer does will be video card limited. That is a really big bummer.
I would like to see a set of tests run on games. Did anyone notice how games were ignored at this conference. Supposedly, there was a new focus on games at apple. Mostly, I think, because there isn't any other good reason to have a faster computer. Intel knows this. They demo games or game-lijke things all the time. Now, I think apple is giving up that market again (ha, lets screw our loyal customers again!!!--I am sTeve Jobs and I wear black turtlenecks because I am eVil). Forgive me, sCary. Anyway, if apple makes an awesome q3 machine, and then POINTEDLY ignores the game playin mojo this box has, then there is a big problem for those interested in this box as a home machine.
Anyway, I would like to see macs succeed, and if I could get IDL and Matlab, I would consider it--but Apple screwed over all the developers, and now I can't even consider their product
Doh
I'd love a PPC, but Steve Jobs is still making closed, proprietary systems that can never be upgraded.
I have a blue G3 here with two empty PCI slots, 62 empty Firewire spots, 119 empty USB spots, two empty DIMM slots that can each take 256MB to bring me up to 1GB of RAM, three empty hard drive bays and the CPU is in a ZIF and can be swapped for a G4. On top of that, the whole guts of the machine come out onto the desktop when you pull the latch so it's easy to put stuff in and take it out. The last thing I added to it was an external 18GB Firewire hard drive (about the same price as a similar SCSI drive) that hot-plugged in and went right to work with no configuration at all. Are you really telling me this machine can't be upgraded, or is that just something you read in PC Magazine in 1994?
I haven't tried running the Mac Seti client (I doubt my wife would let me tie up her iMac for that long), but I've been averaging 8hr 43min seti work units on my Celeron 450 (300a overclocked) running linux. I've heard the GUI clients are a lot slower, but almost 3x slower is riduculous! I suppose that prof didn't mention the Alpha system cranking out seti units in about 50 minutes did he? I like Apple, but their stuff can be so expensive! I wonder if this machine would be able to handle IBM's PPC chip that has multiple processor cores on it.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
Thank god it doesnt come with fucking windows
Isn't it amazing that little Apple Computer can still hold it's own against the big, bad Wintel behemoth. They keep surprising us with exceptionally well engineered products that give the rest of the industry a run for their money.
Admit it, the G4 and the Cinema Display are exceptional products that symbiotically combine stellar performance with breathtaking aestethics. Come on, admit it: you want one.
Umm, no. They know that a lot people who use Macs need to get certain kinds of tasks done quickly and easily. I work all day on one and it does what I need it to do. When I get my G4, it'll do it faster. Please tell us, what tasks do you use for computer for? Or is the computer then end in and of itself? There is nothing wrong with that, just don't put down other people who actually need to get things done and don't want to spend all their time trying to figure out who to do it.
I'm not being facetious, tell us what you do with your computer.
cheers,
Matthew Reilly
If you missed it, Apple just announced MacOS 9. While it is still based on the old code base, it is an improvement. The MacOS has been getting timely, regular updates.
When the MacOS X code base is ready for prime time, it too will be updated regularly.
I am using MacOS X Client now and it is very nice thankyou very much. As I said X Client is available to those that want it. As is the DEV builds of the Linux Kernal.
Need I say more.
- IBM has decided to release the specs for the PowerPC (G3 at least...) series of processors.
This makes me think that Be will have an easier time porting their OS to the newer hardware.IBM has also released the design for a PowerPC mainboard. (And it doesn't use Apple ROMs.)
The reasoning is that the open source community will be able to use IBM's hardware more easily. (Read: more sales)
"...America's great minds of today, teaching America's great minds of tomorrow. Poor bastards." -- A Beautiful Min
Sigh. Apple fans, don't go ballistic. The comrade is just asking for a floppy and more expansion (bays/slots). Not too much to ask. Both can be had, BTW, but at a price (USB floppy and PCI expansion boxes).
/ AUX3/VMS/QNX/Amiga/MacOS1x-8.1/CPM/Win31 -9x-NT/MS&PC-DOS/MVS-CICS. Some folks are even more ecclectic. All useable OS are pretty neat in their own way. Some OS I enjoy more than others, but I recommend not blasting folks for saying they like something, think its neat or want more of x with it!
Sigh the second - Tech. Yah, I've seen this adverse reaction to Apple's technology style/substance so much over the years. Yup, a mouse is for toy computers and 3.5" disks are non-standard; both arguments that columnists and partisans used to use 15 years ago like clubs--from their pulpits and in the trenches. First mass market appearance of those things was on a Mac--now no one thinks twice about mice (if they work) and they complain about missing floppies (I think there are worse omissions in some Apple products!). Nowdays its USB that stinks, scratch that, er, Firewire stinks! "Where are our PS2 & ADB & SCSI Ports?"; these can be had, but at a price. Funny...Apple took it in the neck for adopting USB, a NIH technology, and for using firewire, a tech that they pioneered and licensed (not proprietary like MCA or Intel's SlotWhatever). Guess in some things they'll just keep ahead of the curve and the rest of us will keep on coming behind, even as Apple gets cursed by some who follow later.
Sigh the third. Style, we all like it, but what style we like differs. Think of Apple as a little diversity. Y'know the folks that buy these things aren't snobs, they just like the way they look, they look fun. Now, do I frag them because they don't appreciate a PC Power and Cooling Chrome Maxitower like I do? Besides, I think its neat the way those G3/4 cases can detach the handles and go in a sliding rackmount and I -wish- all my boxes had the same accessibility for upgrades (just drop the side panel and put your grounded hand/tool on anything that needs altering. Apple has had some lame designs but also many that were sweet.
Apple, over the years, has shafted a lot of folks, but then what co. hasn't? They've also broken the ice on a lot of tech/ideas that have benefitted even their detractors.
So, 'die Apple die' folks--not this year or next. Keep hoping. Hope springs eternal. I've seen this hope bloom every year for the last 14 years.
Also, 'Apple Lusers Mocking Society' members--you've got better things to do, if you look around.
But, Apple fanatics, cool your jets! The guy just wants a floppy! Other OSs and hardware have their uses and may be better than a Mac in those uses, if you think about it.
I've used, use, or manage BSD3.9-4.4/SunOS/Solaris/Linux2.x(Intel&PPC)/AIX4
I attended Seybold '99 today and the show was stolen by Apple's G4. I am not a Apple user but i must admit that the G4s and cinema displays look excellent and must be view in person. But for those who were not able to make it to the expo some pictures are hosted on a friends Apple news/rumors site. Get the pics here.
First, the spec95's have been posted on the G4 or PowerPC MPC7400 as it's really called. They are
;-). Interger performance on G4 is somewhat faster than G3 and the FP is much faster on G4. The Velocity Engine (altivec) brings a whole new level to the G4 also.
:~)
~21 for specint at 450mhz and ~20.4 for specfp
The interger is about on par with a PIII but the FP is about 50% faster when comparing to a PIII at the same speed. This doesn't, however, take into account the power of Altivec, or Velocity Engine as Apple is now calling it. As if all that wasn't enough, G4 support a 128 bit bus between processor and main memory. It is also MERSI compliant so it will be a totally bitchin SMP cpu. Look out Xeon.
Second, the use of altivec benchmarks are valid, they are afterall a part of the chip. In fact they are an integral part of the chip. Altivec can do a matrix multiplication in only a few cycles and it can pass up to 4 float or up to 16 interger operations through it in ONE clock cycle. That is power, not vapor benchmarks!
Third, Support for Altivec is as easy as recompiling in Metrowerks. They already have shipping Altivec support.
Fourth, Benchmarks are relative to what you are trying to measure. If you want to measure raw CPU performance, without measureing the performance of the OS or the Memory or the whatever, BYTEmarks ARE a good benchmark. They are just unpopular because the don't go the way that most people want them to! If you want a 'real world' benchmark that is processor intensive, timing a series of Photoshop filters or timing a long rendering is a valid benchmark when the software is optimised for both test systems, as the packages that Apple used are. People are just complaining again because the benchmarks didn't go the way they wanted. Please remember that Intel provides programmers to Adobe to optimise Photoshop for Intel CPU's and not only did Apple humiliate the PIII/600 in photoshop tests, PC Mag also said the G3/400 beat the PIII 500 in 10 of 13 Katmai enhanced plugins and the G4 is faster than the G3 on all levels! Also remember that Apple took the INTEL SUPPLIED benches of PIII that were ment to impress and it made them look pitiful. Some operations were 7X faster on the G4
Fifth, the G4 IS NOT a G3 with Altivec. The core is really different (not different like a PII vs a PIII
Sixth, Apple plans to optimise core OS functions for Altivec. Not only will Quicktime be accelerated, but Quickdraw will also. For those who don't know, Quickdraw is the code responsible for rendering screen display. Imagine, 128 bit vector processing when every you move a window!
Now that is cool.
Ok, end rant mode
..but does it support SMP?
Somehow I do not believe it will actually outrun my dual PIII 500 Dell in my simulation code.
Say nothnig about our 16 head Suns...
And on my home box PIII450+TNT2 will kick G4
butt in any game you find (if it supported on Mac,
which is a rarity).
Apple marketing drivel make me sick. "Think different", my ass. More honest would be "Do not think, just believe all the buzzwords..."
<^>_<(ô ô)>_<^>
I still can't figure out what all the hubbub about 32-bit x86 / PPC CPUs is all about. Don't any of you realize that very powerful (performance comparable to the latest x86/PPC) Alpha and UltraSPARC hardware can be obtained for approximately the same amount of money?
It seems that any mention about a _modern_ 64-bit platform meets derision over being "too expensive"...
As an example, 21164A-based Digital Personal Workstations fetch $800 - $1300 nowadays, and generally come equipped with premium QLogic ISP SCSI controllers and Matrox SVGA cards. Certainly a lot more powerful than the 21066-based Multias/UDBs that most Linux users are familiar with!
So far as performance, the new G4 SPEC95fp is equivalent to my 3-year-old 500Mhz 21164A Alpha. And it's teaching me good 64-bit clean coding habits as well.
The gcc/egcs team could use much help on optimizing for Alpha and UltraSPARC. Linux/Alpha and Linux/USPARC could use more developers working on 64-bit clean ports.
The time you fritter defending braindead 32-bit platforms could be better spent developing for affordable platforms with a future.
Something for all of you x86/PPC developers to think about.
..you correct me, even if PPC can support SMP theoretically - there are no dual/quad G4 boxes offered..
<^>_<(ô ô)>_<^>
Uhhhhhhhh, Seybold is for graphics professionals. NOT the Comdex "Quake 3 rulez" crowd. Thats why you won't find many games there. PC or Mac - thats simply NOT the target of the show. Duh!!! Tom
The iMate is not a bad adapter. they appear to update the drive often (Every Week) yet it has been stable since it was beta (a year ago) works really well with just about everything ADB. also can work without a driver but don't know how it does for linux.
"1394 --> fire wire 802.11-->airport"
Well seeing as iMacs dont have FireWire or AirPort, I really dont see how that's relevant. Oh yeah, I'm sure first time computer buyers would be a lot less confused if they were calling then IEEE 1394 and IEEE 802.11. I also hear they like to talk in binary, and make their own processors.
--- Apparently I have an old
When the PowerMac G3 was first released (back in the bad old beige days), there was already some info on the G4 floating around. Now that the G4 is on the market, does anyone know what's next?
You mean Max OS X? It HAS been released. They even released an open source (ish) version to appeal more to the die-hard technical OS people.
The client is still being worked on. So is Windows 2000. If you don't want to look like a hypocrit, you should also point out all of the other upcoming OSs that have been announced and are not yet available for purchase yet...and also say the companies suck because of that.
So, to please you a company would have to either release a product very fast right after it's announced in development (therefore increasing the chances for very bad bugs, decreasing the chances for nice features, rushing into things...etc), or not announce their newest product at all. Just, out of the blue, throw out a new OS. That of course is awful marketing and would severely decrease sales to normal consumers and other markets, such as schools.
Linux, and open OSs, don't work in this same way. But if you want to nitpick this, it's only fair to say the same about other non-open OSs, rather than picking out one company...which is actually closeser to the open source/free software/Linux/*BSD crowd than any of it;s commercial competitors. It's healthy to criticize and point out suggestions, it's foolish and disrespectful to behave in this manner...in which many people on this site behave.
I also predict the idiots on this site will nitpick flaws in OS X Client right away, EVEN though, once it;s released, it's brand new material. Almost a whole new OS (besides connections to BSD and NeXT)...also, to not be a hypocrit one would need to equally criticize Linux on it's first release. First release of any new distribution release. Criticize every OS because it once had a starting point...and it wasn't perfect.
Anything you permanently put in your living- or work-space in furniture, whether you want it or not. That is just an undeniable reality. Deal
with it.
Very true, I have been using Mac since the LCII days. I myself, had owned several mac. But I dropped this brain dead OS/platform, once Steve Jobs come. I couldn't believe making fancy transparent plastic outlook is a better way to do computer businese then improving the hardware content inside, and strengthening the OS. People can still remember those promises on releasing a morden OS called Rhapsody, those yellow box/blue box/carbon layer support. But these'd never turned to be useful product. x86 linux server is powerful, free and robust, who will need a fucking MacOS X server that run on G3 only?? No matter how fast G3 and G4 is, using it on an OS that don't have protected memory, preemptive multitasking is a kind of joke. These Mac are fast because Motorola and IBM have done good jobs in making CPU, not Apple making good product. I am now using several Pentium Pro, dual celeron linux box and very happy with their stability. The cost-effectiveness of buying a G4 and run PPCLinux may not as good as running x86 Linux on Dual-Celeron machine. Amm... wait, did Steve promise you that G4 can run PPCLinux?
Hmm.. dvd and a special display...
but no mention of any cool sound systems?
I'm a musician/composer and I know the macs kindof have a niche in the realtime sound proccessing area... yet, this is always in the concert hall.
I'm surprised, for all that money, you don't get an amazing dolby digital set of 6 speaks!
anyone have anything else to say re: sound/macs/G4s..?
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
Looks like the Voodoo 4 (or whatever they end up calling it) wi ll support the G4 Macs out of the
box.
> first off, i cant even connect to their sight!
..."
> this might be due to the hit rate, but still. it
> should be able to handle it. (?)
yes, ladies and gentlemen, the slashdot effect in action, combined with the fact that, as you and half the civilized (read: slashdot readers) and about half the mac-owning world were beating on it, they were trying to update their new pages.
> second, the g-4 sight , when i reached it, had
> the same "think different" campaign ideas. this
> includes explaining what mhz means!!
wait until they post the update explaining what a gigaflop is. oy, the humanity. but what do you expect from a company that tries to cater to the professional, as well as the consumer. yes, my grandmother likes the tangerine, but what do all the numbers mean?
> apple once again has claimed fastest machine. i
> dont know if its true or not, but i doubt it.
i'm skeptical myself, but in the keynote they said they performed the operations specified in Intel's own benchmarks (as published) and beat their own published results. no actual hard numbers, but it sure as hell flew on the tests they did in the address. granted, they were optimized for altivec, but then, all the pentium tests were optimized for MMX, etc..
> "So, if you're one of those professionals
> what? its like they are trying to portray mac
> users to some sophisticated guy in a 3000 $ suit!
no.. the professionals they're talking to are graphics and creative professionals. we creative types don't wear suits. you're lucky if you see us in shoes. enterprising, business-types can continue using PCs until they burn up in the all-consuming fire of the apocalypse, but the creative guys have been getting a lot of flak lately for sticking with the mac in the face of better performance from NT boxes, so this is more ammunition for the "i'll use the mac till you pry the trackball from my cold, dead hands" crowd - namely graphics folks.
> "the first desktop with wireless computing"
> uh huh, suuuure.
built-in? that you can use as a wireless hub? i'm not in the wireless market myself, but i, for one, haven;t seen any other pc with it built in from the factory.
- Entertaining Bits from the Ancient Kernel Tree
Advice: stick to Windows, they need people like you !
The statement that many people follow a herd mentality is quite true. I have had many people be totally disinterested in Linux until I tell them that it has become the dominant OS in a few european countries, and then all of a suddun they think it is OK. Most of the people in my area ( midwest USA ) use windoze because everybody else does. Most of the mathematicians at this college use macs because all the rest of them do ( and that's why this lab that I am in is filled with the things ). I use Linux because I have used many systems, and it is the one that I have the most power with, not because it is the underdog ( and most definitely because it is the most popular, I only know about half a dozen other Linux users personally ). I have used CP/M, MS-DOS, Windoze3.11, Windoze95, Windoze98, WindozeNT, RedHat Linux, SuSE Linux, Caldera Linux, Minix, MacOS, and OpenBSD. I personally prefer Linux, and if you are wondering wich distribution I prefer, the answer is none of them. I don't use a distribution.
My favorite corporation will win! We're the good guys! Go Nike! Go McDonalds! Beat Reebok! Beat Burger King! Come on, they suck! Who needs competetion in a capitalist society?!? We KNOW our favorite corporations won't screw us over! We know our favorite corporations won't stop innovating! They're the good guys! Down with Apple! They will die! One world, one corporation! Hooray! Hooray!
well before all these people get their panties wadded up on the stuff apple said....go read about the g4...I think you'll see it's as fast as they say. Remebre it's more than just Mhz that matters...
128 bit vector processsing.....droooooooool
multi core(though not supported, yet)....droooooooool
Alti-vec(MMX sucked, 3dnow was cool)......drooool
g4 is 3 times faster than p3, heh? You should stick to apple.com, dummy. Here we don't like lusers, especially mac ones.
I like the Mac well enough, but it's pretty tiresome to have every Mac afficianado act like you've accused them of child molestation everytime there's a complaint about the OS.
/. crowd when one points out a flaw of Linux (which there are some of...)
Not like that ever happens with
>The 150 mill didn't do squat. It didn't change anything one way or the other.
Monetarily, probably not. You're right, Apple had significant cash reserves. However, based on stories that I've heard from those who were there during "the dark times", because of the bad press about Apple's imminent demise, Apple was having a hard time obtaining credit in order to buy stuff. Supposedly, even Motorola wanted lots of cash up front for the CPUs for Macintoshes that Apple was building at the time.
The $150 Million in stock basically gave Apple some good press when it needed it. And, if you figure that Microsoft's $150 Million in stock is now worth BILLIONS, it worked out pretty well.
A flat, larger screen and it's a G4 alright. Maybe wiley toons also design macs in their spare time :)
4 99.html
http://www.wileytoons.com/homer/again/homer_031
Tim
It's hype vs. truth in sort of the same way as Intel's claims about MMX were: It really is that fast, but only for those tasks that happen to benefit from vector-processing and whose code is optimized to use it. So it's true, but with a huge "Your Mileage May Vary" sticker attached for real-world applications.
However, it's a lot better in the real world than MMX, since (as has been posted countless times) the optimization can be done by flipping a single checkbox in CodeWarrior, with no need to drop into assembly code (though I guess you would still do that foe even better optimization). Also, Apple is optimizing (or has already) a lot of system-level routines to use it, e.g., QuickTime, networking, etc., so even an unoptimized application that spends a lot of time waiting for those routines will see major speedups.
Also, the range of tasks that can benefit from AltiVec is supposedly far wider than that of MMX: they're both the same sort of thing, i.e., a vector-processor, meaning they perform the same operation on multiple data elements with a single instruction, but AltiVec is supposedly much better-designed -- its new instructions are more useful and more powerful, it doesn't have MMX's problem of sharing registers with the FPU, etc. Part of that is due to the PowerPC's overall superior achitecture, which makes it easier to add new stuff without it all getting crowded and jumbled together.
And Jobs claimed in his speech that it really is true that they were contacted by the DOD telling them that these machines are subject to the export controls for supercomputer technology. Hence the ad "For the first time in history, a personal computer has been classified as a weapon by the U.S. government. With its ability to perform over a billion calculations per second, the Pentagon doesn't want it to fall into the wrong hands. As for Pentium PCs... they're harmless." This thing really is technically a supercomputer, since, with vector processing, its speed is in the GFLOPS.
David Gould
David Gould
main(i){putchar(340056100>>(i-1)*5&31|!!(i<6)<< 6)&&main(++i);}
The statement that many people follow a herd mentality is quite true.
Sure...just look at the groupthink here on Slashdolt.
Since I bought my latest Mac 3 years ago, I have added a 300mhz G3 CPU, 256meg ram, 2 2gig HDs, 2 9gig HDs, 2 SCSI CD-Rom drives, 2 SCSI CD-R drives, 2 SCSI printers, 1 SCSI scanner, 1 ethernet printer, 2 19" color monitors, 1 joystick, 1 wireless tablet, 1 MIDI synth and 1 56k modem all attached to 1 system and active at the same time. When I get a new G4 system I will be able to move ALL of my peripherals to my new G4.
You will be able to get one from some independent company soon hopefully, since motorola or IMB can't remember which has released totally free motherboard design info for a CHRP/PREP box.
So it really crashes? And you accept this? You know it really doesn't have to be like that. An OS for your kinda work(any kind work) should really be based on a UNIXoid kernel and a sufficient GUI slapped on. I'd relly complain my ass of if something i had paid money for crashed. Even if it was only once in two weeks or something like that. The whole system going down because of an app-crash whould make me complain even more.
LINUX stands for: Linux Inux Nux Ux X
FRA: STFU GTFO
RIGHT ON!!! I AGREE TOTALLY!!!!
"Are you mocking me??" -- Buzz Lighyear
...at least in my machine, which requires an ATX
mobo. So, I can have an Athlon.
I'd love a PPC, but Steve Jobs is still making
closed, proprietary systems that can never be
upgraded.
Oh well.
No way in hell that it is faster than the Alpha(tm). Not in fp anyway int has alway been the playground of the G, PPC-60 whatever. The Alpha scored SPECint 35 and SPECfp 65 respectively thinks i. The G4 only got 20 and 20 (thinks i(maby that was the 400?)). The bus of the G4 is also silly: 100MHz when even IA32 is leaving that.
LINUX stands for: Linux Inux Nux Ux X
FRA: STFU GTFO
As I go through all of these comments, I see you pop up over and over, continually bashing any person saying that the hype might not be true or picking apart people's knowledge. Well, what about ARS-Technica? http://www.ars-technica.com/reviews/2q99/g3-350/g3 -350-1.html They have a nice G3 review which explains the problems that occur in the MacOS. The Mac people I knew had a computer that crashed more than my Window 98, even though I used my computer 2 times more. And no-one could help him figure out why. That is easy to use. Why did Apple want to charge for Fire-Wire technology again? That doesn't seem an effort at an open standard. Closed hardware. They didn't release specs for the G3 to Be so they didn't have a competitor. Now that's Microsoftian. Closed hardware and software.
The points in your post would have been relevant- if you were making them three or four years ago. Apple has quit the habbit of developing interesting but unviable products only to dump them later on.
Their bloatware problem rivals
What bloatware problem? Show me one piece of Mac OS software from 8.0 or later. Apple is one of the best companies around for deciding if something is a usefull feature, something that needs work or something that gets discarded. With that certain other company, they do 1 and 2 but never get to 3.
People have been saying this, virtually word for word, for the past 10 years.
Your talking at least an extra 350-400 dollars...for a decent fire wire card
/mouse/floppydrive is a little optomistic...
and while your at it:
Win NT which is say about 250$ (I think it might be more..) (Most publishing isn't Linux yet..)
Plus I think there 40$ for a keyboard
Also companies don't buy overclocked chips.
plus you get a cool case with the mac although I will say the keyboard and mouse need to go (add 60$)
And ATI rage 128 isn't the best but its no slouch in 2D (Acceptable in 3d)
Well, considering that MS-DOS 5 with a task swapper is more technically advanced than MacOS 8...
"2. The G4 is available from Motorola for $475 in
quantities of 1000+. The specs for a modern MB are
available FREE from IBM. Now, if only someone with
enough money and a good track record would take
advantage of this..."
OhhhhhhhhhhPleeeeeze, Gigabyte, Asus, Abit, Fic,
someone save save us from Joba the Nut and his proprietary bum-reaming hardware! We want this in
our PC's running Linux!!!
The machines from VA that I saw at the LWCE we're pretty purrdy.
...
Bitchslapped? Give Rob a bitchslap from bitchslapped.com.
BX: $100 and less, dual $150 :) ;)
:)
Athlon: $200 flat
Apple: $400 and way way way beyond (btw, can't buy one
P3-500 is rapidly approaching $200. P3-450 is under now. K7-500 is around $350 afaik, but you really can't get one. Anyone who buys the fastest chip at any time is a complete idiot or is spending someone else's money, they're always 2X (or more) than the 'slowest' of a speed grade. Case-in-point, P3-600. Save the $$$ for more memory.
Anonymous Coward, get it?
Anonymous Coward, get it?
Not bad spelling, bad typing