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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.
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?
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).
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.
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