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Multiprocessor G4s @MacWorld
whostudios writes "According to this arricle at AppleInsider Apple will show their second generation 500Mhz dual G4 boxes at the MacWorld Expo this January. The same article also says that Apple is working on quad-processor boxes. " It'll be pretty sweet to have another SMP capable platform for Linux to run on. Update: 12/27 09:30 by CT : If you don't want to wait for Apple's solution, try this dual G4 board and roll your own.
Doesn't necessarily mean they'll be announced, though. The article indicates they'll be unveiled on stage, but it's also possible they may just be exhibited to a few select developers. Apple is already introducing (by all accounts) a new PowerBook along with updates on OS 9 and OS X. There's also the possibility of a new 17" iMac announcement, and the long-overdue G4/OS X Server machine will hopefully be ready at the same time. That's a lot for even a MacWorld Expo. The MP machines are more likely, IMO, to be announced later in the year at an Apple Event of some type. Unless Steve is looking for that perfect Columbo-esque "Oh, one more thing..." announcement for this Expo. Hey, it worked twice last year...
Mmmmmm...new PowerBook. (makes Homer-ish drool sound)
I use Macs for work, Linux for education, and Windows for cardplaying.
AFAIK nothing but MacOS will run on a G4 as of yet.
I'm sure the Apple boxes will rock, but I suspect they'll cost a little more that this. :-)
However, if ABIT ever puts out a dual-processor PowerPC board...
I don't imagine the current MacOS 9 supports SMP in any way - does anyone know what/if support for SMP is in OS X Server?
At the time only Photoshop, Premiere, and a fractal-calculating demo could use the 4 CPUs, until I installed the BeOS on it. It was amazing what difference the added CPUs made...
After 2 of the CPUs burned out a couple of years ago, (the thermal paste wasn't tropics-proof, it seems) I installed a 300MHz G3 board - which at the time performed somewhat better than all 4 of the original CPUs.
The Mac OS has for some years supported extra CPUs strictly for number-crunching, but it wasn't symmetrical for other things. I'm looking forward to swapping my board for a dual or quad G4 in the near future, once full SMP support is in place.
I've always wanted a multi-processor G4. Currently I'm writing this on a P166 w/128 megs of ram and a 7.2 gig hard drive. I think its time for an upgrade. This box runs rc5-64/csc/seti@home rather slowly...
I for one cannot wait to see SMP Athlon vs SMP G4 benchmarks. Both are excellent CPUs, and should scale well. IIRC, both AMI and Tyan have SMP Athlon boards coming out in 1Q00. This stuff is getting more and more important as people start to wonder about the longevity of Moores Law...
God Fucking Damnit
We had dual and quad PowerMacs years ago, until Apple killed the cloners...
And we are supposed to be thankful? Try another one, Steve.
J.
as a former next owner (attempting to escape the inanity of quickdraw quirks) and rabid macintosh enthusiast, mainstream multiprocessor systems running macosx are something of a holy grail (_especially_ since i recall discussing a sweet dual-processor prototype next machine with the nextstep crowd at mit _years_ ago)... where did those tissues go, i'm all misty ;) kuma
these would rool with beowulf clusters :)
Just wait 'til later in the year when they unveil their machines than will support up to EIGHT (8) G4 processors. True.
Apple (and Mac OS clone manufacturers) have toyed with multiprocessor Macs in the past. Apple itself sold dual processor systems while some cloners went as far as to bring quad processor systems to market. The machines were mighty impressive, but unless BeOS was your bag, the only thing they were good for was accelerating Photoshop filters. And let's face it, most of us don't spend that much time waiting for Photoshop filters to finish.
Fast forward to 1999 and nothing has changed, except that Apple is now being led by a guy who actually understands that multiprocessor boxes are useless with classic Mac OS. That's why Apple isn't shipping any. The next major Apple OS release, Mac OS X, will feature decent SMP support, but could still be a year away. Shipping SMP hardware before that is ethically questionable at best, doomed to backfire at worst.
Marko Karppinen
I'm not a graphic artist type, but I didn't think SMP was of much use in the kinds of graphics apps used by so many Macophiles...Please correct my folly...
Hiawatha Bray
Tech Reporter
Boston Globe
hehe. I just spotted this. It seems it's based on CHRP/POP design and uses the Athalons Viper south bridge. Ya think Apple will crush 'em. It looks even better specced out than Apples upcoming G4s. Siliconfruit
back when the G4 was in development they talked a whole lot about "multiple-core" G4s. As opposed to normal multiprocessor setups, these were just a number of G4s that had been wired to act as if they were only one G4. The point is unlike SMP where you have to rewrite the software to take advantage of it, the multicored g4s would not-- they acted as if they were one processor and you treated them as such. (my apologies if this is not a totally accurate discription; if you care go browse appleinsider's back issues, or something)
Whatever happened to this? This sounded like a really good idea. Has apple just forgotten about it, or did they spend so much time on altivec they just never got around to developing the idea fully?
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
As an avid fan of BOTH macs and Linux, I still have yet to bother trying out PPC linux. Really, I have yet to find a reason, except earning myself serious geek points. The Mac OS is great at what it does - but putting Linux on a Mac box seems to me just to waste more expensive hardware. I've got 4 Linux boxes running, none of them cost a whole wad of cash. Macs have certainly come down in price, but I'm not about to waste the $2,500 I just spent on a G4 to make a linux box that can't do nearly everything that a $500 box could do.
Considering the common notion that the G4 is fast, multiple G4's are obviously the next logical step. The problem becomes: what would I do with G4-MP???
The MacOS seems infinitely capable -- why must it do all of them so poorly and/or primitively? MP support on a Macintosh works out to be a few specific Adobe apps crudely hacked to run two parallel threads on separate CPU's. The OS doesn't natively support any kind of MP, and 90% of Mac apps simply 'stay at home' on CPU 0. If there were more than ten apps used on a Mac (Adobe software, M$ Office, Quark, and Nutscrape), I'm sure that percentage would be higher.
Linux SMP is coming along (but admit it, it's not even up to pace with NT, let alone BeOS), but Yellow Dog only has half-assed support for the G4. Then there is the problem of getting it from kernel 2.2 to 2.4 in the next couple of months...
Apple's OS X is a way off, and given the hardware used in their systems since the introduction of the iMac, would you be able to find any other UN*X that supports bizarre foreign hardware like USB keyboards and mice?
Just imagine a bitchin' Beowulf cluster of MP G4's with a functional OS! =)
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E2 IN2 IE?
Mac OSX will be coming in half a year, with better multiproc support. Until then, Adobe's products tend to work well with multiple processors.
Target PC has an article on a new open PowerPC platform from a company named Silicon Fruit. A motherboard codenamed RioRed is in development and has plenty of high-end features including dual G4s and 64 bit PCI slots. It will ship with Yellow Dog Linux, and they are negotiating to get BeOS ported over. In the middle of next year the company plans to ship a workstation based on this motherboard with some interesting features.
I don't think there is ppc smp support yet, but I am far from an expert. The last I heard was that i386 was the only stable smp arch and alpha was in development. I have heard nothing about ppc smp support yet, does anyone else know?
SiliconFruit is not using any technology of any kind from Apple, It would be very unwise of Apple to comtemplate anything along those lines.
Help fight continental drift.
The site's Slashdotted, so I can't get in, but my bet is that they are selling multiprocessor-G3s, not G4s.
...../QUAD750.html
Why? Look at the URL.
"750" is the real name of the G3, "7400" is the name of the G4.
Also the real time when this is gonna matter is when OS X comes out, because that will include much better SMP support than MacOS 9.
I really don't give a damn about SMP though, all I want is for Apple to start selling some machines above G4/450MHz. That is just way too slow. I know it's more the fault of Motorola/IBM than Apple, but it's still gonna be Apple's head on a plate if the speeds don't start going up soon.
Yes, Apple is working on [Alti-Vec/Velocity Engine/Mktg Name of the month] enhancements to GCC. That is the compiler they are using for MacOSX.
Reading the mailing lists tech-kern, tech-smp, tech-userlevel, port-macppc seem to point that NetBSD/macppc is a suspect.
If you installed another OS and know how to close bugs you can report or query a bug. If you have not found how to get NetBSD CD-ROMs LinuxMall sells these three: NetBSD 2-CD Set, NetBSD-current Snapshot CD or an out of stock NetBSD T-Shirt XL.
...but for BeOS this is really a gigantic "yawn", nothing more. The first Be boxes were running on 5 processrs, because Be was built from the ground up with multiprocessing in mind. It's amazing how just by adding a second processor you increase the performance of your applications by 100% flat.
NT has good multiprocessing, Solaris has great multiprocessing. MacOS seems to have problems with that.
(and BTW, I was a bit disappointed with the performance of kernel-threaded Linux apps running on the 2.2 kernel.)
Sigged!
I got in earlier. They have G3's and G4's
Drool.... I could have some serious fun with a system like that. Dual G4's. Oh, can anybody say Quake3?? And firingsquad though it ran fast on a dual P!!!... That G4 would make mincemeat of anything intel could throw at it. And it would be BEAUTIFUL.
=======
There was never a genius without a tincture of madness.
Multi-core technology is an IBM thang, and due out on later revs of their POWER4 64bit PPC chip. Since the first rev of POWER4 isn't due to hit the RS/6000 and AS/400 scene until summertime, I would expect the MC version to hit early '01. The consumer rev should be out shortly thereafter: most folks put it at summer 2001. Whether this will be the G5, or just multi-cored G4s remains to be seen.
SoupIsGood Food
I am only in the desktop graphics/publishing world to the extent that I know a few people who do it and I have read a few magazines, but I think this will be great for them, and meaningless for the rest of us. Over 50 percent of desktop publishers use macs, and in fact they do spend quite a bit of time waiting for Photoshop filters to finish. The same goes times 30 fps for digital video people. So this will be worth the extra expense for those professionals, and their software will already support it. For the rest of us, even one 500 mhz G4 is probably more than we need.
I'm glad you qualified that with "almost all", since our bureau has been doing large movie posters (mostly MGM/UA) on _Windows_NT_ and Irix (Silicon Graphics) for the past two years...
I think this has been the trend for some time as more color professionals are becoming increasingly frustrated with the MacOS.
Even in the color/prepress world, NT and other OSes are slowly but surely becoming feasible alternatives to the current MacOS because other OSes are _sooo_ much more reliable. With the deadlines we're under, we cannot afford to reboot two, three, five times daily because of the cryptic 'Type #' errors are just plain freezing. Our Irix and NT boxes seldom ever require rebooting (once a week, if even that often).
We're still awaiting MacOS X as most Mac professionals are, but are not averse to running Linux / *BSDs especially if full ICC CMYK support ever comes to the Open Source world (our Appletalk fileservers are Linux, our web/mail servers are OpenBSD). Otherwise, we're going to stick to Irix and NT for apps that require CMYK for the time being...
BudKeep in mind most of the people who have bought the latest macs probably bought the because there pretty.
please educate yourself and realize that rc5 cracking is a pure integer task. Altivec does not help the slightest little bit. rc5 cracking is also *completely* worthless as a cross platform benchmark.
A dual celeron is at least as fast as *a* G4 and costs *many* times less than craples closed platform $$$$$ solution. The x86 platform is still very useable and if your not a big intel fan (like myself) wait for dual athlon boards, imagine... 2000mhz boxes in for a few months... run that by your G4.
NT performs much better at SMP tasks due to intensive multithreading. Now Mac OS X is a new beast but on other versions your still crypled by the OS becuase you always have one CPU that is handleing a smaller load due to uneven balenceing. I'm not saying it's not fast but the mac needs lots of SMP help and hope that OS X will do the job much better
And a dual Pentium II/III would beat a single G4... so whats your point?
Strange it didn't appear on Slashdot... yet.
New PowerPC Platform in Fruition
Sigged!
Duh... the answer would be YES!
And Steve went and stole the idea because he liked it so much... Steve Jobs is no better than bill gates in this respect... I'm so sick of you fucking mac users getting the story worng ALL THE TIME! Shit... learn your history!
Why would a small company such as Be want to spend a shit load of money on platform that only has a small percentage of the market? It costs to much money to support two platforms and this is why devolopers have disconintued mac support.
time Apple has gone the multi-processor route. Way back a while ago they came out with the 9600/200MP, running of dual 604e processors at 200mhz. It was a decent system from what I understand, except MacOS 7 was a bit of a pill to keep running on it. That was back in 97 though. I think dual G4s would be nice but a bit of overkill unless you had some software that could use the AltiVec stuff in multiple threads to really speed things up. Lets just hope the Mystic sells a bit more than the 9600/200MP did.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Coward -
Perhaps you should learn the history of which you speak?
The Xerox GUI research was indeed useful, and made a major impact on Apple. However:
1. Xerox was paid for the 'walkthrough', in the form of stock in Apple (assuming they've held on to it, they should be pretty happy right about now). When will Microsoft start sending their checks out to Apple?
2. Xerox rarely gets anything out the door, and if they do, it usually flops (not due to inferior technology, but for marketing reasons).
3. The previous poster said '...Sure they both saw what was at xerox parc, but Jobs was the man to bring it to the table.'. Reread that. Get a drink. Reread it again. Think about it for a minute or two. He's not saying Apple invented the entire concept of a graphical user interface, he said that Jobs (and Apple) brought it 'to the table'. They took the risk, and it more or less paid off.
Instead of polishing your insult/flaming technique, perhaps you can pay more attention the what a person says before replying?
- Jeff A. Campbell
- VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com)
- Jeff
Bill Atkins, who was the principle developer behind MacOS, came up with the GUI idea back in 1968 in his doctoral thesis on QuickDraw.
Colorsync is one reason why Macs have dominated and will continue to dominate the publishing market.
I think this has been the trend for some time as more color professionals are becoming increasingly frustrated with the MacOS.
Even in the color/prepress world, NT and other OSes are slowly but surely becoming feasible alternatives to the current MacOS because other OSes are _sooo_ much more reliable. With the deadlines we're under, we cannot afford to reboot two, three, five times daily because of the cryptic 'Type #' errors are just plain freezing. Our Irix and NT boxes seldom ever require rebooting (once a week, if even that often).
Um, no. When it comes to heavy memory use with graphic apps, NT is little better than the Mac OS as far stabitlity goes. And losing 20 mintutes a day to reboots is nothing compared to losing 4 hours because you can't get your output to match what you have on the screen.
There are a couple of other big reasons why Macs dominate the industry: Applescript and better support for multiple monitors than you'll find on any other platform.
Oh come on... how many high-end shops have you worked in? The color industry is exceptionally low-margin (considering the time and salaries of top-notch scanners/retouchers) and _few_ bureaus I've worked at actually _use_ Colorsync.
Rather, the high-end shops use good _people_; that is, retouchers who actually know color theory, lithography and composition. Such people can use a 'calibrated' monitor (one that they use everyday) to make aesthetic and practical decisions... Our retouchers always get the desired result in two rounds, usually just one.
Compare this to the shop next door that have the latest G4s, calibrated monitors and high-tech goodies and yet still put out bad color. There are many Mac-anal-retentive shops around who focus on Mac, color calibration, multiple monitors, etc. and forget that you must hire _qualified_ people to run the equipment. How do I know this? We've got (and kept) most of their clients, despite being somewhat pricier...
Um, no. When it comes to heavy memory use with graphic apps, NT is little better than the Mac OS as far stabitlity goes. And losing 20 mintutes a day to reboots is nothing compared to losing 4 hours because you can't get your output to match what you have on the screen._Little_ better on heavy memory use? Though not even close to our Irix boxes (still running Photoshop 3.0), NT is _magnitudes_ better handling large CTs - under heavy usage, we reboot once weekly. So much as a Unix bigot (and former Mac bigot) as I am, this is no lie.
And we always get the color we want, again, usually within two rounds if not the first.
Some advice to you (for color at least):
Then you might actually have a successful color shop
BudRather, the high-end shops use good _people_
Most importantly, get qualified color people (NOT DESIGNERS). Get people who truly understand color theory, composition, and all phases of lithography (from proofing to layout to press).
Of course you have to be qualified; that's true if you're a prepress man, a sysadmin or an auto mechanic.
_Little_ better on heavy memory use? Though not even close to our Irix boxes (still running Photoshop 3.0), NT is _magnitudes_ better handling large CTs - under heavy usage, we reboot once weekly. So much as a Unix bigot (and former Mac bigot) as I am, this is no lie.
NT is a hoary bitch when it comes to playing with video, but I have to admit that I haven't seen Photoshop crash and take down the whole machine, so long as the amount of memory was at least equal to the size of the file. But NT has a tendancy to do boneheaded things like erase your password file and assign the same irq to both your video and network card.
Forget multiple monitors.
Forget MacOS.
Get used SGI Octanes/O2s + Photoshop 3.0
We've got (and kept) most of their clients, despite being somewhat pricier...
Sounds like you've turned into an anti-mac bigot, or Apple pissed you off at one time or another. Multiple monitors are great for doing work on a computer, even coding, and what if I need Photoshop 5?
Macs can't do everything; Apple let a lot of the video editing market slip over to Windows, and I'd go with an SGI box if I wanted to do rendering. But Macs are very good at publishing and will continue to be as its one of Apple's core markets. Hell, whenever they want to show off new machines, they do it with Photoshop.
Look at AMD and Intel... the Athlon is *still* the fastest x86 CPU even if it has a slower clock speed this weeks.. next week it will be a little more fast. They both know that the MHZ rating will sell the computer...
Ok... so your right... but it's still not as fast as you make it out to be... and it foolish to try and discribe mordern CPU's as RISC or CISC. By your discription the G4 is 4 times faster than a 600mhz celery? Now come on... don't even get me started on a 1ghz celery system that will beat apples latest G4 for less than the cost of an Ifruit.