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.

Comments

About time...

[chadmulligan]

I'm writing this on a Genesis MP528. This is a 4-CPU multiprocessor box - a PPC 9500 clone with a Genesis-developed processor board. Four 132 MHz 604 CPUs... this was a top-of-the line system when I bought it several years ago.

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.

Re:OS X Server Required?

[znu]

Mac OS 9 has limited support for multiple processors, but not SMP. Apps need to be specifically coded for MP configurations. Fortunately, most of the apps that actually need MP (stuff like Photoshop) are already MP-enabled, because Apple has made a couple MP machines in the past.

Mac OS X Server does not currently have any kind of MP support at all, but the Server 1.2 update (which was originally just intended to add G4 support) has been taking longer than expected, and it's rumored that this is because it's going to be a rather major upgrade. If Apple really does introduce MP machines at Macworld, it doesn't seem so far fetched that a version of Server that supports SMP will be introduced as well.

SMP is an announced feature for the client version of Mac OS X as well (and all future versions of Server will be based on this client version), whenever that actually ships.

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G4 vs Athlon

[cxreg]

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...

what about multiple-core?

[mcc]

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?