MHz-for-MHz, the G5 is a cooler processor than the G4---reportedly about 20W at 1.2 GHz, compared to 20W for a 1 GHz 7455.
True, but running at full speed (2 GHz CPU and a 2:1 multipler for 1 GHz FSB), the PowerPC 970 "G5" consumes 46.6 watts.
(To compare, a 2.4 GHz Northwood Pentium 4 uses 62 watts, newer P4s use even more. Prescott is expected to use 100-105 watts). ((And this is totally ignoring the even further power needs of the "extreme" edition with its added transistors for on-die L3 cache))
People just assume that G5 consumes this enormous amount of power because of all the fans in the G5 desktop. This isn't true. Even the 2G takes only about 40 watts or so. One P4 3G takes in the range of 80 watts of power. All of the extra G5 fans are to make the cooling quieter.
I'm glad to see someone finally point this out. The exact wattage number is 46.7 watts for the 2 GHz PowerPC 970 "G5" running at full speed (2GHz CPU and a 2:1 multipler for a 1 GHz FSB).
A 2.4 GHz P4 (400 MHz FSB) uses 62 watts, newer P4s use even more. Prescott is expected to use 100 - 105 watts. (And this is totally ignoring the even further power needs of the "extreme" edition with its added transistors for on-die L3 cache)
Apple has always seemed to overengineer the heatsinks and fans in their desktop model, for about as long as I can remember. Oddly, many of the PowerBooks use a much different "transfer the heat from the CPU, Chipset, and GPU right to the bottom of the case" cooling method.
and more to the point the very real possibility of Half Life 2 on a Powerbook
The very real impossibility... HL2 is a totally new engine and is pure DirectX 9. Porting it to OpenGL and the Mac environment would be a total nightmare, take years, and would probably end up running slow.
Doom3, on the other hand, is a totally different story. Hopefully there'll be plenty of games using that engine in the future. (Granted there are lots of games on the Q3 engine, but that sure hasn't helped the mac game world much).
In a related note, anyone notice how slow Tony Hawk 4 is on Mac? Ugh, what an awful port.
All of the PowerBooks now use the same motherboard chipset and the same new PowerPC 7457. This processor has 512 KB of on-chip full-speed L2 cache.
Previous PowerBooks used older 74xx processors with 256 KB of on-chip full-speed L2 cache and varying amounts of off-chip quarter-speed L3 cache.
The L3 isn't really needed anymore due to the doubling of the faster on-chip cache. Sure, 8 MB of L3 cache would be neat, but it would also up the price. Be glad the new books have the nifty Mobility Radeon 9600!
Just imagine for a moment what might happen if Sun released some version of the Solaris kernel under the GPL.
This is happening now, though not with Sun/Solaris... SGI's Altix handles up to 64 processors on a Linux kernel using the patches they release as opensource. As SGI hacks away at their bigmem and numa patches, they'll be able to handle more and more processors. The plan is to eventually graft enough IRIX technology to support just as many processors on Altix as they do with MIPS processors in Origin with IRIX.
Even if you aren't a fan of Itanium2, Linux, or NUMA, these patches are bringing some nifty high-end tech to the free software arena.
The real reason they don't want you to use this stuff is so that your hands are free for their overpriced coffee and sandwiches.
What airline do you fly? I don't recall ever having to pay for food. Sure, if you divide the total number of calories by the price of the ticket, it becomes a pretty expensive meal... but in general, the food is "free" with purchase of ticket. And, every now and then, the alcohol is also "free" for we peons in coach as well.
yea, what people really need is a box with a big shiny button which says "INTERNET" so they can just push the button and be done.
Hehe! Back in highschool (AMD K5 days) I had a teacher that bought a Compaq equiped with the "i" internet button. Right out of the box from the factory, poking that button would bluescreen Win95. Fun stuff.
There's truth to what you say. SGIs are mostly used for graphics, and most of the work is done on the card itself, which operates in what OpenGL and DirectX folks call "retained mode." And SGI have done an exceptional job of keeping the graphics hardware current!
Ehh, depends on which market segment you're talking about. For the typical modeler or CAD person, a PC will have just as much power for a lower cost. SGI does still sell a lot of very high end gfx machines (dozens of graphical pipelines [pipe in sgi world means "gfx card", not a texel path within a gpu]) and machines with gobs of i/o for multiple streams of uncompressed HD. But SGI sells far more non-graphical supercomputers (Origin and Altix) than they do gfx systems.
SGI's Onyx2/Onyx3 InfiniteReality4 graphics have 11 GB of gfx ram to work with, great for vis-sim applications and massive texture roaming. Raw polygon performance isn't that impressive, but the rest of the abilities more than make up for it. The new Onyx4 UltimateVision is based on ATI FireGL. Both IR and UV can handle multiple gfx pipes in the same machine to drive multiple synced displays from the same machine without performance loss. Great for setups needing a dozen projectors and screens requiring software/hardware distortion correction (curved screens, hemisphere screens, etc) and edge blending. In the case of UV, mutliple GPUs can work together in several different ways for greater performance. But for a single-monitor, single GPU user, a PC will give you just as much power for a fraction of the cost.
But as a general purpose UNIX, it's pretty much dirty pants.:)
For a desktop OS, yeah, the GUI is pretty oldschool but does still have some neat goodies (www.nekochan.net). IRIX itself as a flavor of UNIX is pretty decent. Recent versions of IRIX 6.5.x have the security holes fixed and much newer versions of various components since the iniital release of 6.5.0. There are lots of awesome builtin features for performance and activity monitoring, the OS is made for app turning. Guaranteed rate I/O, realtime features, native XFS, native OpenGL... the OS is pretty smooth.
Off the shelf UnixWare supports up to 8 processors today and SCO made a stab at doing NUMA stuff once upon a time, but SGI's NUMA-Linux has tons more R&D behind it and is going 64-way.
SGI's NUMA-Linux (patches and such for their Altix systems) has supported 64 processors per system for almost a year already. They're moving to far more processors than just 64. The buzz is that SGI's goal is to support just as many processors on Linux as they do on IRIX (currently 512 CPUs per single system [not a cluster] with the stock IRIX kernel and 1024 with the "XXL" kernel).
SGI has a lot of impressive tech to make such massive NUMA machines work (lots of job & thread placement, memory management, etc). SCO is going to have a field day if SGI can't afford good lawyers to fight back.
It might be interesting to note that the very first PC laptop (not from IBM but from Data General, their "PC-1") was made at a time they couldn't get even full size mono LCD displays. The PC-1 display...
Do you mean the DG1? If so, I can vouch for the invisible seams... because I've used a DG1 and never noticed that the display was made up of multiple panels!!
I've seen SGI and Barco (the projector company) do this for over a decade on their massive multi-projector screens. (As have Panoram and others...) It's a combination of software (generally image overlap) and hardware (soft edges) that produces an invisible seam. With modern high-dollar projectors there isn't even a noticable difference in brightness anywhere on the screen.
Keep in mind that these sort of professional "reality centers" generally have very precise and predictable optics, these aren't the sort of projects you can buy at Staples or Frys. Cheaply made LCD projectors had a nasty habit of discoloring and changing their output look over time, especially when run for several hours every day. DLP has made a life a lot easier, but the cheap projectors still can't handle continuous use. Shop around and talk to the experts before you plunk a bunch of money down on an array of projectors.
It's just too darn hard to make a shared memory computer with 1000's of processors. So the common architecture is to make a cluster of smaller shared memory machines.
It's hard, but not too hard or impossible. The Silicon Graphics Origin 3000 supports 512 processors in a single image system with the stock IRIX kernel and 1024 processors with the "XXL" kernel.
Rumor has it Origin 4000 will support 2048 processors, as will Altix once SGI has done some major work with their kernel patches. (Altix is currently limited to 64 processors per system image).
Actually, over 70% of Adobe's Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign sales are for the Mac.
I've read this same statistic too, however that figure (70%) is for the three applications as a whole. The majority of Photoshop sales are for Windows, while the majority of Illustrator and InDesign sales are for Mac. All together, 70% of those sales are for Mac.
What about two wire split phase to a household? My service mains enters the house as two 120V hot lines (180 degrees out of phase, I believe) and a ground. My meter claims 242V AC RMS across the two hot lines.
I think one source of the "220V" you often seen is the doubling of the oldschool "110V" terminology.
Also, how does one get 480V from common commercial three phase? 3x120 = 360.
Sweet Grass Inc would certainly explain the buildings on SGI's old campus and may also explain their total lack of marketing since 1993 and their lack of engineering from 1998 - 2001.
You need an SGI with at least two CPUs to take advantage of the superior LavaRnd abilities! Also, dump Netscape for Mozilla!
Your home PC LavaRnd setup may be able to generate a large random number faster than the SGI-based one... but the SGI LavaRnd has the architecture to generate many concurrent random numbers. It also has the ability to easily handle high definition random numbers without chugging!
I have read about communities wiring classrooms for the internet in California, and repairing computers donated by businesses for schools. I would like to do this, but find many schools and libraries would deny this donation since its maintenance would be too big of an investment
You'll see a lot of this, I'm afraid. It's not just the maintenance issue either... schools have to find room for the new machines, their already-overloaded air conditioning systems (in the south) have to handle the increased heat, the network cabling has to meet local fire and safety codes, their insurance company may have issues with the use of used/rebuilt PCs provided by a non-certified source, etc.
Somebody's trying to run a plant dependent upon Microsoft...
I suggest you take some factory tours, the majority of modern factories/plants use Windows for their control software. Unless the end product is something very critical or very expensive, plant designers and control software writers tend to stick with well documented comodity hardware (Win32).
I know there'll be dozens of "they shouldda been using un*x" posts, but in defense of Windows, there has been a patch for this on Windows Update since July 16. Even I had enough time to test the patch on a non-production system between then and now. Every platform gets its 'sploits throughout its lifetime, it's just a matter of learning about them and applying the proper patches in a resonable amount of time... especially on mission-critical machines. (DMV computers, etc...)
But 7.x took up so much space that you pretty much had to choose two of three things to add... applications, network support, printer drivers.
Since we had a file server with our (site licensed) software, I often carried a 7.5 floppy with me containing network drivers and HD formatting software. Handy for cleaning a drive and invoking OS and software installs from across the network.
Re:Curiously showing the size of apps & OSs
on
Windows 95 in 4.47MB
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· Score: 5, Informative
What I find telling as well is that the Mac OSX calculator.app is SIX times the size of the total RAM in the first Mac, and over twice the size of a complete OS install.
That's the "cruft" of a new software framework... it's a fact of computer life. The original Mac had 128 KB of RAM and a single internal 400 KB 3.5" floppy drive. A few people had an external floppy or hard drive for further storage. These days Apple doesn't even sell a machine with less than 128 MB of RAM and 30 GB of HDD space.
The original Mac OS and bundled software was written between 1981 - 1983 in assembly as well as heavily optimized compiled higher level languages. Every byte counted. The team's goal was to outgun the Lisa with 1/8 as much ram and no hard drive. (And way less than what the Xerox Star had). They pulled it off, though. With a single floppy a person could have the full OS and a couple apps. By the time postscript support and networking was added in early 1985, two floppy drives were required for enough space for OS, drivers, apps, and storage.
The first Mac, the original "Macintosh", had 128 KB of RAM and a single internal 400 KB 3.5" floppy drive. Several months later, a 512 KB version was available. The "512K Mac" was sometimes called a "Fat Mac".
I don't recall how large the first few versions of the OS were, but I do recall that the OS (including the desktop "Finder", several utilities, control panels, and a printer driver or two), MacWrite, and MacPaint could fit on one 400 KB disk with room to spare. Such a disk shipped with the original Macs.
heh heh.. The 10 monitors was just an example though I do have about that many now. In most instances I want or need the monitors displaying the information to be visable at all times and dont want to have to switch to see them.
That's exactly what Teleffect was/is used for... most often with a PC and SGI... two monitors side-by-side, one on each system, one keyboard and mouse. Really easy to just move the cursor and type on either display. I know lots of folks that still use it, albeit with SGI IRIX and Windows NT 4. (Still works great for folks that don't mind NT -- it'll still run Office XP and Internet Explorer 6.0, as well as the latest Nvidia GFX drivers.... but it's not a "gamer OS").
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MHz-for-MHz, the G5 is a cooler processor than the G4---reportedly about 20W at 1.2 GHz, compared to 20W for a 1 GHz 7455.
True, but running at full speed (2 GHz CPU and a 2:1 multipler for 1 GHz FSB), the PowerPC 970 "G5" consumes 46.6 watts.
(To compare, a 2.4 GHz Northwood Pentium 4 uses 62 watts, newer P4s use even more. Prescott is expected to use 100-105 watts). ((And this is totally ignoring the even further power needs of the "extreme" edition with its added transistors for on-die L3 cache))
People just assume that G5 consumes this enormous amount of power because of all the fans in the G5 desktop. This isn't true. Even the 2G takes only about 40 watts or so. One P4 3G takes in the range of 80 watts of power. All of the extra G5 fans are to make the cooling quieter.
I'm glad to see someone finally point this out. The exact wattage number is 46.7 watts for the 2 GHz PowerPC 970 "G5" running at full speed (2GHz CPU and a 2:1 multipler for a 1 GHz FSB).
A 2.4 GHz P4 (400 MHz FSB) uses 62 watts, newer P4s use even more. Prescott is expected to use 100 - 105 watts. (And this is totally ignoring the even further power needs of the "extreme" edition with its added transistors for on-die L3 cache)
Apple has always seemed to overengineer the heatsinks and fans in their desktop model, for about as long as I can remember. Oddly, many of the PowerBooks use a much different "transfer the heat from the CPU, Chipset, and GPU right to the bottom of the case" cooling method.
and more to the point the very real possibility of Half Life 2 on a Powerbook
The very real impossibility... HL2 is a totally new engine and is pure DirectX 9. Porting it to OpenGL and the Mac environment would be a total nightmare, take years, and would probably end up running slow.
Doom3, on the other hand, is a totally different story. Hopefully there'll be plenty of games using that engine in the future. (Granted there are lots of games on the Q3 engine, but that sure hasn't helped the mac game world much).
In a related note, anyone notice how slow Tony Hawk 4 is on Mac? Ugh, what an awful port.
All of the PowerBooks now use the same motherboard chipset and the same new PowerPC 7457. This processor has 512 KB of on-chip full-speed L2 cache.
Previous PowerBooks used older 74xx processors with 256 KB of on-chip full-speed L2 cache and varying amounts of off-chip quarter-speed L3 cache.
The L3 isn't really needed anymore due to the doubling of the faster on-chip cache. Sure, 8 MB of L3 cache would be neat, but it would also up the price. Be glad the new books have the nifty Mobility Radeon 9600!
Just imagine for a moment what might happen if Sun released some version of the Solaris kernel under the GPL.
This is happening now, though not with Sun/Solaris... SGI's Altix handles up to 64 processors on a Linux kernel using the patches they release as opensource. As SGI hacks away at their bigmem and numa patches, they'll be able to handle more and more processors. The plan is to eventually graft enough IRIX technology to support just as many processors on Altix as they do with MIPS processors in Origin with IRIX.
Even if you aren't a fan of Itanium2, Linux, or NUMA, these patches are bringing some nifty high-end tech to the free software arena.
The real reason they don't want you to use this stuff is so that your hands are free for their overpriced coffee and sandwiches.
What airline do you fly? I don't recall ever having to pay for food. Sure, if you divide the total number of calories by the price of the ticket, it becomes a pretty expensive meal... but in general, the food is "free" with purchase of ticket. And, every now and then, the alcohol is also "free" for we peons in coach as well.
yea, what people really need is a box with a big shiny button which says "INTERNET" so they can just push the button and be done.
Hehe! Back in highschool (AMD K5 days) I had a teacher that bought a Compaq equiped with the "i" internet button. Right out of the box from the factory, poking that button would bluescreen Win95. Fun stuff.
I thought you were saying that the new iPods had BlueTooth and Airport Extreme support, heh.
Now, that would rock. Apple, are you listening?
Wow, I'll bet Steve Jobs is reading your Slashdot post right now thinking "wireless! Damn, why didn't I think of that!".
There's truth to what you say. SGIs are mostly used for graphics, and most of the work is done on the card itself, which operates in what OpenGL and DirectX folks call "retained mode." And SGI have done an exceptional job of keeping the graphics hardware current!
:)
Ehh, depends on which market segment you're talking about. For the typical modeler or CAD person, a PC will have just as much power for a lower cost. SGI does still sell a lot of very high end gfx machines (dozens of graphical pipelines [pipe in sgi world means "gfx card", not a texel path within a gpu]) and machines with gobs of i/o for multiple streams of uncompressed HD. But SGI sells far more non-graphical supercomputers (Origin and Altix) than they do gfx systems.
SGI's Onyx2/Onyx3 InfiniteReality4 graphics have 11 GB of gfx ram to work with, great for vis-sim applications and massive texture roaming. Raw polygon performance isn't that impressive, but the rest of the abilities more than make up for it. The new Onyx4 UltimateVision is based on ATI FireGL. Both IR and UV can handle multiple gfx pipes in the same machine to drive multiple synced displays from the same machine without performance loss. Great for setups needing a dozen projectors and screens requiring software/hardware distortion correction (curved screens, hemisphere screens, etc) and edge blending. In the case of UV, mutliple GPUs can work together in several different ways for greater performance. But for a single-monitor, single GPU user, a PC will give you just as much power for a fraction of the cost.
But as a general purpose UNIX, it's pretty much dirty pants.
For a desktop OS, yeah, the GUI is pretty oldschool but does still have some neat goodies (www.nekochan.net). IRIX itself as a flavor of UNIX is pretty decent. Recent versions of IRIX 6.5.x have the security holes fixed and much newer versions of various components since the iniital release of 6.5.0. There are lots of awesome builtin features for performance and activity monitoring, the OS is made for app turning. Guaranteed rate I/O, realtime features, native XFS, native OpenGL... the OS is pretty smooth.
Off the shelf UnixWare supports up to 8 processors today and SCO made a stab at doing NUMA stuff once upon a time, but SGI's NUMA-Linux has tons more R&D behind it and is going 64-way.
SGI's NUMA-Linux (patches and such for their Altix systems) has supported 64 processors per system for almost a year already. They're moving to far more processors than just 64. The buzz is that SGI's goal is to support just as many processors on Linux as they do on IRIX (currently 512 CPUs per single system [not a cluster] with the stock IRIX kernel and 1024 with the "XXL" kernel).
SGI has a lot of impressive tech to make such massive NUMA machines work (lots of job & thread placement, memory management, etc). SCO is going to have a field day if SGI can't afford good lawyers to fight back.
It might be interesting to note that the very first PC laptop (not from IBM but from Data General, their "PC-1") was made at a time they couldn't get even full size mono LCD displays. The PC-1 display...
Do you mean the DG1? If so, I can vouch for the invisible seams... because I've used a DG1 and never noticed that the display was made up of multiple panels!!
I've seen SGI and Barco (the projector company) do this for over a decade on their massive multi-projector screens. (As have Panoram and others...) It's a combination of software (generally image overlap) and hardware (soft edges) that produces an invisible seam. With modern high-dollar projectors there isn't even a noticable difference in brightness anywhere on the screen.
Keep in mind that these sort of professional "reality centers" generally have very precise and predictable optics, these aren't the sort of projects you can buy at Staples or Frys. Cheaply made LCD projectors had a nasty habit of discoloring and changing their output look over time, especially when run for several hours every day. DLP has made a life a lot easier, but the cheap projectors still can't handle continuous use. Shop around and talk to the experts before you plunk a bunch of money down on an array of projectors.
It's just too darn hard to make a shared memory computer with 1000's of processors. So the common architecture is to make a cluster of smaller shared memory machines.
It's hard, but not too hard or impossible. The Silicon Graphics Origin 3000 supports 512 processors in a single image system with the stock IRIX kernel and 1024 processors with the "XXL" kernel.
Rumor has it Origin 4000 will support 2048 processors, as will Altix once SGI has done some major work with their kernel patches. (Altix is currently limited to 64 processors per system image).
Actually, over 70% of Adobe's Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign sales are for the Mac.
I've read this same statistic too, however that figure (70%) is for the three applications as a whole. The majority of Photoshop sales are for Windows, while the majority of Illustrator and InDesign sales are for Mac. All together, 70% of those sales are for Mac.
What about two wire split phase to a household? My service mains enters the house as two 120V hot lines (180 degrees out of phase, I believe) and a ground. My meter claims 242V AC RMS across the two hot lines.
I think one source of the "220V" you often seen is the doubling of the oldschool "110V" terminology.
Also, how does one get 480V from common commercial three phase? 3x120 = 360.
Sweet Grass Inc would certainly explain the buildings on SGI's old campus and may also explain their total lack of marketing since 1993 and their lack of engineering from 1998 - 2001.
You need an SGI with at least two CPUs to take advantage of the superior LavaRnd abilities! Also, dump Netscape for Mozilla!
Your home PC LavaRnd setup may be able to generate a large random number faster than the SGI-based one... but the SGI LavaRnd has the architecture to generate many concurrent random numbers. It also has the ability to easily handle high definition random numbers without chugging!
=)
I have read about communities wiring classrooms for the internet in California, and repairing computers donated by businesses for schools. I would like to do this, but find many schools and libraries would deny this donation since its maintenance would be too big of an investment
You'll see a lot of this, I'm afraid. It's not just the maintenance issue either... schools have to find room for the new machines, their already-overloaded air conditioning systems (in the south) have to handle the increased heat, the network cabling has to meet local fire and safety codes, their insurance company may have issues with the use of used/rebuilt PCs provided by a non-certified source, etc.
Somebody's trying to run a plant dependent upon Microsoft...
I suggest you take some factory tours, the majority of modern factories/plants use Windows for their control software. Unless the end product is something very critical or very expensive, plant designers and control software writers tend to stick with well documented comodity hardware (Win32).
... Windows Update once every couple weeks.
I know there'll be dozens of "they shouldda been using un*x" posts, but in defense of Windows, there has been a patch for this on Windows Update since July 16. Even I had enough time to test the patch on a non-production system between then and now. Every platform gets its 'sploits throughout its lifetime, it's just a matter of learning about them and applying the proper patches in a resonable amount of time... especially on mission-critical machines. (DMV computers, etc...)
System 7 was bootable on a floppy
So was 7.5.
But 7.x took up so much space that you pretty much had to choose two of three things to add... applications, network support, printer drivers.
Since we had a file server with our (site licensed) software, I often carried a 7.5 floppy with me containing network drivers and HD formatting software. Handy for cleaning a drive and invoking OS and software installs from across the network.
What I find telling as well is that the Mac OSX calculator.app is SIX times the size of the total RAM in the first Mac, and over twice the size of a complete OS install.
That's the "cruft" of a new software framework... it's a fact of computer life. The original Mac had 128 KB of RAM and a single internal 400 KB 3.5" floppy drive. A few people had an external floppy or hard drive for further storage. These days Apple doesn't even sell a machine with less than 128 MB of RAM and 30 GB of HDD space.
The original Mac OS and bundled software was written between 1981 - 1983 in assembly as well as heavily optimized compiled higher level languages. Every byte counted. The team's goal was to outgun the Lisa with 1/8 as much ram and no hard drive. (And way less than what the Xerox Star had). They pulled it off, though. With a single floppy a person could have the full OS and a couple apps. By the time postscript support and networking was added in early 1985, two floppy drives were required for enough space for OS, drivers, apps, and storage.
The first Mac, the original "Macintosh", had 128 KB of RAM and a single internal 400 KB 3.5" floppy drive. Several months later, a 512 KB version was available. The "512K Mac" was sometimes called a "Fat Mac".
I don't recall how large the first few versions of the OS were, but I do recall that the OS (including the desktop "Finder", several utilities, control panels, and a printer driver or two), MacWrite, and MacPaint could fit on one 400 KB disk with room to spare. Such a disk shipped with the original Macs.
I use iPhoto simply because it's free.
heh heh.. The 10 monitors was just an example though I do have about that many now. In most instances I want or need the monitors displaying the information to be visable at all times and dont want to have to switch to see them.
That's exactly what Teleffect was/is used for... most often with a PC and SGI... two monitors side-by-side, one on each system, one keyboard and mouse. Really easy to just move the cursor and type on either display. I know lots of folks that still use it, albeit with SGI IRIX and Windows NT 4. (Still works great for folks that don't mind NT -- it'll still run Office XP and Internet Explorer 6.0, as well as the latest Nvidia GFX drivers.... but it's not a "gamer OS").