Gosh, I use a mac and I love it (for Linux and OS X) but Intel's new processors, if they perform as advertised, will simply keep knocking AIM's teeth out, performance wise.
With no other advantage besides ColorSync, cute cases, and a (finally) solid operating system, what the hell is going to happen to the platform that was to bring us 'affordable, scalable RISC Processing'?
I hate to think it's necessary, but I may end up with a space heater (P4/Athlon) in my computer.
This is fairly interesting and all, I mean the guy obviously has waaay too much time on his hands, but it seems to me that someone intent on actually getting work done in a mobile environment (like a train) would use a Ricochet...128kbps, wireless,and roams at 70mph.
I'm so tired of all this "Macs are faster 'cos they use SCSI and PowerPC and have majik fairie dust in 'em" crap! There hasn't been a dekstop Mac with built-in SCSI in nearly two years!
I use a Mac and a PC every day for work. Based on my own subjective measurements, yes, my 266Mhz PowerBook seems faster than my 400Mhz PII desktop.
BUT, there is no way anyone will convince me that a 500Mhz G4 is faster than an 800Mhz-1Ghz PC except for some very specialized and rarely performed tasks. when Mot and IBM get their butts in gear, I'll spend my money on another Mac. Until then, I'm looking VERY hard at PCs.
Don't feed me any of your "superscalar, deeply pipelined" crap either. Pentium and Athlon/T-bird pipelines and prediction match or surpass PPC these days.
Signed, a disenchanted former Mac booster annoyed with the zealots posting unoinformed crap,
Apple used heat pipes in their PowerBook designs as long as 3 years ago, in the original PowerBook G3.
Although a very thrifty processor in terms of wattage, the G3+L2 cache was still warmer than anything they'd used. Instead of employing a solitary large heat sink plate, as with the PowerBook 3400, they also installed a heat pipe. It worked extremely well, and case temperatures actually dropped over the previous model.
Hi, I have mentioned in a previous related story here that I have a quad g3 at work and soon (real soon) quad g4. You are right about almost 100% boost running linux.
I'm thinking this post has to be some kind of silly troll. The G3 (PPC750) doesn't support the cache coherency modes to even _do_ MP.
The G4 was and is meant to bring workstation-level performance back to the Mac platform, continuing and enhancing the cache-coherency mechanisms that the 604 series processors shipped with.
There is not, and connot be an such thing as a dual, quad or multiple whatever G3 system. The processors would keep overwriting each other's cache.
Snoop sed: But now, this raises other questions in my mind, like how do devices like the Rio operate within the law?
The Rio is not purpose-built to play.mp3 files ripped from CDs. The device merely plays.mp3 files, no matter the source, and therefore is a pretty risky target for the RIAA or Metallica's lawyers.
That being said, as a photographer, I'd be real pi**ed off if people started trading digtal copies of my work all around the internet free of charge, with or without attribution.
Mac OS web servers are great for people who want either:
Maximum security at any cost
Idiot proof web-serving
Before Apple switched from MacOS web servers from www.apple.com, they were using- get ready-45 Mac OS boxen running specially tuned copies of WebStar.
Granted, the Army (see point#1 above)has started using WebStar, but only because they are paranoid that some port-sniffing hacker is gonna give their NT server a black eye. Plus, they've got a reputation for pouring lots of good money after bad for products that sorta work.
It's worth noting that regarding clones, Apple did all the hard work, for a pittance in license fees.
They wrote the firmware, designed the boards, in many cases did certification testing of the clones' hacks (nubus in a PCI mac, anyone?) and took the sales hit. Clones were nifty, but a Bad Idea.
There was nothing open about the clones. It was a foolish attempt to expand market share by hoping other companies would build low-end machines for less money than Apple. Instead, PCC and Umax built high-end machines for a lot less than Apple could and took most of the margin out of the desktop computer biz. Ouch.
I don't want to take away too much from the clone companies, but their R+D too often consisted of discovering new ways to overextend Apple's existing designs and building them into cheap cases with marginal power supplies. Kinda like a fusion of PC and Mac.
I wish they [Apple] were more open with there hardware Open how? What is there about a TI PCI bridge chip, Motorola memory controller, ATI video card, Opti FireWire controller, or USB controller that is not open? You can get the specs from those companies.
I'm tired of the same old (pardon) crap about Apple hardware not being open/standard/whatever. Maybe it was true when a bunch of lazy developers at Be were ticked and didn't feel like figuring out how to use the custom chips on the old G3 logic board, but it sure ain't true today.
Fact: The blue and white G3 and the 'graphite' G4 are built of almost completely commoditized parts. Try walking down an open firmware device tree sometime and looking at the names of the parts there. Unless you want to do really funky things with the soft power, or maybe write a legacy driver or some old piece of hardware, it's pretty simple to write device drivers for those machines.
Note 2: most bioses will choke on such a beast for quite a while anyway. So unless you have a hardware IDE raid with recent firmware it does not worth using in selfassembled stuff at least for now.
Herein lies on of the advantages to using Linux on a platform other than the PC. While Linux may free the ordinary beige boxen from microsoft tyranny, the short-sightedness of BIOS designers rides around with the hardware--inextricably.
Seriously, I'm not trying to troll here, but my G3 could handle four of these bad boys internally and still boot up just fine.
I think Microsoft will likely do what Apple does: there are no factories around the world anymore with an Apple logo on the building and iMacs coming out of the end.
Lucky Goldstar (LG Electronics) and NatSteel, and lord knows whatever giant Asian manufacturing companies will build it for them. My guess is LG Electronics--they certainly have the capacity.
Which begs another question: since these companies order huge quantities of parts from (insert name of commodity part supplier here), will that help give Microsoft the economies of scale it needs to clobber the market with this thing?
Mac OS Rumors is typically a trollcenter for substantive rumors. They start with half-*ssed misinformation, and go from there.
Three thoughts/points to ponder:
1. Apple has way too much invested in ATI right now to jump ship.
2. It's true that Apple's ATI-sourced video lags behind PCs, and that the drivers are a little under-featured--but usually because Apple hasn't provided anough memory for the ATI hardware to do it's job properly, or because of other hardware restraints.
3. The latest Apple/ATI efforts, coupled with the vector-based Quartz graphics in Mac OS X, make for screen drawing so slick, you'll wonder why everyone's spending so much money on nVidia cards.
Slashdot Mirror
With no other advantage besides ColorSync, cute cases, and a (finally) solid operating system, what the hell is going to happen to the platform that was to bring us 'affordable, scalable RISC Processing'?
I hate to think it's necessary, but I may end up with a space heater (P4/Athlon) in my computer.
Interesting technology brief here
I'll bet some of you smart folks could even get them working with Linux.
I'm so tired of all this "Macs are faster 'cos they use SCSI and PowerPC and have majik fairie dust in 'em" crap! There hasn't been a dekstop Mac with built-in SCSI in nearly two years!
I use a Mac and a PC every day for work. Based on my own subjective measurements, yes, my 266Mhz PowerBook seems faster than my 400Mhz PII desktop.
BUT, there is no way anyone will convince me that a 500Mhz G4 is faster than an 800Mhz-1Ghz PC except for some very specialized and rarely performed tasks. when Mot and IBM get their butts in gear, I'll spend my money on another Mac. Until then, I'm looking VERY hard at PCs.
Don't feed me any of your "superscalar, deeply pipelined" crap either. Pentium and Athlon/T-bird pipelines and prediction match or surpass PPC these days.
Signed, a disenchanted former Mac booster annoyed with the zealots posting unoinformed crap,
Doug
Although a very thrifty processor in terms of wattage, the G3+L2 cache was still warmer than anything they'd used. Instead of employing a solitary large heat sink plate, as with the PowerBook 3400, they also installed a heat pipe. It worked extremely well, and case temperatures actually dropped over the previous model.
Not Tested?
Sorry, couldn't resist. Especially after my NT machine just BSODed for the second time this week.
I'm thinking this post has to be some kind of silly troll. The G3 (PPC750) doesn't support the cache coherency modes to even _do_ MP.
The G4 was and is meant to bring workstation-level performance back to the Mac platform, continuing and enhancing the cache-coherency mechanisms that the 604 series processors shipped with.
There is not, and connot be an such thing as a dual, quad or multiple whatever G3 system. The processors would keep overwriting each other's cache.
The Rio is not purpose-built to play .mp3 files ripped from CDs. The device merely plays .mp3 files, no matter the source, and therefore is a pretty risky target for the RIAA or Metallica's lawyers.
That being said, as a photographer, I'd be real pi**ed off if people started trading digtal copies of my work all around the internet free of charge, with or without attribution.
This guy is hilarious.
Mac OS web servers are great for people who want either:
- Maximum security at any cost
- Idiot proof web-serving
Before Apple switched from MacOS web servers from www.apple.com, they were using- get ready-45 Mac OS boxen running specially tuned copies of WebStar.Granted, the Army (see point#1 above)has started using WebStar, but only because they are paranoid that some port-sniffing hacker is gonna give their NT server a black eye. Plus, they've got a reputation for pouring lots of good money after bad for products that sorta work.
They wrote the firmware, designed the boards, in many cases did certification testing of the clones' hacks (nubus in a PCI mac, anyone?) and took the sales hit. Clones were nifty, but a Bad Idea.
There was nothing open about the clones. It was a foolish attempt to expand market share by hoping other companies would build low-end machines for less money than Apple. Instead, PCC and Umax built high-end machines for a lot less than Apple could and took most of the margin out of the desktop computer biz. Ouch.
I don't want to take away too much from the clone companies, but their R+D too often consisted of discovering new ways to overextend Apple's existing designs and building them into cheap cases with marginal power supplies. Kinda like a fusion of PC and Mac.
Hope this historical information is useful.
I wish they [Apple] were more open with there hardware Open how? What is there about a TI PCI bridge chip, Motorola memory controller, ATI video card, Opti FireWire controller, or USB controller that is not open? You can get the specs from those companies.
I'm tired of the same old (pardon) crap about Apple hardware not being open/standard/whatever. Maybe it was true when a bunch of lazy developers at Be were ticked and didn't feel like figuring out how to use the custom chips on the old G3 logic board, but it sure ain't true today.
Fact: The blue and white G3 and the 'graphite' G4 are built of almost completely commoditized parts. Try walking down an open firmware device tree sometime and looking at the names of the parts there. Unless you want to do really funky things with the soft power, or maybe write a legacy driver or some old piece of hardware, it's pretty simple to write device drivers for those machines.
Herein lies on of the advantages to using Linux on a platform other than the PC. While Linux may free the ordinary beige boxen from microsoft tyranny, the short-sightedness of BIOS designers rides around with the hardware--inextricably.
Seriously, I'm not trying to troll here, but my G3 could handle four of these bad boys internally and still boot up just fine.
I think Microsoft will likely do what Apple does: there are no factories around the world anymore with an Apple logo on the building and iMacs coming out of the end.
Lucky Goldstar (LG Electronics) and NatSteel, and lord knows whatever giant Asian manufacturing companies will build it for them. My guess is LG Electronics--they certainly have the capacity.
Which begs another question: since these companies order huge quantities of parts from (insert name of commodity part supplier here), will that help give Microsoft the economies of scale it needs to clobber the market with this thing?
Three thoughts/points to ponder:
1. Apple has way too much invested in ATI right now to jump ship.
2. It's true that Apple's ATI-sourced video lags behind PCs, and that the drivers are a little under-featured--but usually because Apple hasn't provided anough memory for the ATI hardware to do it's job properly, or because of other hardware restraints.
3. The latest Apple/ATI efforts, coupled with the vector-based Quartz graphics in Mac OS X, make for screen drawing so slick, you'll wonder why everyone's spending so much money on nVidia cards.
And on't forget that Apple helped ship about 4 million ATI chipsets in the past 18 months.