The bulk of digital audio playback devices other than portables don't bother supporting anyone's DRM. I've got a CD/DVD player that'll play audio files, and it only knows about MP3... and none of the ones I looked at in the store were any different... except for the Sony CD players that supported Sony's DRM.
The important thing is not whether you have iTunes on Windows of MediaPlayer on MacOS X. It is whose DRM decoder goes into devices mentioned above.
Apple's not missing that point, and neither am I. Look at their new jukebox software. What do you think that's for?
Power PC (6xx and G3) was 4, which is about the minimum for pipelines to be useful: the "traditional" pipeline model has 5 stages: fetch-decode-execute-memory-writeback.
The original Pentium had 5, but the P6 core (Pentium Pro, Pentium II, and arguably Pentium III and the new Core Duo) had 14. P4, of course, is the poster boy for deep pipelines.
There were too many versions of SPARC right from the start, I don't know how many stages it had... probably not very deep because the register model made deep pipelining difficult... though Sun got up to 14 with the US III.
MIPS had anything from 4-8 stages depending on the implementation. The R4000 would have been on the table at the time, and it had 8.
Deep, yes, but not abnormally so.
As for the "power" of the instruction set... Power might have had all kinds of goodies, but the Power PC didn't get them until the G4.
Don't really know enough about PA-RISC to comment on that. I only got into HP after HP bought Compaq... and all our HP-UX boxes are Itanium. Given my experience with HP I'm quite prepared to believe that PA-RISC was good, but thatnks to Itanic I'll never know.
The point is, Alpha was not simply "insane clock and pipelines". The huge register file and the use of memory barrier to let the compiler manage so much of the pipeline interlocking were also critical to letting it retire instructions effectively without losing clocks to pipeline bubbles.
SPARC was only dominant in market share, and it was only dominant because the dominant vendor was using it. It's never been a high performance chip compared with other RISCs, and rarely even when compared with Intel
I don't think the quality of playback of these little players is at all bad... I was simply astonished at how good my iPod Shuffle sounded, much better than I was expecting.
The main reason I don't think the audio quality is that great an issue for portable music players (and we are talking about portables, now) is that there's enough ambient noise and distractions in most places that people use them that the difference between vinyl, CD, and reasonably high bit-rate compressed formats (like AAC) are not noticable.
And I don't think this really matters for any home-computer-based system. If it's Windows, you can get iTunes for it... if it's a Macintosh, it's not up to Steve Jobs to make Microsoft's formats available: it's up to Microsoft. There's nothing stopping Microsoft from shipping a Mac-compatible version of their player or whatever other component their customers need to make music available to Mac users.
It's strength was it's ferocious clock rates that were enabled by abnormally deep pipelines and instructions that did relatively little (no integer divide!).
7 stages is not an "abnormally deep pipeline", and divide-step is absolutely conventional RISC design. The Berkeley RISC used divide-step. Sparc started out with divide-step. There really isn't a huge difference between Alpha's ISA and any other RISC, the difference is in the small details... whatever criticism you have of the Alpha, you can't in fairness leave the other RISCs out.
Alpha also had great execution control. The memory barrier instruction (also in Power, by the way, and eventually picked up by Sparc) let the compiler control the pipeline far better than Itanium's "I can't believe it's not VLIW" design or MIPS "just guess" delayed branch. And the huge register file gave the compiler much more leeway in scheduling instructions.
The biggest problem with the Alpha was that it jumped prematurely into 64-bit with both feet, so that even if the compiler generated 32-bit code (the -taso option) it was still moving 64-bit words around and throwing away half the result.
Out of all the UNIX systems I've used, Irix beats out HPUX and SCO, but I'd rather have seen just about anything else as the base of Mac OS X than Irix.
And I don't know exactly what the timing was, but if SGI had a consumer OS they might not have had the same incentive to open up GL.
Would have made a huge difference. If Apple had gone to Sparc they'd have gone out of business before Jobs got back, because SPARC is almost as bad a processor architecture as x86, and Sun doesn't have the resources of Intel to just bull through the problems through sheer force of process.
My experience with integrated devices is this: If putting an MP3 player in your cellphone works for you, you can save money by just getting an MP3 player, because you sure as hell aren't making any calls on the cellphone.
It's the batteries, stupid.
Cellphones already push the limits of battery life as it is. Add a music player that drains the battery continuously while it's in use, and you end up with a cellphone that's dead when you need to use it.
Been there, done that, got the spare battery that's ALSO dead because I forgot which one was charged...
I think you are thinking Mac, but the Apple/IBM war was actually decided with the Apple II.
Actually, it was decided with the Apple///. If the Apple/// had been a credible competitor in the 16 bit world, with Apple ][ compatibility along with a clear path to the 16-bit world, Apple's 8-bit popularity would have meant something.
But not only was the/// a flop, but the Mac didn't provide an upgrade path, and the IIGS was clearly a lame duck. If they'd just included a 6502 and a bit of glue logic, or at least an inexpensive daughterboard that you could plug in to your Mac, the Apple ][ and Mac user bases would have been one big pool of marketshare, instead of battling fanclubs.
Just look at how many manufacturers are touting in advertisements that you can play an iPod in their car...
But have you looked at what that means?
It doesn't mean they have an iPod dock and any real iPod integration, in most cases.
What it usually means is they have a line-in jack that you can plug any MP3 player into. Something that should have become standard in all cars 25 years ago, when "music player" was spelled "Walkman", given it probably increases the parts cost of the stereo by 15c.
The iTunes DRM is practically honor-system. It's got an analog hole the size of the Grand Canyon. And Apple tells you how to use it, almost. Just move one word in the slogan and turn "RIP, MIX, BURN" into "MIX, BURN, RIP".
If I were to get a non-iPod music player, I'd burn my iTMS purchaes to audio CD and re-rip them as MP3 or OGG (which happens to be legal), rather than looking for online versions of dubious quality and provenance. You can even use a CDRW as your analog disk and Applescript the whole task... don't have to touch a thing...
A) AAC is not an Apple format. And the payload of a DRM scheme has to be proprietary, because that's how software DRM works. You give the customer the ciphertext, the keys, and the decryption code. The only way to keep them from decrypting it is to hide the keys, or the code, or both... and hope they can't find it.
B) Try to read for content. I didn't say the only software they hadn't released was the iTunes DRM, I said the only interface or protocol I could think of that they hadn't released was the iTunes DRM.
C) You're pointing to one of the rare cases where Microsoft has opened their protocols (though not as wide as you think), and one of the rare cases where Apple can't open them as wide as you want.
Darwin is even a joke with the poor level of source, commenting and disclosure Apple released back.
The time they were accused of holding stuff back was with Webcore... and not because they were holding anything back, but because they weren't doing more than the license for KHTML required. What was their reaction? they bent over backwards to provide more than they were asked for.
Please stop excusing a company just because they make cute computers.
Furthermore, I'd be curious as to the ability of these new iMacs to do two of these things at the same time, versus the old G5 iMac.
I imagine they're pretty good, and application benchmarks are more likely to show this. Pretty much no real apps in OS X are single-threaded, and GUI apps are excersizing WindowServer as well.
There wouldn't be complaints about the performance if Steve hadn't made a big deal about the performance. Twice as fast as the iMac G5, four times as fast as the Powermac G4. And that actually doesn't sound like an outrageous claim, since it's replacing a single CPU with two CPUs, and OSX has a history of making good use of dual-CPU systems, so it's reasonable to believe it could really be that amazing.
And, well, it doesn't really meet those expectations.
People don't react well when their expectations aren't met. That's only normal. It's not a biggie.
Microsoft has published their extensions to Kerberos under a CC license now? OK, I haven't been following that, I could have missed that... but what about Samba? Is Microsoft publishing enough details so the Samba team can work from a spec and don't have to reverse-engineer CIFS any more? I'm pretty sure I'd have heard that.
And which free software license is Apple using?
Primarily APSL, a lot of BSDL and GPL, some bits are under other licenses.
Not all of their software is open source of course, not even the majority, but enough is there that you can build a bootable kernel and get just about everything below the GUI running. And they don't seem to be sitting on any significant amount of interface spec. About the only one I can think of is their nudge-nudge-wink-wink DRM in iTunes, but they pretty much have to if they're going to make the labels happy.
How are you going to put a positive spin on this one?!
We haven't seen Apple's response yet, but it's not super likely that they're going to release the extensions under an NDC with license terms that prohibit their use in competing products like Microsoft's done when they've been giving us hot-n-heavy embrace-n-extend action.
Safari doesn't actually launch programs you download.
Unless you disable the behaviour, Safari uses LaunchServices to open what it considers "safe" files, by calling the handler for that file type to open it. Unless the handler is not only a third-party application but has never been used before, there will be no warning dialog as you describe, and if there is a security hole in that handler it can be exploited with no warning to the user.
There have been multiple exploits of this kind. There will undoubtedly be more.
And, yes, I have had users go through exactly the same sequence of operations on Windows, get the dialog warning that the application may compromise their computer, and went ahead and opened it any way, and gotten infected. There are multiple live viruses in the wild that take advantage of this approach.
Luckily there is one advantage Safari has over IE, here: you can disable "Open Safe Files after Downloading" and it really gets disabled and doesn't get turned on again by "security fixes". There are other security flaws in IE that Safari doesn't share, much bigger ones, but this one is common to both. Turn off "Open Safe Files after Downloading", and be grateful you can.
Apple has been trying to kill the classic Mac OS and replace it with NextStep, I mean OpenStep, errr, Rhapsody... since 1997. The original plan was for all new development to be in what's now Cocoa and was at the time called Yellow Box, and legacy apps would run in a simpler version of Classic that basically ran a whole OS 7 or 8 session in a single window, called Blue Box.
The ISVs, paricularly Adobe, plotzed. There was a major row with threats of abandoning the platform, and Apple backed off, improved Classic, came up with Carbon as a transition API, and brought out OS 9 and eventually OS X.
Steve Jobs reportedly had wanted to go with Intel as soon as possible. He thought Apple had made a mistake switching to the Power PC while he was away at NeXT. OpenStep ran on Intel, of course, and Apple had versions of Rhapsody that ran on Intel boxes, even on generic clones. They had a fat binary mechanism in OpenStep that supported by the end as many as five different processor architectures.
And that's why intel. Not because IBM screwed up, but because it was in their long term roadmap and had been for years.
But obviously... that wouldn't fly if they couldn't even cram classic Mac OS off in Blue Box.
But they kept their Intel code base alive, and every other year, about, they tested the waters by trying to stop offering a Mac that could boot up into OS 9.
Every time there was a user revolt.
Until late 2004. The last G4 that could boot to OS 9 disappeared from the Apple store, without any fanfare. And, apparently, there just weren't that many people dependent on OS 9 to make enough noise to notice.
A little over 6 months later, they announced the Intel switch.
Rosetta will run all legacy Power PC applications... well, all legacy Carbon and Cocoa applications that run on OS X. They're not running Classic under Rosetta. Classic is dead.
And nobody's bitching about that, either. Which means they guessed right, and Apple can finally drive a stake into the heart of Classic Mac OS and leave it behind for good.
And that's why they did it now. Because they could.
Once Intel could execute more than one instruction per clock, the RISC people had to catch up. And that meant all the complexity of a superscalar CPU. The advantages of RISC then disappeared - it wasn't simpler any more.
Um, superscalar and superpipeline design predated the Pentium, and superscalar and superpipelined RISC chips were still a LOT simpler than anything Intel was doing, and got more instructions retired per clock, per watt, per transistor, per development dollar, and usually per second as well. Even the most brainiac Alpha was far simpler than the P4, G5, or IA64, and the development plan for the Alpha was multicore rather than turbo-super-mega-pipelined long before Intel caught on that this might be a good idea. It's a pity Power didn't follow the same logic.
There's a difference between superscalar with a 7 stage pipeline, and superscalar with a 20 stage pipeline. Keeping a 20 stage pipeline filled and keeping bubbles from killing performance is a LOT harder than doing the same for a 7 stage one.
DEC->Compaq used to have a nice white paper about the difference between Alpha and Itanium that made the same point in a LOT more detail than Apple's "Megahertz Myth" campaign, but now that's it's DEC->Compaq->HP I doubt you can find it. Just because it was temporarily unpopular doesn't mean it's not real.
The G5 is a "brainiac" design, a big complex chip with a long highly parallelized pipeline. This is a relatively new approach for RISC chips, which have typically concentrated on a small core, short pipeline, and simple design with a lot of "close" cache.
Intel's Pentium chips have all been "brainiac"s to some extent, but none so much as the P4... which they've backed away from. The new chips in the new Macs are less like the G5 or P4 and, while not exactly as clean and tight as the G4, are closer to it than they are to the real brainiacs.
But there's nothing wrong with the G4 core as a core. Taking the G4 core and giving it a faster bus, the way Intel's taken the PII/PIII core and given it a faster bus in Yonah, would have made a lot more sense. And Freescale's got one like that in the pipeline. They could have called it the "G5 Mobile".:)
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Which Alpha had a 9 stage pipeline? The '064-'264 were all 7-stage designs.
I thought that, but I checked on various sites and found 9. Maybe that's floating point?
Anyway, it definitely wasn't "abnormally deep".
Are you assuming that DRM will actually get effective?
If it does, we have MUCH bigger problems than Apple vs Microsoft.
The bulk of digital audio playback devices other than portables don't bother supporting anyone's DRM. I've got a CD/DVD player that'll play audio files, and it only knows about MP3... and none of the ones I looked at in the store were any different... except for the Sony CD players that supported Sony's DRM.
The important thing is not whether you have iTunes on Windows of MediaPlayer on MacOS X. It is whose DRM decoder goes into devices mentioned above.
Apple's not missing that point, and neither am I. Look at their new jukebox software. What do you think that's for?
You're right, it was 9.
Power PC (6xx and G3) was 4, which is about the minimum for pipelines to be useful: the "traditional" pipeline model has 5 stages: fetch-decode-execute-memory-writeback.
The original Pentium had 5, but the P6 core (Pentium Pro, Pentium II, and arguably Pentium III and the new Core Duo) had 14. P4, of course, is the poster boy for deep pipelines.
There were too many versions of SPARC right from the start, I don't know how many stages it had... probably not very deep because the register model made deep pipelining difficult... though Sun got up to 14 with the US III.
MIPS had anything from 4-8 stages depending on the implementation. The R4000 would have been on the table at the time, and it had 8.
Deep, yes, but not abnormally so.
As for the "power" of the instruction set... Power might have had all kinds of goodies, but the Power PC didn't get them until the G4.
Don't really know enough about PA-RISC to comment on that. I only got into HP after HP bought Compaq... and all our HP-UX boxes are Itanium. Given my experience with HP I'm quite prepared to believe that PA-RISC was good, but thatnks to Itanic I'll never know.
The point is, Alpha was not simply "insane clock and pipelines". The huge register file and the use of memory barrier to let the compiler manage so much of the pipeline interlocking were also critical to letting it retire instructions effectively without losing clocks to pipeline bubbles.
SPARC was only dominant in market share, and it was only dominant because the dominant vendor was using it. It's never been a high performance chip compared with other RISCs, and rarely even when compared with Intel
Don't forget the low single-threaded performance! That's one of the big advantages of SPARC, after all!
I don't think the quality of playback of these little players is at all bad... I was simply astonished at how good my iPod Shuffle sounded, much better than I was expecting.
The main reason I don't think the audio quality is that great an issue for portable music players (and we are talking about portables, now) is that there's enough ambient noise and distractions in most places that people use them that the difference between vinyl, CD, and reasonably high bit-rate compressed formats (like AAC) are not noticable.
And I don't think this really matters for any home-computer-based system. If it's Windows, you can get iTunes for it... if it's a Macintosh, it's not up to Steve Jobs to make Microsoft's formats available: it's up to Microsoft. There's nothing stopping Microsoft from shipping a Mac-compatible version of their player or whatever other component their customers need to make music available to Mac users.
It's strength was it's ferocious clock rates that were enabled by abnormally deep pipelines and instructions that did relatively little (no integer divide!).
7 stages is not an "abnormally deep pipeline", and divide-step is absolutely conventional RISC design. The Berkeley RISC used divide-step. Sparc started out with divide-step. There really isn't a huge difference between Alpha's ISA and any other RISC, the difference is in the small details... whatever criticism you have of the Alpha, you can't in fairness leave the other RISCs out.
Alpha also had great execution control. The memory barrier instruction (also in Power, by the way, and eventually picked up by Sparc) let the compiler control the pipeline far better than Itanium's "I can't believe it's not VLIW" design or MIPS "just guess" delayed branch. And the huge register file gave the compiler much more leeway in scheduling instructions.
The biggest problem with the Alpha was that it jumped prematurely into 64-bit with both feet, so that even if the compiler generated 32-bit code (the -taso option) it was still moving 64-bit words around and throwing away half the result.
Thank god that didn't happen.
Out of all the UNIX systems I've used, Irix beats out HPUX and SCO, but I'd rather have seen just about anything else as the base of Mac OS X than Irix.
And I don't know exactly what the timing was, but if SGI had a consumer OS they might not have had the same incentive to open up GL.
Would have made a huge difference. If Apple had gone to Sparc they'd have gone out of business before Jobs got back, because SPARC is almost as bad a processor architecture as x86, and Sun doesn't have the resources of Intel to just bull through the problems through sheer force of process.
My experience with integrated devices is this: If putting an MP3 player in your cellphone works for you, you can save money by just getting an MP3 player, because you sure as hell aren't making any calls on the cellphone.
It's the batteries, stupid.
Cellphones already push the limits of battery life as it is. Add a music player that drains the battery continuously while it's in use, and you end up with a cellphone that's dead when you need to use it.
Been there, done that, got the spare battery that's ALSO dead because I forgot which one was charged...
I think you are thinking Mac, but the Apple/IBM war was actually decided with the Apple II.
///. If the Apple /// had been a credible competitor in the 16 bit world, with Apple ][ compatibility along with a clear path to the 16-bit world, Apple's 8-bit popularity would have meant something.
/// a flop, but the Mac didn't provide an upgrade path, and the IIGS was clearly a lame duck. If they'd just included a 6502 and a bit of glue logic, or at least an inexpensive daughterboard that you could plug in to your Mac, the Apple ][ and Mac user bases would have been one big pool of marketshare, instead of battling fanclubs.
Actually, it was decided with the Apple
But not only was the
Just look at how many manufacturers are touting in advertisements that you can play an iPod in their car...
But have you looked at what that means?
It doesn't mean they have an iPod dock and any real iPod integration, in most cases.
What it usually means is they have a line-in jack that you can plug any MP3 player into. Something that should have become standard in all cars 25 years ago, when "music player" was spelled "Walkman", given it probably increases the parts cost of the stereo by 15c.
The iTunes DRM is practically honor-system. It's got an analog hole the size of the Grand Canyon. And Apple tells you how to use it, almost. Just move one word in the slogan and turn "RIP, MIX, BURN" into "MIX, BURN, RIP".
If I were to get a non-iPod music player, I'd burn my iTMS purchaes to audio CD and re-rip them as MP3 or OGG (which happens to be legal), rather than looking for online versions of dubious quality and provenance. You can even use a CDRW as your analog disk and Applescript the whole task... don't have to touch a thing...
A) AAC is not an Apple format. And the payload of a DRM scheme has to be proprietary, because that's how software DRM works. You give the customer the ciphertext, the keys, and the decryption code. The only way to keep them from decrypting it is to hide the keys, or the code, or both... and hope they can't find it.
B) Try to read for content. I didn't say the only software they hadn't released was the iTunes DRM, I said the only interface or protocol I could think of that they hadn't released was the iTunes DRM.
C) You're pointing to one of the rare cases where Microsoft has opened their protocols (though not as wide as you think), and one of the rare cases where Apple can't open them as wide as you want.
Darwin is even a joke with the poor level of source, commenting and disclosure Apple released back.
The time they were accused of holding stuff back was with Webcore... and not because they were holding anything back, but because they weren't doing more than the license for KHTML required. What was their reaction? they bent over backwards to provide more than they were asked for.
Please stop excusing a company just because they make cute computers.
There's nothing cute about my Frankenmac.
Furthermore, I'd be curious as to the ability of these new iMacs to do two of these things at the same time, versus the old G5 iMac.
I imagine they're pretty good, and application benchmarks are more likely to show this. Pretty much no real apps in OS X are single-threaded, and GUI apps are excersizing WindowServer as well.
There wouldn't be complaints about the performance if Steve hadn't made a big deal about the performance. Twice as fast as the iMac G5, four times as fast as the Powermac G4. And that actually doesn't sound like an outrageous claim, since it's replacing a single CPU with two CPUs, and OSX has a history of making good use of dual-CPU systems, so it's reasonable to believe it could really be that amazing.
And, well, it doesn't really meet those expectations.
People don't react well when their expectations aren't met. That's only normal. It's not a biggie.
You mean like the Creative Commons license?
Microsoft has published their extensions to Kerberos under a CC license now? OK, I haven't been following that, I could have missed that... but what about Samba? Is Microsoft publishing enough details so the Samba team can work from a spec and don't have to reverse-engineer CIFS any more? I'm pretty sure I'd have heard that.
And which free software license is Apple using?
Primarily APSL, a lot of BSDL and GPL, some bits are under other licenses.
Not all of their software is open source of course, not even the majority, but enough is there that you can build a bootable kernel and get just about everything below the GUI running. And they don't seem to be sitting on any significant amount of interface spec. About the only one I can think of is their nudge-nudge-wink-wink DRM in iTunes, but they pretty much have to if they're going to make the labels happy.
How can you screw up a date format?
Ask me again after 2038.
(at least it's not like the Aztec gods, who created the whole universe with a screwed up date format built in to the foundations)
How are you going to put a positive spin on this one?!
We haven't seen Apple's response yet, but it's not super likely that they're going to release the extensions under an NDC with license terms that prohibit their use in competing products like Microsoft's done when they've been giving us hot-n-heavy embrace-n-extend action.
Safari doesn't actually launch programs you download.
Unless you disable the behaviour, Safari uses LaunchServices to open what it considers "safe" files, by calling the handler for that file type to open it. Unless the handler is not only a third-party application but has never been used before, there will be no warning dialog as you describe, and if there is a security hole in that handler it can be exploited with no warning to the user.
There have been multiple exploits of this kind. There will undoubtedly be more.
And, yes, I have had users go through exactly the same sequence of operations on Windows, get the dialog warning that the application may compromise their computer, and went ahead and opened it any way, and gotten infected. There are multiple live viruses in the wild that take advantage of this approach.
Luckily there is one advantage Safari has over IE, here: you can disable "Open Safe Files after Downloading" and it really gets disabled and doesn't get turned on again by "security fixes". There are other security flaws in IE that Safari doesn't share, much bigger ones, but this one is common to both. Turn off "Open Safe Files after Downloading", and be grateful you can.
Apple has been trying to kill the classic Mac OS and replace it with NextStep, I mean OpenStep, errr, Rhapsody... since 1997. The original plan was for all new development to be in what's now Cocoa and was at the time called Yellow Box, and legacy apps would run in a simpler version of Classic that basically ran a whole OS 7 or 8 session in a single window, called Blue Box.
The ISVs, paricularly Adobe, plotzed. There was a major row with threats of abandoning the platform, and Apple backed off, improved Classic, came up with Carbon as a transition API, and brought out OS 9 and eventually OS X.
Steve Jobs reportedly had wanted to go with Intel as soon as possible. He thought Apple had made a mistake switching to the Power PC while he was away at NeXT. OpenStep ran on Intel, of course, and Apple had versions of Rhapsody that ran on Intel boxes, even on generic clones. They had a fat binary mechanism in OpenStep that supported by the end as many as five different processor architectures.
And that's why intel. Not because IBM screwed up, but because it was in their long term roadmap and had been for years.
But obviously... that wouldn't fly if they couldn't even cram classic Mac OS off in Blue Box.
But they kept their Intel code base alive, and every other year, about, they tested the waters by trying to stop offering a Mac that could boot up into OS 9.
Every time there was a user revolt.
Until late 2004. The last G4 that could boot to OS 9 disappeared from the Apple store, without any fanfare. And, apparently, there just weren't that many people dependent on OS 9 to make enough noise to notice.
A little over 6 months later, they announced the Intel switch.
Rosetta will run all legacy Power PC applications... well, all legacy Carbon and Cocoa applications that run on OS X. They're not running Classic under Rosetta. Classic is dead.
And nobody's bitching about that, either. Which means they guessed right, and Apple can finally drive a stake into the heart of Classic Mac OS and leave it behind for good.
And that's why they did it now. Because they could.
Once Intel could execute more than one instruction per clock, the RISC people had to catch up. And that meant all the complexity of a superscalar CPU. The advantages of RISC then disappeared - it wasn't simpler any more.
Um, superscalar and superpipeline design predated the Pentium, and superscalar and superpipelined RISC chips were still a LOT simpler than anything Intel was doing, and got more instructions retired per clock, per watt, per transistor, per development dollar, and usually per second as well. Even the most brainiac Alpha was far simpler than the P4, G5, or IA64, and the development plan for the Alpha was multicore rather than turbo-super-mega-pipelined long before Intel caught on that this might be a good idea. It's a pity Power didn't follow the same logic.
There's a difference between superscalar with a 7 stage pipeline, and superscalar with a 20 stage pipeline. Keeping a 20 stage pipeline filled and keeping bubbles from killing performance is a LOT harder than doing the same for a 7 stage one.
DEC->Compaq used to have a nice white paper about the difference between Alpha and Itanium that made the same point in a LOT more detail than Apple's "Megahertz Myth" campaign, but now that's it's DEC->Compaq->HP I doubt you can find it. Just because it was temporarily unpopular doesn't mean it's not real.
The G5 is a "brainiac" design, a big complex chip with a long highly parallelized pipeline. This is a relatively new approach for RISC chips, which have typically concentrated on a small core, short pipeline, and simple design with a lot of "close" cache.
:)
Intel's Pentium chips have all been "brainiac"s to some extent, but none so much as the P4... which they've backed away from. The new chips in the new Macs are less like the G5 or P4 and, while not exactly as clean and tight as the G4, are closer to it than they are to the real brainiacs.
But there's nothing wrong with the G4 core as a core. Taking the G4 core and giving it a faster bus, the way Intel's taken the PII/PIII core and given it a faster bus in Yonah, would have made a lot more sense. And Freescale's got one like that in the pipeline. They could have called it the "G5 Mobile".