> In the early 90s, there was this hot debate about RISC vs. CISC, and the merits of each,...etc. > This has all died out now, with CISC (read: Intel) coming out as a winner.
However, let me point out that probably the sole reason why CISC came out as a winner (we can argument this as well...) is that simply the economics of scale pushed intel's architecture forward as other companies struggled to stay profitable (look at SGI, they used to make their own chips...)
of course, AMD prevailed, because it supplied to the same pool (the windows world).
it's good that this piece of commercial software is being rolled out on a couple of different software platforms, namely Linux and Windows. However, what about different ISAs? How difficult would it be to build a cross compiler for building PPC binaries so that I could run Planmaker on my OSX box (of course I have linux installed as well).
So, now when you've practically cloned Excel functionality and/or reverse engineered the file format (or can it be licensed?), how about the new EU comission push towards stringent software patents? Shouldn't it affect the product your company makes? I suppose only the biggest companies, and, usually the ones from U.S., will benefit from these new, strict software patent laws... unfortunately
> so how does going to macs go with the open souce thing - mos OSS software works with windows at least as well as OSX.
Maybe there's quite a bit of OSS software for Windows, but have you ever tried to compile some yourself? Unless shipped with specific win patches, it won't be easy -- or even possible. Compiling for OSX is, on the other hand, mostly just./configure and make. Apple even bundles their X11 with the operating system. Therefore: you can have all that unix/linux sw running on your mac just about as easily as you could do that on linux. On windows, things get much more complicated.
* add SIDPLAY and MOD/XM support so that one can enjoy the full MOD galore without first going through the arduous task of converting them to AAC or MP# * implement a pitch control with the wheel (so I can do some actual dj'ing on the device, or, rather, on 2 devices:)
what's more? there must be a lot more features I want to have. from file formats to fixing stupidities of the existing software:)
Actually, the perceived slowness is just the result of the sloppy refresh rate of terminal.app, but a MUCH MUCH worse problem is the overall cpu usage for just printing some simple stuff. try the following: run mplayer to play back some divx movie, and use top -u -s5 to watch how terminal.app is eating up to 15% of cpu just to display the stupid progress/cpu-usage messages from mplayer!
now, does anyone have a more efficient terminal? maybe xterm is still the king...
well then, if you decide to cease being a passive bystander, please consider joining some organisations against e.g. globalism, that is one of the things Microsoft is strongly using to gain foothold. Without WTO and such organisations, M$ would have more pain entering global markets in such a penetrating way it does right now, and maybe the EU govt would have something to say about its behaviour, since they don't benefit from M$ global monopoly in such a way the US does.
well, running 2.4.17 means it hasn't yet really told about its stability (since it's so recent a kernel). i've been running 2.4.0-test2 for a quite long time now (in a server environment) and in spite of some problems, it's still going and hasn't actually yet crashed on me.
Linux sandpoint 2.4.0-test2 #166 Mon Aug 20 19:32:43 EEST 2001 ppc unknown
6:08pm up 148 days, 11:24, 5 users, load average: 1.00, 1.00, 1.00
explaining: only 148 days because i experienced an electricity shortout in july. 1.00 loads are generated by running rc5;) finally, the high kernel compile count is due to trying lots and lots of different tweaks on this weird platform, but after applying the ide elevator patch, it hasn't failed on me since.
i'd like to point out that the current crop of 2.4 kernels wants AGPGART with drm on r128 so I cannot use my Powerbook's ATI Mobility M3 for OpenGL acceleration. the same problem with PCIGART, it isn't (yet?) supported, so our Celeron system with a PCI-based Radeon doesn't do 3d either in XFree86 4.1.0... now you might want to ask why use PCI-based graphics cards, but the system is a specially designed one and accomodates more than 1 graphics controller, that's why PCI.
Yes we should want this. Or at least remove some of that cruft that exists in current BIOSes that test the memory in the very same fashion as has happened for almost 20 years now. Not to mention all those boring messages about IDE disks connected, Press N for network boot, ad infinitum... Getting to lilo shouldn't take more than 15 seconds, linux itself will anyway reset most of the devices by its own means.
Just to have a comparison: my PowerBook G3 does the POST in about 3-4 seconds after turning it on, and then it proceeds to load the linux kernel. After Tux shows up on screen, it's 17 more long seconds until gdm greets me. IMO, every firmware (in a semi-perfect world) should be able to execute ELF binaries:-)
One of the remaining things i really dislike about x86 arch machines, is that they never took off the legacy stuff, even if the athlons have very modern instruction execution units, the systems itself make too many compromises, use outdated i8254 for cascading interrupts, etc etc. My OpenPIC supports 4 CPUs and 64 IRQ's and that's what I think how systems should be built. I don't like MacOS but I do like the way how Apple designs modern hardware.
Just to correct a bit things; there are actually some games for Linux out there with ppc binaries included. Take a look at Loki Entertainment, they are distributing PPC binaries with at least some of the games they publish - e.g. CivCTP, Heroes III, RR Tycoon, Myth II, to name a few.
Not to mention the multitude of the already-existing games for MacOS, though there are always some titles I am missing... But if I really wanted to play, I'd get a PS2 instead of a frigging PC: at least the PS2 doesn't freeze up or something, in the middle of a game.
I would like to point out that the Sandpoint platform is meant for evaluation purposes, and that's about it. I have one at home, with a 350MHz G4 processor and the included 32MB SO-DIMM, fitted a 20GB IDE disk on the system and hacked the linux 2.4 kernel long enough to make it to work. (thanks to Mark A. Greer from MontaVista for the great work on getting sandpoint to work!)
However, trying to use a regular PCI video card on it (e.g. a rage128 pro or any other VGA based card) will be quite tricky, since you cannot just run the VGA BIOS code with a non-x86 processor... supposedly you could use emulation, like DEC did with their alpha boxen.
Re:What other MS-compatable alternatives are there
on
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Now, i find it irresistible to reply on this...
I use OmniWeb on my PowerBook. It's a very standards compliant browser, hence same problems as with Opera. However, I can view most pages just fine, and flash, quicktime etc. plugins work 100%. Now you might find it annoying, but Omni is a 100% OpenStep developer, therefore you don't get the chance to run this neat piece of s/w unless you run MacOS X or NeXTstep:-)
of course, when i boot to linux, i prefer mozilla. it's not too slow for my machine, and it's very close to displaying correctly every web page out there.
There may be more deployed linux systems in the world than mac systems, but I don't think linux is more numerous on the desktop than the macs are. Yes, on the server side, but on the desktop, linux is still coming and trying to break through...
What would be interesting, would be the possibility of doing multi-architecture ports, like loki has did in a couple of cases. e.g. the linux civctp comes with x86, ppc, alpha, sparc binaries (they are just in their respective bin/x directories, replace x for the architecture)... then you could run this linux/ppc game on macos X with the linux binary compatibility package and some linux libs. this is why i installed osX on my powerbook after a year of using linux on it. finally a system that has all the possibilities of getting best of both worlds. and it's BSD, the *real* unix distribution (flamebait)
a brief comment on this 400->500mhz overclocking thread.
the 400mhz g4's will be exactly the same parts as the 500mhz ones, but they just failed some tests at motorola. this doesn't mean that they couldn't be more or less safely run at 500mhz, though. you'll find that after overclocking, it doesn't heat up your lap more than the higher-powered, 500mhz model. and anyway, when i run linux on my powerbook, it doesn't get too hot until i start up setiathome or something other that really stresses the cpu...
my powerbook has a fan as well... it just doesn't start up unless i put the powerbook on top of some very insulating material, e.g. clothes or something like that.
I'm moving people from KDE to Ice or WindowMaker and the general reaction is "Hey, this is so much quicker and does what I expect!".
It's annoying how people mention words like "KDE" or "GNOME" in the same context as "IceWM" or "WindowMaker" when they're two entirely different things... KDE and GNOME try to be your desktops, and encompass lots of your desktop functionality, whereas IceWM and wmaker are just mere window managers. Well, with some added functionality nowadays, but still there's a certain difference.
When dropping KDE, you lose those wonderful features like functioning drag'n'drop which, unfortunately, X11 doesn't provide. Neither can wmaker or IceWM provide.
Well, there are certain advantages of having a 3-dimensional "desktop" or whatever we might call it. since humans inherently manipulate objects in a 3-d environment, with the proper input apparel and proper output devices (be that a holodeck from startrek or something other), there is always a certain advantage when we can represent things in a very fundamental way. a 2-d representation is not that fundamental, since we have to learn to use it, and therefore it has certain disadvantages although we (as computer users) might find it's the only and fastest way of doing things.
who knows what will happen in the computer interface field in the following 20 years? the past 20 years have already changed a lot.
macos X will not be anything new (in my opinion) but it's good to get a proper UNIX system to horsepower the upper layers. of course, if i had the choice, i'd be running AmigaOS:))
Price-wise, I think these chips are quite cheap
for Sun to manufacture (actually, contract). Could be even cheaper than Athlon chips, they even have the same amounts of L2 cache on chip, but the UltraSPARC design is simpler than the Athlon design (which needs some more xsistors for all that lecacy x86 stuff and op translations etc...)
Performance-wise, I don't think the 400MHz UltraIIe can match a 1GHz Athlon, but it isn't too far away either. The Sun white papers claim a performance of 20/21 (SPECint95/fp95) which is more or less equivalent to a G4/500MHz... But that is not the point. The 1U rack is a special environment and therefore, some considerations must be taken. An Athlon at 1GHz would just generate way too much heat in such a small case, that it would be quite daring (or altogether stupid) to put one into a 1U rack. The UltraIIe at 400MHz draws 6.7W (typical) and 8W (max), so it's quite a LOT more power efficient than an Athlon, even if you under-clocked the Athlon...
So, why a SPARC? Or, for that matter, a PPC? It's simple, they're efficient chips, even though they might not match up to par to the fastest x86 solutions. The only reason they don't match the price is the lower production volumes and generally inferior fab processes. In the case of the PPC, lack of cheap motherboards.
Now, a powerful enough SPARC server for such a low price - that's a bliss! Let's wait and see what happens...
There's no such thing as a mobile G4. The main reason is that the G4 is already biased towards low-power usage since its main market area is routers and other internet infrastructure stuff. Apple is only a mid-sized player in the chip market. IMO Apple should go for the POWER4 architecture chips from IBM which are _real_ desktop and server CPUs, and can easily outperform any x86.
The regular G4 (7400) eats 11.5W maximum, true, but the part they use in the new PB4Ti is 7450 aka G4+ which is a different chip. Since it has 256K of on-chip L2 cache, it's got lots (lots) more transistors (around 22M) than the old design (6M IIRC)... I saw a figure of 14 watts max somewhere for the G4+, but I'm quite unsure whether it was for the 533MHz part or the 733MHz one.
I already play 3D games on my PowerBook... Quake3 runs 65fps using the "fast" settings. Of course, I'll run out of batteries in just 3 hours of playing, since the G3/500 draws 8 watts when utilizing the FPU heavily, and the R128 mobility M3 (with 8M VRAM) draws 2.0 watts.
of course, it's annoying that the Mac versions of games are generally more expensive here in Finland, and usually harder to find a specific title you're looking for. And, you need to bring Linux down and boot into MacOS to play them, this is just as bad as in the intel world where linux guys need dual-boot setups if they want to play games...
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> In the early 90s, there was this hot debate about RISC vs. CISC, and the merits of each, ...etc.
> This has all died out now, with CISC (read: Intel) coming out as a winner.
However, let me point out that probably the sole reason why CISC came out as a winner (we can argument this as well...) is that simply the economics of scale pushed intel's architecture forward as other companies struggled to stay profitable (look at SGI, they used to make their own chips...)
of course, AMD prevailed, because it supplied to the same pool (the windows world).
it's good that this piece of commercial software is being rolled out on a couple of different software platforms, namely Linux and Windows. However, what about different ISAs? How difficult would it be to build a cross compiler for building PPC binaries so that I could run Planmaker on my OSX box (of course I have linux installed as well).
troll?
at least our university had VAXen running an UNIX os... namely the Digital Ultrix, of course.
So, now when you've practically cloned Excel functionality and/or reverse engineered the file format (or can it be licensed?), how about the new EU comission push towards stringent software patents? Shouldn't it affect the product your company makes? I suppose only the biggest companies, and, usually the ones from U.S., will benefit from these new, strict software patent laws... unfortunately
> so how does going to macs go with the open souce thing - mos OSS software works with windows at least as well as OSX.
./configure and make. Apple even bundles their X11 with the operating system. Therefore: you can have all that unix/linux sw running on your mac just about as easily as you could do that on linux. On windows, things get much more complicated.
Maybe there's quite a bit of OSS software for Windows, but have you ever tried to compile some yourself? Unless shipped with specific win patches, it won't be easy -- or even possible. Compiling for OSX is, on the other hand, mostly just
let me add some more.
:)
:)
* add SIDPLAY and MOD/XM support so that one can enjoy the full MOD galore without first going through the arduous task of converting them to AAC or MP#
* implement a pitch control with the wheel (so I can do some actual dj'ing on the device, or, rather, on 2 devices
what's more? there must be a lot more features I want to have. from file formats to fixing stupidities of the existing software
Actually, the perceived slowness is just the result of the sloppy refresh rate of terminal.app, but a MUCH MUCH worse problem is the overall cpu usage for just printing some simple stuff. try the following: run mplayer to play back some divx movie, and use top -u -s5 to watch how terminal.app is eating up to 15% of cpu just to display the stupid progress/cpu-usage messages from mplayer!
now, does anyone have a more efficient terminal? maybe xterm is still the king...
well then, if you decide to cease being a passive bystander, please consider joining some organisations against e.g. globalism, that is one of the things Microsoft is strongly using to gain foothold. Without WTO and such organisations, M$ would have more pain entering global markets in such a penetrating way it does right now, and maybe the EU govt would have something to say about its behaviour, since they don't benefit from M$ global monopoly in such a way the US does.
well, running 2.4.17 means it hasn't yet really told about its stability (since it's so recent a kernel). i've been running 2.4.0-test2 for a quite long time now (in a server environment) and in spite of some problems, it's still going and hasn't actually yet crashed on me.
;) finally, the high kernel compile count is due to trying lots and lots of different tweaks on this weird platform, but after applying the ide elevator patch, it hasn't failed on me since.
Linux sandpoint 2.4.0-test2 #166 Mon Aug 20 19:32:43 EEST 2001 ppc unknown
6:08pm up 148 days, 11:24, 5 users, load average: 1.00, 1.00, 1.00
explaining: only 148 days because i experienced an electricity shortout in july. 1.00 loads are generated by running rc5
so, 2.4 looks pretty good to me.
i'd like to point out that the current crop of 2.4 kernels wants AGPGART with drm on r128 so I cannot use my Powerbook's ATI Mobility M3 for OpenGL acceleration. the same problem with PCIGART, it isn't (yet?) supported, so our Celeron system with a PCI-based Radeon doesn't do 3d either in XFree86 4.1.0 ... now you might want to ask why use PCI-based graphics cards, but the system is a specially designed one and accomodates more than 1 graphics controller, that's why PCI.
Yes we should want this. Or at least remove some of that cruft that exists in current BIOSes that test the memory in the very same fashion as has happened for almost 20 years now. Not to mention all those boring messages about IDE disks connected, Press N for network boot, ad infinitum... Getting to lilo shouldn't take more than 15 seconds, linux itself will anyway reset most of the devices by its own means.
Just to have a comparison: my PowerBook G3 does the POST in about 3-4 seconds after turning it on, and then it proceeds to load the linux kernel. After Tux shows up on screen, it's 17 more long seconds until gdm greets me. IMO, every firmware (in a semi-perfect world) should be able to execute ELF binaries :-)
One of the remaining things i really dislike about x86 arch machines, is that they never took off the legacy stuff, even if the athlons have very modern instruction execution units, the systems itself make too many compromises, use outdated i8254 for cascading interrupts, etc etc. My OpenPIC supports 4 CPUs and 64 IRQ's and that's what I think how systems should be built. I don't like MacOS but I do like the way how Apple designs modern hardware.
i believe it's the portable units they put the IBM drives to. i have a 12-gig 2.5" disk drive from IBM in my PowerBook G3.
Just to correct a bit things; there are actually some games for Linux out there with ppc binaries included. Take a look at Loki Entertainment, they are distributing PPC binaries with at least some of the games they publish - e.g. CivCTP, Heroes III, RR Tycoon, Myth II, to name a few.
Not to mention the multitude of the already-existing games for MacOS, though there are always some titles I am missing... But if I really wanted to play, I'd get a PS2 instead of a frigging PC: at least the PS2 doesn't freeze up or something, in the middle of a game.
I would like to point out that the Sandpoint platform is meant for evaluation purposes, and that's about it. I have one at home, with a 350MHz G4 processor and the included 32MB SO-DIMM, fitted a 20GB IDE disk on the system and hacked the linux 2.4 kernel long enough to make it to work. (thanks to Mark A. Greer from MontaVista for the great work on getting sandpoint to work!)
However, trying to use a regular PCI video card on it (e.g. a rage128 pro or any other VGA based card) will be quite tricky, since you cannot just run the VGA BIOS code with a non-x86 processor... supposedly you could use emulation, like DEC did with their alpha boxen.
Now, i find it irresistible to reply on this... I use OmniWeb on my PowerBook. It's a very standards compliant browser, hence same problems as with Opera. However, I can view most pages just fine, and flash, quicktime etc. plugins work 100%. Now you might find it annoying, but Omni is a 100% OpenStep developer, therefore you don't get the chance to run this neat piece of s/w unless you run MacOS X or NeXTstep :-)
of course, when i boot to linux, i prefer mozilla. it's not too slow for my machine, and it's very close to displaying correctly every web page out there.
There may be more deployed linux systems in the world than mac systems, but I don't think linux is more numerous on the desktop than the macs are. Yes, on the server side, but on the desktop, linux is still coming and trying to break through...
What would be interesting, would be the possibility of doing multi-architecture ports, like loki has did in a couple of cases. e.g. the linux civctp comes with x86, ppc, alpha, sparc binaries (they are just in their respective bin/x directories, replace x for the architecture)... then you could run this linux/ppc game on macos X with the linux binary compatibility package and some linux libs. this is why i installed osX on my powerbook after a year of using linux on it. finally a system that has all the possibilities of getting best of both worlds. and it's BSD, the *real* unix distribution (flamebait)
a brief comment on this 400->500mhz overclocking thread.
the 400mhz g4's will be exactly the same parts as the 500mhz ones, but they just failed some tests at motorola. this doesn't mean that they couldn't be more or less safely run at 500mhz, though. you'll find that after overclocking, it doesn't heat up your lap more than the higher-powered, 500mhz model. and anyway, when i run linux on my powerbook, it doesn't get too hot until i start up setiathome or something other that really stresses the cpu...
my powerbook has a fan as well... it just doesn't start up unless i put the powerbook on top of some very insulating material, e.g. clothes or something like that.
I'm moving people from KDE to Ice or WindowMaker and the general reaction is "Hey, this is so much quicker and does what I expect!".
It's annoying how people mention words like "KDE" or "GNOME" in the same context as "IceWM" or "WindowMaker" when they're two entirely different things... KDE and GNOME try to be your desktops, and encompass lots of your desktop functionality, whereas IceWM and wmaker are just mere window managers. Well, with some added functionality nowadays, but still there's a certain difference.
When dropping KDE, you lose those wonderful features like functioning drag'n'drop which, unfortunately, X11 doesn't provide. Neither can wmaker or IceWM provide.
Well, there are certain advantages of having a 3-dimensional "desktop" or whatever we might call it. since humans inherently manipulate objects in a 3-d environment, with the proper input apparel and proper output devices (be that a holodeck from startrek or something other), there is always a certain advantage when we can represent things in a very fundamental way. a 2-d representation is not that fundamental, since we have to learn to use it, and therefore it has certain disadvantages although we (as computer users) might find it's the only and fastest way of doing things.
:))
who knows what will happen in the computer interface field in the following 20 years? the past 20 years have already changed a lot.
macos X will not be anything new (in my opinion) but it's good to get a proper UNIX system to horsepower the upper layers. of course, if i had the choice, i'd be running AmigaOS
topi
Price-wise, I think these chips are quite cheap for Sun to manufacture (actually, contract). Could be even cheaper than Athlon chips, they even have the same amounts of L2 cache on chip, but the UltraSPARC design is simpler than the Athlon design (which needs some more xsistors for all that lecacy x86 stuff and op translations etc...)
Performance-wise, I don't think the 400MHz UltraIIe can match a 1GHz Athlon, but it isn't too far away either. The Sun white papers claim a performance of 20/21 (SPECint95/fp95) which is more or less equivalent to a G4/500MHz... But that is not the point. The 1U rack is a special environment and therefore, some considerations must be taken. An Athlon at 1GHz would just generate way too much heat in such a small case, that it would be quite daring (or altogether stupid) to put one into a 1U rack. The UltraIIe at 400MHz draws 6.7W (typical) and 8W (max), so it's quite a LOT more power efficient than an Athlon, even if you under-clocked the Athlon...
So, why a SPARC? Or, for that matter, a PPC? It's simple, they're efficient chips, even though they might not match up to par to the fastest x86 solutions. The only reason they don't match the price is the lower production volumes and generally inferior fab processes. In the case of the PPC, lack of cheap motherboards.
Now, a powerful enough SPARC server for such a low price - that's a bliss! Let's wait and see what happens...
There's no such thing as a mobile G4. The main reason is that the G4 is already biased towards low-power usage since its main market area is routers and other internet infrastructure stuff. Apple is only a mid-sized player in the chip market. IMO Apple should go for the POWER4 architecture chips from IBM which are _real_ desktop and server CPUs, and can easily outperform any x86.
The regular G4 (7400) eats 11.5W maximum, true, but the part they use in the new PB4Ti is 7450 aka G4+ which is a different chip. Since it has 256K of on-chip L2 cache, it's got lots (lots) more transistors (around 22M) than the old design (6M IIRC)... I saw a figure of 14 watts max somewhere for the G4+, but I'm quite unsure whether it was for the 533MHz part or the 733MHz one.
I already play 3D games on my PowerBook... Quake3 runs 65fps using the "fast" settings. Of course, I'll run out of batteries in just 3 hours of playing, since the G3/500 draws 8 watts when utilizing the FPU heavily, and the R128 mobility M3 (with 8M VRAM) draws 2.0 watts.
of course, it's annoying that the Mac versions of games are generally more expensive here in Finland, and usually harder to find a specific title you're looking for. And, you need to bring Linux down and boot into MacOS to play them, this is just as bad as in the intel world where linux guys need dual-boot setups if they want to play games...