"I'm not sure it makes more sense then puting the $2k towards a machine that can handle more RAM in the first place, though."
If you've got a dual athlon (or Xeon) rig with.. say.. 4GB in it, and don't want the slowdown pain of PAE, then one of these things acting as a scratchdisk might well be just what the doctor ordered:)
"Also, you claim this Half-Life (never heard of it) was more popular than Quake? I doubt that. You'd see it in stores or see it mentioned on Usenet if it was."
Only problem there is, the iMac is only available in one colour, the iBook is only available in one colour, the PowerMac is only available in one colour, the Powerbook is only available in one colour, the Xserve is only available in one colour..
Sorry, but your troll is about 3 years out of date, better luck next time.
"There's nothing magical or mysterious about emulating one 32-bit architecture on another, and writing a PowerPC emulator for the x86 would not be significantly different to writing an x86 emulator for the PowerPC"
Go count up the PPC registers.. then the registers in the x86 architecture...
With JIT "acceptable" speed would be possible, but I wouldn't expect more than 601-66 performance from a high clocked P4 running interpretive PPC emulation..
Personally I'd be inclined to have a drive in a removable (hotswappable- of course) caddy and manually moving it between machines if the box fell over..
That or a full blown SAN. but I'm all-or-nothing like that:)
My next machine will be a mac, partially due to my continuing distaste at the Microsoft DRM approach, and partially because I'd like to be able to sell a machine a year or so later without only getting 10% of the purchase price back:)
" All data goes through the PCI bus...and it's bandwidth is only 133MB/sec theoretical."
Except of course on boards that have dedicated interlinks between the northbridge and southbridge for IDE/legacy/integrated sound etc.. (VIA KT266 onwards, SiS's recent chipsets, Intel i810 onwards, nForce etc.)
Slashdot Mirror
"The question is: can Linux/PPC take an advantage of Apple's hardware"
Surely the question should be "can Linux/PPC take advantage of Apple hardware AS WELL AS Apples own OS does" ?
okay then, first dual processor mac?
"On the upside, the Xserve was the first Mac I've used that actually ran OS X's GUI with something resembling responsiveness."
First Quartz Extreme utilising Mac you used?
go look at the online gaming stats at gamespy...
It'll be something like
"Halflife : 60,000 online"
"Quake 3 : 2500 online"
"Quakeworld : 250 online"
"I'm not sure it makes more sense then puting the $2k towards a machine that can handle more RAM in the first place, though."
:)
If you've got a dual athlon (or Xeon) rig with.. say.. 4GB in it, and don't want the slowdown pain of PAE, then one of these things acting as a scratchdisk might well be just what the doctor ordered
"Also, you claim this Half-Life (never heard of it) was more popular than Quake? I doubt that. You'd see it in stores or see it mentioned on Usenet if it was."
That's a troll/joke, right?.. right?... RIGHT?
On this machine (1.6Ghz Athlon/Palomino - 1GB DDR Sdram - 120GB 7200rpm 8MB cache - WinXP Pro) phoenix starts up like
"click 'beat' open" on first run, and instantanously thereafter.
IE6 starts up instantanously, but it's preloaded alongside the rest of the windows...
compared to Mozilla, which takes an age to start up unless you keep it memory resident...
"since the spot is smaller a head-crash could crash your entire harddrive instead of loosing a "few" files."
Um, I've never seen a disk that was remotely usable after a headcrash?... for starters the head itself will be wrecked?
Only problem there is, the iMac is only available in one colour, the iBook is only available in one colour, the PowerMac is only available in one colour, the Powerbook is only available in one colour, the Xserve is only available in one colour..
Sorry, but your troll is about 3 years out of date, better luck next time.
*waves* Hi Klerck!
Whoever modded that as funny.. um, he's got a point, the Apple "El Capitan" tower cases are some of the best designed I've ever seen.
My AthlonXP 1900+ machine has an Intel Inside/Pentium III sticker on the frontpanel...
I wonder, is that a sign that I am the Anti-rice?
"There's nothing magical or mysterious about emulating one 32-bit architecture on another, and writing a PowerPC emulator for the x86 would not be significantly different to writing an x86 emulator for the PowerPC"
Go count up the PPC registers.. then the registers in the x86 architecture...
With JIT "acceptable" speed would be possible, but I wouldn't expect more than 601-66 performance from a high clocked P4 running interpretive PPC emulation..
I picture 250Mhz DDR sram (as used as PowerMac L3 cache)
half a gig of that stuff... damn
"If SRAM were as cheap as DRAM we'd be seeing 2MB caches common place nowadays..."
:)
If SRAM were as cheap as DRAM I'd hope to see machines using it as system ram
Personally I'd be inclined to have a drive in a removable (hotswappable- of course) caddy and manually moving it between machines if the box fell over..
:)
That or a full blown SAN. but I'm all-or-nothing like that
"Apple's big problem is still the chipset used with the G4's."
How do you figure?, are you sure you aren't referring to the SDR frontside bus of the G4's? (the blame for which is firmly in motorolas court.)
Aside from that downside (and Apple hardly had a choice) the Xserve/PowerMac DDR chipset seems pretty nice?
Yes, but a 2.8Ghz P4 with a Radeon 9700 will outrun a P3-800 with a Radeon 9700.. all other things being equal.
astroturf?... bah, get out!
100% natural grass here!
Yep, and it's footprint can be around 130MB
:)
My next machine will be a mac, partially due to my continuing distaste at the Microsoft DRM approach, and partially because I'd like to be able to sell a machine a year or so later without only getting 10% of the purchase price back
G5 is an Apple designation, not a Motorola (or IBM) one, I'm firmly convinced at this point that the PowerPC 970 _IS_ "G5"
And as for Motorola, they have a 64bit Embedded chip (the 8540) that lacks floating point and altivec (amongst other things)..
That's the most rediculous argument I've ever heard you've not seen a Mac withstand something it's never been exposed to?.. duh?
Aside from that, go dig around for embedded PPC chip, they turn up in the weirdest placest...
price was so high and a good deal of the internals are proprietary.
:)
You'd think, but it's not really the case, the way PowerMacs hold their value is disproportionate to their initial purchase price.
take a £1,500 x86 box, and a £1,500 Mac, and in 3 years the Mac will still be worth something, chances are the x86 box won't.
As for them "lasting twice as long" that is more because people can't afford to upgrade because they have to buy all new software and hardware.
And BTW, if you're going to mock-troll, you should take note that Apple don't do design work on the G4 aka PowerPC 74xx series, Motorola do
Point 1) Macs are upgradable (laptops and i/eMac aside, the PowerMac is upgradable, I've seen G3 towers with 733Mhz G4's in them for example)
Point 2) buying a new mac doesn't mean you have to repurchase all the software you had for the previous one...
Windows XP runs fine on a >300Mhz P2 class machine as long as you throw a big pile of ram at it.. (as in, more than 256MB)
" All data goes through the PCI bus...and it's bandwidth is only 133MB/sec theoretical."
Except of course on boards that have dedicated interlinks between the northbridge and southbridge for IDE/legacy/integrated sound etc.. (VIA KT266 onwards, SiS's recent chipsets, Intel i810 onwards, nForce etc.)