Notice that the Mac tests included a dual Opteron 246 in order to beat the Dual G5 in the photoshop benchmarks.
The dual Polycomm dual Opteron is around $4200 in the closest configuration that I could build on their site.. but that was with dual Opteron 244s because they don't offer the 246s in the BTO site yet. The opteron that beat the Mac in Photoshop isn't even available yet.
Hmn... Not to mention that there are fairly significant changes between the G4 and the G5 that haven't been optimized for yet.
Athlon is a great chip, but it's been around longer than the PPC 970. There is better compiler support for it and the software vendors have had more time to tweak for it. Not to mention that IBM has diverged from Moto in some very real ways that affect performance on G4 optimized code.
They are both plenty fast, but we are just beginning to see what the G5 can do while the Opteron is a bit farter down the track in that regard.
We've got an Apple IIe running a Mass Spectrometer....
A 286 running some physics code (that relies on the slow clock timing...
A 486 processing images from an Electron Microscope (well we just upgraded that to a Pentium 1 about a week ago)...
And we just put up our AD test tree, it's a dual P2 running in a Dell Series 310 case (386). We put in a slot loading CDrom so it looks like the 5 1/4" floppy is still installed.:-)
2) 5 million is the cost of the project.... that is 1100 Macs with (I think) 4 GB of ram and 160 GB HDs, GigE and FW800 on board, Infiniband cards, Customized 19" racks, a customized cooling solution.... The Macs were just a fraction of the overall cost, a sizeable fraction but there were a lot of other significant costs.
Aside from SPEC, what would you benchmark with to compare an itanium and a G5? The Itanium software list makes that Mac platform look like it's brimming over with available titles.
Apple isn't even a niche player when compared to Itanium. Itanium and the G5 don't come close to playing on the same field (price, use, target audience) so there really isn't a reason to compare them.
maybe it would fair if we compared 2 dual processor G5s to 1 dual 900MHz Itanium workstation since that's about where the pricing would come in.
Opteron is another matter. AMD insists that Opteron is a server chip that does double duty in workstations. With Apple claiming that the G5 is a personal computer (a $3000 dual processor personal computer), AMD is keeping themselves out of contention as a competetor. Once the Athlon 64 hits (tomorrow), Apple will feel more pressure to deal with x86-64 comparisons. Right now, they can dodge on symantics.
sorry, thought the subject would get people's attention.
I do want to make a case for OS X though.
Mac software has historically carried a lower support cost than software on other platforms (though I'm sure any differences are much smaller now than in the Win98 and earlier days)
Mac users spend more on software than Windows users (per user per year). Mac OS users exist in a slightly different culture... a culture where you're so happy to see the software you want on the shelf that you actually buy it instead of just firing up Morpheus. The only real exception to this 'rule' are poor designers... they swap Adobe licenses like it's going out of style...
Apple _finally_ has hardware that will run modern games nicely. I'm not sure I've been able to say this since the Blue and White G3 days (when Intel started to pull away).
Here's the deal... OS X is an easier sell for a company like Valve. You have a supported OS (don't start about the wealth of great linux support on the web, I know it's out there but corporations put more value in a manned phone line). You have robust graphic drivers and a company behind them that would be very happy to help you with any issues you find. You have a large corporation who would back your development efforts... heck HL2 would probably end up on the index of http://www.apple.com
what does this buy Linux users? They get an OpenGL 1.4 codebase from the OS X project. The only thing left to port is the networking and coreaudio... repackage the installer.... badda bing.
"the beatles wrote all their own lyrics and music"
haha... A significant portion of the early beatles catalog is comprised of covers of other artists. The beatles got famous remaking rockabilly songs. If you think the beatles were so revolutionary through out all of their careers, what do you think about Carl Perkins?
I mailed the barefeats guy but haven't heard back yet...
The photoshop tests indicate version 7.0, while Adobe has posted some optimised libraries and plugins for 7.0.1 that supposedly speed up some functions considerably.
I haven't heard back as to whether the author actually used 7.0.[0] or the slightly optimised 7.0.1.
so far, I'm pretty happy with the reported G5 performance considering how different the architecture is to the G4. Apple's in a very odd position for a Computer Company right now. Instead of releasing increasingly bloated software that runs ever slower, requiring ever faster hardware... their hardware is getting faster and the software is speeding up. i'm running Panther now and it is noticeably faster at many tasks.:-) The same seems to be the case for the G5 in general... it's only going to get faster.
All of the physicists I know use the same tools, but a lot of them do it all on the Mac. The Quartz interface is display PDF so they can produce PDFs from anywere without acrobat. We put LaTeX / TeXShop and Ghostscript on all their machines... they visualize data with GNUPlot and other tools, and they can actually read their colleagues Word docs when they have to.
Best quote so far... one of our National Metal of Science winners said 'I guess I can actually do research on my desktop now'... after I installed his new dual G4 recently.
The mac is actually a great tool for Physicists and other like types. It's really the convergence of the workstation and the desktop.. and it got a lot better as of Monday (well, August to be fair;-)
As far as I know (and I could certainly be wrong), a person [vendor, organization,...] is not required to accept more than 25 cents in pennies as real currency. Just about everyone will accept more, but they don't have to... In other words, you can't punish the store clerk down the street by bringing in 200lbs of pennies when he is busy.
For the most part, Apple Store employees are actually very informed. It's kind of the Mac Geeks Dream Job so they usually get the cream of the crop.
I do, however, occasionally hear about Apple store employees that don't seem to know what they are talking about. The mac folk here would probably appreciate it if you mentioned which store you had this problem in... I'm sure apple would like to, ahem, re-educate her... Maybe an increased dose of Kool-aid too.;-)
Anywho... Yes, OS X ships with apache (and perl, and sendmail, and (I believe) proftp, and yadda, yadda, yadda). OS X Server has all the same, but they ship Apache 2.x.x, they enable more stuff... they give you everything else you'd expect right out of the box (dhcp, netboot server, QuickTime streaming server, and a load of really nice tools to monitor you box (though some require xServe hardware).
The G4 really was a supercomputer at launch... but only by the letter of the law. The G4, capable of over 1GFlop, came in north of the Federal definition of a Supercomputer (in relation to the export of arms). So.. you couldn't ship the Macs to any 'enemy' country like Libya... or even to France... at least not right after they were released.
The US Govt. quickly revised the rules. I believe supercomputers are just north of 50GFlops now.... so Apple could get real close again with an SMP 970... if you go by Altivec performance again.;-) A dual 2.5 GHz machine would be capable of up to 40GFlops (max theoretical) by Apple's calculations.;-) hehe.
several insiders mention how Microsoft was caught using quite a bit of code directly from the older MacOS codebase in Windows.
almost correct.
Actually, Video for Windows was found to have a significant ammount of Quicktime for Windows code in it. Apple was able to demonstrate thousands of lines of code that were identical. They were also able to show that Video for Windows ran significantly slower without Apple's code.
As far as I know, it was never proven that Microsoft knowingly stole that code. Microsoft outsourced some work to a development company that Apple just happened to use for Quicktime for Windows. Maybe the company cut corners by stealing Apple's code, maybe M$ got them to do it... it never got that far. The issue was dropped (along with other IP contentions) when the deal came through.
How about, instead of banning MS software, this person offers to subsidize faculty/staff/student purchases for non-MS licenses. Buy a Mac, get 20% subsidized. Buy a software license for something that directly competes with an MS app or license and have his fund kick in some money. This would certainly work for Unix boxes.. but maybe you could even offer discounts for x86 boxes that were preinstalled with Linux.. if the faculty/staff/student signs a contract to NOT install an MS product on it.
This person could even kick in money to make an open-office package the standard for the university. $500K for training and deployment of an opensource office suite.. plus the licensing money they'd save!... just an idea. Don't lock MS out, just make it more attractive to NOT use them.
The price/performance actually isn't that bad. I've spec'ed out 1U servers, xServes and dual athlon/dual Xeon boxes. After you trick out the x86 boxes, you are pretty much in the same ballpark. Granted, you'll get faster processors on the x86 boxes... but Altivec runs encryption rather nice so your SSL routines will run fast on the G4 server.:-) I think it's really a well priced product, considering the type of performance you actually get out of it.
It's just too bad they didn't get an up to date CPU from Motorola. I was REALLY hoping that Moto would have delivered a PPC 7457 with 512K L2 cache... and possibly DDR FSB support... but you can never over-estimate MOTO
It's been made painfully clear that this person didn't bother looking at ANY of the xServe specs. Isn't it about time they were mod'ed out of existance?
you really need to lighten up. If your friends purchased an iMac after the 7th, they'll get new apps FOR FREE!!
Apple only charges for very significant updates to their software. They released OS 10.1 for free, 9.2 (with 10.1), 9.1, 8.6, 8.1... They've also released pretty big updates to a host of other apps for free. Current Mac users enjoy iTunes 3 as a free upgrade (as they did iTunes 2). In my opinion, Apple has a history of releasing a significant ammount of updates for free. They also don't force you to tie your OS releases to your serial code. They don't raid your company to bust you for license violations.
So what does Apple actually charge for? What drives Mac users so unbelievably hostile?
Major OS revisions like 7.x -> 8, 8 -> 8.5, 8.5 -> 9, classic to X, and yes X to X.2. The old OS X 10.2 outrage! The OS X to X.2 upgrade was probably much more significant than any of the other past upgrades. OS X.2 included an update of the entire BSD core from the 3.4 code base to the 4.3 code base. The development tools were majorly updated, the bundled Apps were majorly updated... The only reason 10.2 didn't warrant a bigger OS number was because Apple has so much invested in OS X marketing that they don't plan to run out of 10.x numbers anytime soon. This in no way dimishes the scope or breadth of the update.
Now it all starts again with the iApps. Apple has already done this in the past. iMovie 2 was not a free update from iMovie and no one seemed to care. If Adobe gave you widget bundled with photoshop 10, but then only included widget updates with new purchases of photoshop, no one would care... especially if widget v1 was a really nice App.
The reality is, no one will really care about this change. New macs will come with new versions of the apps. Apple has never been big on narc'ing people on their software. They don't even have registration codes unless the software is VERY expensive or very ubiquitous like Quicktime{pro}. People will use the new copies on their old machines... but most people probably won't bother because the existing apps do everything they need to.
in reality... the whole thing will be a non-issue even if Apple does implement this... I have a real feeling that if this does happen,.Mac users will get the updates for free anyway. It adds further value to.Mac. Now, not only do you get 100MB of space, email, backups, software, deals (like free photos) for $100 a year {$65/year for edu, $50 for existing iTools members}....ffakr
Deerfield is supposed to be the 'low cost' IA64 chip. Problem is, the performance of the IA64 right now (and in the near future), combined with the fact that Deerfield must be castrated to be small/low power enough, means that it won't fair well. Right now, the P4 is faster than the Itanium. P4 should make 3 GHz this year, probably hit 2.5 by the summer release. If one were to believe Intel's PR machine, a Dual P4 should easily overpower the enormous, expensive McKinley. Deerfield will be McKinleyMX (to borrow Nvidia's naming conventions). It will be a smaller, castrated processor. It will still be big, and it will perform poorly on a price/performance basis. I would expect that you will still be able to get a dual Athlon or dual P4 system for less, and the dualie will blow it away. The only thing that IA64 has going for it is 64 bit address space.
... and don't forget, deerfield isn't expected till sometime in 2003 (and remember how well Intel keeps to IA64 schedules). Expect Deerfield to be a major disappointment by the time its released. It will be directly competing with: SMP.13micron Athlon systems Hammer systems SMP P4 systems (at over 3GHz per CPU) SMP G4 (7470?) systems SMP G5 systems (Yes, they will be out by then;-)
Apparently, verndors are being told that the current G4 desktop line will be available for another month.
Coincidently, the current G4/monitor deal runs until January 31st.
I expect that the new desktop will be released in about a month.
I think there are 3 possible reasons for this...
1) the intended design just didn't come together and Apple would have moved no current stock if they pre-announced a new model (or maybe they have too much current stock)
2) The new model... perhaps an Apollo G4... would be soon eclipsed by another, more powerful model like the G5. If this were the case, Apple would be foolish to release the Apollo G4s. They would loose money on the current G4 inventory, they would also take costs to retool the line and they would have additional parts/support costs. If the G5 is close behind, Apple would have to go through the same problem all over again... this wouldn't allow the Apollo line to adequately cover it's roll out costs.
3) The lamest reason possible... the new hardware was ready but the desktop is selling well enough and they didn't want to eclipse the iMac roll out.
A few people are complaining fo the game performance of the G4 (I haven't drilled too low in the threads so I assume there are quite a few such sentiments).
I wonder if anyone of these critics have played Games on a G4? My dual 450 runs just fine with OSX or OS 9.x. I've just recently upgraded it to a GeForce 2MX and it Screams with AvP [and other games] under OSX, and it will even run Rune in OS 9 compatibility layer under OSX, though performance could be better (but hey, it's emulation).
OS10.1 is supposed to bring optimized Nvidia drivers and GL performance of up to +20% and thats literally days away.
http://www.omnigroup.com are currently finishing the port of Giants from a DirectX PC game to an OpenGL version for the Mac. They are claiming that their MP ready, GL version gets the same frame rates on a dual G4 500mhz with a GeForce 2mx as they see on their PC (Athlon 1.3 GHz with GeForce 3). Doesn't sound too bad to me.
Just because mac users have a crappy selection, doesn't automatically mean that the processor can't run current games. Also doesn't mean that Altivec (or vector math in general) can't be useful in games.
Now, this gets me round to something that I've told Apple in the past (which they've certainly ignored).
If Apple want's to really make a dent in PC market share, they need to not only support Game developers from an intellectual standpoint... they need to support the game developers in a very real sense.
Here is my proposal:
*Apple tends to pull a profit of 100-250 Million in profit per quarter over the last few years. Take a relatively small investment, say 20 Million dollars, and set up a Game task force.
*The agenda of the task force would be to increase cross platform development of cutting edge games, and to provide for releases on the Mac ahead of PC versions.
*Step one is to hire and train talented programmers, let's assume that at ~$100,000 per year they can get 30 quality programmers for about 3 mill. Tack on $500,000 for contacts, managers...
*Train these programmers with the inside knowledge available from Apple, turn a few around to train game developer employees at Apple (free of charge of course).
*offer the rest out as hired guns. If Id is short handed, or if they need inside knowledge about OSX, assign 4 programmers to work exclusively with Id (for free!!!) on the next big thing.
*For other vendors, like activision, that often don't release Mac versions of thier software you offer developers to work on the port. The best offer would be give us a few programmers to train, and we'll provide you with some for free... and you get access to free hardware, sneak peaks, and insider info on the OS internals. Plus, you get a port that you can sell with very little or no expense.
*any money not spent on staff, should be spent to ensure that the 'development partners' get equipment grants, training... etc. Smaller developers could demonstrate working demos or proof of concept and apply for training or machine grants, but maybe not free staff.
*Mac Faithful developers should ABSOLUTELY be treated very well also, including development hardware, access to upcomming boxes, and free training and code consultation.
*Finally, a portion of that money should be kept in reserve for bribery. Find a legal way to offer release insentives. If Quake 4 will be ready July 1 of 2002 for cross platform release, offer Id $200,000 to release the Mac version 2 weeks early. It won't hurt their sales overall, and they get an immediate $200,000 at launch... even better, give them 4 checks of $50,000 as they meet development goals. This may not mean much for Id, but for a smaller, promising game house it means that a long development cycle would get VC during production and they wouldn't have to wait till it was done.
A program like this a year ago might have keep Bungee out of Microsoft's hands and we might have gotten the Mac version of Halo before the xbox version. At the very least, if Apple could add the next 10 or even 20 best of class games (in addition to what they normally get developed) over the next year it would make a huge difference in their market acceptance. Getting key games early, even if only by a few weeks would only help more. [when Q3 test came out for Mac first, my G3 lab was packed every night... some students even said they used a Mac for the first time to play that game and they really liked it]
Once it started, the movement would hopefully gain momentium... game companies with staff trained on OSX porting would be more likely to release Mac versions since the staff is there already (and Apple would help...). More games would spurn more Home purchases of Apple hardware which would in turn urge even more game manufacturers to look at mac versions of their games.
Apple should also note that the 'geek factor' can be swung over to them. Geeks play games, geeks use linux, geeks keep a win98se partition only to play games and run Word on the ocassions that they really need it. Unfortunately the Linux game market does not look good, especially with the exit of Loki. Make the games, release the G5, open OSX even more and the geeks will come... and they will tell their families and friends that OSX is the place to be (because then they won't waste their time fixing the family windoze boxes like I do).
Well, I'd have to take issue with the claim that there are no native cocoa apps.
This may be technically true, there are some very nice Mac OSX only apps that although not 'big name' are none the less quite nice. The products at Omnigroup are all nice. Stone Studios products are nice but they could use a nice how to book.
On the near horizon, Adobe Illustrator 10 and Quark 5 are nearing release (both demonstrated at MWNY in July) and they are both, to the best of my knowledge, Cocoa native. They both look VERY, VERY cool.
Office for OSX will also be Cocoa native... not that MS will want to empower Linux, but I believe that MS departments will go for profit where ever it is found... Just look at the Mac market back around 96 when every was SURE that the Mac was dead... MS releases a PPC native Office, mainly because Office was pulling in about 400 Million a year on the Mac way back then.
I think the could only be good for Linux... it will hopefully be good for the Mac OSX community. Tools written here will be very portable to the Mac.
Now if Apple was REALLY smart (hey, they could be once or twice a decade), they would support this project in a big way and they would fund the porting of their _very_ nice free development enviornment to Linux... perhaps built on this foundation.
Apple, you could gain HUGE amounts of respect in the linux community by doing this. You will also gain access to more industrial strength Linux tools for OSX, an OS that will be sound at release 10.1 but which will still be in desperate need of diverse apps.
Slashdot Mirror
Notice that the Mac tests included a dual Opteron 246 in order to beat the Dual G5 in the photoshop benchmarks.
The dual Polycomm dual Opteron is around $4200 in the closest configuration that I could build on their site.. but that was with dual Opteron 244s because they don't offer the 246s in the BTO site yet.
The opteron that beat the Mac in Photoshop isn't even available yet.
Hmn...
Not to mention that there are fairly significant changes between the G4 and the G5 that haven't been optimized for yet.
Athlon is a great chip, but it's been around longer than the PPC 970. There is better compiler support for it and the software vendors have had more time to tweak for it. Not to mention that IBM has diverged from Moto in some very real ways that affect performance on G4 optimized code.
They are both plenty fast, but we are just beginning to see what the G5 can do while the Opteron is a bit farter down the track in that regard.
ffakr.
We've got an Apple IIe running a Mass Spectrometer....
:-)
A 286 running some physics code (that relies on the slow clock timing...
A 486 processing images from an Electron Microscope (well we just upgraded that to a Pentium 1 about a week ago)...
And we just put up our AD test tree, it's a dual P2 running in a Dell Series 310 case (386). We put in a slot loading CDrom so it looks like the 5 1/4" floppy is still installed.
1) your link doesn't work
2) 5 million is the cost of the project.... that is 1100 Macs with (I think) 4 GB of ram and 160 GB HDs, GigE and FW800 on board, Infiniband cards, Customized 19" racks, a customized cooling solution.... The Macs were just a fraction of the overall cost, a sizeable fraction but there were a lot of other significant costs.
Aside from SPEC, what would you benchmark with to compare an itanium and a G5?
The Itanium software list makes that Mac platform look like it's brimming over with available titles.
Apple isn't even a niche player when compared to Itanium. Itanium and the G5 don't come close to playing on the same field (price, use, target audience) so there really isn't a reason to compare them.
maybe it would fair if we compared 2 dual processor G5s to 1 dual 900MHz Itanium workstation since that's about where the pricing would come in.
Opteron is another matter. AMD insists that Opteron is a server chip that does double duty in workstations. With Apple claiming that the G5 is a personal computer (a $3000 dual processor personal computer), AMD is keeping themselves out of contention as a competetor. Once the Athlon 64 hits (tomorrow), Apple will feel more pressure to deal with x86-64 comparisons. Right now, they can dodge on symantics.
"P.s. If you think the G5 "Looks nice" you must have just had a stroke.
/ pe dge_6600_frontrack.jpg
Hey man, what have you got agaist cheese graters?"
Yea, CheezeGrater Computers suck.
http://di.dell.com/images/global/products/pedge
sorry, thought the subject would get people's attention.
I do want to make a case for OS X though.
Mac software has historically carried a lower support cost than software on other platforms (though I'm sure any differences are much smaller now than in the Win98 and earlier days)
Mac users spend more on software than Windows users (per user per year). Mac OS users exist in a slightly different culture... a culture where you're so happy to see the software you want on the shelf that you actually buy it instead of just firing up Morpheus. The only real exception to this 'rule' are poor designers... they swap Adobe licenses like it's going out of style...
Apple _finally_ has hardware that will run modern games nicely. I'm not sure I've been able to say this since the Blue and White G3 days (when Intel started to pull away).
Here's the deal... OS X is an easier sell for a company like Valve. You have a supported OS (don't start about the wealth of great linux support on the web, I know it's out there but corporations put more value in a manned phone line). You have robust graphic drivers and a company behind them that would be very happy to help you with any issues you find. You have a large corporation who would back your development efforts... heck HL2 would probably end up on the index of http://www.apple.com
what does this buy Linux users? They get an OpenGL 1.4 codebase from the OS X project. The only thing left to port is the networking and coreaudio... repackage the installer.... badda bing.
"stupid ffakr" -- that's me.
"the beatles wrote all their own lyrics and music"
haha... A significant portion of the early beatles catalog is comprised of covers of other artists. The beatles got famous remaking rockabilly songs.
If you think the beatles were so revolutionary through out all of their careers, what do you think about Carl Perkins?
I mailed the barefeats guy but haven't heard back yet...
:-) The same seems to be the case for the G5 in general... it's only going to get faster.
The photoshop tests indicate version 7.0, while Adobe has posted some optimised libraries and plugins for 7.0.1 that supposedly speed up some functions considerably.
I haven't heard back as to whether the author actually used 7.0.[0] or the slightly optimised 7.0.1.
so far, I'm pretty happy with the reported G5 performance considering how different the architecture is to the G4.
Apple's in a very odd position for a Computer Company right now. Instead of releasing increasingly bloated software that runs ever slower, requiring ever faster hardware... their hardware is getting faster and the software is speeding up. i'm running Panther now and it is noticeably faster at many tasks.
if by "all technical" you mean accurate, yes. :-)
You said that Apple just needs to tweak an x86 bsd kernel to get OS X to run on X86 and that isn't even close to accurate.
actually, the kernel is Mach. The core of the OS is Darwin. Darwin is based off FreeBSD. Mach is based off... Mach. Freebsd has a different kernel.
Mach has run on x86 though (NeXT ran Mach on x86).
All of the physicists I know use the same tools, but a lot of them do it all on the Mac. The Quartz interface is display PDF so they can produce PDFs from anywere without acrobat. We put LaTeX / TeXShop and Ghostscript on all their machines... they visualize data with GNUPlot and other tools, and they can actually read their colleagues Word docs when they have to.
Best quote so far... one of our National Metal of Science winners said 'I guess I can actually do research on my desktop now'... after I installed his new dual G4 recently.
The mac is actually a great tool for Physicists and other like types. It's really the convergence of the workstation and the desktop.. and it got a lot better as of Monday (well, August to be fair ;-)
As far as I know (and I could certainly be wrong), a person [vendor, organization, ...] is not required to accept more than 25 cents in pennies as real currency.
Just about everyone will accept more, but they don't have to... In other words, you can't punish the store clerk down the street by bringing in 200lbs of pennies when he is busy.
For the most part, Apple Store employees are actually very informed. It's kind of the Mac Geeks Dream Job so they usually get the cream of the crop.
;-)
I do, however, occasionally hear about Apple store employees that don't seem to know what they are talking about. The mac folk here would probably appreciate it if you mentioned which store you had this problem in... I'm sure apple would like to, ahem, re-educate her... Maybe an increased dose of Kool-aid too.
Anywho... Yes, OS X ships with apache (and perl, and sendmail, and (I believe) proftp, and yadda, yadda, yadda). OS X Server has all the same, but they ship Apache 2.x.x, they enable more stuff... they give you everything else you'd expect right out of the box (dhcp, netboot server, QuickTime streaming server, and a load of really nice tools to monitor you box (though some require xServe hardware).
The G4 really was a supercomputer at launch... but only by the letter of the law. The G4, capable of over 1GFlop, came in north of the Federal definition of a Supercomputer (in relation to the export of arms). So.. you couldn't ship the Macs to any 'enemy' country like Libya... or even to France... at least not right after they were released.
;-) A dual 2.5 GHz machine would be capable of up to 40GFlops (max theoretical) by Apple's calculations. ;-) hehe.
The US Govt. quickly revised the rules. I believe supercomputers are just north of 50GFlops now.... so Apple could get real close again with an SMP 970... if you go by Altivec performance again.
almost correct.
Actually, Video for Windows was found to have a significant ammount of Quicktime for Windows code in it. Apple was able to demonstrate thousands of lines of code that were identical. They were also able to show that Video for Windows ran significantly slower without Apple's code.
As far as I know, it was never proven that Microsoft knowingly stole that code. Microsoft outsourced some work to a development company that Apple just happened to use for Quicktime for Windows. Maybe the company cut corners by stealing Apple's code, maybe M$ got them to do it... it never got that far. The issue was dropped (along with other IP contentions) when the deal came through.
The educational price is $2,299. Very nice.
How about, instead of banning MS software, this person offers to subsidize faculty/staff/student purchases for non-MS licenses.
... just an idea. Don't lock MS out, just make it more attractive to NOT use them.
Buy a Mac, get 20% subsidized. Buy a software license for something that directly competes with an MS app or license and have his fund kick in some money.
This would certainly work for Unix boxes.. but maybe you could even offer discounts for x86 boxes that were preinstalled with Linux.. if the faculty/staff/student signs a contract to NOT install an MS product on it.
This person could even kick in money to make an open-office package the standard for the university. $500K for training and deployment of an opensource office suite.. plus the licensing money they'd save!
The price/performance actually isn't that bad. I've spec'ed out 1U servers, xServes and dual athlon/dual Xeon boxes. After you trick out the x86 boxes, you are pretty much in the same ballpark. :-)
Granted, you'll get faster processors on the x86 boxes... but Altivec runs encryption rather nice so your SSL routines will run fast on the G4 server.
I think it's really a well priced product, considering the type of performance you actually get out of it.
It's just too bad they didn't get an up to date CPU from Motorola. I was REALLY hoping that Moto would have delivered a PPC 7457 with 512K L2 cache... and possibly DDR FSB support... but you can never over-estimate MOTO
It's been made painfully clear that this person didn't bother looking at ANY of the xServe specs. Isn't it about time they were mod'ed out of existance?
OK... Slashdot, News for Nerds.
/. is supposed to post news, not crazy rumors.
News!!
I'm a mac geek and I'm combing the mac rumors sites like any hard core mac geek, but
Sheesh! How long till CNN starts posting breaking stories about Apple rumors?
you really need to lighten up.
.Mac users will get the updates for free anyway. It adds further value to .Mac. Now, not only do you get 100MB of space, email, backups, software, deals (like free photos) for $100 a year {$65/year for edu, $50 for existing iTools members}. ...ffakr
If your friends purchased an iMac after the 7th, they'll get new apps FOR FREE!!
Apple only charges for very significant updates to their software. They released OS 10.1 for free, 9.2 (with 10.1), 9.1, 8.6, 8.1... They've also released pretty big updates to a host of other apps for free. Current Mac users enjoy iTunes 3 as a free upgrade (as they did iTunes 2). In my opinion, Apple has a history of releasing a significant ammount of updates for free. They also don't force you to tie your OS releases to your serial code. They don't raid your company to bust you for license violations.
So what does Apple actually charge for? What drives Mac users so unbelievably hostile?
Major OS revisions like 7.x -> 8, 8 -> 8.5, 8.5 -> 9, classic to X, and yes X to X.2. The old OS X 10.2 outrage! The OS X to X.2 upgrade was probably much more significant than any of the other past upgrades. OS X.2 included an update of the entire BSD core from the 3.4 code base to the 4.3 code base. The development tools were majorly updated, the bundled Apps were majorly updated... The only reason 10.2 didn't warrant a bigger OS number was because Apple has so much invested in OS X marketing that they don't plan to run out of 10.x numbers anytime soon. This in no way dimishes the scope or breadth of the update.
Now it all starts again with the iApps. Apple has already done this in the past. iMovie 2 was not a free update from iMovie and no one seemed to care. If Adobe gave you widget bundled with photoshop 10, but then only included widget updates with new purchases of photoshop, no one would care... especially if widget v1 was a really nice App.
The reality is, no one will really care about this change. New macs will come with new versions of the apps. Apple has never been big on narc'ing people on their software. They don't even have registration codes unless the software is VERY expensive or very ubiquitous like Quicktime{pro}. People will use the new copies on their old machines... but most people probably won't bother because the existing apps do everything they need to.
in reality... the whole thing will be a non-issue even if Apple does implement this... I have a real feeling that if this does happen,
Deerfield is supposed to be the 'low cost' IA64 chip. Problem is, the performance of the IA64 right now (and in the near future), combined with the fact that Deerfield must be castrated to be small/low power enough, means that it won't fair well.
.13micron Athlon systems ;-)
Right now, the P4 is faster than the Itanium. P4 should make 3 GHz this year, probably hit 2.5 by the summer release. If one were to believe Intel's PR machine, a Dual P4 should easily overpower the enormous, expensive McKinley.
Deerfield will be McKinleyMX (to borrow Nvidia's naming conventions). It will be a smaller, castrated processor. It will still be big, and it will perform poorly on a price/performance basis. I would expect that you will still be able to get a dual Athlon or dual P4 system for less, and the dualie will blow it away. The only thing that IA64 has going for it is 64 bit address space.
... and don't forget, deerfield isn't expected till sometime in 2003 (and remember how well Intel keeps to IA64 schedules). Expect Deerfield to be a major disappointment by the time its released.
It will be directly competing with:
SMP
Hammer systems
SMP P4 systems (at over 3GHz per CPU)
SMP G4 (7470?) systems
SMP G5 systems (Yes, they will be out by then
...stupid Ffakr
Apparently, verndors are being told that the current G4 desktop line will be available for another month.
Coincidently, the current G4/monitor deal runs until January 31st.
I expect that the new desktop will be released in about a month.
I think there are 3 possible reasons for this...
1) the intended design just didn't come together and Apple would have moved no current stock if they pre-announced a new model (or maybe they have too much current stock)
2) The new model... perhaps an Apollo G4... would be soon eclipsed by another, more powerful model like the G5. If this were the case, Apple would be foolish to release the Apollo G4s. They would loose money on the current G4 inventory, they would also take costs to retool the line and they would have additional parts/support costs. If the G5 is close behind, Apple would have to go through the same problem all over again... this wouldn't allow the Apollo line to adequately cover it's roll out costs.
3) The lamest reason possible... the new hardware was ready but the desktop is selling well enough and they didn't want to eclipse the iMac roll out.
I think each explanation has merit.
...ffakr
I wonder if anyone of these critics have played Games on a G4? My dual 450 runs just fine with OSX or OS 9.x. I've just recently upgraded it to a GeForce 2MX and it Screams with AvP [and other games] under OSX, and it will even run Rune in OS 9 compatibility layer under OSX, though performance could be better (but hey, it's emulation).
OS10.1 is supposed to bring optimized Nvidia drivers and GL performance of up to +20% and thats literally days away.
http://www.omnigroup.com are currently finishing the port of Giants from a DirectX PC game to an OpenGL version for the Mac. They are claiming that their MP ready, GL version gets the same frame rates on a dual G4 500mhz with a GeForce 2mx as they see on their PC (Athlon 1.3 GHz with GeForce 3). Doesn't sound too bad to me.
Just because mac users have a crappy selection, doesn't automatically mean that the processor can't run current games. Also doesn't mean that Altivec (or vector math in general) can't be useful in games.
Now, this gets me round to something that I've told Apple in the past (which they've certainly ignored).
If Apple want's to really make a dent in PC market share, they need to not only support Game developers from an intellectual standpoint... they need to support the game developers in a very real sense.
Here is my proposal:
*Apple tends to pull a profit of 100-250 Million in profit per quarter over the last few years. Take a relatively small investment, say 20 Million dollars, and set up a Game task force.
*The agenda of the task force would be to increase cross platform development of cutting edge games, and to provide for releases on the Mac ahead of PC versions.
*Step one is to hire and train talented programmers, let's assume that at ~$100,000 per year they can get 30 quality programmers for about 3 mill. Tack on $500,000 for contacts, managers...
*Train these programmers with the inside knowledge available from Apple, turn a few around to train game developer employees at Apple (free of charge of course).
*offer the rest out as hired guns. If Id is short handed, or if they need inside knowledge about OSX, assign 4 programmers to work exclusively with Id (for free!!!) on the next big thing.
*For other vendors, like activision, that often don't release Mac versions of thier software you offer developers to work on the port. The best offer would be give us a few programmers to train, and we'll provide you with some for free... and you get access to free hardware, sneak peaks, and insider info on the OS internals. Plus, you get a port that you can sell with very little or no expense.
*any money not spent on staff, should be spent to ensure that the 'development partners' get equipment grants, training... etc. Smaller developers could demonstrate working demos or proof of concept and apply for training or machine grants, but maybe not free staff.
*Mac Faithful developers should ABSOLUTELY be treated very well also, including development hardware, access to upcomming boxes, and free training and code consultation.
*Finally, a portion of that money should be kept in reserve for bribery. Find a legal way to offer release insentives. If Quake 4 will be ready July 1 of 2002 for cross platform release, offer Id $200,000 to release the Mac version 2 weeks early. It won't hurt their sales overall, and they get an immediate $200,000 at launch... even better, give them 4 checks of $50,000 as they meet development goals. This may not mean much for Id, but for a smaller, promising game house it means that a long development cycle would get VC during production and they wouldn't have to wait till it was done.
A program like this a year ago might have keep Bungee out of Microsoft's hands and we might have gotten the Mac version of Halo before the xbox version. At the very least, if Apple could add the next 10 or even 20 best of class games (in addition to what they normally get developed) over the next year it would make a huge difference in their market acceptance. Getting key games early, even if only by a few weeks would only help more. [when Q3 test came out for Mac first, my G3 lab was packed every night... some students even said they used a Mac for the first time to play that game and they really liked it]
Once it started, the movement would hopefully gain momentium... game companies with staff trained on OSX porting would be more likely to release Mac versions since the staff is there already (and Apple would help...). More games would spurn more Home purchases of Apple hardware which would in turn urge even more game manufacturers to look at mac versions of their games.
Apple should also note that the 'geek factor' can be swung over to them. Geeks play games, geeks use linux, geeks keep a win98se partition only to play games and run Word on the ocassions that they really need it. Unfortunately the Linux game market does not look good, especially with the exit of Loki. Make the games, release the G5, open OSX even more and the geeks will come... and they will tell their families and friends that OSX is the place to be (because then they won't waste their time fixing the family windoze boxes like I do).
Just my humble ideas, what cha think? Steven.
This may be technically true, there are some very nice Mac OSX only apps that although not 'big name' are none the less quite nice. The products at Omnigroup are all nice. Stone Studios products are nice but they could use a nice how to book.
On the near horizon, Adobe Illustrator 10 and Quark 5 are nearing release (both demonstrated at MWNY in July) and they are both, to the best of my knowledge, Cocoa native. They both look VERY, VERY cool.
Office for OSX will also be Cocoa native... not that MS will want to empower Linux, but I believe that MS departments will go for profit where ever it is found... Just look at the Mac market back around 96 when every was SURE that the Mac was dead... MS releases a PPC native Office, mainly because Office was pulling in about 400 Million a year on the Mac way back then.
I think the could only be good for Linux... it will hopefully be good for the Mac OSX community. Tools written here will be very portable to the Mac.
Now if Apple was REALLY smart (hey, they could be once or twice a decade), they would support this project in a big way and they would fund the porting of their _very_ nice free development enviornment to Linux... perhaps built on this foundation.
Apple, you could gain HUGE amounts of respect in the linux community by doing this. You will also gain access to more industrial strength Linux tools for OSX, an OS that will be sound at release 10.1 but which will still be in desperate need of diverse apps.
Steven (stupid Ffakr)