The possibility of add on Intel card to G5 Powemacs

tedndi

Here is a little nugget of a thought experiment that I came across. It details the idea of an add on card to G5 powermacs that would allow for a smooth(er) transition to the Intel platform yet still retain the legacy of the G5.



comments?



http://www.macteens.com/more.php?id=1034_0_1_0

hmurchison

Add in cards are poor performers because you're cramming everything into PCIs anemic bus. Even PCI-X wouldn't offer that much improvement.

the one to rescue

Same report on french site www.macbidouille.com (for those who can read French). Not so irrelevant since Apple built add-on cards with x86 CPUs on them on their Performas and early Powermacs.

Anyway, if this ever sees the light of day, expect crappy performances (PCI-X) and a Classic-like environment or dual-boot to run Mac OS X for Intel on your G5.

tedndi

What about through the agp port?



or could there be another way. Perhaps remove one of the Power PC chips in the dualie and plug a pin compatable cord to the PC card?



could that work?

xool

One of the perks of the MacIntel machines is that it should run windows natively. I don't think these FrankenMac machines with intel add-on processors will perform as well nor be compatible in the same manner.

the one to rescue

Quote:

Originally posted by TednDi

What about through the agp port?



or could there be another way. Perhaps remove one of the Power PC chips in the dualie and plug a pin compatable cord to the PC card?



could that work?

The AGP port is used by the video card. Well, you could move the video card on a PCI-X port and then have crappy performance in both PPC AND Intel worlds. Not so good. Plus AGP is not a symetrical bus. You read data faster than you write data on an AGP bus (ie with AGP 8x, reads are 8 times faster), which is quite OK for the GPU since it doesn't have to send huge amounts of data to the CPU, but which is not that good for communication between CPUs...



Replacing a PPC chip by a x86 is all but feasible! Even if you could replace it on the mobo, you'd have to replace the chipset, and most of the components of the mobo to have it run properly. Purely impossible.

tedndi

last question



what about using 2 pci ports?



I know that pretty much clogs the powermac but you could move everything to firewire 800 for i/o and still not have to buy a new mac for a little while.

chris000001

The easiest most efective thing to do would be replaceing the mobo and cpu....like the guy in the article said a mobo/cpu combo upgrade kit. but then you would have to but a graphics card because all the intel chipsets will probably br running PCIe(pci express) and more than likley upgrade to DDR2 ram and but the time you have done this you have pracitcally bought a new machine cept for hard drive and optical drive and case. so this is pretty much usless. you could never run an intel chip thru the pci or pci-x bus they would never provide enough bandwidth... considering the new dual core intel chips have a 20 gig bandwidth with the ram.

tedndi

So then, you really are looking at a legacy machine?

emig647

Ummm... I fail to see the point of putting an intel card in a g5 powermac? Anything going through the southbridge (pci-x, usb, fw, etc) is going to be slooooooooooow. The g5's are quick... everything is universal binary... the code isn't changing here. You're going to get the same performance through a universal binary application (ones that run on intel machines and ppc machines) as you would as a stand alone ppc application (carbon or cocoa). There is no need to slap an x86 chip in a ppc.