A look at the July Power Macs now that we know the Xserve specs - Page 4

[quote]For a high end system, SCSI was the best
way to go pre-1995.
<hr></blockquote>

Like I said, SCSI was a good choice for the non PowerMac macs...then again, before 95 none or only very few configurations came with a drive bigger than 500MB anyway...

But after 95, EIDE would have been the better, and most importantly MUCH CHEAPER, implementation for many customers. Having EIDE (which, btw has a maximum transfer rate of 16.7MB/sec, not 13) and SCSI in the same system was doen, so they could have chosen whether to give users SCSI or IDE harddrives, depending on configuration (as they did with extra UltraSCSI cards and HDs in the Beige G3 shortly after introduction).

What I'm saying is that Apple could have added the same or more performance for significantly less cost starting around 1995, and they didn't.
Strangely enough they did for the cheaper models, but refused to do so for the "PowerMacs".

And I wasn't trying to say that the Beige G3 was revolutionary for the industry, certainly not, but it was for Apple, and for the Mac market, and that counted.

And btw, the G3 266 creamed the 604ev 350 in integer performance,and vice versa in FPU.
For some apps, the G3 was the top level machine, not the mid range thing...even across platforms.

G-news

[quote]Originally posted by Amorph:
<strong>
In that case, nothing will change anything, so you're also disagreeing with yourself.
[ 05-16-2002: Message edited by: Amorph ]</strong><hr></blockquote>

I am? I sure didn't think I was.

From what I see, Apple's PowerMac sales have dropped 23%, and still, there is no forward momentum in their hardware development. Their sales must not have not dropped ENOUGH for them to take action. I guess it's a question of numbers.

Remember Fight Club? If there aren't enough car accidents to be cost-impactive, the automobile manufacturer doesn't have a recall. It's a movie, I realize, but it describes American business practices to a tee.

If Apple continues to make enough money on their iMac/iBook lines, they can effectively offset the losses from their PowerMac line with minimal impact.

[quote]
They have to work with what they have to work with. If the CPUs they have available are better suited to PowerBooks and iMacs than to high-end towers, Apple would be foolish not to concentrate its efforts on PowerBooks and iMacs.

The reason I see their focus as component-driven, rather than as Steve forgetting power users, is that Apple is targetting higher end customers than they ever have.
<hr></blockquote>

I agree completely. I don't think that anyone is "forgetting power users". I'm simply suggesting that no one should blow good money on machines that are 1+ years behind the hardware curve.

[quote]
And (I can't resist asking) have you actually tried a dual-GHz PowerMac? Is the performance actually inadequate for your needs in practice? I'm not saying it isn't, I'm wondering if you've given it a chance. I have, and as far as I can tell the thing just blazes. As some of the engineers on this board have discovered, Apple's 133Mhz bus holds its own against some DDR implementations on the PC side. Quality of implementation matters.
<hr></blockquote>

Ask away! No, I have not used the 2xGig Powermac.

I have used the 800MHz PowerMac, and concluded that $1600 is far too much to spend (for me, personally) on hardware that is outdated right out of the box.

I agree that 512MB of 133MHz SDRAM can be as fast as 256MB of 266MHz DDR, all other things being equal. But I do not perceive Apple has having "quality" in mind when they made the decision to keep their 133MHz bus implementation. Rather, I imagine that they did it because they do not have a cost-effective/plausible implementation that would allow a 266MHz bus to be implemented for current PowerMac designs.

And, yes, I believe that an 800MHz G4 PowerMac is beautifully-fast compared to my 350MHz G3 PowerMac. But that is completely irrelevant. My 1Gig Duron is beautifully-fast compared to my 350MHz G3, also. And it cost $1000 less.

The REAL question is whether the 800MHz G4 is worth the money - now AND a year from now.

[quote]
And it's quite possible that people who look at nothing more than spec sheets do not realize that Apple isn't as far behind as they imagine. Spec sheets are marketing; they're designed to make the product look as good as possible. On the other hand, good engineers pride themselves on doing more with less. This is why there is no love lost between engineers and marketers, generally speaking.
<hr></blockquote>

I'm curious, do you work in the engineering field?

[quote]
Are they behind in some areas? Sure. Woefully behind in running a couple of professional applications (I'm thinking 3D here). Could Apple solve those problems by throwing hardware at them, even though some of them may be specific to the software? Of course. Hardware was eventually able to make even System V UNIX run fast. But I suggest sitting down in front of what they're offering now, if you haven't, and giving it a fair shot first.
<hr></blockquote>

How, exactly, could I give the 2x1Gig PowerMac a fair shot without shelling out $2999?

[quote]
Faster? Name one ATA HDD that comes anywhere close to transferring 66MB/s sustained. If Apple put ATA/100 on a PowerMac tomorrow without telling you, you'd never know they had. I expect Apple to leap up to ATA/133 soon, not for the added bandwidth, but because ATA/133 can address volumes bigger than 137GB, and hard drives are getting up there.
<hr></blockquote>

Whoa! Back up!

What I said was that ATA/66 is outdated. I would challenge you to find a Dell, Gateway, or HP in the PowerMac price range that still used an ATA/66.

And be careful about the word SUSTAINED. There is NO ATA HD out there (to my knowledge) that has a SUSTAINED data transfer rate. It's the same reason why Firewire wipes the floor with USB 2.0. A peak, unstable data rate of 800MB/s is no match for a sustained data rate of 400MB/s.

ATA/100 has the potential to write at 100MB/s in random bursts. Are you telling me that there's NO software out there that would require 100MB/s bursts? Are you telling me that there's NO speed to be gained from 33MB/s MORE data throughput? Are you telling me that there WON'T be software out there that may require this within the next year?

[quote]
If you really want speed, forget the onboard controller and get <a href="http://www.macgurus.com/graphics/customraid.html" target="_blank">one of these</a>.
<hr></blockquote>

Sorry, I don't see the need to pay $2999 AND shell out more cash for more speed. It's a personal preference, but the top of the line machine should offer top of the line performance, hands-down.

Please don't misunderstand me, Amorph. I'm not saying that Apple Computer has crappy hardware. What I'm saying is that, for the money, they should utilize more powerful, longer-lasting hardware that is comperable with their price-point.

I do consider SOME Apple merchendise worthy of a higher price-point. Apple's flat panels are gorgeous compared to what the PC world can offer. I would GLADLY pay more for them.

Respectfully,
-theMagius

<strong>Originally posted by G-News:
Like I said, SCSI was a good choice for the non PowerMac macs...then again, before 95 none or only very few configurations came with a drive bigger than 500MB anyway...</strong>

Macs used a lot of media drives. SCSI was better at the time. In addition, the PPC 601 PowerMacs (7100 and 8100) used &gt; 500 MByte drives.

<strong>But after 95, EIDE would have been the better, and most importantly MUCH CHEAPER, implementation for many customers.</strong>

Agree here. But you hyperbolized by saying "always". For a time, Apple was using 5 MB/s SCSI while PC's mostly had IDE. And Fast SCSI v EIDE is very debateable.

<strong>which, btw has a maximum transfer rate of 16.7MB/sec, not 13)</strong>

PIO 3 or Multi-word DMA Mode 1 = 13.3 MB/s
PIO 4 or Multi-word DMA Mode 2 = 16.6 MB/s
Ultra DMA (ATA/33) = 33.0 MB/s

<strong>And I wasn't trying to say that the Beige G3 was revolutionary for the industry, certainly not, but it was for Apple, and for the Mac market, and that counted.</strong>

No, I wouldn't agree with that. If Apple wanted to be technologically superior, they had a lot directions they could have gone to, but decided to follow the pack instead of lead.

And isn't it a logical contradiction. If Apple wants to be revolutionary, they should be better than the industry. Being revolutionary within there own market doesn't help them otherwise. The object of everyone's disappointment is that Apple isn't competing with PCs is it not?

<strong>And btw, the G3 266 creamed the 604ev 350 in integer performance,and vice versa in FPU.
For some apps, the G3 was the top level machine, not the mid range thing...even across platforms.</strong>

Yes, very true, but we've been saying for a long while that if the 604e was the architecture Moto and IBM used for future development instead of the 603e, Apple could be better off. The addition of backside cache, improving the integer units the same way, et al, should have given a 604 based processor increasingly better performance as well. The 604 was 4-way superscalar and had a lot more buffers and such for concurrent execution. It had much more potential.

<strong>Originally posted by jeromba:
Do you really think that waiting for a Dual G4 1.4 Ghz with a FSB @ 266 Mhz it's silly ?</strong>

It's borderline. A 0.13 micron 7450 based G4 can clock at 1.4 GHz, but I would expect the yield to be borderline for the first run. It may not be high enough to ship. A DDR bus, or something of the same bandwidth, would be the same sort of thing. I think it's waiting for a 0.13 micron product.

The 7450 is a 7 stage execution pipeline architecture. It will always clock lower than the Athlon (10 stage), P3 (10 stage) and P4 (20 stage) on the same process. The only way a PPC processor will clock higher than the Athlon is to have a &gt; 10 stage pipeline processor on a clean fab or to fabricate it on a better fab. That's just the Athlon, Intel's P4 clock rate won't be overtaken, and we should not expect it to nor want it to.

All G5 expectations are silly. There is no evidence of a G5 processor whatsoever. None. No descriptions of its archiecture. Not even a set of goals they are trying to reach. Any G5 statement is pure fantasy as far as I'm concerned.

[ 05-16-2002: Message edited by: THT ]</p>

tiramisubomb
<a href="http://www.corporate-ir.net/ireye/ir_site.zhtml?ticker=mot&script=411&layout=-6&item_id=164832" target="_blank">http://www.corporate-ir.net/ireye/ir_site.zhtml?ticker=mot&script=411&layout=-6&item_id=164832</a>

This is from a Motorola press release the day before.
[quote]

Motorola Inc. (ticker: MOT, exchange: New York Stock Exchange) News Release - 9-Apr-2001
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Motorola's 'HiP7' Ushers in Launch of Full System-on-Chip Development Environment for Tomorrow's 'Smarter' Products

"Motorola is currently running embedded microprocessor cores on this advanced 0.13 micron process. Production is expected to begin in second quarter of this year in MOS13, Motorola's most advanced 8-inch facility in Austin, Texas. With the completion of this new process, Motorola continues to be an industry leader in copper process capabilities, building on the successes of two previous generations. "<hr></blockquote>

I've done searches on Motorola's web site and still can not find a complete processor using HiP7. I also regularly check out their press releases, hoping for information about HiP7 and the G4 and G5.

Granted, I know nothing of this technology and very easily could be missing Motorola parts being manufactured using the 0.13µ process other than embedded processor cores.

Any links to product summary sheets would be appreciated. I would think the longer Motorola has been using HiP7 the closer this process becomes being implemented on a G4.

Actually, I was very disappointed in Jan. when the G4 wasn't upgraded to HiP7 since they had had what 8 months manufacturing experience using HiP7 @ least on a minimum of embedded processor cores if not complete processors.

By the way, I tend to agree w/ THT that any expectations for a G5 within the next 12 - 18 months is wishful thinking.

Maybe the delay in using HiP7 on a G4 is partly due to Motorola using the smaller die to extend the pipeline, or add/beef up the floating point, or incrreased on die cache, or wider piped altivec or or or or or

crap I'm tired of waiting.

[quote]Originally posted by crayz:
<strong>Of course it should also be noted that the new G4s are already breaking the 200fps barrier on the toughest games when used with the high end graphics cards

Are you joking? In Q3A a DP 1GHz w/ a Radeon 8500 or GF3 gets only 150FPS at 640x480. Q3A is not one of the "toughest games" either, and that limit appears to be because of the processor/bus, *not* the card. Try running RtCW on *any* Mac with *any* card and getting 200FPS with *any* settings....dumbass.</strong><hr></blockquote>

Crazy,

If you're going to call someone a dumbass, you should at least have your facts straight. You've just corrected someone for saying that Macs have now broken the 200fps barrier in the toughest games. You then go on to site Quake3 as one of those games.

That said, I'd like to bring your attention to the following link:

<a href="http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/Graphics/geforce4_ti/geforce4_titanium_Mac.html" target="_blank">http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/Graphics/geforce4_ti/geforce4_titanium_Mac.html</a>

Please note the DP 1GHZ G4 on with Geforce 4 Ti achieving 201.3 fps at 640 x 480 in HIGH quality mode (32bit, trilinear filtering, 32bit textures, etc.).

Also note that earlier graphics cards were not far behind on the same system.

Further, these numbers are consistent with the 1.8 - 2 GHZ P4s with Geforce 3 Ti's I've seen in PC Gamer.

In short, the orginal poster was correct. You should get your facts straight before you go on to call others a "dumbass", dumbass! <img src="graemlins/lol.gif" border="0" alt="[Laughing]" />

Steve

and another thing.

While pondering THT's post concerning the 133 MHz MPX, it occurred to me that, at least in many Altivec aware programs, the current G4's keep up with and occasionally surpass the speed of X86 machine over twice the rated GHz speed.

Me thinking... after the G4 crunches the numbers, it must pass the results throught the same 133 MHz MPX bus to the monitor or CD burner or DVD burner, right??

Unless my reasoning is totally bassackwards, and the G4 733 truely does say, encode a DVD 70% faster than a 2000 GHz Sony Viao , whatever, this same 133 MHz MPX bus must be handling the data and can't be too awfully bad, can it??

Please let me know if my reasoning is truely bassackwards.

And if the G4's are really handcuffed on this measely little 133 MHz MPX bus, great things could be in store for a G4 @ 1.4 - 1.6GHz on a frontside bus capable of 266MHz.

Does anyone know how a 3 DP Xserver workstation would compare to a DP 1GHZ G4? With everyday tasks, with MAYA complete, with Final Cut Pro? Just looking into making myself some sort of workstation.
Thanks,

Apropos the apple leak (or whatever it was) about 100% performance increase. I don't think there's even the slightest chance for 100% increase in clock rate. If the above "rumor" is true, I predict quads for MWNY. I guess that means either there's a new G4 coming soon, with a much faster bus, or apple has developed a system controller that lets the processors use individual buses (instead of sharing the same bus) while still letting them talk to each other (through said controller) about things like memory sharing asf. That way they could get away with using the current G4 design (though speed bumped, hopefully).
I don't know alot about processor design, of course, so anyone who does is welcome to enlighten me on this subject.

[quote]Originally posted by THT:
<strong>[qb]All G5 expectations are silly. There is no evidence of a G5 processor whatsoever. None. No descriptions of its archiecture. Not even a set of goals they are trying to reach. Any G5 statement is pure fantasy as far as I'm concerned.</strong><hr></blockquote>
It's always a pleasure to find a voice of reason when reading threads in Future Hardware.

Well its obvious the sales haven't slipped enough for apple to do their homework. Their loss, we will get it eventually. The sales are expected to fall even further this quarter, and even more if nothing comes out in July that is decent (and 1.2ghz is NOT in any way, shape or form, decent, unless its a quad G5 at 1.2)


FYI, on the topic of "have you even tried the new powermacs??". Yes, I have tried the 800 and 933. My thoughts?
slow
I wouldn't spend anymore than $1200 on the 933, with the performance I felt it had. It was SLOW at OSX. The only nice thing was the ASD17, beautiful. But beauty can't hide slowness, and what I felt, was OSX not a whole lot faster at all than my G4 933. Note I didn't do anything else other than IE, and finder stuff, and for what its worth, that performance would feel adequate for the bottom of the line ibook at best.

really, it was quite shameful..... oh well.

[quote]Originally posted by Belle:
<strong>
It's always a pleasure to find a voice of reason when reading threads in Future Hardware. </strong><hr></blockquote>

Yes and no : the G5 appear in the Motorola's roadmap since a long time. There is even a G6 on this roadmap. And the roadmap describe a 64 bit chip with I/O based upon 0,13 SOI process. It's not a precise info about the architecture, but the G5 is on the way ; the question is when : personally i won't bet a cent for G5 at MWNY 2002.

[ 05-17-2002: Message edited by: powerdoc ]</p>

guys. .. just my 2c:

the Xserve is something that Apple cannot stumble with. they have to be 110% sure that everything inside that 1U work of art will work 110^% of the time. EVERYTHING inside there has Apple's peace of mind stamp.

IMO we might yet 266Mhz bus speeds, ATA-133, Firewire2, as for the chip, i fully expect 1.4Ghz, 512Mb L2 cache, Altivec2 (we can but hope). let's not forget that Apple consider the 4x AGP Radeon for their Xserve, so they gotta be pretty confident.

Peace,
G <img src="graemlins/smokin.gif" border="0" alt="[Chilling]" />

If you're going to call someone a dumbass, you should at least have your facts straight. You've just corrected someone for saying that Macs have now broken the 200fps barrier in the toughest games. You then go on to site Quake3 as one of those games.

Are you blind? I specifically said "Q3A is not one of the 'toughest games' either"

And no, I am not all that impressed by the most expensive and powerful Mac ever created barely breaking the 200FPS barrier in Q3 only when using a tweaked config file.

Tom's has an Athlon XP 2000+(a much cheaper system than a DP 1GHz) running Windows XP getting nearly 220FPS at 1024x768. That's the exact same card and the exact same game run with the exact same settings, and its getting over 35FPS more than the much more expensive PowerMac. That means that the PowerMac, either the CPU, the OS, or some other part of the system(like the AGP bus) is limiting the ability of the Ti4600 to do its job - BECAUSE THE MAC IS JUST TOO SLOW.

And I repeat: Q3 is an old game, and hardly "one of the toughest" out there.

[quote]Originally posted by powerdoc:
<strong>
Yes and no : the G5 appear in the Motorola's roadmap since a long time. There is even a G6 on this roadmap. And the roadmap describe a 64 bit chip with I/O based upon 0,13 SOI process. It's not a precise info about the architecture, but the G5 is on the way ; the question is when : personally i won't bet a cent for G5 at MWNY 2002.
</strong><hr></blockquote>


Not to pick on you PowerDoc, but I'm going to reiterate something I've said many times before: the Motorola "PPC Roadmap" IS NOT a legitimate source of evidence. Thus THT and Belle are correct in their assertions.

The roadmap does not provide any useful information in terms of gauging what is actually happening with their PPC lineup. The roadmap was released years (not weeks) ago by some marketing schmo at MOT. Not by the head of SPS, not by their engineering team - by a marketing wonk. That's all you need to know in order to discern the "roadmap's" true purpose (to stoke user interest, not to inform).

You don't actually think anyone at Apple uses the roadmap for anything but paper airplanes, do you? Companies who buy PPC products in large lots have all the inside information about what's coming in a few months and what isn't, because they are the ones who actually get to test those chips before we ever see them. The roadmap is for us, not for Apple or anyone making embedded systems - another sign telling you the document's true purpose.

[ 05-17-2002: Message edited by: Moogs ]

[ 05-17-2002: Message edited by: Moogs ]</p>

[quote]Originally posted by Moogs:
<strong>


Not to pick on you PowerDoc, but I'm going to reiterate something I've said many times before: the Motorola "PPC Roadmap" IS NOT a legitimate source of evidence. Thus THT and Belle are correct in their assertions.

The roadmap does not provide any useful information in terms of gauging what is actually happening with their PPC lineup. The roadmap was released years (not weeks) ago by some marketing schmo at MOT. Not by the head of SPS, not by their engineering team - by a marketing wonk. That's all you need to know in order to discern the "roadmap's" true purpose (to stoke user interest, not to inform).

You don't actually think anyone at Apple uses the roadmap for anything but paper airplanes, do you? Companies who buy PPC products in large lots have all the inside information about what's coming in a few months and what isn't, because they are the ones who actually get to test those chips before we ever see them. The roadmap is for us, not for Apple or anyone making embedded systems - another sign telling you the document's true purpose.

[ 05-17-2002: Message edited by: Moogs ]

[ 05-17-2002: Message edited by: Moogs ]</strong><hr></blockquote>
Well i start my post with yes and no meanings that what they say was not perfectly true but was not wrong either . The roadmap is not the bible and is for consumer only , but in the past the MOTOROLA roadmap use to be nearly correct. It's not a big bet to say that the G5 will have IO tech since the 8450 chip have them (the reserach have be already done : they just have to put in their new desktop chip (or high end embedded chip if you prefer), for 64 bit i don't know : if the G5 come in one year may be yes, sooner may be no (there was a thread about this some times ago).

So i think Mot will follow roughly the roadmap with one exception : if Apple design his new chip himself (let's call him the powerapple PPC chip ), in this case the next generation of PPC chip by mot is already there : it is the 8450 and all further developpements will be based upon this new architecture.

I agree with Belle and THT for one thing : we will not see G5 tomorrow, if the day came we should be in 2003 and the G4 has not finish his developpement (DDR memory controller, and larger cache can be added without too much R&D. )
BTW after this latest revision of the G4 , i don't see how Mot can improve this architecture with this old core : too short pipeline, old FPU unit .They have to go in a brand new architecture, like Intel has done with his P4.

The way people talk about their computer specs, you'd think they were talking about d*ck size or something.

Numbers aren't everything. The reason OS X apps seem sluggish, especially web browsing and the like, is simply because the programs are not fully written to properly take advantage of OS X.

There is going to be a long road ahead in ridding ourselves of Carbon apps (which, for all intents and purposes, are legacy apps) and transitioning not only to Cocoa but also in getting programmers up to speed on how to take best advantage of the services the OS has to offer.

For all of you clamoring for the latest and greatest specs, go buy a PC. Those of you who don't feel defined by your possessions and can measure your computer purchase by more realistic yardsticks (productivity, ease-of-use, balanced system performance, user experience), keep your Macs.

Macs have never had leading-edge processing hardware, and I doubt they ever will. Apple has no competitors, as it is the sole producer of hardware that runs Mac OS, and it will never feel compelled to play the Intel/Windows numbers game. Whatever you think you're giving up in processing power (which is a misnomer, as Macs are inherently faster for me because they allow me to do more work in less time) you are gaining in things like built-in Firewire, Gigabit ethernet, and a kick-ass OS.

Playing the performance numbers game is small-minded. Look to the bigger picture of workflow, troubleshooting, and productivity, and you'll see that Macs win hands-down at any speed.

TheMagius wrote:

[quote]<strong>I am? I sure didn't think I was.</strong><hr></blockquote>

Well, you said that people needed to stop buying PowerMacs, I replied that people needed to stop buying them and tell Apple why, and you said that would be ineffective. Ergo, not buying PowerMacs is ineffective.

[quote]<strong>From what I see, Apple's PowerMac sales have dropped 23%, and still, there is no forward momentum in their hardware development. Their sales must not have not dropped ENOUGH for them to take action. I guess it's a question of numbers.

Remember Fight Club? If there aren't enough car accidents to be cost-impactive, the automobile manufacturer doesn't have a recall. It's a movie, I realize, but it describes American business practices to a tee.</strong><hr></blockquote>

I don't get my sense of economics from Hollywood films, and since I saw nothing about Fight Club to recommend it, I ignored it.

Remember that Apple is aggressively moving into markets that cannot subsist on consumer products or laptops, and they are trying to grow market share. In both these cases, subsisting on increased sales of their other lines is a stopgap solution at best. It might be what they're doing now, but I'll bet it's not because they want to.

[quote]<strong>No, I have not used the 2xGig Powermac.</strong><hr></blockquote>

It's about 30% faster than the dual 800, to give you some idea. (That based on xlr8yourmac's tests.)

[quote]<strong>I agree that 512MB of 133MHz SDRAM can be as fast as 256MB of 266MHz DDR, all other things being equal.</strong><hr></blockquote>

Busses and memory controllers being unequal (as they often are), 256MB of SDR SDRAM can outrun 256MB of DDR, or at least keep up in the majority of cases. MaxBus has robust support for streaming.

[quote]<strong>But I do not perceive Apple has having "quality" in mind when they made the decision to keep their 133MHz bus implementation. Rather, I imagine that they did it because they do not have a cost-effective/plausible implementation that would allow a 266MHz bus to be implemented for current PowerMac designs.</strong><hr></blockquote>

What part of "quality" implies that they should use an implementation that isn't plausible? :confused:

They've eked an astonishing amount of performance out of their current architecture, far more than most - if not all - PC motherboards ever got out of their single-pumped busses. If they switched to DDR, and the net result was a single-digit performance improvement sometimes, Apple would be laughed off the boards. They implemented DDR for their servers, despite the 133Mhz MaxBus, because it made sense to have all that extra memory bandwidth for I/O; now that they have a memory controller that can use DDR efficiently, they'll implement DDR in the towers when they have a processor that supports it. To claim that they're holding back because the iMac is selling well is just strange.

[quote]<strong>And, yes, I believe that an 800MHz G4 PowerMac is beautifully-fast compared to my 350MHz G3 PowerMac. But that is completely irrelevant. My 1Gig Duron is beautifully-fast compared to my 350MHz G3, also. And it cost $1000 less.</strong><hr></blockquote>

Might as well ask another question: Is processor speed the only item of concern for you? Or hardware speed, for that matter? Do you mean real-world performance or numbers on spec sheets?

BTW, you can check out a dual GHz by going to a VAR or an Apple Store, if there's one around. That's how I did it. The folks in the Apple Store load them up with pro apps, and they're more than willing to let you take them for a spin.

[quote]<strong>The REAL question is whether the 800MHz G4 is worth the money - now AND a year from now.</strong><hr></blockquote>

My 450MHz G4 was worth the money when I bought it last year, and I still haven't come close to tapping its potential. I suppose it depends on what you're actually trying to do.

[quote]<strong>I'm curious, do you work in the engineering field?</strong><hr></blockquote>

In software, which has the same relationship to marketing that the hardware guys do. Plus a great many of my friends and coworkers are hardware guys. The "more with less" doctrine is more especially critical in hardware, especially where clock speed is concerned, because high clock speeds introduce a double handful of complications to motherboard design. But it's not uncommon in software, either. In fact, on the programming newsgroups, someone with a loaded, up-to-the-minute rig is most likely an abject newbie, and his uncapitalized "how do i clear the screen in c k thx bye" is probably going to be handled by someone on an 8500.

[quote]<strong>What I said was that ATA/66 is outdated. I would challenge you to find a Dell, Gateway, or HP in the PowerMac price range that still used an ATA/66.</strong><hr></blockquote>

Sorry, but what you said is that you wanted something faster. If Dell, Gateway and HP ship those... so what? The theoretical speed advantage they offer is irrelevant, and they offer no increase in storage capacity, unlike ATA/133. So we're back to real performance vs. theoretical numbers.

When I wanted more space, I bought an ATA/133 FW enclosure. I have my original 30GB drive in there now, but if I wanted to add a whopping 160GB drive tomorrow I could, and bigger drives as they become available. I can also buy another enclosure and daisy-chain it for even more storage. The FW drive is every bit as fast as the internal drive, so there's no loss there either.

[quote]<strong>And be careful about the word SUSTAINED. There is NO ATA HD out there (to my knowledge) that has a SUSTAINED data transfer rate. It's the same reason why Firewire wipes the floor with USB 2.0. A peak, unstable data rate of 800MB/s is no match for a sustained data rate of 400MB/s.

ATA/100 has the potential to write at 100MB/s in random bursts. Are you telling me that there's NO software out there that would require 100MB/s bursts?</strong><hr></blockquote>

Whether there is or not is moot if there isn't the hardware to provide those bursts.

Also, I doubt that there is. There is software that benefits from it, of course, which is why people buy big SCSI RAIDs like the ones that I linked to, but nothing I've heard of that requires it. Real-time video, perhaps? Off to MacGurus you go, because you're not going to get it from your ATA bus.

[quote]<strong>Are you telling me that there's NO speed to be gained from 33MB/s MORE data throughput?</strong><hr></blockquote>

Maybe a fraction of a second here or there reading relatively small files from RAM cache (which OS X does to some extent anyway by caching files in main RAM, bypassing the drive bus altogether), but nothing like the 33% increase in theoretical bandwidth. You won't get that until sustained reads from ATA drives get faster (what's a sustained read from an ATA drive? Well, copy a 1GB file on an optimized disk. There you go. ).

[quote]<strong>Are you telling me that there WON'T be software out there that may require this within the next year?</strong><hr></blockquote>

With almost 100% certainty. Any software that failed to run without being able to access an ATA HDD at that rate (i.e., which required that bandwidth) would find itself with a vanishingly small market. People who really need that kind of speed fork out for SCSI RAIDs. That's where your read/write rates of 100MB/s are, and you'll pay dearly for them.

It's possible that Apple will introduce something like the ATA RAID technology on the XServe, although I'll bet they have two channels instead of four if they do. Even then, people who want real speed will get a SCSI RAID or an XServe RAID (when those appear). If disk performance is critical, you don't under any circumstance rely on a single ATA drive to provide it. It's just never done.

[ 05-17-2002: Message edited by: Amorph ]</p>

Well said sonny.

Also, as avi said the compilers have not been optimzed for OSX. With jagwire we will see all apps get an almost free speed increase with a recompile.

I don't own the fastest g4 on the planet, But I would put up the work toe to toe I do with it with any PC geek that justs buy the latest 2 gig pc so he can play quake faster.

Sure there are some PC users who do work that needs the mhz but pound for pound and mhz. for mhz I'll bet mac users do far more creative (meaningful?) work than any gighz crazed pc weenie.

[ 05-17-2002: Message edited by: keyboardf12 ]</p>

What you're forgetting about those burtst rates, is that bursts are generally a thing between the HD cache and the system RAM on an ATA bus.

And I'm sorry to tell you, but even the now 2 year old IBM 75GXP series had internal transfer rates of up to 400MB/sec.

That'd fill you every inch of the ATA-133 bus for every bursted data that is smaller or equal to the cache size of the HD, thus generally around 2MB today, maxing out at around 8MB.

Problems is, only few apps burst to such an extent that they'd gain speed from faster ATA busses.
Coz if you do a lot of bursting in a row, it's no longer bursting, it's simply reading and then you're back at the sustained rates.

So you'd probably benefit if you had to copy a folder with many small files around 100-200KB in size, coz that'd mostly be done out of the cache.

Denying that ATA133 is faster than ATA 66 or 100 is just stupid. The differences are small for most tasks, but it's not like Maxtor just put a "133" sticker on their ATA 66 drives.

And yeah I think faster is better, especially because you obviously don't lose anything in the trade, you win on both size and speed.

However, the real reason why were still stuck at ATA-66 in the towers, is because we're still using the same Southbridge since the G4 Sawtooth was released.

And southbridges usually don't get changed without changing the whole rest of the mainboard too.

There you go.

G-news

To the dude who said that Carbon was slow and everything would be much faster once it was all Cocoaified:
Look at OmniWeb... While it's a pretty nice browser, it is by no means a speed demon, try opening five or six web pages with it and see how it handles them.

To the other dude who dismissed Fight Club:
Your loss. It's a great movie, by virtually any metric.

I liked Fight Club.

I liked theMagius post.

I think he said it all.

Sure. You can blow £3K on a 'Power'mac and think it's very fast...well, if you're living in the Mac Pocketuniverse where your last computer was a 200mhz Mac clone. Yep. Then the 1 gig dual may seem actually fast. But if you've used any AMD cpu based machine with even a few hundred megs of ram from the past year then the Dual 1 gig Power mac seems too little, too late, overpriced and none to impressive. You may even get the distinct feeling Apple is ripping you off, charging obscene amounts of dosh for hardware that was out of date last year.

The falling 'Power'mac sales are obviously dropping within the context of the larger industry performance picture. ie Apple's 'Power'mac monopoly powerbase is shrinking. And until they offer a compelling upgrade it will likely continue to do so.

('Whoops, 'Power'mac has been lapped three times by Intel Pantium 4.') Signal for more 'Power'mac users to abandon ship. Perhaps some professionals look not just whether it was fast compared to my last mac but whether it's value for money to what they can get else where. Windows with XP is getting increasingly bareable.

I don't think Mac users need to be lectured on what they actually use their machines for. I like the Mac Os X. I presume most people who post here do so too and would just like apple to push the boat out more than 'a little'. 'X'? It isn't worth £3000 for 'X' on an out of date machine. Well, not to me it isn't.

I don't see the dual 1 gig G4 beating my Athlon 1.6 gig. The AMD seemed faster to me.

I expect better from a 'Power'mac three times the price with no monitor included.

I like 'x' but it's retail value is less than £100! I guess these things are subjective.

Part of my would like to believe its worth paying £3000 for. It's not. I want competitive kit to run it on. Not a warmed over G3.

I want a 'Power'mac worthy of the name. In my view, the current one isn't. Hence the stagnating sales (oops, sorry, Apple, must be the 'economy'...oh...and millions awaiting the the 'PS7' upgrade...) The point is apple are constanly stiffing their users with 'old' specs.

ibook with 8 meg graphic card anyone?

The dual gig is far from impressive in my eyes.

You're paying one heck of a premium for performance that is mostly 1 gig or so most of the time.

Fraoch anyone?

Lemon Bon Bon




[ 05-17-2002: Message edited by: Lemon Bon Bon ]</p>

fight club was an awesome movie. you should rent it this weekend.

I did not say that a Cocoa application will automatically be faster than its Carbon counterpart. I read in an article that one of the biggest reasons even the "fastest" Cocoa browsers are still slower than PC browsers isn't because they run on Mac hardware -- it's because the programmers aren't fully versed in all the appropriate events, etc., that need to be utilized in order to maximize performance.

It makes sense that Windows apps will be faster than their Mac counterparts -- look how long Windows has been around compared to OS X. OS X is brand new and it will take some time for apps to get better and faster as programmers learn new programming techniques to obtain better performance. Patience.

Now about the gigahertz crap. I have no doubt that an AMD Athlon system can wipe the floor with a PowerMac. I've seen plenty of benchmarks and comparisons. So what's new about that? The PC world has always been able to "wipe the floor" with the Macs, or vice versa, depending on whos benchmarks you believe. But, more to the point, who cares? If all that mattered was raw numbers, we'd all be working on Athlon systems. Obviously we all don't, and if you feel you are getting cheated or ripped-off by Apple, then please do not purchase Apple products. Stick with your superior, faster, much more competitive PC/Windows product.

As for me, I am perfectly content with my G4 500MP. I am a print and web designer, routinely working with images that are many megabytes huge, and I don't have any performance problems... Not only that, but with OS X I can reliably burn CD-Rs and check email in the background without any perceptible loss of performance. Overall, my productivity has gone up since moving to OS X, even though I haven't put a dime into faster hardware.

The increased productivity afforded by any particular hardware/OS combo is the ultimate measure of a system's performance. It has nothing to do with gigahertz, megabytes, or anything else.

Case in point: I plugged my PowerMac into a Linksys wireless router and it ran without a hitch. I started sending out proposals and proofs via email almost immediately. But installing a matching wireless network card on my roommate's multi-gigahertz PC took over 2 hours of debugging, reinstallation, and a phone call to Linksys technical support before it would work. So you see, all those gigahertz don't mean squat if they save you a few seconds here and there, but then you waste several hours at a time trying to do what should be very simple and straightforward.

The ultimate measure is productivity and smoothness of workflow. Period.

Also, to those people who are lambasting Apple's Xserve because it may not have the latest and greatest specs. I watched the video of the introduction and saw them pull 500 DSL-quality QuickTime streams off the server with &lt; 50% CPU utilization. Call me a moron, but that looked pretty darned impressive for a single box. Because servers are more oriented towards throughput, bandwidth, and responding to a multitude of client requests, CPU and processing power isn't the most important feature. It's the overall system performance, which Apple seems to have nailed.

Your Mac, no matter how much or how little money you've spent on it, is only a tool. It's not a measure of your intelligence or self worth, so let's stop investing so much of ourselves in the fate of Apple and its computers. Use the tool that helps you accomplish the most, and move on.

[quote] The ultimate measure is productivity and smoothness of workflow. Period.<hr></blockquote>

Well said. Mac's should not be compared with PC's, but that doesn't mean I don't want Apple to make faster Macs. A computer can never be too fast.

<strong> [quote]
The ultimate measure is productivity and smoothness of workflow. Period.
</strong><hr></blockquote>

generally, applications offered on both platforms are identical. who requires colorful doohickeys in order to be productive?

windows is rigid precisely because of it's neglection of aesthetics in favor of productivity/efficiency. aqua was hardly created with efficiency in mind, style rather.

now, with that in mind and considering the speed gap which would also tip the scale of productivity, i find your arguments baseless.

please refrain from misconstruing style with "ease of use" from this point forward.

My arguement was simply that Final Cut Pro is only available on the Mac and it is a much better program than Premeir. That is pretty straightforward and has nothing to do with style of "ease of use".

[quote]<strong>
I don't get my sense of economics from Hollywood films, and since I saw nothing about Fight Club to recommend it, I ignored it.
</strong><hr></blockquote>

Heh. Well, I guess everyone's tastes in movies is different. Allow me to clarify.

My point in quoting portions of "Fight Club" was not to convince you that movie economics are accurate. My point was that the main character in the film works for a company that pretty much decides EVERYTHING (including loss of life) based on the underlying cost-impact it will have on their company.

Although Apple Computer does not seem NEARLY this drastic, it is likely to assume that they make the majority of their decisions with cost-impact as one of the more prominent deciding factors. Thus, if a 23% loss in PowerMac sales can be effectively offset with profit increases from the iMac and iBook lines, then there is no IMMEDIATE need to focus on the PowerMac line. Does Apple have concerns about the lagging sales? Well, I would HOPE so, but money is money.

Now, imagine if those numbers went to, say 50% losses for PowerMac sales. Would that be enough for Apple to place its IMMEDIATE focus on the PowerMac line? I can't say for sure, but I'm willing to bet that SOMETHING radical would be done to the design to try to compensate for lost sales.

Again, it's all just my speculation. I don't work for Apple, and I'm not an economist.

[quote]<strong>
What part of "quality" implies that they should use an implementation that isn't plausible?

They've eked an astonishing amount of performance out of their current architecture, far more than most - if not all - PC motherboards ever got out of their single-pumped busses. If they switched to DDR, and the net result was a single-digit performance improvement sometimes, Apple would be laughed off the boards. They implemented DDR for their servers, despite the 133Mhz MaxBus, because it made sense to have all that extra memory bandwidth for I/O; now that they have a memory controller that can use DDR efficiently, they'll implement DDR in the towers when they have a processor that supports it. To claim that they're holding back because the iMac is selling well is just strange.
</strong><hr></blockquote>

I see what you're saying, but there's a big "IF" in your third sentence. What happens if they spend the money and resources to implement a DDR-based bus that yields double-digit performance improvements? Was it worth the product focus then?

[quote]<strong>
Might as well ask another question: Is processor speed the only item of concern for you? Or hardware speed, for that matter? Do you mean real-world performance or numbers on spec sheets?
</strong><hr></blockquote>

Please don't misunderstand me. I do most all of my (creative) work on my G3 350MHz. There's pretty much NOTHING that Apple offers today that wouldn't beat the snot out of my current setup. My contention IS NOT that Apple doesn't make fast hardware. My contention is that Apple's PowerMac line is not necessarily built on the most powerful/current hardware available, and thus, does not warrant the cost that Apple Computer is charging to the consumer.

[quote]<strong>
In software, which has the same relationship to marketing that the hardware guys do. Plus a great many of my friends and coworkers are hardware guys. The "more with less" doctrine is more especially critical in hardware, especially where clock speed is concerned, because high clock speeds introduce a double handful of complications to motherboard design. But it's not uncommon in software, either. In fact, on the programming newsgroups, someone with a loaded, up-to-the-minute rig is most likely an abject newbie, and his uncapitalized "how do i clear the screen in c k thx bye" is probably going to be handled by someone on an 8500.
</strong><hr></blockquote>

I, too, work in software. Specifically, I have worked as a software engineer, software test engineer, and systems engineer. My experience has been MOSTLY as a technical contractor, but (of course) I have worked as a permanent employee for several large firms.

My experience--which, arguably, may be different than yours--is that engineering firms are concerned, FIRST, about their stock prices. They will do ALMOST anything (manipulate earnings numbers, lay off employees, and eliminate company-wide raises) to make their quarterly figures look good enough to promote stockholder investment. SECONDLY, they are concerned with the needs of the customer. The convergence of these two (I believe) is where the "more with less" doctrine comes in. If the company can save money by being more efficient, they will do so. My personal belief is that Apple computer does this (partially) by furnishing their products with older technology that can be purchased for less.

[quote]<strong>
Sorry, but what you said is that you wanted something faster. If Dell, Gateway and HP ship those... so what? The theoretical speed advantage they offer is irrelevant, and they offer no increase in storage capacity, unlike ATA/133. So we're back to real performance vs. theoretical numbers.
</strong><hr></blockquote>

Well, I guess we're just going to have to "agree to disagree" on this one. If you believe that 33MB/s to 66MB/s greater data transfer capability does not contribute to a "noticeable" increase in speed, then I'm not sure I can convince you otherwise.

[quote]<strong>
Whether there is or not is moot if there isn't the hardware to provide those bursts.

Also, I doubt that there is. There is software that benefits from it, of course, which is why people buy big SCSI RAIDs like the ones that I linked to, but nothing I've heard of that requires it. Real-time video, perhaps? Off to MacGurus you go, because you're not going to get it from your ATA bus.
</strong><hr></blockquote>

From what I've been taught in my A+ classes, the advantage of a SCSI chain is NOT so much that it is inherently faster at data transfer than an ATA drive (as they both move data to the HD in un-sustained bursts). The advantage is that multiple devices (e.g. HD1, HD2, SCANNER, CDROM, DVDROM, etc.) on the same SCSI chain can SIMULTANEOUSLY transmit/receive data. Whereas, an ATA bus can only communicate with ONE of its devices at a time (e.g. HD1 or CDROM on the same ATA controller, but NOT both at the same time).

I guess I don't see how SCSI comes into play since my (personal) beef is with apple supplying ATA/66 controllers with their PowerMacs instead of something more advanced.

[quote]<strong>
Maybe a fraction of a second here or there reading relatively small files from RAM cache (which OS X does to some extent anyway by caching files in main RAM, bypassing the drive bus altogether), but nothing like the 33% increase in theoretical bandwidth. You won't get that until sustained reads from ATA drives get faster (what's a sustained read from an ATA drive? Well, copy a 1GB file on an optimized disk. There you go. ).
</strong><hr></blockquote>

Perhaps I need a hardware engineer to explain this to me, but my understanding was that every ATA drive has a maximum data transfer limit. This limit can be reached for brief periods of time, but cannot be sustained for all data transfers. How is disk optimization to have any effect for a prolonged period of time unless a defragmentation program is executed after every disk write?

[quote]<strong>
With almost 100% certainty. Any software that failed to run without being able to access an ATA HDD at that rate (i.e., which required that bandwidth) would find itself with a vanishingly small market. People who really need that kind of speed fork out for SCSI RAIDs. That's where your read/write rates of 100MB/s are, and you'll pay dearly for them.

It's possible that Apple will introduce something like the ATA RAID technology on the XServe, although I'll bet they have two channels instead of four if they do. Even then, people who want real speed will get a SCSI RAID or an XServe RAID (when those appear). If disk performance is critical, you don't under any circumstance rely on a single ATA drive to provide it. It's just never done.
</strong><hr></blockquote>

Well, I guess this must be the "marketing ploy" of the century, then. Hell, if I could get thousands of computer users to buy a product that would yield better performance (e.g. ATA/133) without actually gaining any noticeable performance over the "old, cheaper product" (e.g. ATA/66), I'd be a millionaire!

Now, I don't mean any disrespect. You're the moderator on this board, and I'm just some guy who came onto the website and tossed forth his opinion.

If you could post a hyperlink to some test results (PC/MAC) where a faster HD controller and drive interface DIDN'T yield better performance, I'd be more than happy to humble up and eat crow.

Drawing another proverbial line in the sand,
-theMagius

[ 05-18-2002: Message edited by: theMagius ]</p>

Hi,
I think that Apple will show something completely new, because it would be too easy for the whole world to make their predictions on the xserve model.
Regards
Torsten,
germany

[quote]Originally posted by G-News:
<strong>Denying that ATA133 is faster than ATA 66 or 100 is just stupid. The differences are small for most tasks, but it's not like Maxtor just put a "133" sticker on their ATA 66 drives.</strong><hr></blockquote>

I said exactly that. I also noted that since OS X, like a good UNIX, tends to cache files in main RAM, the size of the HD cache and/or the speed of the ATA bus is less relevant.

[quote]<strong>However, the real reason why were still stuck at ATA-66 in the towers, is because we're still using the same Southbridge since the G4 Sawtooth was released.

And southbridges usually don't get changed without changing the whole rest of the mainboard too.</strong><hr></blockquote>

Precisely. In the mean time, ATA/66 works just fine.

I think we are forgetting about last year's New York show. Such hype from Apple, and nothing much unveiled. Won't everyone be disappointed if it's just speed bumped desktops with a drop in price and only DDR Ram?

Maybe, but I'm not sure that the company is too concerned. They keep raising the bar with their own software (Jagwire, iDVD, Final Cut Pro, DVD Studio Pro, iPhoto, iTunes) that current users on g3's are being motivated to upgrade no matter what.

Let's get some common sense. They just unveiled the new apollo chips, you now want new versions again to support a 266mhz bus in July, and then a g5 for MWSF? Get real. SF is the big show, and what will they do for that one if you get the improved mobo and case in July?

Get ready for disappointment, because AI members often are. I suspect it will be 20% speed bump with DDR RAM, possible price drop as well. That and Jagwire.

Then again, I could be wrong. I wish we knew for certain, though, so I could plan a purchase.

theMagius wrote:

[quote]<strong>Although Apple Computer does not seem NEARLY this drastic, it is likely to assume that they make the majority of their decisions with cost-impact as one of the more prominent deciding factors. Thus, if a 23% loss in PowerMac sales can be effectively offset with profit increases from the iMac and iBook lines, then there is no IMMEDIATE need to focus on the PowerMac line. Does Apple have concerns about the lagging sales? Well, I would HOPE so, but money is money.</strong><hr></blockquote>

Apple's profit margin on the LCD iMac is smaller than on previous iMacs, and it shrunk from what they expected. iBooks are getting sold in huge transactions with very slim profit margins per machine. They make their money off the professional lines, and in particular from the people who are willing to pay for the absolute fastest model. You can be sure that the drop in PowerMac sales has hurt Apple's bottom line hard, and they'd have to sell a whole lot of iMacs and iBooks to make up the difference.

[quote]<strong>Now, imagine if those numbers went to, say 50% losses for PowerMac sales. Would that be enough for Apple to place its IMMEDIATE focus on the PowerMac line? I can't say for sure, but I'm willing to bet that SOMETHING radical would be done to the design to try to compensate for lost sales.</strong><hr></blockquote>

This, and the rest of your post, are based on the assumption that Apple is not focused on its PowerMac line. I see no basis for that. The fastest PowerPC they can get their hands on doesn't support DDR. Their southbridge's ATA controller might not be bleeding edge anymore, but there's no point updating it until there's a lot to update, especially since the advantage of updating it is small to negligible. So they have dedicated a lot of work to getting insane amounts of efficiency out of what they do have. That looks like focus to me. No matter how hard their engineers concentrate on something, they can't pull things out of thin air.

There have been murmurings of a good, fast DDR motherboard for some time now. I would be frankly shocked if Apple didn't have several in process. But again, if your fastest processor doesn't support DDR in its front side bus, well, what can you do?

Still, if you feel it will help, go ahead and tell Apple that you're not going to buy a PowerMac, and tell them why. I'd be surprised if it spurs them to any greater action than they're already undertaking, because I see no reason to believe that they aren't working hard already.

Most people were skeptical that two GHz G4s could be fed well at all by a 133MHz bus, but they are. Not optimally, obviously, but better than anyone predicted. If Apple hardware does things that people don't think it should be capable of doing, that tells me their engineers are hard at work. Even if the result doesn't have the biggest numbers on its spec sheet.

[edit: more]

[quote]<strong>Well, I guess we're just going to have to "agree to disagree" on this one. If you believe that 33MB/s to 66MB/s greater data transfer capability does not contribute to a "noticeable" increase in speed, then I'm not sure I can convince you otherwise.</strong><hr></blockquote>

It's available bandwidth. If you have a two-lane highway that principally handles traffic from a couple of country roads, it can probably do all right. If you widen it to six lanes, it's theoretically capable of handling much greater amounts of traffic, but in practice there's just those country roads feeding into it. So the four extra lanes buy you... nothing.

That's an extreme example, but it illustrates the point: ATA/100 is only an improvement on ATA/66 in those circumstances when there's actually a transfer rate greater than 66MB/s. Most of the time, the drive can muster 40MB/s at best. So the benefit of the faster bus is restricted to reads off the HDD's (comparatively small) RAM cache.

[quote]<strong>From what I've been taught in my A+ classes, the advantage of a SCSI chain is NOT so much that it is inherently faster at data transfer than an ATA drive (as they both move data to the HD in un-sustained bursts).</strong><hr></blockquote>

Well, no. Bandwidth is bandwidth. SCSI has the advantage you list, plus the ability to schedule reads and writes out of order to minimize the amount of seeking the drive heads have to do, plus the ability to do all of this without leaning on the CPU. Also, there is the simple fact that you can get 10k and 15k SCSI HDDs, but no such things exist for ATA. So besides being a more autonomous and efficient bus, SCSI has the (potential) advantage of faster drives, and thus higher data transfer rates.

[quote]<strong>I guess I don't see how SCSI comes into play since my (personal) beef is with apple supplying ATA/66 controllers with their PowerMacs instead of something more advanced.</strong><hr></blockquote>

I was addressing the numbers you were throwing around (100MB/s), since you seemed to think that an ATA controller would be sufficient to provide them. These are the sort of numbers that, if needed, are almost always provided by a big, expensive SCSI RAID. It's a third-party solution available to PowerMac owners who need that kind of speed badly enough to plunk down $8k or more. Apple has provided (and might still provide - I haven't checked) high-end PowerMacs with Ultra160 SCSI cards and twin 10k drives as BTO options, so their solution seems to be to recognize that ATA (and specifically ATA/66) works well enough for the majority of cases, and those people who need more can either get Apple's BTO SCSI solution or a third party's.

Apple shipping PowerMacs with ATA/100 controllers, or ATA/133 for that matter, wouldn't significantly change this situation unless Apple pulled an XServe and set up multiple controllers, each attached to a single drives, and the whole system configured as a RAID (I wouldn't put this past them). In this case, again, the difference between ATA/66 and ATA/100 would be measurable, but nowhere even close to what the 33% gain in available bandwidth implies, because each controller is only handling a single, dense (and therefore relatively slow) 7200RPM drive.

[ 05-18-2002: Message edited by: Amorph ]</p>

Agreed Bodhi.

Lemon Bon Bon

"Maybe apple wanted something that was more than a single core 10 stage pipelined cpu that was little more than a mhz'd G4? I didn't hear of any additional fpus.
But that this 'G5' would have the benefits of an improved mobo. Which basically gives us a bumped Apollo (which is clocking higher than Moto expected...) in rapid io set up. This reduces the need for the G5 that Moto envisaged replacing the Apollo. ie cheaper to just push the G4 on if you've found it has legs. (Look at what Intel have done to push their chips over the last few years...ie bolting things on and engineering more mhz from them when they were supposed to 'hit the wall' years ago.)

Apollo, a chip that was to enable the G4 to get to just over 1 gig. Maybe Moto has found it can clock higher so their original G5 needed to be re-thought, cancelled or improved. ie was it worth the cost of developing a new chip when their were few advantages over the old one?

Whether Moto' gets the contract for the successor to the G4 or IBM gets it... Well, nobody seems to know for sure. But the chip we think of the original 'G5' may have had its chips, mate. Perhaps what we want to be the 'G5' had to be redesigned to be accepted by the market. ie, more than merely mhz, more fpu, more MHZ, more integer, more simd, multi-core and architectural improvements. Apple and moto and even IBM haven't had an easy ride cpu rise over the last few years. Perhaps we can expect the next 'true' next gen' processor to be something special.

...if Motorola had this G5, then why isn't it here now? Perhaps Moto's vision of the G5 was the same 'cheap shot' gimmick that took us from G3 to G4? ie the G5 would have been a G4 but with more mhz and a ten stage pipeline (ie a really stretched G3 ). Which... is...er...what Apollo will be this Summer at Macworld New York..? (minus the ten stage pipeline?) But at San Fran, maybe the G4 pipeline will be stretched to 10 stages with Rapid Io and then be what the G5 would have been anyway.)

Surely Apple would ship the fast chip they could instead of make do with shrinking Powermac sales and a g4 that has clearly struggled to keep apace with the x86 side of the competition.

I'm beginning to think the '7500' chip will be nothing but an Apollo+ with a rapid io architecture. Clocked at 1.2 - 1.6 (if all we see at Macworld New York is a 1.2 gig Apollo with DDR mobo.) This is effectively the G5 chip, by proxy, that Moto would have shipped. It's not THE G5 that would have shipped...but it's effectively the same in all but name. And they didn't have to waste money getting the same product.

I heard the G5 was going to be single core from a poster who used to post here called Motoman.

That being the case...if all Moto's G5 was...some glorified G4 ie longer pipeline with no real benefit...then what we have is...is...bumped Apollo ala Macworld New York.

Maybe IBM bid with a multicore g3 with it's own simd unit which would more than take on Moto's version of the 'G5'.

Take away the altivec unit and the G4 outside of the embedded market doesn't seem that impressive to me.

Maybe Apple wanted more and hence the delay for any G5 type chip worthy of the mantle.

With Maya and Digital Video markets becomging more important to Apple then it's realistic to assume, long term, Apple know the cpu and performance issue has to be addressed...

We'll have to see if the chips Apple has coming in the next half year deliver compelling performance reasons to make me get out the wallet.

I'm dying here without a POWERmac.

However, it seems more and more to me, that unless Apple have something we just don't expect up their sleeve, there are going to be some disappointed people not only at Macworld New York but at San Fran next year also.

The true 'next gen' processor from Apple/Moto/IBM may not be with us until Macworld Newyork 2003. With a 64 bit version to follow that...

Lemon Bon Bon"

Had these thoughts in the 'nixing' thread. Thought I'd add more broth to our masturbatory Apple/Moto' kickings.

Spare boot anyone?



[ 05-18-2002: Message edited by: Lemon Bon Bon ]

[ 05-18-2002: Message edited by: Lemon Bon Bon ]

[ 05-18-2002: Message edited by: Lemon Bon Bon ]</p>

sorry guys, but this thread starts to be very amusing.

there are people who are bitching about apple isn't taking powermac R&D serious today - and they have no clue what apple has planed for MWNY.

and there are people who are bitching that actual powermacs are slower than actual pcs - and they are still working with a G3 300MHz.

just imagine: "i would like to buy a new powermac, would be 3 times faster than my old G3. but then, no. a P4 would be 3,5 times faster. so i guess i'm better of with my old slow mac until powermacs are getting cheaper."

sorry, if you care about a fast computer then think about buying a new powermac - or a new pc for gods sake. but stop complaining about this "apple is slower than pc today" when you're comfortable with your old G3 and do not want a new computer ...

and, btw, do not count on taken seriously!

chris
iBook 366 - will buy a new powermac after MWNY - and will love it :o )

Like I said, my G4 500MP system works just great for what I do... high-end print design / web publishing. My work would directly benefit from higher memory bandwidth and faster processors, but the 500MP speeds along at an acceptable pace -- I never find that I'm waiting on anything.

People, there's a danger to becoming psychologically tied to your computer's speed rating. It's just like anything else that gets updated on a regular basis -- cars, fashion, whatever -- you will always suffer an inherent feeling of inferiority if you don't own the latest and greatest. Companies exploit this psychological weakness to keep themselves in business. If you unplug your emotional processor from your computer's central processor, you'll find the hidden reality: a computer, like a car, is simply a vehicle designed to get you from point A to point B.

Computers are tools, folks. Buy the best tool that is available and be content that it does the job you purchased it for. When it stops doing that job to your satisfaction, upgrade it as necessary or buy a new one.

I chuckle when I read about people getting mad that PowerMacs don't have superior specs to PCs. These are people who just like to complain, who are never happy with what they have, and who are playing p*ssing games with their buddies over whose system can put out more frames in Quake.

Detach yourselves for a moment and look at the situation realistically. The PC world has Intel and AMD, each an incredible corporate powerhouse in its own right, working on hardware innovation. Then there's Microsoft, which is practically a small country in terms of employees and economic power, working on the OS side of the equation. Then there's Apple, which is a tiny fraction of the size of the above, developing both hardware *and* software.

Having the fastest hardware is not a prerequisite to running the best software. Many years ago there was this computer called the Amiga. It did with 7 MHz of hardware what the Mac and PC are only now approaching with GHz of hardware. They key is the OS and underlying technologies, and this is what Apple is correctly focusing on.

Apple's products, whether they are the fastest or not, have one thing that no PC or Windows product has ever had: a soul.

The point is not about wanting the fastest now -- though I do want the fastest now

the point is will Apple be able to survive with such consistently slow progress on the speed bump/hardware update end.

survive, or at least flourish...after all I own stock and want to make enough from it to buy the FASTEST when it comes out

...it would be ironic if my Apple stock ended up purchasing a PC