what does the G5 xserve tell us? - Page 3

well - the 970 will scale very good bet on it. but i don't think it has to go further than 3GHz. IBM and Apple are developing the successor based on the Power5. this will be the high-end processor of upcoming macs starting from 2005. for this year a 970 at 3GHz will deliver the performance we're all expecting. along with its well designed bus-technology (half the clock) it has the potential to perform much better than the current 2GHz 970. bet on faster RAM-technology. also the fact that the cache speed scales with the cpu speed will help to boost performance. we don't have the bottlenecks as we had with the PowerMac G4 (especially the slow bus).


planned for the 970s successor is the processors multi-threading capability as well as a new implementation of altivec. i think this alone will to the trick

I could care less if you PC monkeys want a SP computer. Your just getting second rate POS's anyways. Apple has to live up to performance comparisons against Dual Xeons, and Athlons. Not to mention almost everybody that has a Dual PowerMac says they would never go back sp configuration in million years. Duals are staying.
Think about it. If Apple go's to SP with a 3GHz PowerMac tomorrow, it's going to be blown into the dirt in so many categories VS. Dual Xeon, and Dual Athlon processor configured PC's.
Sorry I'll keep my Dual 3GHz PowerMac money until WWDC, or sooner. If not that BOXX I configured for $5,000.00+ is going to be my next computer.

yeah excactly. i'm working with my single G4 since 4 years now and it runs the latest software and most of the time i've around 12 apps running. at that time i should have bought a dual 450MHz G4 instead - that beast - with os x - has a lot of advantages over my single ... my next machine will be a dual for sure...

oh and btw. imagine a single PIII/700 which was the competitor in the pc-world when i bought my G4... how would that machine compare to my G4 today with 12 apps at the same time *lol*

[QUOTE]Originally posted by Antithesis
[B
So maybe I can go out and purchase a G4 PowerMac for around $1300 instead? And I can use my 17" (smurf) Apple CRT display. And the PowerMac will be able to do basic tasks FASTER than the eMac. But it's STILL completely inadequate for DVD burning and video games.

So I guess that means that the entry-level G5 is really the ONLY Apple product that can suit my needs. But even with the DVD burning capability, the 1.6GHz G5 machine still has an AVERAGE video card. Which kind of makes me scratch my head. Because I'd think that a machine that costs $1800 should have more than an AVERAGE card. (But I suppose that's more of a personal preference, and not a requirement at this point)

I Am sick of people on this post BITCHING about PRICE. GET A JOB DUDE!

The professional reality is that if you want ot author a serious DVD you need to go to DLT ( digital linear tape ) as apple's superdrive does not support authoring media for dvd mass repro. iDVD is a consumer tool nothing more soemthing to show your friends ect. Go buy studio dvd pro. Quite frankly $1800 is nothing to spend on a computer if your really using it for work. I wish mac's were that cheap in my part of the world... I shelled out $5000 for my TI book and still consider it my best investment.. As far as the G5 is concerned we should all be lucky that companies like apple exist to provide us with machines that are SCALEABLE THINK X-SERVE KIDDIES... lest we be stuck with more beige from wintel....

How to expand the eMac:
* Floppy drives: USB.
* Zip drives: USB/FireWire.
* Hard Drives: FireWire.
* DSL/Cable: Ethernet/USB.
* RAM: Upgrades fine.
* Optical drives: FireWire.
* Card Reader: USB
* Mouse & Keyboard: USB.
etc.

No matter how many times you point this out to someone, a lot of people will claim that unless it's inside the case, it doesn't count. Or it's too expensive. Or they don't like a second thingy with a cable to their box. Something.

You'll never satisfy this contingent unless you produce a case that's mostly empty space, takes up a huge amount of room, and looks k3wl. (Hint: same folks that drive ricers. :P ) They don't expandability, they want looks, even if they won't admit it.

The *only* reasonable counter argument is that external drives, for instance, cost a bit more than internal ones. Fair enough, they do. But you know what? I use my external drives for backups, and I like being able to remove them easily. Added security from electrical surges, etc, to boot. When a storm comes through, even though I have a UPS, I worry about the internal drives. My backups are safely off-line, off-grid. And, I can rotate two of them, keeping one at work and one at home. There are good solid reasons to *prefer* externals in many cases.

If things are selling well, you don't have to run specials on them. All the things you mention have short effective shelf lives because the tech is constantly getting better, which is where the incentives come in to issue those fliers.

Also, I think there's more expansion on the PC side just because people believe there's more need for it, or skimp on features at purchase because the geek they've dragged along to help them with all those confusing things has told them they can always add something later.

It's all needless trouble and complexity most of the time. In fact, were it not for Apple, it would be much worse. If there was any great consumer demand for internal expansion, wouldn't someone have made it easier? But who made it easier? Before Apple's cases for the x600 towers and the G3, taking a PC case apart involved lots of screws and sharp edges and fiddling. Even now it's often needlessly difficult to extricate something or put it in. So, again, zero market research was done. The PC tower is not a product of demand. It's a product of inertia and manufacturer convenience. If Apple intends to sell machines based on what consumers want to use, they have to do better than that. And I believe that they are.

The iBook is a great computer, though? Why is it so bad to have only two good consumer computers, when they're both good? Is it the "laptops are not for desktops" motif? I don't get that.

Double post.

Where'd you get the idea that a die size change should mean a new processor? Believe it or not, I think of a 90nm 970 as just that - a 90nm 970, not some newfangled processor.

Ah, you mean no nice extras like an elegant case, a clean inside, an easy-access door, a built-in monitor making the computer dead-simple to setup, a battery power indicator on the battery (useful when the computer is sleeping or when you have multiple batteries,) a better power adapter with wrapping-up areas that neatly pop out when needed and an adjustable clippy? No neat stuff like light weight and a smooth-as-silk trackpad? No nice optical mice?
Or is your idea of "extras" 6 expansion slots for the not included FireWire, Gigabit Ethernet, and SATA, leaving you with the same number as the G5? Plus enough drive bays so you never have to buy one of those convenient FireWire drives?

All of IBM's low-end to mid-range servers.

Not so much new as improved. Now granted whn e some of the more detailed informaiton is shoved upon us in the future it may be shown that some issues with the 970 are cleaned up. I've yet to see any indication of that.

The lack of a change to the cache size strikes me as a negative for a couple of reasons. One is the issue with scaling performance as the clock rate differential increases. If the size has not changed I do wonder if any attempt was made to increase the caches effectiveness. At this time there is no indication that anything has been done here.

It is fine to think of the unit as just a die shrunk version of the old processor. But what is wrong with expecting a few fixes along the way. AS was mentioned else where there are things that can be done to the 970 to make it a better processor, one of these is supporting the no-oped instructions from the vector unit.

Ultimately I believe that this processor will end up being Apples processor for the low end machines. Why not make it all it can be?

Thanks
Dave

The door that hits you in the ass on the way out will be the $3K dual 3 Gig G5's that comes out before your 90 day warranty on that $5K BOXX runs out.

You PC monkeys are just getting second rate POS's anyways. Apple will not only live up to performance comparisons against Dual Xeons, and Athlons, it will destroy them.

This sort of response is getting to be a bit tiresome. If any of this conversation had revolved around external devices that would be one thing, but we are not talking about those sorts of devices.

Mind you each and every device below has its place in the world. But why would anyone want to clutter up his desk with all of these accessories.

Thanks
Dave

I think you're getting ahead of yourself here. These 90nm chips are the first rolling off the lines at Fishkill. We just don't know enough about the (semi) new design. Maybe they kept the cache at 512k to keep initial costs down.

Notice how much the die shrank, lots of stuff could be put in there later, keeping the cost the same as before. But these new chips will be cheaper.

In addition, you shouldn't think that increasing the cache on the G5 is quite the necessity that it would be on in the PC world.

Apple's use of HyperTransport means that the G5s have much faster access to main memory than PC designs (or previous Mac designs) allow. A cache miss on a PowerMac doesn't impose nearly the penalty it would on a PC. As the memory intensive benchmarks show, the main bottleneck in the new PowerMacs isn't memory bandwidth; judging by the improvement in performance brought by G5 optimized compiling, I'd estimate the main problem lies in optimization and compiler design (Apple/IBM's compilers are nowhere near as good as Intel's).

I imagine that Apple and IBM considered these factors when when designing the chip and the architecture. Also, there has been talk of a 970+ appearing before the 980 revision, and that's likely to have the sort of improvements people are missing here as that will be the design that scales to dramatically higher clock speeds. Or so say the rumors.

1) Memory access doesn't go across the Hypertransport bus, just the elastic bus.

2) The main purpose of cache is to reduce the latency of memory access rather than increase the bandwidth, and in this regard the G5s perform poorly compared to most modern PCs, and very poorly compared to Opteron machines with on-chip memory controllers. Most purely bandwidth dependent programmes have datasets that will never fit in cache.

michael

Or more likely because it would not greatly increase the performance of the chip to increase the cache to 1mb.Take a look at these benchmarks.

http://www.anandtech.com/cpu/showdoc.html?i=1941

Note the minimal to nonexistant difference in performance between the athelon64 3000+ and the athelon64 3200+.
Both run at 2.0 ghrz-the only difference is that the 3000+ has 512kb of cache and the 3200+ has 1mb.

And notice what the 128 bit memory controler does.Shocking.

overkill!

sorry kb.I will correct.....

it tells us that G5 powerbooks are far off

This is a bit misleading on a number of accounts. First, your dealling with a processor with an entirely differrent instruction set.

Second not all application are cache bound and one is likely to have several applications running on his PC. It is possible for an individual application not to benefit on a machine with larger cache but the overall system can gain a bit.

Third CACHE becomes more important as the ratio between memory speed and cpu speed increases. Running a processor at the same speed as another really does nothing to change these ratios.

Now given all of the above there are other ways to deal with the ratio between memory and the processor. Apparently there are a few more transistors in the 90 nm 970, it will be interesting to find out what they do.

Thanks
Dave

One little thing to consider, cache does not increase bandwidth this is true. It can however make more of a given bandwidth available for other uses. In the older G4 and G3 processors increasing the cach can have a dramatic impact on perfromance as it leaves the bus available for other things. Not to mention of course the timing issues across a slow bus, which as you point out is a reduction in latency.

While I have been trumpeting an increase in cache size there are a number of things that could be improved with the 970 that would make better use of the cache it currently has. Wether things such as the no-oped cache instructions have been re-implemented is an open question at the moment. All I can say is that I'm eagerly awaiting the latest and greatest information.

thanks
Dave

Well that is why I'm wondering :0 . You never know somebody might spill the beans. We will all know shortly so that isn't a big deal.

Costs could very well be an issue which leads one to suspect that this processor will have a short life span at the high end and be quickly implemented into the low end. While it may no be all it could be, in a $1200 computer it would be an excellent processor at 2.3GHz.

Not that Apple would eve deliver a computer that truely performs at that price level, but hey that is what competition is for.

More and more I'm wondering just how long the 970 will be around. My supiscion is that it won't be in the high end long. Due to this I'm not of the opinion that a great deal more development effort will go into the 970. Instead we will see more effort put into the Power 5 derived technology.

Dave

Macs have the best cup holders around.
Heres one for you, when you plug in an ethernet cable the system automaticaly determines what you are connected to, and adjusts the wiring to support it. I used it just yesterday to transfer files from my ibook to my mothers hp laptop. Just plug in a ethernet cable, no worrying about crossover cables, or hubs or anything.

It just works.

Apple makes polished products. All of the manufacturers you mention are just assemblers of someone elses products. They have very little polish, because polish costs money.

We all want more than what is available, but we have to be realistic about what can be offered. The parts cost of an emac may be $250, but the polish, the OS, everything costs more than that. The polish costs money.

Bonus Round:

I just had projector home with me over xmas, and having left my ibook video cable ( hmmm, dont like it ) at home I had to use my mothers hp to drive the projector. The projector is an 800x600 dlp, but for the life of me, I could not get that laptop to output 800x600 on its external signal. Im sure its a windows issue, but its also a polish issue. My iBook would have worked beautifully. Not to mention that when you use dvd player it disables the screensaver, much unlike the dvd software that came with the hp. Polish, polish, polish. Time and again my ibook just works the way I want it to. I didnt even bother having music on my pc till itunes was released, because I found all of the windows software to be so clumsy. Polish. Ill pay for it.

Exactly what I was saying.

How does addressing a legitimate concern for the Macintosh hardware line and its price point equate to not having a job? Id love to know how you came to this conclusion.


Actually, Im not a video professional. Im simply a user who wishes to burn DVDs. Again, Im not sure where youve come to your conclusions about my needs.


Why would I buy $999 worth of product that Im going to use for personal (amateur) home video?

Okay, so you paid a large sum of money and have been happy with your computer purchase. Good for you. I paid a large sum of money for my Macintosh(es), and I got good value out of them. But there is now a void in the product line that is preventing me from making more Apple purchases. How is this whining?


Im curious about whether youve actually USED a wintel machine. Id be interested in knowing which model and operating system version youve used, and when. Im trying to zero-in on the cause of your vitriol and name-calling, and am finding it difficult to ascertain.


Absolutely, there are good reasons to prefer external drives in many cases. However, for many users, there are good reasons to prefer INTERNAL drives, as well. Trying to argue which is better is an exercise in futility, IMHO.

Point is, some of Apples software WILL NOT WORK with external drives (iDVD).


Okay, so weve established that the Macintosh OS is quite robust and functional. You'll get no argument to the contrary from me.


So, your assertion is that the extra manhours needed to program and test the Macintosh OS justifies the increased cost for hardware? Am I to believe that the Macintosh OS somehow has more code than, say, Windows XP? If that is the case, does that account for the polish? (Honestly asking, here. Dont know what youre trying to say.)


Actually, I was under the impression that I wanted the same as what was available, not more.

I'm amiss as to why anyone would spend, say, $1000 on a machine (eMac w/Superdrive) that has an outdated video card that BARELY supports Quartz Extreme TODAY, and will most certainly be stymied on video game performance tomorrow. Now, if you don't play video games on your computer, that's fine. But why would you DELIBERATELY CAUSE YOURSELF A REPURCHASE within the next year because the manufacturer of the machine:

a) Does not allow for video upgrades
b) Includes an obselete, fixed, video processor (Radeon 7500)

You wouldn't, of course. Because you're a SMART, REASONABLE consumer. You look for value that will meet your needs NOW and IN THE FUTURE, and then you spend your money.

Regards,
-Antithesis

Can't you connect your upgraded video card through one of the USB 1.1 ports?

What I said was that Apple makes ONE decent consumer computer...the iBook. The price/performance of the iMac isn't competitive. The eMac isn't intended for the consumer market, it's primarily for educational institutions that want a bare-bones AIO.

As for "laptops are not for desktops", I'd never make such a strong statement. But I would say that for at any given price level a dedicated desktop is cheaper, faster and easier to use than any laptop because of its screen size and keyboard.

my emac is hardly bare-bones. its seriously faster than some 1Ghz pm's i've seen (my emac is 800Mhz). nevertheless, i'll have a new pm soon

I'm gonna presume that you're addressing one of my issues, though I didn't see any of my quotes in your post.

To answer your question, I believe there are only TWO ways to upgrade a video card in a computer. Both ways are ONLY accessable via the motherboard of a computer.

1) PCI slot (older, slower)
2) AGP slot (newer, faster)

I do not know of any video card upgrade solution pertaining to the USB ports on any computer.

Regards,
-Antithesis

To bring this back to the thread title... The G5 xServe tells me Apple is going high-end. The 970 is a strong chip and one of Apple's strengths. Like any good company Apple will run with its strength. I expect a whole lot of kick-ass $2000+ G5 machines from Apple.

What makes me sad, is that I also expect a whole lot of nothing in the sub-$1500 desktop segment. I want Apple to prove me wrong...but their AIO vision for consumer computers doesn't appeal to me one bit.

Yes...I was addressing one of your posts. I was giving my own sarcastic view of the eMac's upgradability while pointing out its antiquated use of USB 1.1.

D'OH!

Sorry about that, Ompus. I actually laughed when I read your response in its proper context.

-Antithesis (who, sometimes, NEEDS that smiley face)

Cache helped the G3 and G4's because their bandwidth was horrible. Most large problems (e.g. really big heavy processing jobs) require bandwidth because there is no way to fit half a gig of data into the cache.

Cache matters much less for a machine with better bandwidth.

That's right.
However cache have better latency than the mobo ram.

Kickaha and Amorph couldn't moderate themselves out of a paper bag. Abdicate responsibility and succumb to idiocy. Two years of letting a member make personal attacks against others, then stepping aside when someone won't put up with it. Not only that but go ahead and shut down my posting priviledges but not the one making the attacks. Not even the common decency to abide by their warning (afer three days of absorbing personal attacks with no mods in sight), just shut my posting down and then say it might happen later if a certian line is crossed. Bullshit flag is flying, I won't abide by lying and coddling of liars who go off-site, create accounts differing in a single letter from my handle with the express purpose to decieve and then claim here that I did it. Everyone be warned, kim kap sol is a lying, deceitful poster.

Now I guess they should have banned me rather than just shut off posting priviledges, because kickaha and Amorph definitely aren't going to like being called to task when they thought they had it all ignored *cough* *cough* I mean under control. Just a couple o' tools.

Don't worry, as soon as my work resetting my posts is done I'll disappear forever.

True, but any real problem will be many many many times larger than the cache. Cache is useful, but not as useful as some people think, especially for heavy number crunching problems. I'd take a 15% increase in bandwidth over a 100% increase in cache size any day.