When will Apple catch up?
It seems Apple is always way behind PC's when it comes to motherboard technologies. Better DDR Ram has been a PC standard for how long now? It takes Apple forever to speed up their frontside bus, and whenever they catch up, they are quickly left behind again on the PC side.
Apple was late in the game with AGP, but now they're at 4x. They were also late with CD-RW, but finally caught up.
I don't know a whole lot about the nitty gritties of the computer, but when my PC using friends dog me for Apple selling such outdated PowerMacs with such high prices, I really can't argue back
When will Apple just catch up and keep up? Am I just being stupid? Apple's PowerMac upgrade cycle seems so slow, it gets frustrating after a while.
Apple was late in the game with AGP, but now they're at 4x. They were also late with CD-RW, but finally caught up.
I don't know a whole lot about the nitty gritties of the computer, but when my PC using friends dog me for Apple selling such outdated PowerMacs with such high prices, I really can't argue back
When will Apple just catch up and keep up? Am I just being stupid? Apple's PowerMac upgrade cycle seems so slow, it gets frustrating after a while.
Comments
Apple's hardware, in actual use, does just fine.
There are some things, like the G4's lack of support for a double-pumped frontside bus, that are genuine concerns; but then, that's what the Apollo's monster cache (and sweet cache architecture) address: The more code you can stick into the cache, and the more efficiently you can access and manage it, the less relevant the front side bus becomes for most tasks.
If they come at you with what their machines can have, come back with what your machine can do, or just nod and smile. There are shortcomings, and things it can't do as well, of course - but every platform has shortcomings.
Apple is behind on some things and others they are ahead. However yes Apple computers are expensive, but have you ever look at the quailty and care that goes into design of the machine I don't just mean the case ethier. I work with 1000's of PC's in my job and I'm always impressed by the quailty of the machines. Look at the cap's on there boards they have a plastic supports. Also not many companys use star washers under their screws. The Card Slots have have a radius cut out of them to make it easy to remove a AGP or PCI slot with a screw driver.
The IBM's and Dell's I work with don't have this kind of make up or quailty. The IBM server are better than desktop but over all are no made with the same care.
Where as with many things in life there's always a good reason to bitch. Try to look at the things that you like instead. The next time they dog you, think of the quailty of the machine you have, and forget about the FPS happy crack heads.
If the machine works for you however slow it is compared to a PC why worrie about them. If it right for you use it, same goes for a slow PC if it's good enough for you that's all that matters.
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All that really matters is if your computer is fast enough for what you use it for. I've heard the same BS from PC users, many of them only use their computers for web, email, word processing, and yet they get excited about RAMBUS and 2 GHZ Pentiums. I have no idea why, since a cheap celeron is fine for what they do with their computers.
For serious gaming, a PC is a must, but a good gaming machine is not necessarily good at everything else. Even the most bad-ass gaming rig gets stomped in Photoshop by a good Powermac.
So if these PC wankers start giving you crap about your Mac, tell them that it's fast for what YOU use it for. And it's also fine if the Mac is slower at some things, too. Tell them specs are less important to you than overall user experience, that you think of a computer as the sum of its parts, rather than a table of numbers.
I hate to use a car analogy, but it's a good example: a Dodge Viper has a hell of a lot of horsepower, but for daily transportation in a temperate climate, a Viper is a total piece of crap, and in fact I would rather drive a Honda than a Viper. But if you race your car on weekends, a Viper is a good car (and the Viper is also a good car to use for getting laid, but I've never heard of anyone getting laid with a really fast computer).
If they keep doggin' ya, just bitch-slap 'em and tell them that your life doesn't revolve around you computer. That should shut them up for awhile.
An interesting link regarding market demand for DDR broken down by machine type:
<a href="http://www.kingston.com/roadmap/default.asp" target="_blank">http://www.kingston.com/roadmap/default.asp</a>
Another good link, so we don't get confused by all the RAM naming conventions:
<a href="http://www.kingston.com/memory/ddr/jedec.asp" target="_blank">http://www.kingston.com/memory/ddr/jedec.asp</a>
[ 01-30-2002: Message edited by: Moogs ? ]</p>
<strong>I found out that DDR SDRAM only offers a 5-10% increase in benchmark performance and not very noticable real world performance.
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This is what I heard too.
Still, I guess OS X is currently as memory-bound as it gets for an operating system, so the advantage of a faster memory bus might be a little bigger here. Of course, it will hardly ever give as much of an improvement as some might hope (i.e. close to 100%).
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Even though a 266MHz DDR bus, theoretically gives 2GBps, it suffers from slightly higher latency issues and a more complicated motherboard set up.
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Actually, as far as I understand it, the design is *less* complicated with DDR (as opposed to SDR at twice the frequency) - that's the whole point of using DDR in spite of the associated higher latencies.
Bye,
RazzFazz
<strong>Thing is, if we *don't* get support for either PC1600 or PC2100 DDR modules, what's left?
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A possible non-DDR-memory option would be bank interleaving, i.e. having a 200MHz SDR 64bit bus between processor and northbridge, and a 100MHz SDR 128bit bus between northbridge and memory. 128 bits of width would be achieved by using pairs of identical PC100 DIMMs.
The nForce does basically the same with DDR RAM to lessen the impact of the integrated graphics core on memory bandwidth available to the processor.
Bye,
RazzFazz
Furthermore, there is one part of the G4 that always, invariably wants the next 64 bits: AltiVec. So DDR gets best-case performance feeding the hungry vector unit.
AltiVec is capable of performing really fast, but much of the time it is hamstrung by how fast the developer can get data to and from it. Those 15 GigaFlops do you a fat lot of good unless you're using an awful lot of them on each piece of data.
<strong>DDR gets its speed boost by speculatively fetching the next 64 bit word.</strong><hr></blockquote>
No, DDR gets its speed boost by delivering twice as much data in the same number of clocks. Processors (or memory controllers) get their speed by reading the next burst before it is actually requested by the code. The G4 can actually be told what to read ahead, and it will do so at the maximum memory bandwidth.
At the lab here at school the superdrive 733's and DP533's seem to crunch through most people's work just fine. OSX isn't as responsive as even some of the older win98 machines. But OSX looks *a lot* nicer, and the sluggishness may be all GUI related. Once programs are launched they run very nicely. I bet that WinXP would slow down our older PC hardware considerably too, so call it even. Both OS's are intended for recent/not yet released hardware, at least to get the snappiness we've become accustomed to with OS9x and Win9x/NT.
FP performance is probably better on the PC side. Apple will need to improve that. Altivec will help. From speaking with some of the comp-sci geeks (i don't know squat) it seems to me that Altivec is very flexible and powerful when apps are coded to properly take advantage of it. Look at final cut pro. The effects generated in software in REAL TIME require a lot of muscle. A PB 667 manages to pull off some mean feats in this respect. Now take your average 2Ghz + pentium4. It also does pretty good, but it ain't 3 times faster, or even 2 times faster. In fact it's faster in some things and slower in others. It only gets a lot faster when you add in some expensive hardware encoding/decoding functions.
Altivec is in fact quite powerful, but the devs need time. When altivec was released it was a slightly different concept in coding. Devs had to deal with that, and with an upcoming change to OSX. No one was going to invest a lot of time in Altivec aware OS9 apps. Like quark and photoshop devs, most probably didn't put the maximum effort into classic development after a certain point. They're learning a lot of stuff: OSX and altivec, and even DP awareness in combination with these technologies. For the last 2 years they could bank on a huge installed base of G3 based PRO machines. If you figure that a lot of users won't benefit from your work with these technologies, you probably just don't bother bringing them to market until you can get all those new principles reasonably integrated onto a new app for a new system that won't bog down under it.
iMacs point to the future here. IBM elected to wait at least another 6-12 before the introduction of their own SIMD part. Apple didn't want to wait anymore (despite the efficiency/heat benefits. Consumer altivec is here (probably for iBooks too within a year) and the installed base is gonna be a whole lot bigger. That's significant; the software will reflect it.
Apple might fudge it's benchmarking results a touch, as I'm sure everyone picks the most favorable result. But most side by side comparos put the 867 mac damned close. And, when it gets properly coded software (like final cut pro, or iDVD, etc) look out! Cost is the only issue. They could stand to offer better prices on their machines, but most of the pros you talk to (and those who use multiple platforms) know that the mac is at least competitive in most areas.
Actually, that's a flat out lie. For serious gaming, buy a console. I'm serious - the GameCube, even the XBox kick ass over the best PC hardware because they are customized for gaming. Why the hell should you shell out $$$ for a serious PC system when you can buy a console for the cost of a graphics card on one of the high end boxes.
The only reason you wouldn't buy a console is because you're a pirating thief, or in my case, because you're not into the hardcore 3D games and prefer the strategy (CivIII addict, I admit) and basically anything you buy today will do.
So all that leaves for serious computing requirements on a Mac are Photoshop (optimized for Altivec), DVD burning (optimized for Altivec), scientific applications (see clustering thread), Maya (optimized for Altivec).
Anyone seeing a pattern here? Personally, I can only type around 70 words per minute, so Word, Excel, etc., do not need more that about 500 Mhz (even with OS X slowness, which is going to improve).
'Nuff said. Stop telling them to buy a PC. Buy a console.
but then again, moto says a lot of things...
<img src="graemlins/hmmm.gif" border="0" alt="[Hmmm]" />
What about AMD?
<strong>So all that leaves for serious computing requirements on a Mac are Photoshop (optimized for Altivec), DVD burning (optimized for Altivec), scientific applications (see clustering thread), Maya (optimized for Altivec).
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Well that's a gross over-simplification if there ever was one. But it doesn't change my point above -- if you are limited by memory, and not by the processor, then it doesn't matter how good AltiVec is. Say AltiVec can do twice as much work in the same number of cycles as the SSE2 (used to be true, but may not hold on the latest P4)... now consider you are doing a relatively expensive calculation that takes 50 operations per vector. AltiVec is running at half its theoretical speed because of the memory constraint. The SSE2 system is running just as fast if it has the same memory subsystem! But it doesn't... instead its memory is twice as fast and its clock rate is double, so it is actually twice as fast as the AltiVec machine because of the memory bottleneck. Now consider a mythical G5 at a 50% higher clock than the G4 with a much faster (3x) memory bus and memory... it would run three times faster than the G4, and 50% faster than the (higher clocked) SSE2 machine. Yes, AltiVec is really great but it continues to be badly limited by the memory interface.