Twin engine GPU?
Juicy little article over at Architosh claiming apple is coming out (possibly in conjunction with Nvidia) with a twin engine graphics card with 128 Megs of DDR for each GPU.
<a href="http://www.architosh.com/news/2002-04/2002c1-0412-applegraph1.phtml" target="_blank">http://www.architosh.com/news/2002-04/2002c1-0412-applegraph1.phtml</a>
If I'm not mistaken, it also insinuates Dorsal M is a source of theirs.
Well reasoned out little article
Probably a crock, but certainly plenty entertaining
Discuss......
<a href="http://www.architosh.com/news/2002-04/2002c1-0412-applegraph1.phtml" target="_blank">http://www.architosh.com/news/2002-04/2002c1-0412-applegraph1.phtml</a>
If I'm not mistaken, it also insinuates Dorsal M is a source of theirs.
Well reasoned out little article
Probably a crock, but certainly plenty entertaining
Discuss......
Comments
Heh, all those posts should be categorized into something like:
"Son of G4, it's back and it's pissed!"
or
"Night of the living G5's"
From recent announcements, nVidia seems to be committed to mac now so I'm sure if a card like this does come out, it'll be available for the Mac within weeks of announcement of the PC version (or in the case of the GF3, announced for mac first, but in actuality the GF3 shipped first on PC afterwards).
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Now thats good news.
[quote] Chief 'wants' among the studios is for more powerful hardware. Specifically, they want 'best of breed' graphics performance and options there. They also want a 1U or 2U industry standard, rack-mountable Power Mac for render farm building and servers. And they want only duals and quads -- single processor Macs are not desired except at the portable level.
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So thay might get the massage at last
[ 04-17-2002: Message edited by: Alpha Mac ]</p>
<strong>
So thay might get the massage at last
</strong><hr></blockquote>
We'll see. Also I am not sure whether that "going after the pro market" means any more reasonable pricing. <img src="graemlins/hmmm.gif" border="0" alt="[Hmmm]" />
If I'm not mistaken, it also insinuates Dorsal M is a source of theirs.
[/QB]<hr></blockquote>
Dorsal, you little whore! <img src="graemlins/lol.gif" border="0" alt="[Laughing]" />
They might have had me if they hadn't said "In fact, the G4 architecture has always been cited for its strong floating point performance". <hr></blockquote>
I've read this elsewhere also. I could be wrong but I think these references to a strong floating point performance refer to it's efficiency. The woeful fp performance compared to Intel and AMD might have more to do with clock speed and don't Intel chips have 2 floating point units??
Any one have the correct information?
PowerPCs have traditionally been stronger at floating point, but the G4 simply has not kept pace over the course of its lifetime and the Athlon & P4 have overtaken it in terms of scalar floating point. The AltiVec unit's single precision floating point is still superiour, but is now so far behind in clock rate as to have lost much of its advantage. The next PowerPC design could change that and put it back on top, at least temporarily.
Nvidia makes the architecture for XBox and Gamecube(?)...
could this become an Apple videocard manufactured by Nvidia?
(is my research completely accurate? hell no, but I raise an interesting question no?)
<strong>I have also read some of the same concerns relative to the OS X math libraries. Folks seem happy with the accuracy of Apples but rumors of the uber-no-debug-code-fast-mathlib-that-fixes-performance-but-gives-wrong-result still pop up every now and then. I think it will take a design difference to break out of that rut.</strong><hr></blockquote>
The uber-no-debug-code-fast-mathlib-that-fixes-performance was rolled into 10.1.2. The difference (besides No Debug Code(TM), for Snappier(TM) performance! ) is highly optimized PPC assembler code (as OS 9 had) instead of off-the-shelf, cross-platform C code borrowed from BSD.
I haven't heard any complaints about accuracy.
[ 04-17-2002: Message edited by: Amorph ]</p>
<strong>IBM and Motorola make the G3 and G4, but they are Apple Products.
Nvidia makes the architecture for XBox and Gamecube(?)...
could this become an Apple videocard manufactured by Nvidia?
(is my research completely accurate? hell no, but I raise an interesting question no?)</strong><hr></blockquote>
ATI makes the gamecube gfx card
Nvidia doesnt manufacture anything... they just design boards and outsource the heavy lifting to other companies--like apple so i think what you meant to say was backwards.... although i didnt do any research either... so who knows...
Also, if apple made a propritary video card, they would probably only sell it with new machines to pad their bottom line, which would make a lot of people angry.... not that it would matter to apple anywyas... they rape the "faithful" all the time.... <img src="graemlins/oyvey.gif" border="0" alt="[No]" />
<strong>Well, here at Appleinsider, someone posted that a dual 1.8Ghz G5 (the chips by themselves) produce 80GigaFLOPS of power. If this were true, where would it put apple against the likes of AMD?</strong><hr></blockquote>
Yeah well, lots of people post lots of things here. Many of them make good jokes.
Current P4/Athlon performance levels are about 8-20 gigaflops per processor, and this is peak vector single precision.