Major speed boost come MWSF

Posted:
in Future Apple Hardware edited January 2014
A friend of mine works for a company that uses Macs for a trading system they have (75 traders with 1-2 macs each and each mac has dual screens). He said that after complaining bitterly to Apple that the Dual 800's are only marginally faster than dual 1400 AMD's (OS 10.1 vs W2K) they were visited by some folk higher up than the normal account manager. They showed them the results and showed them that the app was written and turned for the mac and runs on MS using Webobjects. My friend has been assured that much faster machines will shortly be available. He has even been invited to MSFW (from Germany) and has been given a couple of freebee's (including iPods) to try and pacify the company. He said Apple didn't mention exact speeds but he said that they should be more than pleased with the performance and the Ghz gap should no longer exist despite me friend mentioning the release of a dual 1900AMD.

My friend says they expect no less than a dual 1.6 G4 and although Apple did not say yes they did not tell him that he should expect less.

Probably about as unreliable as rumours get but I interpret this a sure sign that dual 1.6 G5's are pending imminent release.
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Comments

  • Reply 1 of 33
    leonisleonis Posts: 3,427member
    Oh yeah....in order to beat Dual Athlon 1900 Apple really needs Dual 1.6Ghz G5.



    Athlon is such a one bad ass chip.



    [ 12-13-2001: Message edited by: Leonis ]</p>
  • Reply 2 of 33
    onlookeronlooker Posts: 5,252member
    [quote]Originally posted by Leonis:

    <strong>Oh yeah....in order to beat Dual Athlon 1900 Apple really needs Dual 1.6Ghz G5.



    Athlon is such a one bad ass chip.



    [ 12-13-2001: Message edited by: Leonis ]</strong><hr></blockquote>



    1.6GHz G4 would equil a 1.9GHz Athlon. Why would it have to be a G5?

    <img src="confused.gif" border="0">
  • Reply 3 of 33
    andersanders Posts: 6,523member
    [quote]Originally posted by onlooker:

    <strong>



    1.6GHz G4 would equil a 1.9GHz Athlon. Why would it have to be a G5?

    :confused: </strong><hr></blockquote>



    Because Leonis chips has a two seven stage long 128 bit I-ron-Y pipelines. Its apparently so advanced that many other chips aren´t able to understand its data output



    [ 12-13-2001: Message edited by: Anders ]</p>
  • Reply 4 of 33
    leonisleonis Posts: 3,427member
    [quote]Originally posted by onlooker:

    <strong>



    1.6GHz G4 would equil a 1.9GHz Athlon. Why would it have to be a G5?

    :confused: </strong><hr></blockquote>



    The reason I am saying it must be G5 is because Athlon's Floating Point Unit is currently the top in the consumer cpu market.



    Even G4 can go to the same clock rate as Athlon's the G4 still sucks when comes to 3D rendering because of the relatively 'weak' FPU.



    Similar to when choosing a car...you look at Horse Power (Mhz)....you also look at Torque (FPU)......



    BTW. If G5's FPU really is as good as what The Register said that would be coool.....imagine cutting down the radiosity rendering time by a big margin :cool:





    [edit] Hey Anders, are you making fun to me?



    [ 12-14-2001: Message edited by: Leonis ]</p>
  • Reply 5 of 33
    and for all you Altivec freaks out there--Altivec don't do raytracing or radiosity. Pure FP power.
  • Reply 6 of 33
    glurxglurx Posts: 1,031member
    [quote]Originally posted by Leonis:

    <strong>



    The reason I am saying it must be G5 is because Athlon's Floating Point Unit is currently the top in the consumer cpu market.



    Even G4 can go to the same clock rate as Athlon's the G4 still sucks when comes to 3D rendering because of the relatively 'weak' FPU.



    Similar to when choosing a car...you look at Horse Power (Mhz)....you also look at Torque (FPU)......



    BTW. If G5's FPU really is as good as what The Register said that would be coool.....imagine cutting down the radiosity rendering time by a big margin :cool:





    [edit] Hey Anders, are you making fun to me?



    [ 12-14-2001: Message edited by: Leonis ]</strong><hr></blockquote>



    Is 3d rendering performance really all that important for boxes running a trading system? It may be that the new systems from Apple will excel at the tasks required by Mr_B8er's friends company while having less wonderful performance in other areas.
  • Reply 7 of 33
    leonisleonis Posts: 3,427member
    I know nothing is perfect.



    PPC is good at something while Athlon excels in others.



    I don't mean to start the flame war
  • Reply 8 of 33
    glurxglurx Posts: 1,031member
    [quote]<strong>I don't mean to start the flame war</strong><hr></blockquote>



    Me neither. Most flame wars are tedious & banal. We Mac users are not either of those.

    <img src="graemlins/smokin.gif" border="0" alt="[Chilling]" /> :cool:
  • Reply 9 of 33
    airslufairsluf Posts: 1,861member
  • Reply 10 of 33
    The software has been written for Cocoa. It used to run on NEXT/OpenStep then OSX1.2server. It has been fairly heavly tuned when it went to OS10 but I don't know if the Altivec has been used or if it helps.

    It is a CPU eater and fairly heavy on graphics although the graphics are just number changing.

    The have done a 3D Volatility matrix that spins on the Mac but not on the NT boxes.

    The traders prefer the Mac over their normal NT desktops as it is more reliable and the graphics are far more fluid. (A few have even dumped their PC's and have gotten Power books etc).
  • Reply 11 of 33
    cowerdcowerd Posts: 579member
    now that you're good and angry let me ask if single or double point floats are sufficient for radiosity calcs?

    [quote]but if you only want to program for a FPU, go ahead<hr></blockquote>

    I don't roll my own, cause apparently I'm too stupid to, but the software that I pay for doesn't seem to take any advantage SIMD specific code on either platform, hence my unhealthy obsession with FP performance and an utter disinterest in anything in anything having to do with Altivec/SSE because in real life I still spend too much time waiting for lines to appear on my screen.
  • Reply 12 of 33
    amorphamorph Posts: 7,112member
    AirSluf wrote:



    [quote]Do you enjoy advertising your ignorance of hardware or radiosity? Altivec is in fact a vectorized floating point unit (4*32).<hr></blockquote>



    Until it can do 2*64 it's no help in e.g. LightWave.
  • Reply 13 of 33
    bigcbigc Posts: 1,224member
    There's no double precision (g4 bit integer calcs in the Altivec units = slow rendering



    Try here

    <a href="http://mac.povray.org/support/faq.html#when_macosx"; target="_blank">POV-ray</a>
  • Reply 14 of 33
    mspmsp Posts: 40member
    [quote]Originally posted by AirSluf:

    <strong>



    Do you enjoy advertising your ignorance of hardware or radiosity? Altivec is in fact a vectorized floating point unit (4*32)[ 12-14-2001: Message edited by: AirSluf ]</strong><hr></blockquote>



    That's the problem right there: 4*32.



    That is, Altivec does not handle doubles (64bit).
  • Reply 15 of 33
    addisonaddison Posts: 1,185member
    I am sure Apple has something special that is going to address all these issues. I think they are going to kick SGI out of business. You have only to look at the businesses they have bought and the support of Mayer.



    Apple must have convinced Mayer that it was strategically important for Mayer to port the software to OS X. They must have some really special kit and I bet Mayer are privi to it.



    How about a quad 1.6ghz G5 with some faster processors and dedicated chips for some functions like Quartz. Of course a really high spec machine could cost $20,000 but would be dedicated to rendering etc.
  • Reply 16 of 33
    amorphamorph Posts: 7,112member
    I doubt Apple will release a $20K machine. They'll more likely release a $3K machine that does the work that required a $20K machine the day before. That's what they've been doing for years.



    I do see some convergence: The SuperDrive; MPEG-4; massive internal bandwidth (RapidIO); 64-bit support (&gt;4GB files and memory partitions, possibly double-precision support in AltiVec). Built-in, low-latency n-channel 32 bit audio. FCP3 (and iMovie 3 is due). This all points to a serious platform for video, and video is the direction Apple has been headed for some time now. By video I mean live and rendered, especially since the two are increasingly complimentary.



    A lot of digital cameras (still and video) use QT in hardware. What happens when QT supports MPEG-4 natively? Would Apple release a video camera-like appliance that interfaced with iMovie just like the iPod interfaces with iTunes?



    To top it off, MS just announced "Corona." Since MS has been reading out of IBM's playbook for decades, it's likely that this is FUD to take the wind out of an Apple announcement. What is "Corona?" Streaming video, in a nutshell.



    Something to think about.



    [ 12-14-2001: Message edited by: Amorph ]</p>
  • Reply 17 of 33
    airslufairsluf Posts: 1,861member
  • Reply 18 of 33
    noahjnoahj Posts: 4,503member
    [quote]Originally posted by onlooker:

    <strong>



    1.6GHz G4 would equil a 1.9GHz Athlon. Why would it have to be a G5?

    :confused: </strong><hr></blockquote>



    Actually the Athlon XP 1900 is not 1.9 GHz. I don't recall the actual speed (something like 1.6 GHz) They renamed them in order to take the Attention off of the MHz gap with Intel. The name denotes how it should perform when campared to an Intel P4. So using your math a 1.3 GHz G4 would put us around the same performance as AMD's current top of the line. Whether that is true or not will be seen real soon now.
  • Reply 19 of 33
    iKnow that come MWSF we will see major speed boosts, whether they are G5's or G4's is anyones guess becuase my sources have given me conflicting answers to this years million dollar question. My bet is that we will not see the G5 until mid to early (after MWSF) 2002.



    If i don't know that who knows?
  • Reply 20 of 33
    addisonaddison Posts: 1,185member
    I hope that the new Power Macs have been re-designed to provide enough power for two ADC LCD screens. Having a twin cinema display set-up would just be heaven.
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