First Intel Macs on track for January

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  • Reply 221 of 451
    powerdocpowerdoc Posts: 8,123member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by wizard69

    I haven't gone bak and verified this but I think the original poster was technically correct. The clock rate on the bus is (on some machines) one quater the clock rate of the CPU. The actually data transfer rate being higher due to transfers on the leading and trailing edges of the clocks.



    Or so I seem to recall. It would be a considerable engineering feat to get a 1.5 or 3 GHz bus to work on a standard PC board. Not that there hasn't been considerable gains made here just that the PIE bus isn't one of them.



    Dave




    What apple say :

    From the Apple Technical overview PDF file :

    Quote:

    bidirectional Frontside Bus



    Leveraging the dual frontside bus architecture pioneered in the original Power Mac G5, each dual-core processor has an independent data path to the system controller running at up to 1.25GHz. Unlike conventional processor interfaces, which carry data in only one direction at a time, this dual-channel frontside bus has two 32-bit point- to-point links (64 bits total): One link travels into the processor and another travels from the processor, which means no wait time while the processor and the system controller negotiate which will use the bus or while the bus switches direction. This enables data to move in opposite directions simultaneously?a dramatic improvement over previous processor interfaces. to the system controller, unlike traditional dual-processor systems, which constrain throughput by placing all processor resources on one bus. Each G5 processor has a dedicated interface to main memory for total bandwidth of up to 10 GBps per processor, or a total of 20 GBps for a quad system. This high-performance frontside bus architecture also enables each core to discover and access data in the other cores? caches?further increasing performance on quad-core systems.

    In Power Mac G5 Quad systems, each dual-core PowerPC G5 processor has its own bidirectional frontside bus.



    So for me 1,25 ghz compared to 2,5 is 1/2 ratio.

    Note that Apple do not say that the bus is double pumped here. The DDR is double pumped, but the memory bus is between the CPU and the memory controller, not between the CPU and the RAM (in this case : direct link, the dual pumped thing will be mandatory).
  • Reply 222 of 451
    Quote:

    Originally posted by hmurchison

    64-bit support in an iMac with 1 memory slot is silly. Large memory access is a staple of 64-bit computing. The extra bits have to go somewhere and without fast memory 64-bit support is there to placate some geek who wants to brag about his/her computer.



    64 bit in an iMac is good PR, and the processor is doing better Mhz-wise than the G4. And the chip is probably just as cheap.



    (Sorry if this was Intel plabber, too lazy to read the thread)
  • Reply 223 of 451
    Quote:

    Originally posted by melgross

    http://darwine.opendarwin.org//



    Quote:

    The Darwine project intends to port and develop WINE as well as other supporting tools that will allow Darwin and Mac OS X users to run Windows Applications, and to provide a Win32 API compatibility at application source code level.



    "Intends to port" and "WINE is here for OS X" are not the same thing.
  • Reply 224 of 451
    strobestrobe Posts: 369member
    ? Darwine has yet to have a "nice GUI", at least as I would define it. Currently it uses X11, thus you have to deal with an extra layer of ancient display server protocols if you want to do rudimentary tasks such as copy/paste or even input control. I know this because I wrote what is currently the quartz driver for Darwine, a project that got stalled because of poor documentation for Win32 and WINE. I may resume development if I get some coding support.



    ? Darwine already runs on OSx86 and can run some simple windows apps.



    ? Darwine poses a risk that windows developers will use it to port their crappy windows apps instead of using Carbon or Cocoa, or not bother porting at all. This matters less for apps which aren't meant to interact with anything else like games, but it is worth mentioning. I don't want the Windows API to become even more entrenched, and I certainly don't want people to believe it is a viable multi-platform API. Incidentally, I would say the same thing about Qt and GTK.



    ? Darwine, which is, of course, based on WINE, will also have the same crappy compatibility level as WINE does, so don't expect miracles. WINE is a constantly evolving beast where most users have to debug their apps to make them run, often using nightly WINE builds. The "stable" version of WINE is merely there for kicks and giggles.
  • Reply 225 of 451
    melgrossmelgross Posts: 33,598member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Gene Clean

    "Intends to port" and "WINE is here for OS X" are not the same thing.



    I never said that "it was here".



    I said that it will be here. Crossover, which will be here as well, will be more useful.



    Don't forget that Wine for Linux will always be in a perpetual state of beta. at least 75% of all Windows programs don't run. They are only interested in getting some of the big names to work. If others can piggyback theirs onto that, fine.



    Read the link to eWeek I posted.
  • Reply 226 of 451
    melgrossmelgross Posts: 33,598member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by strobe

    ? Darwine has yet to have a "nice GUI", at least as I would define it. Currently it uses X11, thus you have to deal with an extra layer of ancient display server protocols if you want to do rudimentary tasks such as copy/paste or even input control. I know this because I wrote what is currently the quartz driver for Darwine, a project that got stalled because of poor documentation for Win32 and WINE. I may resume development if I get some coding support.



    ? Darwine already runs on OSx86 and can run some simple windows apps.



    ? Darwine poses a risk that windows developers will use it to port their crappy windows apps instead of using Carbon or Cocoa, or not bother porting at all. This matters less for apps which aren't meant to interact with anything else like games, but it is worth mentioning. I don't want the Windows API to become even more entrenched, and I certainly don't want people to believe it is a viable multi-platform API. Incidentally, I would say the same thing about Qt and GTK.



    ? Darwine, which is, of course, based on WINE, will also have the same crappy compatibility level as WINE does, so don't expect miracles. WINE is a constantly evolving beast where most users have to debug their apps to make them run, often using nightly WINE builds. The "stable" version of WINE is merely there for kicks and giggles.




    I agree with that. Linux users love the problems they have getting things to work. It's part of the bragging rights.
  • Reply 227 of 451
    Quote:

    Originally posted by melgross

    You're missing the point here.



    Well, no offense, but after the whole "my cordless phone works at several GHz" argument, I tend to think that that statement actually applies to you...





    Quote:



    The design of a hi frequency circuit is similar whether it is analog or digital, serial or parallel.




    Similar maybe, but the complexity differs by orders of magnitude.





    Quote:



    The same problems exist. Whether it's a cell or a computer. Don't think that because one circuit is different from another, there is no convergence between them, because if you do, you'd be wrong.





    Of course the basic issues are the same; we're talking about physics, after all. It's just that the complexity of coping with them varies enormously depending on what exactly you try to do.



    As an example, your typical run-of-the-mill serial bus uses LVDS with embedded clocks. As such, you can by definition never have bits coming in early or late, and don't have to worry about piecing them back together in the proper way -- which just so happens to be a huge deal for high-speed parallel buses.





    Quote:



    All hi frequency circuitry has capacitance problems, parasitic interference, length of line problems, etc. A %10,000 scope has more in common with a computer than you think.





    Yeah. But just because it's feasible to hand-tune every trace on a simple MMIC doesn't mean the same applies to the complex, multi-layer PCBs found in computers. It's a totally different order of complexity.



    In any case, whether you believe me or not, the point that nobody in the industry uses GHz-speed off-chip parallel buses should kinda tip you off to the fact that it's a lot less trivial than you seem to think.





    Quote:



    A microwave oven has nothing to do with what we're talking about and will just confuse the issue.




    Well, if I'm not mistaken, it was you who brought up the "my phone runs at GHz speeds" point...
  • Reply 228 of 451
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Powerdoc

    What apple say :

    From the Apple Technical overview PDF file :



    So for me 1,25 ghz compared to 2,5 is 1/2 ratio.

    Note that Apple do not say that the bus is double pumped here. The DDR is double pumped, but the memory bus is between the CPU and the memory controller, not between the CPU and the RAM (in this case : direct link, the dual pumped thing will be mandatory).




    This is just the writer's being sloppy (which does seem to be rather common these days). As is clearly stated in the PPC 970MP user manual, the processor bus is double-pumped.
  • Reply 229 of 451
    Quote:

    Originally posted by melgross

    [B]I never said that "it was here".



    You mentioned different versions, which implied that there are non-Linux versions. There aren't.



    Quote:

    I said that it will be here. Crossover, which will be here as well, will be more useful.



    Hardly, seeing as Crossover is just an implementation of WINE with a GUI.



    Quote:

    Don't forget that Wine for Linux will always be in a perpetual state of beta. at least 75% of all Windows programs don't run. They are only interested in getting some of the big names to work. If others can piggyback theirs onto that, fine.



    Of course they are, as the benefit of getting thousands of small Windows apps to run would be minimal. People want IE to test their pages on, Word for that file OpenOffice can't open (rarely) and they want to run Photoshop and perhaps iTunes (in Linux). Nobody cares for the entire library of Windows-compatible apps because there are very good replacements for them.



    And CrossOver = WINE with a GUI slapped on it. I don't see how that is "more useful" in running those 75% of other applications, unless you mean that people can use a mouse now instead of typing words for programs to start. Yep, useful as hell.
  • Reply 230 of 451
    Quote:

    Originally posted by strobe

    The "stable" version of WINE is merely there for kicks and giggles.



    Oh, so you helped develope Darwine, which is based on WINE, but don't seem to know that there is no "stable" version of WINE yet. It's in Beta, and the version is 0.9.



    Yep. For kicks and giggles alright.
  • Reply 231 of 451
    strobestrobe Posts: 369member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Gene Clean

    Oh, so you helped develope Darwine, which is based on WINE, but don't seem to know that there is no "stable" version of WINE yet. It's in Beta, and the version is 0.9.



    Yep. For kicks and giggles alright.




    Most linux distributions have a 'stable' fork with a copy of WINE.



    There's a huge difference between having a 'beta' copy which runs, and a nightly build which may not run depending how good a day you're having. I wouldn't say WINE is even in a beta stage, not even those "fc" copies you're invited to download from the official web site.
  • Reply 232 of 451
    Quote:

    Originally posted by T'hain Esh Kelch

    64 bit in an iMac is good PR, and the processor is doing better Mhz-wise than the G4. And the chip is probably just as cheap.



    (Sorry if this was Intel plabber, too lazy to read the thread)




    yes... we must come to terms that a lot of tech specs advertised is pretty much stupid and irrelevant for joe schmoe. but if you want your mac to sell against a Dull, you have to have some numbers so that joe schmoe can look at it and say, oh, okay, it has what Dull has and it looks a bit nicer...



    remember that a big part of apple's target market is joe and jane schmoe, not it managers, not gamers for example, which have a cult following view of AMD (and rightly so, i say!! )
  • Reply 233 of 451
    Quote:

    Originally posted by strobe

    [B]Most linux distributions have a 'stable' fork with a copy of WINE.



    That doesn't make WINE itself "stable" - as you claimed.



    Quote:

    There's a huge difference between having a 'beta' copy which runs, and a nightly build which may not run depending how good a day you're having. I wouldn't say WINE is even in a beta stage, not even those "fc" copies you're invited to download from the official web site.



    Totally irrelevant. You claimed WINE has a "stable" release and that it isn't stable at all, and then you admitted it's in Beta and "not even in a beta stage". WINE just got out of Alpha, been there for several years, and now it's in Beta. But as with any Beta software, it may crash, stop running or kill your dog.



    But you should know that already, being a developer and all.
  • Reply 234 of 451
    I'm not going to get into a pedantic argument with some obtuse schmuck lawyer when any reasonable person would have realized my point was how unstable and incompatible it is.



    Oh no! I meant WINE as found in 'stable' distributions and not a stable WINE fork! SEND THE HOUNDS!!!
  • Reply 236 of 451
    "Interestingly, iTunes 4.9 asked us to update to version 5.0?so we did, and that ran correctly as well. We took things too far when we plugged in a Motorola ROKR E1 phone (what can we say? It was lying around) and attempted to transfer music to it. The developer build doesn't have drivers for the E1, unfortunately. This makes sense, of course, since the build was completed before the E1 was released to the public. We probably tested this combo even before the folks at Apple."



    hahahahahahahah yeah, PC Magazine iss waaaayyyy ahead of apple and all the other osx86'ers
  • Reply 237 of 451
    Quote:

    Originally posted by sunilraman

    "Interestingly, iTunes 4.9 asked us to update to version 5.0?so we did, and that ran correctly as well. We took things too far when we plugged in a Motorola ROKR E1 phone (what can we say? It was lying around) and attempted to transfer music to it. The developer build doesn't have drivers for the E1, unfortunately. This makes sense, of course, since the build was completed before the E1 was released to the public. We probably tested this combo even before the folks at Apple."



    hahahahahahahah yeah, PC Magazine iss waaaayyyy ahead of apple and all the other osx86'ers








    Yeah, it's just going to be SO easy to run OS X on generic PC's. By the time the MacTel's do come out, imagine how much more difficult (if not in fact impossible) it will be to get generic PC HW to work with OS X (i. e. I think this is also part of Apple's strategy to negate generic PC OS X'es, release, revise, repeat as necessary). Imagine, arguably the leading PC trade pub, with their inhouse guru's, needing how many outside people, how many man hours? Finally, isn't this arguably ILLEGAL?



    Now if I were a l33t piratez, I just might keep my mouth shut UNTIL the production MacTel's are released, then and only then would I get the word out. Basic human nature, people talk, loose lips sink ships!



    I just can't imagine a scenario where a HW vendor (i. e. MB vendor) constantly releases new MB's for each update to OS X (wherein each new OS X release breaks all previous generic PC HW). Apple legal would be all over this one! So even if a few thousand hackerz get OS X to work, so what, Apple's done their job, they've limited the damage to a VERY small fraction of the potental market. And arguably, those hackerz weren't going to PAY for ANY SW to begin with in the first place!



    Yeah, the OS X hackerz, they are really FREE OS X beta testers! It's the "Crack OS X" contest, Apple pays ZERO dollars for you to troubleshoot their SW. Given Apple's proprietary nature and de facto history, all I can say is that I'm ROTFLMAO!



    No, if anything the article just shows how difficult it's going to be to get OS X to run on one specific HW platform, let alone ANY HW platform. Maybe that's their point?



  • Reply 238 of 451
    heh. maybe its the old-skoolers at pcMag tryin to get some madd rezpectz yo.... even though, yes, as you pointed out, they are a few light-years behind the 8 ball and the bit about "someone handed us an [Os X86] Tiger build on an external drive" made me crack up with laughter. to which i say, WTF? well somebody just violated their NDA big time by handing Os X86 to a major magazine that then published their testing or maybe pcMag got it off some pansy that got it from bitTorrent who's set up to take the fall if apple comes knocking, lawyers in tow.
  • Reply 239 of 451
    "ive installed tiger on an inspiron 6000



    no wifi, no scrolling, no power managemnt, no external mouse, overall pretty bad and useless.



    as for osx itself, totally not worth the hassle of getting it installed. functionally provides nothing over xp, and wont be compatible with many of your apps."



    This was a post at a message board I frequent from a PC user. This is exactly why Apple needs to provide a stable supported version for non-Apple computers. An unstable pirated version is exactly what the PC industry will see. They will tell everyone they know about their experiences with the hacked version and expect it to work just as badly on Apple's own computers. Casual Mac buyers will hear this and not buy the Mactels as a result. Apple cannot enjoy the same proprietary advantages on x86. They either need to go all the way or stay with an ISA where this is not a problem.
  • Reply 240 of 451
    Quote:

    Originally posted by BenRoethig

    "ive installed tiger on an inspiron 6000



    no wifi, no scrolling, no power managemnt, no external mouse, overall pretty bad and useless.



    as for osx itself, totally not worth the hassle of getting it installed. functionally provides nothing over xp, and wont be compatible with many of your apps."



    This was a post at a message board I frequent from a PC user. This is exactly why Apple needs to provide a stable supported version for non-Apple computers. An unstable pirated version is exactly what the PC industry will see. They will tell everyone they know about their experiences with the hacked version and expect it to work just as badly on Apple's own computers. Casual Mac buyers will hear this and not buy the Mactels as a result. Apple cannot enjoy the same proprietary advantages on x86. They either need to go all the way or stay with an ISA where this is not a problem.








    I must eat crow on that one. In fact it appears that OS heX runs on many PC boxen (as I've found out since my previous post).



    On your negative argument, ain't going to happen, not as long as Apple's in the HW biz! Word of mouth from Joe hackerz to Joe average (Who doesn't even know that Apple currently uses PowerPC's?)? No, the word of mouth will be "If you want a good OS experience, get OS X ON an Apple computer!" Otherwise, "If you want a POS experience, get WinDOS ON a WalMart computer!"



    PS - Found this on the extremetech website, and I quote, "Link removed. Please do not post links to copyrighted material. We do not sanction piracy or the violation of anyone's copyright. Thanks." Like I said ROTFLMAO!



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