I don;t know if this is necessary - artists can use services like CD Baby to get their tracks on iTunes. Perhaps Apple might get rid of the middle man and turn iTunes into a pay-to-own YouTube of sorts, allowing people creating content with Apple products (Logic, Logic Express, Garage Band, iMovie, Final Cut) to post content for sale in the iTunes store.
This could be a HUGE step to win over the people who made Mac important, and have been neglected by Apple with the lack of pro updates. If this is something Apple has planned, I would definitely welcome it, I just hope they have some quality control, or else it could be flooded by people who think that someone will want to spend money for a webcam rant or their cat doing something cute.
I'm afraid somehow farting will involved. As per the iPhone App Store iFartFiesta.
....Nah, I think it's partly Intel's fault combined with Apple's design choices. Good desktop chips have been out for ages but they can't go into Apple's consumer lineup. The mobile chips haven't really improved or dropped price so there's little that would sell an upgrade model besides it being new but the desktop chips are racing ahead.
This is why the new laptops are pretty much the exact same speed as the old ones. The selling point they can make on the laptop is durability, better cooling etc. This doesn't fly on a desktop where it's about performance and value for money.
They can't shoehorn a 95W CPU into an iMac that is only meant to hold about 55W tops so they had to wait until Intel landed the new low power desktop quads running at 65W. Still a bit of a technical challenge as the iMacs are still not much more than laptops.
This shouldn't affect the mini if they are crippling it again but they won't push it out ahead of their favorite in case, god forbid, people actually prefer them. If they put quads in the Mini too, well that would be awesome but they probably won't.
Either way, since Intel only released these chips recently (last week):
they couldn't really have put anything significant out earlier.
The Mac Pro and XServe share the same chips and AI reports these won't come until the end of March from Intel. Gainestown is already out though but not all the chips so it will depend on which ones Apple chooses.
The Cinema display line will come with the Mac Pro I imagine but they're probably ready to push out an all glossy lineup and smart people inside the company holding them back saying 'are you crazy, the 517 people we manage to sell these expensive displays to worldwide won't ever buy from us again, we'll lose thousands of pounds'.
Not to mention on top of this Apple may be fumbling around like a headless chicken now that number 1 is out of action.
Still, the positive things to note are that the low powered quads are out and there is a timeframe for Mac Pros. Given that they don't usually update these machines together, we can only hope that the Mini and iMacs will be out within a matter of days. If so, it would be a new strategy for Apple not to have an event for a redesign but you saw what happened to their stock the last time they did that. I think it's safer to just put the updates on the store and let people figure out the spec for themselves. The US dollar prices they quote are always pretty meaningless worldwide anyway given that Apple use their own tax calculators.
Thank you for the response. Any ideas as to what Andy Ihnatko found so jaw dropping? I haven't seen anything from Apple that would be considered jaw dropping.
Is it possible the delay is due to some significant architectural changes?
Hell NO! SJ and Apple just don't give a rap about the 'faithful'. They'd rather play mind games with us. They expect us to be loyal to Apple, but that's a one way street. Isn't that apparent from all the crap they've foisted on us? When has Apple EVER had it's users in mind? They are up in their ivory tower with NO regard to users who keep them in business. Do I sound bitter? You bet your a__ I am.
Do any of you fanboys think my opinion is wrong? Do you think Apple actually cares about us?
Doesn't the support cut off of G4's tell you what Apple thinks of users?
Hell NO! SJ and Apple just don't give a rap about the 'faithful'. They'd rather play mind games with us. They expect us to be loyal to Apple, but that's a one way street. Isn't that apparent from all the crap they've foisted on us? When has Apple EVER had it's users in mind? They are up in their ivory tower with NO regard to users who keep them in business. Do I sound bitter? You bet your a__ I am.
Do any of you fanboys think my opinion is wrong? Do you think Apple actually cares about us?
Doesn't the support cut off of G4's tell you what Apple thinks of users?
Everything has to end, they cannot keep support for older systems in indefinitely. There may be very good reasons for dropping it like performance gains on the newer systems that break G4 support.
By the reports they are updating the Finder for better performance and that update might break PowerPC support right there. Should they not update core components that benefit the OS just to keep in support older systems?
You have a choice, you don't have to update to the latest system and you G4 will work just fine. Apple needs to advance the OS to keep in competitive, and the extra time writing code to ensure support for systems that are at least 3 years old may not be cost effective for them.
Any ideas as to what Andy Ihnatko found so jaw dropping? I haven't seen anything from Apple that would be considered jaw dropping.
I personally find OpenCL jaw dropping. Some uninformed reporters say things like 10.6 will be 100 times faster, which are quite funny to watch but I believe it will be very impressive.
This is not some advance like auto-vectorization in Alti-vec, this is using the processors in the GPU to do intense calculations and even on the new low end 9400M, it's capable of 54 Gflops, which is double what a Core 2 Duo can do.
It's not that surprising when you think of them as 16 x 450MHz cores vs 2 x 2GHz cores.
Now yes it will be limited to certain tasks but this isn't some language that came from somewhere else, this is Apple's language developed alongside GPU manufacturers. I think they will leverage this a lot at the core level of the OS. Not for use in the OS itself (Finder etc) but in the Core APIs.
They could render text with this, PDFs, encode video or at least process intensive parts of the encoding. Right now, the hardware can handle normal tasks just fine. All machines including the high end Mac Pro struggle when it comes to raw encoding and calculations.
I would bet that every model they bring out will have a GPU that at least equals the CPU in that machine. So the low end Mini will have Core 2 Duo with 9400M. The iMac will use the core 2 quad and a mid-range Nvidia card and the Core i7 Mac Pro should come with the 9800GT with the GTX 280 as BTO. This means for the same price, you effectively get 2-3x the performance for certain tasks than if you didn't have OpenCL. I think that's impressive.
I have a suspicion that Apple could eliminate the 20" iMac and go all 24" and use the 3 mobile quad chips. This means they can share the display panel from the 24" Cinema LED and economize the inventory - it then makes sense why they didn't make a 20" model. If you look at the 2.8GHz Core 2 Extreme 24" iMac, that CPU costs $851. The price of the quad 2.33GHz chip is $245.
This means that a 24" iMac with that chip would drop to:
$1799 - $606 = $1193
The current low end on the iMac line is a 20" display with 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo and is priced: $1199
So to summarize, what I think they will do:
Core 2 Duo Mini, still with mobile chips but 9400M, maybe drop back to the original lower price point.
Core 2 Quad iMac, possibly 9400M on entry model and going up to a mid-range Nvidia 9 series card.
Core i7 Gainestown, possibly 8-core chips but likely dual quads, with a single quad on the lowest end and high end Nvidia 9 series cards with the pro cards too.
I'd like to see them make an entry level headless quad but this is the lineup that seems most likely to me. As I say, combine these hardware specs with OpenCL and I will be impressed. Still annoyed about the lack of the mid-range headless machine as always but I would acknowledge these as very good performance and competitive machines. I will buy a Mini for home and a Pro for work and complain that I would rather buy two middle options.
I think the iMac and Mini updates will come first given that the processors for the Pro probably aren't ready yet although there is a possibility they could organise an event some time this month and launch them all together with redesigned enclosures (the chin is definitely going if it's 24" all the way), then ship the Pro later on.
Apple are also supposed to be working on high end graphics software to replace Shake and their recent update after a number of years suggests they at least haven't forgotten about it. If there was a new Final Cut Studio that was OpenCL enabled and rendering say 4 times faster than the old Mac Pro, it would be very appealling.
This is why rumors are best to be fully detailed because the above is what I find impressive but others will always be looking for gold at the end of the rainbow instead of just stopping to admire the rainbow itself.
There doesn't need to be something that is beyond everyone's imagination. When it comes to highly parallel tasks, we will see as much as 10x increase in performance. This will destroy PC benchmarks for at least a few months.
The G4 is 10 years old now, how long do you expect them to continue to support it?
Apple has never been sentimental for legacy technology. At some point you have to let go of old and antiquated technology, to then support optimized and lightweight technology. This is exactly the same as when Apple switched from OS 9 to OS X.
Quote:
Originally Posted by sequitur
Hell NO! SJ and Apple just don't give a rap about the 'faithful'. They'd rather play mind games with us. They expect us to be loyal to Apple, but that's a one way street. Isn't that apparent from all the crap they've foisted on us? When has Apple EVER had it's users in mind? They are up in their ivory tower with NO regard to users who keep them in business. Do I sound bitter? You bet your a__ I am.
Do any of you fanboys think my opinion is wrong? Do you think Apple actually cares about us?
Doesn't the support cut off of G4's tell you what Apple thinks of users?
I personally find OpenCL jaw dropping. Some uninformed reporters say things like 10.6 will be 100 times faster, which are quite funny to watch but I believe it will be very impressive....
There doesn't need to be something that is beyond everyone's imagination. When it comes to highly parallel tasks, we will see as much as 10x increase in performance. This will destroy PC benchmarks for at least a few months.
It will take a few years for OpenCL to really mature in a lot of Mac OS X apps... But yes, it is promising. Just look at the Folding At Home stats:
There are much less Nvidia-GPU clients but they destroy the CPU clients:
think this is interesting, the 4800 is from 2008... maybe a low power version of this card would be new and good for the next iMac ;-)
Yeah hopefully we're talking a lower power version Radeon 4850 or 4870. Maybe Radeon 4650 or better. Radeon 4650 at minimum. But the iMac will very likely use the Nvidia chipset so no Radeons in iMac, I think...
I personally find OpenCL jaw dropping. Some uninformed reporters say things like 10.6 will be 100 times faster, which are quite funny to watch but I believe it will be very impressive.
This is the thing we have people over selling what OpenCL will be capable of doing. People that don't understand will be disappointed.
The big but here is that yeah it will be impressive in limited ways. Currently my biggest concern is that Apple back ports GPU acceleration of movie playback on my early 2008 MBP.
Quote:
This is not some advance like auto-vectorization in Alti-vec, this is using the processors in the GPU to do intense calculations and even on the new low end 9400M, it's capable of 54 Gflops, which is double what a Core 2 Duo can do.
Auto-vectorization is a compiler technology. You may be confusing people here because the processors in the GPU are similar to vector processors. Also those GFlops are all but useless if your code and compiler can't fined an arrangement of code and data that these units can execute against. Effectively that is.
Quote:
It's not that surprising when you think of them as 16 x 450MHz cores vs 2 x 2GHz cores.
Remember that almost never are all of those cores available at once. Do even a little bit of graphics or other tasks that tie up the GPU and your free cores begin to shrink. In fact there is some evidence out that that indicates that one can actually put to much of the work load onto the GPU and actually lower performance. This often involves heavy 3D but the point remains in order for those processors to help they need to be free for use and not impact bandwidth that the GPU needs.
The other problem is just how many of those GPU's is Apple going to leverage? I could actually see them eventually having a couple in use just about all the time. There are several possiblilities here including sound processing, TrueType processing, Much more of Quartz or even all of it. It all depends on just how aggressive Apple wants to be and how well the GPU can actually accelerate these subsystems.
Quote:
Now yes it will be limited to certain tasks but this isn't some language that came from somewhere else, this is Apple's language developed alongside GPU manufacturers. I think they will leverage this a lot at the core level of the OS. Not for use in the OS itself (Finder etc) but in the Core APIs.
Actually I think you are half right above. Eventually they may accelerate Apple supplied apps themselves. Many of the API's are a given.
In any event i'M surprised that you discount finder as there is good potential there for acceleration. Just rendering all those icons could be an area of improvement.
Quote:
They could render text with this, PDFs, encode video or at least process intensive parts of the encoding. Right now, the hardware can handle normal tasks just fine. All machines including the high end Mac Pro struggle when it comes to raw encoding and calculations.
Yep, lots of potential but I don't see the huge speed ups that some imagine. YOu will see exceptional performance when your app and the API's can make use of all the hardware threads available but you shouldn't assume that every app will leverage those GPU cores.
Quote:
I would bet that every model they bring out will have a GPU that at least equals the CPU in that machine. So the low end Mini will have Core 2 Duo with 9400M. The iMac will use the core 2 quad and a mid-range Nvidia card and the Core i7 Mac Pro should come with the 9800GT with the GTX 280 as BTO. This means for the same price, you effectively get 2-3x the performance for certain tasks than if you didn't have OpenCL. I think that's impressive.
Potentially get that sort of performance increase. For specific apps though you need to know how or if the app can leverage all those cores. A so called embarrassing parallel app might actually see a 16X speed up, but those will be few and far between.
Quote:
I have a suspicion that Apple could eliminate the 20" iMac and go all 24" and use the 3 mobile quad chips. This means they can share the display panel from the 24" Cinema LED and economize the inventory - it then makes sense why they didn't make a 20" model. If you look at the 2.8GHz Core 2 Extreme 24" iMac, that CPU costs $851. The price of the quad 2.33GHz chip is $245.
This means that a 24" iMac with that chip would drop to:
$1799 - $606 = $1193
The current low end on the iMac line is a 20" display with 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo and is priced: $1199
So to summarize, what I think they will do:
Core 2 Duo Mini, still with mobile chips but 9400M, maybe drop back to the original lower price point.
Core 2 Quad iMac, possibly 9400M on entry model and going up to a mid-range Nvidia 9 series card.
Core i7 Gainestown, possibly 8-core chips but likely dual quads, with a single quad on the lowest end and high end Nvidia 9 series cards with the pro cards too.
I'd like to see them make an entry level headless quad but this is the lineup that seems most likely to me. As I say, combine these hardware specs with OpenCL and I will be impressed. Still annoyed about the lack of the mid-range headless machine as always but I would acknowledge these as very good performance and competitive machines. I will buy a Mini for home and a Pro for work and complain that I would rather buy two middle options.
I think the iMac and Mini updates will come first given that the processors for the Pro probably aren't ready yet although there is a possibility they could organise an event some time this month and launch them all together with redesigned enclosures (the chin is definitely going if it's 24" all the way), then ship the Pro later on.
Apple are also supposed to be working on high end graphics software to replace Shake and their recent update after a number of years suggests they at least haven't forgotten about it. If there was a new Final Cut Studio that was OpenCL enabled and rendering say 4 times faster than the old Mac Pro, it would be very appealling.
This is why rumors are best to be fully detailed because the above is what I find impressive but others will always be looking for gold at the end of the rainbow instead of just stopping to admire the rainbow itself.
There doesn't need to be something that is beyond everyone's imagination. When it comes to highly parallel tasks, we will see as much as 10x increase in performance. This will destroy PC benchmarks for at least a few months.
Well hopefully Apple won't degenerate into the highly questionable benchmarking that was common when the G's where being marketed. OpenCL is great and all but the last thing we need is some sort of garbage bench mark being promoted b Apple the way they did some of the G5 benchmarks. Generally what they did was to concentrate of the good things that maybe didn't have universal usage by Apple hardware buyers.
Along these lines I wouldn't expect Apple to have 10.6 highly accelerated with OpenCL at introduction. In other words what we are likely to see is a slow but stead improvement in the libraries and apps as Apple finds more and more uses for GPU processing. Note that I'm not calling this GPU acceleration because in many instance the benefit will simply be the reality that there is another hardware thread acting in parallel to heavier threads.
It will take a few years for OpenCL to really mature in a lot of Mac OS X apps... But yes, it is promising. Just look at the Folding At Home stats:
I really hate to see references to a signal processing program like this which marries up to GPU processing all most ideally. The problem is that it sets up an expectation that all programs will benefit in a like manner. This isn't the case in the least. What we should see is a wide range of acceleration from almost zero to performance numbers like Folding at Home imply.
I still see the bigger advantage i the idea that you will have many parallel hardware threads to work with. In some ways it won't matter if the GPU acceleration is a bit slower than the main GPU for some tasks, you benefit more from doing many things at once. At least for some work flows.
In other words; even for tasks where GPU acceleration isn't faster than the main CPU you may get a significant advantage simply from off loading the main CPU. Of course it would be nice if every task that got sent to the GPU ended up running 3X faster or even faster, it just isn't a requirement to be considered an advantage.
Yeah hopefully we're talking a lower power version Radeon 4850 or 4870. Maybe Radeon 4650 or better. Radeon 4650 at minimum. But the iMac will very likely use the Nvidia chipset so no Radeons in iMac, I think...
my thoughts are more like:
mac mini - nvidia (desktop version of the MacBooks)
iMac - something "bigger" with quad (real desktop)
In my experience, anyone hysterical enough to use terms like 'fanboys' can safely be ignored.
Are you ten years old or just plain stupid? Do you post for no other reason than to insult AI members?
The word 'fanboys' has been used by many members. Are they all hysterical? Are you going to ignore them all no matter what their opinion is?
I see nothing positive in your post, but only a negative diatribe. You say, "In your experience." You must not have much. Either grow up or stay out of this forum.
Comments
I don;t know if this is necessary - artists can use services like CD Baby to get their tracks on iTunes. Perhaps Apple might get rid of the middle man and turn iTunes into a pay-to-own YouTube of sorts, allowing people creating content with Apple products (Logic, Logic Express, Garage Band, iMovie, Final Cut) to post content for sale in the iTunes store.
This could be a HUGE step to win over the people who made Mac important, and have been neglected by Apple with the lack of pro updates. If this is something Apple has planned, I would definitely welcome it, I just hope they have some quality control, or else it could be flooded by people who think that someone will want to spend money for a webcam rant or their cat doing something cute.
I'm afraid somehow farting will involved. As per the iPhone App Store iFartFiesta.
...Not to mention on top of this Apple may be fumbling around like a headless chicken now that number 1 is out of action...
That's a scary but not-too-remote possibility.
Edit: Oops wrong thread. LOL.
If they can't even deliver on the things they said are ready (17"MBP) then why are people still expecting another announcement?
That's what I said on the 17" thread. No 17", no Mac Mini, no iMac... Analysts are pulling things out of their ass to keep interest in AAPL.
Something is going on at Apple HQ. I am concerned.
....Nah, I think it's partly Intel's fault combined with Apple's design choices. Good desktop chips have been out for ages but they can't go into Apple's consumer lineup. The mobile chips haven't really improved or dropped price so there's little that would sell an upgrade model besides it being new but the desktop chips are racing ahead.
This is why the new laptops are pretty much the exact same speed as the old ones. The selling point they can make on the laptop is durability, better cooling etc. This doesn't fly on a desktop where it's about performance and value for money.
They can't shoehorn a 95W CPU into an iMac that is only meant to hold about 55W tops so they had to wait until Intel landed the new low power desktop quads running at 65W. Still a bit of a technical challenge as the iMacs are still not much more than laptops.
This shouldn't affect the mini if they are crippling it again but they won't push it out ahead of their favorite in case, god forbid, people actually prefer them. If they put quads in the Mini too, well that would be awesome but they probably won't.
Either way, since Intel only released these chips recently (last week):
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets...oc.aspx?i=3505
they couldn't really have put anything significant out earlier.
The Mac Pro and XServe share the same chips and AI reports these won't come until the end of March from Intel. Gainestown is already out though but not all the chips so it will depend on which ones Apple chooses.
The Cinema display line will come with the Mac Pro I imagine but they're probably ready to push out an all glossy lineup and smart people inside the company holding them back saying 'are you crazy, the 517 people we manage to sell these expensive displays to worldwide won't ever buy from us again, we'll lose thousands of pounds'.
Not to mention on top of this Apple may be fumbling around like a headless chicken now that number 1 is out of action.
Still, the positive things to note are that the low powered quads are out and there is a timeframe for Mac Pros. Given that they don't usually update these machines together, we can only hope that the Mini and iMacs will be out within a matter of days. If so, it would be a new strategy for Apple not to have an event for a redesign but you saw what happened to their stock the last time they did that. I think it's safer to just put the updates on the store and let people figure out the spec for themselves. The US dollar prices they quote are always pretty meaningless worldwide anyway given that Apple use their own tax calculators.
Thank you for the response. Any ideas as to what Andy Ihnatko found so jaw dropping? I haven't seen anything from Apple that would be considered jaw dropping.
Is it possible the delay is due to some significant architectural changes?
Hell NO! SJ and Apple just don't give a rap about the 'faithful'. They'd rather play mind games with us. They expect us to be loyal to Apple, but that's a one way street. Isn't that apparent from all the crap they've foisted on us? When has Apple EVER had it's users in mind? They are up in their ivory tower with NO regard to users who keep them in business. Do I sound bitter? You bet your a__ I am.
Do any of you fanboys think my opinion is wrong? Do you think Apple actually cares about us?
Doesn't the support cut off of G4's tell you what Apple thinks of users?
Hell NO! SJ and Apple just don't give a rap about the 'faithful'. They'd rather play mind games with us. They expect us to be loyal to Apple, but that's a one way street. Isn't that apparent from all the crap they've foisted on us? When has Apple EVER had it's users in mind? They are up in their ivory tower with NO regard to users who keep them in business. Do I sound bitter? You bet your a__ I am.
Do any of you fanboys think my opinion is wrong? Do you think Apple actually cares about us?
Doesn't the support cut off of G4's tell you what Apple thinks of users?
Everything has to end, they cannot keep support for older systems in indefinitely. There may be very good reasons for dropping it like performance gains on the newer systems that break G4 support.
By the reports they are updating the Finder for better performance and that update might break PowerPC support right there. Should they not update core components that benefit the OS just to keep in support older systems?
You have a choice, you don't have to update to the latest system and you G4 will work just fine. Apple needs to advance the OS to keep in competitive, and the extra time writing code to ensure support for systems that are at least 3 years old may not be cost effective for them.
Any ideas as to what Andy Ihnatko found so jaw dropping? I haven't seen anything from Apple that would be considered jaw dropping.
I personally find OpenCL jaw dropping. Some uninformed reporters say things like 10.6 will be 100 times faster, which are quite funny to watch but I believe it will be very impressive.
This is not some advance like auto-vectorization in Alti-vec, this is using the processors in the GPU to do intense calculations and even on the new low end 9400M, it's capable of 54 Gflops, which is double what a Core 2 Duo can do.
It's not that surprising when you think of them as 16 x 450MHz cores vs 2 x 2GHz cores.
Now yes it will be limited to certain tasks but this isn't some language that came from somewhere else, this is Apple's language developed alongside GPU manufacturers. I think they will leverage this a lot at the core level of the OS. Not for use in the OS itself (Finder etc) but in the Core APIs.
They could render text with this, PDFs, encode video or at least process intensive parts of the encoding. Right now, the hardware can handle normal tasks just fine. All machines including the high end Mac Pro struggle when it comes to raw encoding and calculations.
I would bet that every model they bring out will have a GPU that at least equals the CPU in that machine. So the low end Mini will have Core 2 Duo with 9400M. The iMac will use the core 2 quad and a mid-range Nvidia card and the Core i7 Mac Pro should come with the 9800GT with the GTX 280 as BTO. This means for the same price, you effectively get 2-3x the performance for certain tasks than if you didn't have OpenCL. I think that's impressive.
I have a suspicion that Apple could eliminate the 20" iMac and go all 24" and use the 3 mobile quad chips. This means they can share the display panel from the 24" Cinema LED and economize the inventory - it then makes sense why they didn't make a 20" model. If you look at the 2.8GHz Core 2 Extreme 24" iMac, that CPU costs $851. The price of the quad 2.33GHz chip is $245.
This means that a 24" iMac with that chip would drop to:
$1799 - $606 = $1193
The current low end on the iMac line is a 20" display with 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo and is priced: $1199
So to summarize, what I think they will do:
Core 2 Duo Mini, still with mobile chips but 9400M, maybe drop back to the original lower price point.
Core 2 Quad iMac, possibly 9400M on entry model and going up to a mid-range Nvidia 9 series card.
Core i7 Gainestown, possibly 8-core chips but likely dual quads, with a single quad on the lowest end and high end Nvidia 9 series cards with the pro cards too.
I'd like to see them make an entry level headless quad but this is the lineup that seems most likely to me. As I say, combine these hardware specs with OpenCL and I will be impressed. Still annoyed about the lack of the mid-range headless machine as always but I would acknowledge these as very good performance and competitive machines. I will buy a Mini for home and a Pro for work and complain that I would rather buy two middle options.
I think the iMac and Mini updates will come first given that the processors for the Pro probably aren't ready yet although there is a possibility they could organise an event some time this month and launch them all together with redesigned enclosures (the chin is definitely going if it's 24" all the way), then ship the Pro later on.
Apple are also supposed to be working on high end graphics software to replace Shake and their recent update after a number of years suggests they at least haven't forgotten about it. If there was a new Final Cut Studio that was OpenCL enabled and rendering say 4 times faster than the old Mac Pro, it would be very appealling.
This is why rumors are best to be fully detailed because the above is what I find impressive but others will always be looking for gold at the end of the rainbow instead of just stopping to admire the rainbow itself.
There doesn't need to be something that is beyond everyone's imagination. When it comes to highly parallel tasks, we will see as much as 10x increase in performance. This will destroy PC benchmarks for at least a few months.
Apple has never been sentimental for legacy technology. At some point you have to let go of old and antiquated technology, to then support optimized and lightweight technology. This is exactly the same as when Apple switched from OS 9 to OS X.
Hell NO! SJ and Apple just don't give a rap about the 'faithful'. They'd rather play mind games with us. They expect us to be loyal to Apple, but that's a one way street. Isn't that apparent from all the crap they've foisted on us? When has Apple EVER had it's users in mind? They are up in their ivory tower with NO regard to users who keep them in business. Do I sound bitter? You bet your a__ I am.
Do any of you fanboys think my opinion is wrong? Do you think Apple actually cares about us?
Doesn't the support cut off of G4's tell you what Apple thinks of users?
I have a suspicion that Apple could eliminate the 20" iMac and go all 24" .
That would be foolish IMO.
While I don't know for fact, I would bet the 20" iMac is the best selling iMac.
http://www.macbidouille.com/news/2009-02-09/#17950
think this is interesting, the 4800 is from 2008... maybe a low power version of this card would be new and good for the next iMac ;-)
I personally find OpenCL jaw dropping. Some uninformed reporters say things like 10.6 will be 100 times faster, which are quite funny to watch but I believe it will be very impressive....
There doesn't need to be something that is beyond everyone's imagination. When it comes to highly parallel tasks, we will see as much as 10x increase in performance. This will destroy PC benchmarks for at least a few months.
It will take a few years for OpenCL to really mature in a lot of Mac OS X apps... But yes, it is promising. Just look at the Folding At Home stats:
There are much less Nvidia-GPU clients but they destroy the CPU clients:
http://fah-web.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/...?qtype=osstats
Radeon HD 4800 support in Snow Leopard:
http://www.macbidouille.com/news/2009-02-09/#17950
think this is interesting, the 4800 is from 2008... maybe a low power version of this card would be new and good for the next iMac ;-)
Yeah hopefully we're talking a lower power version Radeon 4850 or 4870. Maybe Radeon 4650 or better. Radeon 4650 at minimum. But the iMac will very likely use the Nvidia chipset so no Radeons in iMac, I think...
I personally find OpenCL jaw dropping. Some uninformed reporters say things like 10.6 will be 100 times faster, which are quite funny to watch but I believe it will be very impressive.
This is the thing we have people over selling what OpenCL will be capable of doing. People that don't understand will be disappointed.
The big but here is that yeah it will be impressive in limited ways. Currently my biggest concern is that Apple back ports GPU acceleration of movie playback on my early 2008 MBP.
This is not some advance like auto-vectorization in Alti-vec, this is using the processors in the GPU to do intense calculations and even on the new low end 9400M, it's capable of 54 Gflops, which is double what a Core 2 Duo can do.
Auto-vectorization is a compiler technology. You may be confusing people here because the processors in the GPU are similar to vector processors. Also those GFlops are all but useless if your code and compiler can't fined an arrangement of code and data that these units can execute against. Effectively that is.
It's not that surprising when you think of them as 16 x 450MHz cores vs 2 x 2GHz cores.
Remember that almost never are all of those cores available at once. Do even a little bit of graphics or other tasks that tie up the GPU and your free cores begin to shrink. In fact there is some evidence out that that indicates that one can actually put to much of the work load onto the GPU and actually lower performance. This often involves heavy 3D but the point remains in order for those processors to help they need to be free for use and not impact bandwidth that the GPU needs.
The other problem is just how many of those GPU's is Apple going to leverage? I could actually see them eventually having a couple in use just about all the time. There are several possiblilities here including sound processing, TrueType processing, Much more of Quartz or even all of it. It all depends on just how aggressive Apple wants to be and how well the GPU can actually accelerate these subsystems.
Now yes it will be limited to certain tasks but this isn't some language that came from somewhere else, this is Apple's language developed alongside GPU manufacturers. I think they will leverage this a lot at the core level of the OS. Not for use in the OS itself (Finder etc) but in the Core APIs.
Actually I think you are half right above. Eventually they may accelerate Apple supplied apps themselves. Many of the API's are a given.
In any event i'M surprised that you discount finder as there is good potential there for acceleration. Just rendering all those icons could be an area of improvement.
They could render text with this, PDFs, encode video or at least process intensive parts of the encoding. Right now, the hardware can handle normal tasks just fine. All machines including the high end Mac Pro struggle when it comes to raw encoding and calculations.
Yep, lots of potential but I don't see the huge speed ups that some imagine. YOu will see exceptional performance when your app and the API's can make use of all the hardware threads available but you shouldn't assume that every app will leverage those GPU cores.
I would bet that every model they bring out will have a GPU that at least equals the CPU in that machine. So the low end Mini will have Core 2 Duo with 9400M. The iMac will use the core 2 quad and a mid-range Nvidia card and the Core i7 Mac Pro should come with the 9800GT with the GTX 280 as BTO. This means for the same price, you effectively get 2-3x the performance for certain tasks than if you didn't have OpenCL. I think that's impressive.
Potentially get that sort of performance increase. For specific apps though you need to know how or if the app can leverage all those cores. A so called embarrassing parallel app might actually see a 16X speed up, but those will be few and far between.
I have a suspicion that Apple could eliminate the 20" iMac and go all 24" and use the 3 mobile quad chips. This means they can share the display panel from the 24" Cinema LED and economize the inventory - it then makes sense why they didn't make a 20" model. If you look at the 2.8GHz Core 2 Extreme 24" iMac, that CPU costs $851. The price of the quad 2.33GHz chip is $245.
This means that a 24" iMac with that chip would drop to:
$1799 - $606 = $1193
The current low end on the iMac line is a 20" display with 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo and is priced: $1199
So to summarize, what I think they will do:
Core 2 Duo Mini, still with mobile chips but 9400M, maybe drop back to the original lower price point.
Core 2 Quad iMac, possibly 9400M on entry model and going up to a mid-range Nvidia 9 series card.
Core i7 Gainestown, possibly 8-core chips but likely dual quads, with a single quad on the lowest end and high end Nvidia 9 series cards with the pro cards too.
I'd like to see them make an entry level headless quad but this is the lineup that seems most likely to me. As I say, combine these hardware specs with OpenCL and I will be impressed. Still annoyed about the lack of the mid-range headless machine as always but I would acknowledge these as very good performance and competitive machines. I will buy a Mini for home and a Pro for work and complain that I would rather buy two middle options.
I think the iMac and Mini updates will come first given that the processors for the Pro probably aren't ready yet although there is a possibility they could organise an event some time this month and launch them all together with redesigned enclosures (the chin is definitely going if it's 24" all the way), then ship the Pro later on.
Apple are also supposed to be working on high end graphics software to replace Shake and their recent update after a number of years suggests they at least haven't forgotten about it. If there was a new Final Cut Studio that was OpenCL enabled and rendering say 4 times faster than the old Mac Pro, it would be very appealling.
This is why rumors are best to be fully detailed because the above is what I find impressive but others will always be looking for gold at the end of the rainbow instead of just stopping to admire the rainbow itself.
There doesn't need to be something that is beyond everyone's imagination. When it comes to highly parallel tasks, we will see as much as 10x increase in performance. This will destroy PC benchmarks for at least a few months.
Well hopefully Apple won't degenerate into the highly questionable benchmarking that was common when the G's where being marketed. OpenCL is great and all but the last thing we need is some sort of garbage bench mark being promoted b Apple the way they did some of the G5 benchmarks. Generally what they did was to concentrate of the good things that maybe didn't have universal usage by Apple hardware buyers.
Along these lines I wouldn't expect Apple to have 10.6 highly accelerated with OpenCL at introduction. In other words what we are likely to see is a slow but stead improvement in the libraries and apps as Apple finds more and more uses for GPU processing. Note that I'm not calling this GPU acceleration because in many instance the benefit will simply be the reality that there is another hardware thread acting in parallel to heavier threads.
Dave
It will take a few years for OpenCL to really mature in a lot of Mac OS X apps... But yes, it is promising. Just look at the Folding At Home stats:
I really hate to see references to a signal processing program like this which marries up to GPU processing all most ideally. The problem is that it sets up an expectation that all programs will benefit in a like manner. This isn't the case in the least. What we should see is a wide range of acceleration from almost zero to performance numbers like Folding at Home imply.
I still see the bigger advantage i the idea that you will have many parallel hardware threads to work with. In some ways it won't matter if the GPU acceleration is a bit slower than the main GPU for some tasks, you benefit more from doing many things at once. At least for some work flows.
In other words; even for tasks where GPU acceleration isn't faster than the main CPU you may get a significant advantage simply from off loading the main CPU. Of course it would be nice if every task that got sent to the GPU ended up running 3X faster or even faster, it just isn't a requirement to be considered an advantage.
Dave
Yeah hopefully we're talking a lower power version Radeon 4850 or 4870. Maybe Radeon 4650 or better. Radeon 4650 at minimum. But the iMac will very likely use the Nvidia chipset so no Radeons in iMac, I think...
my thoughts are more like:
mac mini - nvidia (desktop version of the MacBooks)
iMac - something "bigger" with quad (real desktop)
but who knows, maybe that's just wishful thinking
In my experience, anyone hysterical enough to use terms like 'fanboys' can safely be ignored.
Are you ten years old or just plain stupid? Do you post for no other reason than to insult AI members?
The word 'fanboys' has been used by many members. Are they all hysterical? Are you going to ignore them all no matter what their opinion is?
I see nothing positive in your post, but only a negative diatribe. You say, "In your experience." You must not have much. Either grow up or stay out of this forum.