I wish Apple would dump the G4 chip from the powermacs and put in the G5. Why? Because I just read at spec.org that the G4 has sub-standard floating and interger point performance compared to a PIII!
The latest rumors are that the G5 may be introduced at MWSF '03. I just hope that the rumored floating/integer performance of it is fairly accurate. I also hope that it's not a G4 thats being called a G5 because I won't buy it. I'll keep my 8600/200 until Apple releases a processor with REAL floating and integer point performance.
<strong>I wish Apple would dump the G4 chip from the powermacs and put in the G5. Why? Because I just read at spec.org that the G4 has sub-standard floating and interger point performance compared to a PIII!
</strong><hr></blockquote>
Don't believe everything you read. If the G4 is sub-standard compared to the PIII, why is it that the G4 outperforms the PIII at the same clock rate by about 20-30% in IPU/FPU computations?
Motorola has no incentive to make fast desktop PPCs, they care more about the embedded market. It would be very cool if Apple could acquire the rights to Moto's PPC development (and the engineers) and design their own CPUs, then have someone else fab them. This seems like a better set-up than the current one, which essentially is Apple over a barrel w/Criso smeared up their a$$holes and a great big Moto cock repeatedly reaming Apple. Yeah it's that bad.
<strong>Motorola has no incentive to make fast desktop PPCs, they care more about the embedded market. It would be very cool if Apple could acquire the rights to Moto's PPC development (and the engineers) and design their own CPUs, then have someone else fab them. This seems like a better set-up than the current one, which essentially is Apple over a barrel w/Criso smeared up their a$$holes and a great big Moto cock repeatedly reaming Apple. Yeah it's that bad.</strong><hr></blockquote>
Motorola is a privat company and must make money.
I have red (I can not remember the URL) that Moto would need to sell/produce at least 2,5 million PPC pro quartal to have enough financial return in order to invest in R&D and keep step with Intel.
Perhaps it is a good sign now that Apple put G4 in allmost all lines, exept I-Book.
As the sold pieces of G4 familly grows we can expect more from Moto?
Well there isn't much reason for IBM TO make the fastest PowerPC chips right now, is there? If they went to all the trouble of designing/manufacturing them, they still couldn't sell them to Apple until the current PowerPC agreement has reached its end this summer.
S</strong><hr></blockquote>
There is no contract in existence that prevents Apple from buying PowerPCs from whoever it wants.
I'm well aware of the POWER4. It's a moot point whether it counts as a PowerPC chip - it uses the core PowerPC instruction set, but its architecture is radically different. What's more, it is never going to be used in a Mac. So your point is, well, pointless.
<strong>Motorola has no incentive to make fast desktop PPCs, they care more about the embedded market. It would be very cool if Apple could acquire the rights to Moto's PPC development (and the engineers) and design their own CPUs, then have someone else fab them. </strong><hr></blockquote>
This is simply wrong. First of all, Apple remains one of the largest customers for PowerPC, and therefore Motorola will orient its development plans towards Apple's requirements. Secondly, the needs of the embedded markets that Motorola is addressing are similar to Apple's - high performance, low power chips. Companies like Ericsson and Cisco are buying fast MPC7455's, not cheap G3s, because they are extremely good chips for high-end communications applications - thanks largely to AltiVec.
before mhz i personally would just like apple to focus up on catching up with the vast array of capabilities the windows side has over us, i mean yes we have been used to it for a long time now, but somehow I feel its stronger than ever, and apple leading us off like sheep with the whole digital hub thing is kinda iffy...
The only reason why I'm staying with the Mac OS is because i still have some faith... and mostly it would just be too much of a hassle to just get all of my mac crap onto a PC...
MHz gap is a losing battle, we just hit 1Ghz and it doesn't matter anymore, even though our macs are greater and faster then ever, I still feel like the whole world is caring less and less... Apple really once again needs to remove heads from asses and face the real issues that mac users are facing, depression
Apple will license altivec from Moto and get IBM to build the G5.
Moto will concentrate on PPC for emedded applications only.
<hr></blockquote>
I'm wondering where Apple will get the engineers to do this. yeah, they have firmware and VLSI developers for logic board component etc, and rumor has it that they consort on PPC design (what their role is, is somewhat uncertain, probably just a bunch of rowboat captains hired on to shout out in board meetings and the like, "Stroke! Stroke! Faster! Faster!") but Apple has no experience in developing MPU's on it's own or in the cutting edge Manufacturing Processess associated with them.
So this subject always amuses me and begs the question whether Apple has ever seriously thought about doing MPU design, or is this just make-believe in the heads of rumor-mongers.
BM can't produce G4s because Motorola has the rights to Altivec. They could make Altivec-less G4s, but what good would that do after all of Apple's optimisations for OS X and Altivec?
The Altivec ISA was created in the AIM days, and IBM has full rights to use the ISA. They would either need to do an implementation from scratch, or license Moto's. Graft the latter from a G4 onto an IBM G3, and what you have is a G4... circa about 2 years ago.. but perhaps IBM could get some more Hz out of it.
In effect it would be as if IBM sort of took over the old G4. This doesn't sound like progress to me: a clean sheet of paper is waranted.
I am tired of ill-informed Maclots dumping on Moto for somehow "killing" Apple. These same folks pine for IBM to "be the cavalry to the rescue."
The reality is take the altivec unit out of the picture and the G4+ CPUs still clobber any G3.
Moto is a business. IBM is a business. Apple is a business. SJ keeps tirelessly talking about that "5 billion dollars in the bank" which he extracted from mac users. If he had spent some of that on engineering and on incentives for Moto and/or IBM ... then Apple would have faster CPUs. Ditto if Apple had managed to do something about marketshare ... because that would have generated CPU demand which would have caused the manufacturers to work a little harder for the business.
Instead SJ thinks he can do it all with sexy plastic. When the cube was such a fiasco I had a great idea: "the zero Mhz cube." That's right: most of the buyers of the cube where managers for whom it was a prestige statement. So the $699 "zero Mhz cube" was gonna be just the plastic case to sit on your desktop... and the tower hidden under your desk was gonna run the show. I think I coulda sold a bundle... but then he discontinued the model.
Comments
<strong>
Wrong. Power4 is a PPC chip that is light-years ahead in performance.</strong><hr></blockquote>
Enh?
PowerPC is a proper subset of the POWER architecture. Is the POWER4 really a PPC, or a full-blown POWER chip? I had assumed the latter.
If I'm right, Mot does in fact make the highest-performing PowerPC chip at the moment.
The latest rumors are that the G5 may be introduced at MWSF '03. I just hope that the rumored floating/integer performance of it is fairly accurate. I also hope that it's not a G4 thats being called a G5 because I won't buy it. I'll keep my 8600/200 until Apple releases a processor with REAL floating and integer point performance.
<strong>I wish Apple would dump the G4 chip from the powermacs and put in the G5. Why? Because I just read at spec.org that the G4 has sub-standard floating and interger point performance compared to a PIII!
</strong><hr></blockquote>
Don't believe everything you read. If the G4 is sub-standard compared to the PIII, why is it that the G4 outperforms the PIII at the same clock rate by about 20-30% in IPU/FPU computations?
<strong>Motorola has no incentive to make fast desktop PPCs, they care more about the embedded market. It would be very cool if Apple could acquire the rights to Moto's PPC development (and the engineers) and design their own CPUs, then have someone else fab them. This seems like a better set-up than the current one, which essentially is Apple over a barrel w/Criso smeared up their a$$holes and a great big Moto cock repeatedly reaming Apple. Yeah it's that bad.</strong><hr></blockquote>
Motorola is a privat company and must make money.
I have red (I can not remember the URL) that Moto would need to sell/produce at least 2,5 million PPC pro quartal to have enough financial return in order to invest in R&D and keep step with Intel.
Perhaps it is a good sign now that Apple put G4 in allmost all lines, exept I-Book.
As the sold pieces of G4 familly grows we can expect more from Moto?
Rooster
<strong>
Well there isn't much reason for IBM TO make the fastest PowerPC chips right now, is there? If they went to all the trouble of designing/manufacturing them, they still couldn't sell them to Apple until the current PowerPC agreement has reached its end this summer.
S</strong><hr></blockquote>
There is no contract in existence that prevents Apple from buying PowerPCs from whoever it wants.
<strong>
Wrong. Power4 is a PPC chip that is light-years ahead in performance. It just isn't targeted to desktop PC use at a consumer price point.
[ 03-08-2002: Message edited by: AirSluf ]</strong><hr></blockquote>
<sigh>
I'm well aware of the POWER4. It's a moot point whether it counts as a PowerPC chip - it uses the core PowerPC instruction set, but its architecture is radically different. What's more, it is never going to be used in a Mac. So your point is, well, pointless.
<strong>Motorola has no incentive to make fast desktop PPCs, they care more about the embedded market. It would be very cool if Apple could acquire the rights to Moto's PPC development (and the engineers) and design their own CPUs, then have someone else fab them. </strong><hr></blockquote>
This is simply wrong. First of all, Apple remains one of the largest customers for PowerPC, and therefore Motorola will orient its development plans towards Apple's requirements. Secondly, the needs of the embedded markets that Motorola is addressing are similar to Apple's - high performance, low power chips. Companies like Ericsson and Cisco are buying fast MPC7455's, not cheap G3s, because they are extremely good chips for high-end communications applications - thanks largely to AltiVec.
The only reason why I'm staying with the Mac OS is because i still have some faith... and mostly it would just be too much of a hassle to just get all of my mac crap onto a PC...
MHz gap is a losing battle, we just hit 1Ghz and it doesn't matter anymore, even though our macs are greater and faster then ever, I still feel like the whole world is caring less and less... Apple really once again needs to remove heads from asses and face the real issues that mac users are facing, depression
Apple will license altivec from Moto and get IBM to build the G5.
Moto will concentrate on PPC for emedded applications only.
Apple will license altivec from Moto and get IBM to build the G5.
Moto will concentrate on PPC for emedded applications only.
<hr></blockquote>
I'm wondering where Apple will get the engineers to do this. yeah, they have firmware and VLSI developers for logic board component etc, and rumor has it that they consort on PPC design (what their role is, is somewhat uncertain, probably just a bunch of rowboat captains hired on to shout out in board meetings and the like, "Stroke! Stroke! Faster! Faster!") but Apple has no experience in developing MPU's on it's own or in the cutting edge Manufacturing Processess associated with them.
So this subject always amuses me and begs the question whether Apple has ever seriously thought about doing MPU design, or is this just make-believe in the heads of rumor-mongers.
Hmmm.
My prediction:
Apple will license altivec from Moto and get IBM to build the G5.
Moto will concentrate on PPC for emedded applications only.<hr></blockquote>
The following is a post on Arstechnica that seems to clearly sum up the situation.
BadAndy
Wise, Aged Ars Veteran
Tribus: Albany, NY, USA
Registered: May 07, 2001
Posts: 195
\t
posted March 07 2002, 19:41 PM Â*
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Punting on G5
................(edited out-irrelevant)............
The one thing I want to blow out of the water because I am friggin tired of hearing this over and over and it is just flat WRONG is:
quote:
------------------------------------------------------------------------
BM can't produce G4s because Motorola has the rights to Altivec. They could make Altivec-less G4s, but what good would that do after all of Apple's optimisations for OS X and Altivec?
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Altivec ISA was created in the AIM days, and IBM has full rights to use the ISA. They would either need to do an implementation from scratch, or license Moto's. Graft the latter from a G4 onto an IBM G3, and what you have is a G4... circa about 2 years ago.. but perhaps IBM could get some more Hz out of it.
In effect it would be as if IBM sort of took over the old G4. This doesn't sound like progress to me: a clean sheet of paper is waranted.
I am tired of ill-informed Maclots dumping on Moto for somehow "killing" Apple. These same folks pine for IBM to "be the cavalry to the rescue."
The reality is take the altivec unit out of the picture and the G4+ CPUs still clobber any G3.
Moto is a business. IBM is a business. Apple is a business. SJ keeps tirelessly talking about that "5 billion dollars in the bank" which he extracted from mac users. If he had spent some of that on engineering and on incentives for Moto and/or IBM ... then Apple would have faster CPUs. Ditto if Apple had managed to do something about marketshare ... because that would have generated CPU demand which would have caused the manufacturers to work a little harder for the business.
Instead SJ thinks he can do it all with sexy plastic. When the cube was such a fiasco I had a great idea: "the zero Mhz cube." That's right: most of the buyers of the cube where managers for whom it was a prestige statement. So the $699 "zero Mhz cube" was gonna be just the plastic case to sit on your desktop... and the tower hidden under your desk was gonna run the show. I think I coulda sold a bundle... but then he discontinued the model.