will the 970 just be hype?
Hi,
I've been wondering about the possible introduction of the 970 and have a horrible nagging feeling that all will probably not be quite groovy. having finally adopted X and persevered with it I still can't really see the promise of it coming to the fore. each successive update to X has shown no real performance boost - it just seems to have fewer Kps. equally, apple have spent forever using altivec as the great leveller to persuade people that a 1Ghz Powermac is as fast as the competition. will steve jobs do the same trick here and claim that 64bits makes the 970 powermac as fast as the pentiums even though the new machines don't have the real changes needed to make the machine fly?
worst case scenario:
1) the 970 ships at 1.4Ghz
2) its faster than the G4 but not by much
3) apple doesn't make substantial changes to the mobo to allow for FW2, fast (and big) ram, fast FSB, new graphics architecture etc
4) apple tries to push of the combination of 64 bits and altivc as the great leveller
5) developers like adobe simply don't update their software to take full advantage of the 970
6) even apple doesn't ensure that its own software is fully 970 kicking
I don't know squat about processors and stuff but I can't help getting more nervous as the possible announcement of the 970s comes closer
any thoughts?
I've been wondering about the possible introduction of the 970 and have a horrible nagging feeling that all will probably not be quite groovy. having finally adopted X and persevered with it I still can't really see the promise of it coming to the fore. each successive update to X has shown no real performance boost - it just seems to have fewer Kps. equally, apple have spent forever using altivec as the great leveller to persuade people that a 1Ghz Powermac is as fast as the competition. will steve jobs do the same trick here and claim that 64bits makes the 970 powermac as fast as the pentiums even though the new machines don't have the real changes needed to make the machine fly?
worst case scenario:
1) the 970 ships at 1.4Ghz
2) its faster than the G4 but not by much
3) apple doesn't make substantial changes to the mobo to allow for FW2, fast (and big) ram, fast FSB, new graphics architecture etc
4) apple tries to push of the combination of 64 bits and altivc as the great leveller
5) developers like adobe simply don't update their software to take full advantage of the 970
6) even apple doesn't ensure that its own software is fully 970 kicking
I don't know squat about processors and stuff but I can't help getting more nervous as the possible announcement of the 970s comes closer
any thoughts?
Comments
Originally posted by spooky
each successive update to X has shown no real performance boost - it just seems to have fewer Kps.
You must be joking! Each .x rev has given HUGE amounts of speed increase.
Originally posted by spooky
equally, apple have spent forever using altivec as the great leveller to persuade people that a 1Ghz Powermac is as fast as the competition. will steve jobs do the same trick here and claim that 64bits makes the 970 powermac as fast as the pentiums even though the new machines don't have the real changes needed to make the machine fly?
It won't? Sure as hell will! The OS may be 32-bit, but the machine will be pure 64-bit goodness!
Originally posted by spooky
1) the 970 ships at 1.4Ghz
2) its faster than the G4 but not by much
3) apple doesn't make substantial changes to the mobo to allow for FW2, fast (and big) ram, fast FSB, new graphics architecture etc
4) apple tries to push of the combination of 64 bits and altivc as the great leveller
5) developers like adobe simply don't update their software to take full advantage of the 970
6) even apple doesn't ensure that its own software is fully 970 kicking
I don't know squat about processors and stuff but I can't help getting more nervous as the possible announcement of the 970s comes closer
any thoughts?
Plenty:
1) fine, 1.4 to 1.8 has been mentioned a number of times.
2) faster, much, much, much, much, MUCH faster.
3) have you read anything about the PowerPC 970 architecture. All of those things are essential for a mobo to support it.
4) Just marketing, don't fret it.
5) Adobe is slower than hell, and Quark is slower than THAT! So what, they will still run sh!tloads faster.
6) Huh? Why the hell would they release something that isn't 970-aware eventually. Right off, hell no. That's a lot of coding for tweaking.
Just relax and feel safe that and 970-Powermac will kick anything you have at home/work right now. Sources estimate 4X the speed of a current fastest Powermac G4.
Apple not allowing for FW2? that's just silly.
What type of new graphics architechture are you talking about?
If anything as of yet is true about the 970, then a 1.4ghz 970 will school a 1.4 ghz. g4
1.8 GHz 970 SpecFP=1051.
If you see "the competition" as x86land -> things to debate.
But the opposition is the G4. And there's no question which will come out on top in that comparison, even if you postulate 2.0 GHz G4+s by June.
Originally posted by Rhumgod
You must be joking! Each .x rev has given HUGE amounts of speed increase.
Or even *both* .x revs.
Mods, please do something about this.
According to AI history, when a forum gets too big, it's split in 2. Witness the splitting of AO into AO and FC. And the subsequent retardedness.
Maybe there will be a Power Mac forum?
Barto
Originally posted by Bigc
at this point anything faster is welcome to me. Hopefully Apple takes advantage of the FSB speed, but I still have reservations at this time. Apple may want to keep along a reasonable (to Apple) upgrade path.
Apple has never wanted to keep to a "reasonable upgrade path." They had their current upgrade path forced on them by Motorola's failure to deliver on the potential of the G4. It was never by Apple's choice. The plan was to have 1.5+ ghz plus G4's running on 400mhz (2x 200mhz) FSB last year. Moto didn't deliver the CPU's, therefore Apple couldn't deliver the systems. It is amazing they have sqeezed as much out of the current G4 as they have? They may have been looking to IBM as far back as two years ago, because Moto wasn't delivering. We know that IBM is "capable" of delivering, and can only hope they will do so.
I don't know what to expect for sure, other then that I don't think Apple will hold anything back they don't have to, except for technical reasons.
The 60040 to PPC 601 was a huge leap in theory and RC-5 scores while in most applications the boost was much smallar due to many facts in hard ware (slow bus, NUBUS etc) and software ( a lot of 68k code and emulation)
The G4 to 970 offers a huge leap in theory and I think in practice as well.
1. The whole quagmire of software emulation does not excist this time (there is recompling and some tweeking that seemt to be needed to get the 970 to run optimaly but it appears to be far less of a problem)
2. The bus is far different to Apple can not really do like the first generation PPC that really just was Quadras with a different engine so to speak. So the 970 will get a suitable bus to run on.
Looking at the SPEC mark in isolation suggest something like a doubling of performance. If the next tower really is like the current one with a new bus both otherwise a bare minimum of changes and the clock speeds are at the low end we might get "only" a 50% performance boost if they are truly loaded with things like serial ATA and 10 000 rpm drives, dedicated sound hardware offloading the CPU, SOTA graphical cards and so on with the clock speeds in the high range the performance boost will be substantially above a doubling.
The only sure thing we know is that some will be disapointed and start to rave that Apple should have added a 8 GB L2 cache, support for 11 chanel sound and at least 32 X AGP
No, I didn't think so.