Also, you failed to mention the one market that could sink them, the consumer market. All of the enterprise, content creation, and education business in the world won't mean spit if they cease to be the computer for the "rest of us".
Exactly. I think Apple needs to be even more forward-looking at developing the next generation of consumer/computer interface.
Perhaps the time is coming soon where we can lose the clunky computer display altogether and push towards high quality Video Glasses and other kinds of Head Display Units. The quality is getting better every year (the Glasstron, i-glasses, etc are proving size now is becoming quite managable) and the whole Virtual Reality interface could be the angle to put a hook into the consumer. There's your lead-in to build a whole new 3D working environment/OS and design it from the ground up to be seamless and functional.
You could be hammering out some email in front of you, with a movie playing "off to the left", web pages open "on your right. Your virtual desktop space could be enormous now that you would no longer be constrained to the physical dimensions of your monitor. Zoom in/Zoom out on what you wanted to work on, etc.
Games, multimedia, etc... The technology is already here to do these things (or very nearly here) but no one has ever really tried to push an integrated solution. And once you can develop a wireless video headset, voice commands and killer games - look out, that would take the consumer market by storm.
I'm glad I did a search for this. But I have a hard time believing Apple is going to put fourth a 4-way crossbar SMP home PC at WWDC.
I think whatever you guys are guessing at is a Shared Memory Unit though.
That could be too, and would make more sense than Stack Manager Unit, considering that there's an enabler for it.
SMU could be appearing because of an on-chip MMU. If the 975 has one, and isn't talking to a MMU via the FSB, then it needs some mechanism for sharing RAM in a SMP setup.
We were talking about PCI-Express a while ago, well AnandTech has an article on Computex 2004. Looks like there's a lot of PCIe motherboards coming out soon with chipsets from Intel, SiS, and VIA. There's even boards with both AGP and PCIe. I really think the next rev will sport PCIe (or PCX or PCI-Express.... )
Yeah, that's probably it. More than likely, however, it refers to shared memory between a single CPU and the GPU.
Quote:
Here is what I want to know.
How come months before MS even decided to use IBM processors in the XBOX2 we were talking about the 976 as an IBM PPC that was a multi-core processor that was presumed to be in a future design of the PowerMac?
Now it's Microsoft's' processor? Did they say their processor was the 976, or is that part of a spill over of the rumor that IBM was making G5's for MS for use in the XBOX2? Cause that is what it sounds like to me.
I'm glad I did a search for this. But I have a hard time believing Apple is going to put fourth a 4-way crossbar SMP home PC at WWDC.
I think whatever you guys are guessing at is a Shared Memory Unit though.
...
Actually, this makes sense. This is a machine Apple would be making for midrange Unix users, such as the government. You set up "domains" of 4 or 8 processors to work as a virtual machine. This eliminates the overhead of the Infiniband cluster backend. You could have an off-the-shelf supercomputer. Such a computer would start in the low $20K's and range up to $200K or more. They might sell thousands of machines if the prices were right.
They'd be competing with IBM's Power4's in this area, though. And this is what bothers me: If IBM and Apple were to apportion markets, I would expect that IBM would want the "minisuper" market, and would want Apple to move lots of PowerPCs in the consumer space. I'd expect IBM to even give Apple chips at a loss, with the proviso that they have to aggressively target consumers. A bigger PowerPC world is one in which Big Blue can make more money. It doesn't make sense for Apple to move upscale. Apple should be selling a simplified G5 LCD iMac for $899 or even $799, and shipping millions of them.
They'd be competing with IBM's Power4's in this area, though. And this is what bothers me: If IBM and Apple were to apportion markets, I would expect that IBM would want the "minisuper" market, and would want Apple to move lots of PowerPCs in the consumer space. I'd expect IBM to even give Apple chips at a loss, with the proviso that they have to aggressively target consumers. A bigger PowerPC world is one in which Big Blue can make more money. It doesn't make sense for Apple to move upscale. Apple should be selling a simplified G5 LCD iMac for $899 or even $799, and shipping millions of them.
That would make a lot of sense, at least from my point of view. IBM want's to establish a new "standard" in CPU architect, that was one of the original AIM goals in the first place. The problem has been, and remains, is that Apple is the only large scale manufacturer of PowerPC based desktop computers. If IBM looks at their commitment to Apple as a PR campaign for their platform then IBM would make money as other manufacturers moved to the PowerPC platform for their Unix boxes, and with the proper evolution of the PowerPC chips the re-emergence of WinNT for the PowerPC architecture. The biggest problem that I see with splitting the market up this way is that for IBM to succeed they have to expand their market, which means selling the chips and a motherboard "reference" design to companies that will compete with Apple, which would not be in Apple's best interest.
They will never make the iMac appealing enough for potential PM buyers to purchase an iMac instead.
Add one PCI slot and allow the graphics card to upgradable. There are people who buy PowerMacs who don't need all of what is offered, and people who buy iMacs that need more than what is offered.
[B]KFC changed their name to a "nothing but initials" name because a certain state has an asinine policy of charging royalties for use of the name... ]
I ten to be the believer they changed their name to follow current slang, BK, MickyDee's, KFC, etc. Once McDonalds and Burger King went the way of the young consumer, KFC followed. Hell, even IHOP changed their names. Hard to believe a state made KFC do it, while consumers made the others pick up on the latest trends.
... The biggest problem that I see with splitting the market up this way is that for IBM to succeed they have to expand their market, which means selling the chips and a motherboard "reference" design to companies that will compete with Apple, which would not be in Apple's best interest.
Ah, so what you're saying is that the low-end would be taken by generic PowerPC machines running Linux or Windows; Apple would abandon the low-end and go into the midrange; and IBM would have the top-end. So Apple would need to stake out the upper end of their segment with a considerably more powerful and expensive machine.
There have been some noises to support such a view. It could happen.
I ten to be the believer they changed their name to follow current slang, BK, MickyDee's, KFC, etc. Once McDonalds and Burger King went the way of the young consumer, KFC followed. Hell, even IHOP changed their names. Hard to believe a state made KFC do it, while consumers made the others pick up on the latest trends.
No, cubist is right. The state of Kentucky charges royalties for the use of the name Kentucky. Even the Kentucky Derby changed their name, and Kentucky Bluegrass is now called Shenandoah Bluegrass or something. Neil Diamond pulled a song off the air because his royalty payments to Kentucky would be more than he made from the air play.
KFC changed their name to a "nothing but initials" name because a certain state has an asinine policy of charging royalties for use of the name... Neil Diamond reportedly called radio stations and begged them not to play a certain song with the state's name in the title.
Some guesses about SMU:
Stackable Mac Unit
Storage Management Unit (Xserve RAID?)
Systeme Macintosh Universelle (Francaise)
Could it be Streaming Memory Unit? Check out this white paper - possible new memory architecture?
i thought kentucky fried chicken changed its name to KFC to disassociate itself with the word fried, as it has negative connotations... that's what i heard anyway.
i thought kentucky fried chicken changed its name to KFC to disassociate itself with the word fried, as it has negative connotations... that's what i heard anyway.
I prefer Boston Market chicken- but on Fridays it's pizza. Man, am I the only one who thinks this thread has run it's course?
Ah, so what you're saying is that the low-end would be taken by generic PowerPC machines running Linux or Windows; Apple would abandon the low-end and go into the midrange; and IBM would have the top-end. So Apple would need to stake out the upper end of their segment with a considerably more powerful and expensive machine.
There have been some noises to support such a view. It could happen.
I would imagine that in the short run Apple would have to make a more aggressive marketing strategy in the lower end market so that there was a large enough access to PowerPC hardware to build up a community of users of OS's other than the Mac OS (yes I know, sacrilege) that are running, and developing for the hardware. This along with Apple's success with the platform and IBM's higher end strategy would work together to bring about a sense of stability in the platform that is needed for it to be taken seriously. It will also take aggressive development by IBM to push beyond the benchmarks of the Intel hardware. I'm not sure what the "saturation" point would be as far as hardware sales to build a market that could sustain the platform, and even challenge the dominate platform on the market. Reaching beyond that point should be IBM's goal. Taking a loss for a year or so on the sales of 970 series chips to Apple might help to reach that point sooner, especially if they can offset that loss on their higher end blade and Power5 servers.
I prefer Boston Market chicken- but on Fridays it's pizza. Man, am I the only one who thinks this thread has run it's course?
Well then stop talking about chicken and get back on topic.
I'm totally conviced with the 8,1 designation and more info that we're going to see a High End Powermac over $3k.
Everything is pointing towards Apple announcing an Uber Powermac for those with deep pockets that need speed. Let's be honest. The top Mac should always be droolworthy and while I was gratified to sea Dual 2Ghz...it didn't light me on fire with lust. We need a new POWERmac to kickstart things off right. Let there be gobs of memory...gobs of megahertz and for the first time a high end FireGL or QuadroFX card in there to satiate 3D artists.
Comments
Originally posted by MacVoyer
Also, you failed to mention the one market that could sink them, the consumer market. All of the enterprise, content creation, and education business in the world won't mean spit if they cease to be the computer for the "rest of us".
Exactly. I think Apple needs to be even more forward-looking at developing the next generation of consumer/computer interface.
Perhaps the time is coming soon where we can lose the clunky computer display altogether and push towards high quality Video Glasses and other kinds of Head Display Units. The quality is getting better every year (the Glasstron, i-glasses, etc are proving size now is becoming quite managable) and the whole Virtual Reality interface could be the angle to put a hook into the consumer. There's your lead-in to build a whole new 3D working environment/OS and design it from the ground up to be seamless and functional.
You could be hammering out some email in front of you, with a movie playing "off to the left", web pages open "on your right. Your virtual desktop space could be enormous now that you would no longer be constrained to the physical dimensions of your monitor. Zoom in/Zoom out on what you wanted to work on, etc.
Games, multimedia, etc... The technology is already here to do these things (or very nearly here) but no one has ever really tried to push an integrated solution. And once you can develop a wireless video headset, voice commands and killer games - look out, that would take the consumer market by storm.
Just my pie-in-the-sky 2 bits.
C.
Originally posted by tad44
Single-chip Multicore Unit?
Simultaneous Multithreading Unit?
I think SMU could stand for Stack Manager Unit, though almost every reference to this has something to do with picoJava, so maybe not.
Originally posted by onlooker
Shared Memory Unit.
I'm glad I did a search for this. But I have a hard time believing Apple is going to put fourth a 4-way crossbar SMP home PC at WWDC.
I think whatever you guys are guessing at is a Shared Memory Unit though.
That could be too, and would make more sense than Stack Manager Unit, considering that there's an enabler for it.
SMU could be appearing because of an on-chip MMU. If the 975 has one, and isn't talking to a MMU via the FSB, then it needs some mechanism for sharing RAM in a SMP setup.
We were talking about PCI-Express a while ago, well AnandTech has an article on Computex 2004. Looks like there's a lot of PCIe motherboards coming out soon with chipsets from Intel, SiS, and VIA. There's even boards with both AGP and PCIe. I really think the next rev will sport PCIe (or PCX or PCI-Express.... )
Originally posted by onlooker
Shared Memory Unit.
Yeah, that's probably it. More than likely, however, it refers to shared memory between a single CPU and the GPU.
Here is what I want to know.
How come months before MS even decided to use IBM processors in the XBOX2 we were talking about the 976 as an IBM PPC that was a multi-core processor that was presumed to be in a future design of the PowerMac?
Now it's Microsoft's' processor? Did they say their processor was the 976, or is that part of a spill over of the rumor that IBM was making G5's for MS for use in the XBOX2? Cause that is what it sounds like to me.
Are you believing everything you read again?
Originally posted by onlooker
Shared Memory Unit.
I'm glad I did a search for this. But I have a hard time believing Apple is going to put fourth a 4-way crossbar SMP home PC at WWDC.
I think whatever you guys are guessing at is a Shared Memory Unit though.
...
Actually, this makes sense. This is a machine Apple would be making for midrange Unix users, such as the government. You set up "domains" of 4 or 8 processors to work as a virtual machine. This eliminates the overhead of the Infiniband cluster backend. You could have an off-the-shelf supercomputer. Such a computer would start in the low $20K's and range up to $200K or more. They might sell thousands of machines if the prices were right.
They'd be competing with IBM's Power4's in this area, though. And this is what bothers me: If IBM and Apple were to apportion markets, I would expect that IBM would want the "minisuper" market, and would want Apple to move lots of PowerPCs in the consumer space. I'd expect IBM to even give Apple chips at a loss, with the proviso that they have to aggressively target consumers. A bigger PowerPC world is one in which Big Blue can make more money. It doesn't make sense for Apple to move upscale. Apple should be selling a simplified G5 LCD iMac for $899 or even $799, and shipping millions of them.
Originally posted by cubist
They'd be competing with IBM's Power4's in this area, though. And this is what bothers me: If IBM and Apple were to apportion markets, I would expect that IBM would want the "minisuper" market, and would want Apple to move lots of PowerPCs in the consumer space. I'd expect IBM to even give Apple chips at a loss, with the proviso that they have to aggressively target consumers. A bigger PowerPC world is one in which Big Blue can make more money. It doesn't make sense for Apple to move upscale. Apple should be selling a simplified G5 LCD iMac for $899 or even $799, and shipping millions of them.
That would make a lot of sense, at least from my point of view. IBM want's to establish a new "standard" in CPU architect, that was one of the original AIM goals in the first place. The problem has been, and remains, is that Apple is the only large scale manufacturer of PowerPC based desktop computers. If IBM looks at their commitment to Apple as a PR campaign for their platform then IBM would make money as other manufacturers moved to the PowerPC platform for their Unix boxes, and with the proper evolution of the PowerPC chips the re-emergence of WinNT for the PowerPC architecture. The biggest problem that I see with splitting the market up this way is that for IBM to succeed they have to expand their market, which means selling the chips and a motherboard "reference" design to companies that will compete with Apple, which would not be in Apple's best interest.
Originally posted by tad44
Single-chip Multicore Unit?
Simultaneous Multithreading Unit?
Symmetrical Multiprocessing Unit - This might indicate an iMac with a dual 970FX just for the 5th anniversary of iMac.
Originally posted by no1allowed
Symmetrical Multiprocessing Unit - This might indicate an iMac with a dual 970FX just for the 5th anniversary of iMac.
You wish. If that happened, I'd buy one right away.
Originally posted by no1allowed
Symmetrical Multiprocessing Unit - This might indicate an iMac with a dual 970FX just for the 5th anniversary of iMac.
They will never make the iMac appealing enough for potential PM buyers to purchase an iMac instead.
Originally posted by Mac Voyer
They will never make the iMac appealing enough for potential PM buyers to purchase an iMac instead.
Add one PCI slot and allow the graphics card to upgradable. There are people who buy PowerMacs who don't need all of what is offered, and people who buy iMacs that need more than what is offered.
Originally posted by cubist
[B]KFC changed their name to a "nothing but initials" name because a certain state has an asinine policy of charging royalties for use of the name... ]
I ten to be the believer they changed their name to follow current slang, BK, MickyDee's, KFC, etc. Once McDonalds and Burger King went the way of the young consumer, KFC followed. Hell, even IHOP changed their names. Hard to believe a state made KFC do it, while consumers made the others pick up on the latest trends.
Originally posted by @homenow
... The biggest problem that I see with splitting the market up this way is that for IBM to succeed they have to expand their market, which means selling the chips and a motherboard "reference" design to companies that will compete with Apple, which would not be in Apple's best interest.
Ah, so what you're saying is that the low-end would be taken by generic PowerPC machines running Linux or Windows; Apple would abandon the low-end and go into the midrange; and IBM would have the top-end. So Apple would need to stake out the upper end of their segment with a considerably more powerful and expensive machine.
There have been some noises to support such a view. It could happen.
Originally posted by KidRed
I ten to be the believer they changed their name to follow current slang, BK, MickyDee's, KFC, etc. Once McDonalds and Burger King went the way of the young consumer, KFC followed. Hell, even IHOP changed their names. Hard to believe a state made KFC do it, while consumers made the others pick up on the latest trends.
No, cubist is right. The state of Kentucky charges royalties for the use of the name Kentucky. Even the Kentucky Derby changed their name, and Kentucky Bluegrass is now called Shenandoah Bluegrass or something. Neil Diamond pulled a song off the air because his royalty payments to Kentucky would be more than he made from the air play.
Originally posted by cubist
KFC changed their name to a "nothing but initials" name because a certain state has an asinine policy of charging royalties for use of the name... Neil Diamond reportedly called radio stations and begged them not to play a certain song with the state's name in the title.
Some guesses about SMU:
Stackable Mac Unit
Storage Management Unit (Xserve RAID?)
Systeme Macintosh Universelle (Francaise)
Could it be Streaming Memory Unit? Check out this white paper - possible new memory architecture?
http://www.machinevisiononline.org/p...hite_Paper.pdf
Quote from the pdf:
"A Short Note On ?Streaming?
The word ?streaming? is used to convey the concept of ?Address Inferred Data Transfer?.
Streaming is of value in memory transactions where the data is in a sequence whose
addressing is known beforehand. Such is the case with most vector transactions."
and
Conclusion
Four key problems central to image processing are simultaneously solved by the SMU?s
novel architecture. In doing so, an extremely high-bandwidth memory is made available
for a fraction of what it would be expected to cost if implemented ?conventionally?.
Maybe boost Altivec and/or video processing?
Originally posted by gsfmark
i thought kentucky fried chicken changed its name to KFC to disassociate itself with the word fried, as it has negative connotations... that's what i heard anyway.
I prefer Boston Market chicken- but on Fridays it's pizza. Man, am I the only one who thinks this thread has run it's course?
Originally posted by cubist
Ah, so what you're saying is that the low-end would be taken by generic PowerPC machines running Linux or Windows; Apple would abandon the low-end and go into the midrange; and IBM would have the top-end. So Apple would need to stake out the upper end of their segment with a considerably more powerful and expensive machine.
There have been some noises to support such a view. It could happen.
I would imagine that in the short run Apple would have to make a more aggressive marketing strategy in the lower end market so that there was a large enough access to PowerPC hardware to build up a community of users of OS's other than the Mac OS (yes I know, sacrilege) that are running, and developing for the hardware. This along with Apple's success with the platform and IBM's higher end strategy would work together to bring about a sense of stability in the platform that is needed for it to be taken seriously. It will also take aggressive development by IBM to push beyond the benchmarks of the Intel hardware. I'm not sure what the "saturation" point would be as far as hardware sales to build a market that could sustain the platform, and even challenge the dominate platform on the market. Reaching beyond that point should be IBM's goal. Taking a loss for a year or so on the sales of 970 series chips to Apple might help to reach that point sooner, especially if they can offset that loss on their higher end blade and Power5 servers.
Originally posted by tman
I prefer Boston Market chicken- but on Fridays it's pizza. Man, am I the only one who thinks this thread has run it's course?
Well then stop talking about chicken and get back on topic.
I'm totally conviced with the 8,1 designation and more info that we're going to see a High End Powermac over $3k.
Everything is pointing towards Apple announcing an Uber Powermac for those with deep pockets that need speed. Let's be honest. The top Mac should always be droolworthy and while I was gratified to sea Dual 2Ghz...it didn't light me on fire with lust. We need a new POWERmac to kickstart things off right. Let there be gobs of memory...gobs of megahertz and for the first time a high end FireGL or QuadroFX card in there to satiate 3D artists.
Seriously, repeated claims like that without substantiation, while they may keep an optimist happy, start to sound bogus after a while.
Not that I *want* them to be bogus, I just want more dirt