New Power Mac G4s Announced

benh57 writes "Apple today announced the new Power Mac G4 towers with new faces, running at dual-867MHz (US$1,699), dual-1GHz ($2,499), and dual-1.25GHz ($3,299). All are running DDR, the two higher end models at 166MHz FSB with Radeon 9000, the low end at 133 w/GF4MX." Check it out at The Apple Store, and keep your eyes peeled for an appearance on the Power Mac G4 site.

Re:dual processors - all of them

[DietFluffy]

Even more interesting is the fact that Apple doesn't seem to be relying as heavily on trade shows (ala macworld) to promote new products anymore.

Re:What this also means..

[elocutio]

I find it interesting that this move has been made so soon after recent announcements that Apple is considering a move to an x86 architecture.

I felt those claims were groundless, but they gave me a really good laugh. This new product release is much more like the Apple that I have come to expect and love. :)

Mixed reaction

[Xel]

I was waiting for these for a long time. And im disappointed, frankly.

Basically, the motherboard is a thing of beauty: DDR finally comes to Mac, dual procs, gobs of cache, ATA/100 AND ATA/66, a bitchin memory controller, 4x AGP and 4 PCI slots... This is the culmination of everything Mac users have been lusting over in a mobo.

But what the $&#*@ is up with that case??

It looks like Apple is so stubbornly hanging on to the 4 year old G3 design that theyre just cramming everything in wherever it will fit- some HDs mounted sideways, some flat. PCI slots on TOP? vents everywhere, ungly front bezel that looks like it was cobbled together last minute to accomodate the two optical drives, and a heatsink the size of an air conditioner. The engineers should have stopped and asked themselves if this was a good idea after they started perforating the thing like a cheese grater just to get air flowing through it.

----------------
www.overstim.net

The holes in the front

[pininfrna]

/. keeps down-modding my posts about this bit of info which I think is pretty informative... the holes on the front aren't vents, they are little speakers.

Re:maybe I'm the only one

[foo12]

The ATA66 is likely intended for the optical drives, neither of which would require an ATA100. From an engineering-meets-realworld-use standpoint, it makes perfect: a few pennies on a single machine mean profiting an extra few hundred grand on the whole.

Re:No!!!!

[foo12]

Did you open it? If so, it's 15% restock fee. If not, you're out nothing.

As a frame of reference...

[shawnce]

About a year ago we had dual 800 MHz systems with 100MHz FSB, PC133 RAM (133 MHz), 2MB of L3 via a 200 MHz bus and single channel ATA/66. Just over one year later we have 1250 MHz systems with 166 MHz FSB, PC2700 RAM (166 MHz double pumped or 333 MHz data rate), 2MB of L3 via a 294 MHz[1] bus double pumped, and dual channel ATA (one ATA/100 and the other ATA/66).

So in a year...
1.56x increase in CPU clock speed (ignoring other CPU enhancements).
2.5x increase in RAM throughput.
1.66x increase in FSB throughput.
2.94x increase in L3 throughput (possibly only 2.5x).
over a doubling in internal disk storage support (not counting SCSI options).

Looking over things on the Intel/AMD side...

AMD had about a year ago 1.53GHz chips (1800+ Athlon XP) today 1.8Ghz (2200+ Athlon XP) (FSB speeds did not changed). Intel had about a year ago 2Ghz P4s with FSB of 266MHz (133Mhz dual pumped) and today 2.53GHz P4s with FSB of 533MHz (133MHz quad pumped, AFAIK).

So in a year...
AMD...
1.18x increase in CPU clock speed.
no change in FSB (from what I see).

Intel...
1.27x increase in CPU clock speed.
2.01x increase in FSB throughput.

AMD/Intel system have been using PC2100 for a while and are now starting to use PC2700 (some are starting to use DDR400 and/or going dual channel to RAM). This is side stepping the issue of RDRAM.

Again just as a frame of reference...

[1] Apple's current specs don't add up fully on this, one states that it stops at 500MHz DDR but the throughput numbers lead me to believe it is running faster then 500MHz DDR for the top end system.

p.s. I am doing the above math with a fever of 102+ so I may have messed up someplace... just don't tell the pink elephant sitting next me.

a decent critism of the new powermacs at

[iradik]

http://www.macosrumors.com

Re:Too little -- too late

[sparkleytone]

this is really an old argument. anyone with any inkling of computer knowledge knows that if you want all around power and nothing else, you get a p4 in the desktop world. no g4 or athlon is going to touch it. it also helps that they are much cheaper than the avg apple machine. however, people do not buyapple products strictly for their power. apple provides a combination of power, ease of use, versatility, and stability that no one can really match in the computer market. i bought a mac on the belief that computing was going to be fun again. i was not disappointed. that is a first. i have been continually disappointed with every x86 OS yet. Windows XP was almost gonna make it, back in the Beta2 times, but i believe it got to their heads.so yes, i bought an iBook 600, and bought just about every accessory i could semi-justify, because i just couldnt wait to get home and play. apple makes the best consumer operating system around, which is continually being improved. These improvements come not only in the way of under-the-hood changes, but with user interaction as well. As this improves, time spend doing work in the computer is cut by a factor much larger than any pentium4 or athlon can give you. kudos to the microprocessor manufacturers, its too bad we can't harness it. When it comes to the total package, there is no other choice but Mac OS X for the end-user/programmer/writer/artist/producer/etc. Notice i didnt say anything about servers. Well thats not what im talking about now is it?? :)

Worried about the "System Controller"

[LenE]

I felt a little ill when I read through the Xserve tech. info, since this brand new ASIC called the "System Controller" was responsible for running things. With this G4 release, combined with recent and near future announcements (7470, IBM 64-bit) I'm even more disturbed.

The thing that bothers me to the core is how long it took for the UMA, UMA 1.5, and UMA 2.0 chipsets to be released from Apple on prior designs. Now, all of these functions are put into one ASIC that would have to be redesigned to upgrade any one of the functions that it covers.

For example, it integrates the IDE interface on the chip. It didn't make sense to me that ATA100 was used on this chip in the Xserve, since Maxtor was practically giving away PCI ATA133 cards back in January of this year with some of their hard drives. With this new G4, only two of those ATA100 channels are used, and they use an external chip to provide ATA66. This doesn't scream cutting edge, and the design seems crippled to protect the position of the Xserve.

Maybe Apple packed a whole lot more into this System Controller than they are using. It appears to support multiple bus speeds (133 & 167), but does it support the DDR bus of the 7470? How about the interface of the upcoming IBM chip? Does it have the capability to support HyperTransport already? How about 800 Mbps Firewire?

Who knows! If it is capable of any of these things, then Apple planned correctly to integrate everything and then drip out features as they see fit (or as tested drivers and not-yet-existant hardware are ready and feasible).

Unfortunately, I am afraid that this may not be the case. It looks like this system controller was designed to be wintel compettitive last year.

-- Len