Motorola to Boost 0.13-micron PowerPCs 274
Anonymous Cow writes "From The Register: 'Speculation that Motorola may soon cease to be a supplier of processors to Apple may be premature. The chip maker yesterday said it had successfully implemented low-k dielectric materials in its 0.18 micron silicon-on-insulator (SOI) processors, bringing an estimated 20 per cent speed bump to the PowerPC line. Motorola expects to roll out the process on its 0.13 micron chips this month...'"
20%? nothing...! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:20%? nothing...! (Score:2, Insightful)
Not that I completely disagree with you, but stop and ask *why* you think such CPUs are so important. Apple is focusing on laptops and quiet PCs like the iMac. Low power is very important in that regard. You wouldn't want to blindly throw all that away in exchange for the 5-fan monsters Dell is shipping.
In all honesty, the sweet spot of CPU sp
Re:20%? nothing...! (Score:2, Insightful)
also, of course i can do everything with a 1 GHz cpu. however, i can do it faster with a 3 GHz one. true, i could just wait half an hour everytime i want to apply some complex filter in photoshop, but i dont want to
Re:20%? nothing...! (Score:4, Insightful)
There are so many reasons why Apple needs more speed out of their processors. For one, I am not going to invest in a machine that won't be able to run the operating system being released in 2-3 years. Even if it's a little slow, being a few years old, it should at least be able to deal with things well.
There are also a lot of people that need power. Apple wants a share of the server market. They're not going to do it with only dual 1.4GHz G4s. They need more power!
20% is a joke! The real promise is still IBM's 970s. Almost double the computing power at the same GHz, and higher available speeds. Sure, power consumption might be of concern for laptops, with their recent focus, but 20% still isn't going to hold much water in a PowerBook.
Stop making the age-old mistake of saying "no one needs more" about technology. Every idiot who has said that has been proven to be rediculously wrong. Hell! Bill Gates said no one would need more than 640K on a computer, didn't he? And I can't tell you how many time I've heard that same general statement from people over the years. Just accept that you WILL need more, and it will be sooner than you think or expect. History has shown this time and time again.
-Alex
Re:20%? nothing...! (Score:3, Funny)
Steve: yeah, what's up?
Bill: Saw this on a
Steve:Well, now what? Are they starting to catch on?
Bill: More marketing Steve. Oh, and Stevie boy, less jumping please.
Re:20%? nothing...! (Score:4, Insightful)
The cry for raw speed is so vulgar! Look, I've done commercial 3D game development on an 866MHz Pentium III. It was completely and utterly fine, and not just in a "barely acceptable" kind of way. I had no need to upgrade. Eventually I did upgrade (for other reasons) and I can't tell the difference performance wise. Now, sure, the people who use Photoshop for a living on 600dpi images, or the people who do high-end CG work using Maya, they're extraordinary cases. Those people are in the "I'll pay $5000 for a decent performance increase" category.
Realistically, going from 1GHz to 3GHz does not give you a 300% speed increase. It's more like 50%. Personally, I'm getting tired of the usual 12% clock speed increase that results in a 6% benchmark score increase at the expense of 15% higher power consumption.
Re:20%? nothing...! (Score:3, Insightful)
As a developer myself, I agree that programmers should be better about trying to conserve CPU cycles. Most do, after an initial release or two.
What I find rediculous is that people fight getting faster machines!
Re:20%? nothing...! (Score:2)
So, tell me again how the computing power of today is enough. It barely looks like it keeps up with the apps Apple is trying to push on it.
-Alex
Re:20%? nothing...! (Score:2)
Also let us not forget the lesson of the early PowerPC adopters. Fearing the discontinuation of the 68k-based macs (which did come to pass) they upgraded to the latest greatest thing. Then support for P
Re:20%? nothing...! (Score:2)
Re:20%? nothing...! (Score:2)
Although, unless you're speaking of a laptop, I think you're a little mistaken about the ease of upgrading recent Macs. Years ago, I would
Re:20%? nothing...! (Score:2)
Seriously. The only thing left is the floppy drive which might not even work anymore (It's been a long time since I put a disk in there) but it's really cool and that ugly dark taupe color so I hang on to it.
Re:20%? nothing...! (Score:2)
I know the AIX machines well. I used to work for IBM as an admin.
-Alex
Re:20%? nothing...! (Score:2, Funny)
don't speed bumps ... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:don't speed bumps ... (Score:2)
Why do we park in driveways and drive on parkways?
Why do we spell knife with a "k"?
Why are Yanks so full of themselves?
The many mysteries of the 'modern' world...
Re:don't speed bumps ... (Score:2)
Because they have won 26 World Series...
I'm sure that's what you meant, right? I'd hate to think you made a blanket generalization of a people.
Re:don't speed bumps ... (Score:2)
"slow you down?"
No, they don't but they sure make my car fly.
Beyond 1 GHz..? (Score:4, Interesting)
candidate processors include the MPC7457, which has yet to ship but is set to take Motorola's G4 family beyond 1GHz.
I don't know where they've been looking but under my desk just here is a dual 1.25GHz G4 tower... there are 1.42s out there, too...
Honestly, I don't know what I'd do with a dual 2GHz G4 at the moment... apart from the two folding@home [stanford.edu] clients I'm running, I'm using perhaps 10 - 20% of the CPU on this machine, and that's running OS X and a heap of graphics apps...
Re:Beyond 1 GHz..? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Beyond 1 GHz..? (Score:5, Insightful)
Finally, there may be something you or I haven't thought of yet. Apple is doing a good job of finding new things for us to do with our faster processors (iDVD, for example, uses a lot of resources) while other software/OS companies have not done such a good job of finding a "killer app" for having computers faster than they were in 1999. Not that iDVD is the killer app -- I think it's still out there waiting to be found.
Re:Beyond 1 GHz..? (Score:2)
Check out SketchUp [sketchup.com] - expensive software, but the downloadale demo gives you 8 hours in which to become addicted to it.
Apple leaving Moto? (Score:3, Insightful)
Somebody didn't RTFA...970 isn't high-end. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Somebody didn't RTFA...970 isn't high-end. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Somebody didn't RTFA...970 isn't high-end. (Score:2)
The G3 was introduced in Powerbooks and towers simultaneously.
# People say that this chip currently consumes to much power for laptop use.
I've heard conflicting numbers, but most say a 1.2 GHz 970 consumes roughly the same power as a 1.0 GHz G4. So it might be possible, although the motherboard upgrades needed to support the 970 might increase the power requirements too much.
Re:Somebody didn't RTFA...970 isn't high-end. (Score:2)
The real choice, though, is Apple's. We suspect it will choose a multi-vendor approach, utilising chips from IBM and Motorola by matching processor characteristics to application: G4 for mobile machines and consumer desktops, 970 for pro desktops and servers.
Re:Apple leaving Moto? (Score:2)
Most mac users don't know jack about tech.
Actually, most computer users don't know jack about tech. The difference in Mac users is that they're usually more willing to admit they want an "appliance" machine, and that they're more willing to use a machine that is so obviously in the minority. In my dealings with Mac users, they are less moronic than your average Windows drone for those reasons.
Re:Apple leaving Moto? (Score:2)
Niether group (when speaking of just the users) knows shit about computers though. Mac users generally seem to be more willing to conceed that they don't know anything about computers and are at least smart enough to go with something they can deal with.
Every shaved ape that ever edited a batch file or entered "safe mode" though thinks he
Well (Score:4, Interesting)
This is what Quark was waiting for (Score:5, Funny)
This is what Quark has been waiting for. Now that we can zoom along at these blazingly fast new speeds, Quark will finally release the OS X version and the Mac platform will be saved.
Hurray!
Quark is Dead (Score:2, Insightful)
20% of which speed? (Score:3, Interesting)
I doubt it will be a big jump, merely allowing a jump from 1.25GHz to 1.5GHz.
Of course, I fully expect Apple to do their overclocking again, and attempt to pull 1.7GHz out of these systems.
Re:20% of which speed? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:20% of which speed? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:20% of which speed? (Score:2)
Still Playing Catch-Up (Score:5, Informative)
Not for high end Macs (Score:5, Interesting)
Apple will most likely use this as an oppurtunity to drop the G3. Finally Apple will have Altivec across the board. You have to take into account that the manufacturing process also reduces heat and well ... size ... making this sound more and more like a processor for an iBook.
I also beleive Apple will use this as an oppurtunity to make everything above 1Ghz this year. We will most also likely see quad G4 Xserves because of this (moto producing better G4s)
The 970 is a great chip. It's benchmarks at the Microprocessor Forum VERY HANDILY beat EVERY processor put up against it - even the AMD 64 bit!
Apple shouldn't move to x86 as suggested in the redundant Apple naysayers. (hey you "apple is dead people": how about looking in my journal?) I rather like the RISC processor anf the PPC - there is MUCH less code overhead and easier "addon" capability (cache, media functionality, i/o) - Motorola has been the hold up in it's development and needed someone like IBM to step in and lend a hand, they have done so.
Re:Not for high end Macs (Score:3, Informative)
Sorry, that is just rubbish. The 970 is not the best processor ever evented. Check out this link:
970 news at Ace's [aceshardware.com]
It's SPEC figures are good. But they are below the P4 and Opteron which you can easily go out and buy right now of course.
It is also a lot lower the real big machine like the Alpha, Itanium 2 and IBM's own Power4. I think IBM would be very silly if
Re:Not for high end Macs (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Not for high end Macs (Score:4, Informative)
SPEC2000
POWER4 @ 1.7ghz: 1113/1699 (int/fp)
PPC970 @ 1.8ghz: 937/1085 (int/fp) *projected
Don't get me wrong: as soon as a Mac with this baby in it is available, I'm upgrading, but let's call a spade a spade. The 970 looks to be decently faster than what we currently have in raw processing power, but with a radical, "holy cow where're my pants" faster memory interface.
'jfb
Apple, Motorola, and IBM (Score:2, Insightful)
Weird Anagram (Score:4, Funny)
motorola processor
otorola processor - m
torola processor - mo
trola processor - moo
tola processor - moor
tola procssor - moore
tola procsor - moores
tola pocsor - moores r
tola pocor - moores rs
tol pocor - moores rsa
tol ocor - moores rsa p
tol oco - moores rsa pr
tol co - moores rsa pro
ol co - moores rsa prot
l co - moores rsa proto
l o - moores rsa protoc
l - moores rsa protoco
moores rsa protocol
Weird indeed... especially when condiering this one [motorola.com] (search for RSA in the document)
Re:Weird Anagram (Score:2)
Motorola does supply other companies (Score:3, Informative)
Too little, way too late (Score:4, Insightful)
Sitting on or near my desk are a 800MHz Athlon (running a Linux 2.4.x kernel), an 800MHz G4 Titanium (MacOSX 10.2.x), and a 1.8GHz P4 laptop (Linux 2.4.x). The Titanium was bought for me by my employer, since many of the people here use them, and I do application and hardware support, as well as Astrophysical research.
I have benchmarked my applications on these three platforms (and the best benchmarks are, of course, your own applications, aren't they?). The G4 is slower, by about 20%, than the 800MHz Athlon. Arguably, if my applications were made 'Altivec-aware' they'd run significantly faster on the G4, but if I were to use SSE2 extensions on the Athlon or P4, they'd run faster on those platforms, too.
Although I kinda like MacOSX (and abhorred MacOS9), and think Apple wins top marks for esthetics, their hardware is way too slow for a 20% improvement in processor speed to give them the boost they need.
The best move for Apple will probably be to go with the new IBM chips.
My 0.02CDN.
Re:Too little, way too late (Score:2)
Meanwhile Opteron has SSE2.
Re:Too little, way too late (Score:3, Funny)
I won't argue with you. But, I will trade my 800 Mhz AMD system for your TiBook. Deal?
Re:Too little, way too late (Score:2)
Still Too Little, Too Late Anyway (Score:4, Interesting)
This is actually bad news. The MPC7457 still doesn't make full use of the bandwidth available in the DDR400 RAM the Macs are currently using. The MPC7470 does, but we're still not getting that chip - for whatever reason - I assume its a manufacturing & design issue. It's been a very long delay.
Motorola looks pretty amateurish with this feeble boost. This is a manufacturing tweak that intel and IBM have made months ago in their primary foundries. The MPC7457 likely isn't going to get used in any serious Macintoshes - perhaps it will go into the iBook and iMacs eventually.
So perhaps Motorola has given up on the MPC7470, and conceded that market to IBM's 970 and 980 chips. Let's hope so; I would like to buy a new workstation pretty soon. ;-)
Motorola is done (Score:5, Insightful)
IBM is moving in the other direction, which is frankly the direction that apple NEEDS to go if they want to compete and keep this architecture.
They're planning on keeping this architecture.
apples are not oranges (Score:2, Insightful)
The nature of these disputes is fundamentally fundamentalist: Person A is angry because person B fails to see the revealed truth. The relativity of that truth always fails to impress itself upon the fundamentalist.
My own viewpoint is that instead of ragg
The Facts of the Rumor (Score:2, Informative)
What was that? A lead in? Yeah, ok, now let me see if I can shed some light on these rumors (well ok.... I'm going to shamelessly quote the article in an attempt at karma whoring):
Interestingly, Motorola said it had been delivering low-k dielectric 0.18 micron SOI processors for a full quarter. The 7455 is just such
Re:The Facts of the Rumor (Score:2)
Not with the G4 being limited to a 167mhz SDR bus. The G4 is bandwidth starved and upping the clock speed is an exercise in the very definition of "marginal return".
'jfb
Re:The Facts of the Rumor (Score:2)
It's funny that you use the word "pipeline". The G4e's short pipeline (11 stage I think? And the G3 is 7? something like that) won't let it be pushed very far, or so I would think. Especially not up into the 2GHz range.
Item's from March. Its June. Lots has happened. (Score:3, Insightful)
That is the kind of stochastic tittilation usually provided by people trying to predict the direction the an elephant will travel from a point of view only slightly in front of its tail.
Re: (Score:2)
"Motorola expects..." (Score:2)
Motorola sells lots of PowerPCs (Score:5, Informative)
The big customer is everyone who's buying PowerQuicc's and putting them in embedded spaces. PowerQuicc's with RapidIO connections, PowerQuicc's four-on-a-board, lots and lots of PowerPC chips going in lots and lots of embedded spaces.
I was recently at the Global Signal Processing Expo [gspx.com] and it was amazing how many people were doing tasks involving heavy signal processing -- where you would expect DSPs and FPGAs -- on PowerPC chips. The interesting thing was that raw number-crunching power wasn't always the most important thing -- many times it is bandwith (what kind of interconnect you have to your processor makes a huge difference when you are trying to process gigabytes of information a second). Sometimes it is programmability that is the reason (use of familiar tools is a big plus). Sometimes you just want to use the same chip to do your signal processing as your network I/O.
Companies like Sky Computers [skycomputers.com] are selling more PowerPCs than companies like Apple Computers [apple.com].
This explains a lot (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:That's awesome! (Score:4, Funny)
Re:That's awesome! (Score:2)
Re:That's awesome! (Score:2, Interesting)
i've got os x running on a g3/400 and i'll admit its not snappy, but it doesnt lag to the point of frustration either. it works and it doesnt seem to be a pain to me.
i just had to get my 2 cents out there because EVERYONE says you need an g6/5000 to run aqua smoothly. i dont agree.
Re:That's awesome! (Score:2)
Re:That's awesome! (Score:2)
Re:That's awesome! (Score:2, Insightful)
Try using a Mac sometime, then you'd know.
They won't switch to x86 except as a last resort (Score:2, Informative)
Not only that, but at the moment the PPC family is looking rather rosey... I mean we have G4s comming up to 2GHz (woopdey doo) but more importantly we have the
Re:They won't switch to x86 except as a last resor (Score:2)
What about a PPC chip on a PCI card? For people who absolutely NEED backward compatibility, this would be a solution.
I personally don't see the need for App
Re:I can't help thinking that this is a bad thing. (Score:3, Insightful)
People forget Apple is a hardware company, and I feel if they are going to change chips (Which they should considering Motorola's lack of interest in maintaining good competition and providing bet
Re:I can't help... - not commodity hardware (Score:2)
That said, the PPC seems to have a pretty bright future and I'm all for sticking with it.
blakespot
Re:I can't help thinking that this is a bad thing. (Score:5, Insightful)
We do? Sorry, there's a huge difference between an interesting prototype and production quality software. In any case, a popular rumor is still a rumor.
We know that the longer Apple uses the PowerPC platform, the less likely the possibility of it switching to an Intel/AMD platform becomes.
Why? They switched to PPC from 68000 after about 10 years. They could switch regardless of the length of time. You're implying that more software would be available after a longer length of time - implying a growing market.
We know that an Intel/AMD platform Apple Mac would probably cost less than a PowerPC platform Mac currently does, and run faster too.
We do? How do we know this? Just because one chip runs at 1.2 Ghz and the other runs at 2 Ghz? Because the P4 runs at 3+ Ghz? Because of bus speeds?
We know that if they could upgrade their Windows PCs to Apple Macs - say, by installing an Apple upgrade card that contained any necessary Apple ROMs, etc and then installing the new OS - millions of users would be tempted to abandon Windows and convert to the Mac OS.
Really????? Wow, that's a leap. And how much would people pay? I know I'd pay just about $0.
Might as well just have a software licensing key scheme - as Mac Plus ROMs don't go to far these days
We know that this Intel/AMD platform Apple Mac would get much better support from hardware and software manufacturers.
Really? Just because OS2 ran on Intel didn't help it.
An Apple Mac running the newest hardware would never be significantly disadvantaged performance-wise, and Apple would attract a lot of users who previously considered Macs bad value for money.
Using a particular chipset does not guarentee great performance or value.
We know that this would make Apple a force to be reckoned with once more, make Microsoft very anxious and millions of customers delighted.
I think Apple has already achieved that. Throwing a couple "ROMs" into an Intel box just doesn't fit the big picture.
Please, let's not be so negative (Score:2)
1. I never suggested that Apple has blistering fast Intel/AMD code at this moment in time. Heck, they'd be mad to have spent too much time optimising that code up until now - why spend more money squeezing extra performance out of code that you're not planning to use? Bu
They can't support all that extra hardware (Score:5, Insightful)
Or, as has been pointed out many times before, Apple doesn't want the toruble of supporting god-knows-what hardware is going to be in the masses' PCs. One of, if not the major, reasons Apple is able to make the OS play so nice most of the time is their control of the underlying hardware - sure, you can get most any peripheral you want (as long as it comes with a Mac driver), but the basic computer is always consistent.
I suppose Apple could just tweak the G4 mobos and replace the processors with P4s, or replace the internals completely, but I doubt that's where the costs of the machine lie, plus the homebrew crowd would scream bloody murder. It makes me shiver to think what OS X would be like if it had to support every piece of x86 hardware under the sun...
Re:They can't support all that extra hardware (Score:2)
Well no - there is relatively little hardware available for the Mac. If people start upgrading the boxes themselves (which they do rarely due to aforementioned small market) things start going wrong also - I've seen this happen to my local Mac user several times now....
Re:They can't support all that extra hardware (Score:2)
I have a 2x1.25 G4 with 512MB stock Apple RAM, 512 of PC2700 DDR SDRAM from Crucial, two ATA drives I scrounged from dead PCs (the stock is a deathstar), a Radeon card, and Philips and Pioneer optical drives (Apple's SuperDrive is just a pioneer DVR-104). No problems whatsoever.
A better move than going IA-32... (Score:5, Insightful)
What would they go to? IA-32 is a poor choice when processors are starting to move to 64 bit with X86-64 and Itanium. Going Athlon-64 would be ahead of time, it's not even out yet (and if Intel managed to get their 64 bit solution pushed through, X86-64 would fade into a niche) and if they went IA32, by the time they're done it'd be time to change again.
We know that an Intel/AMD platform Apple Mac would probably cost less than a PowerPC platform Mac currently does, and run faster too.
Code designed for X86: Yes.
Code designed for PPC, compiled for X86: Maybe
Code compiled for PPC, emulated on X86: Hell no
Nevermind that Apple has, and always will have a high mark-up to cover the costs of developing their software.
We know that if they could upgrade their Windows PCs to Apple Macs - say, by installing an Apple upgrade card that contained any necessary Apple ROMs, etc and then installing the new OS - millions of users would be tempted to abandon Windows and convert to the Mac OS.
Apple's business plan is to be a cathedral where PCs are the bazaar. They wish to deliver a _solution_, where they control the hardware and the software, that will "just work". They do not want to get into the driver and compatibility problems of PCs, because then they would lose their greatest advantage. And there's a price tag involved, of course. Which is also why getting dinner served (the solution) is more expensive than buying the ingredients and cooking it up yourself (hardware+drivers+OS+applications+utilities).
To me, who likes to mix and match and create my own "dish", that is probably not of that great a value. But it is of value to some, and those are Apple's customers. And it sounds like a viable business plan to me. The rest will say it's too expensive, of course.
Kjella
Re:A better move than going IA-32... (Score:2)
Re:I can't help thinking that this is a bad thing. (Score:2, Insightful)
Repeat after me: "Apple is a hardware manufacturer".
Apple does not make money selling OS licenses, that's for Microsoft to do. They make their money selling hardware. That's why they will never switch to a Intel/AMD system. If they do that they lose their hardware market and get beat out by el-cheapo manufacturers.
The other key factor is that one reason OS X is so great and stable is that Apple has very tight control on the hardware they have to support. Look at the common reported kernel panics: almost a
Apple will NEVER use x86 processors (Score:2)
Anyway, Apple doesn't want to lose their hardware distinctiveness. To do so would mean that Apple would have to cut their margins to razor-thin along with the rest of the x86 world. Apple is enjoying the esoteric platform comparisons right now, because there is no true 1:1 comparison between PPC and x86; PPC is faster in some a
Re:I can't help thinking that this is a bad thing. (Score:2)
Competition is a good thing. You shouldn't be cheering for x, y, and z platform to consolidate on a chip. Without the PowerPC beating x86 bac
Re:I can't help thinking that this is a bad thing. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I can't help thinking that this is a bad thing. (Score:3, Interesting)
You know, the longer Apple has been around, the more likely it has become. Years ago there was only broad speculation. Now there is a feasibility build. Give it another 10 years and they will have a *BSD/OSX combination running happily, and with enough proprietary hardware to make it worth Apple's while.
Why they would do such a financially suicidal thing is beyond m
Re:I can't help thinking that this is a bad thing. (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm still trying to contain my laughter.
Supporting Macintosh hardware has little to do with hardware and much to do with drivers. Just because a Macintosh has an Intel chip in it doesn't mean a
Re:I can't help thinking that this is a bad thing. (Score:3, Insightful)
It's all about image combined with the comfortable environment that Macs are famous for. If Microsoft or Linux managed to successfully offer the same thing, you'd probably sneer at that
Re:Mac Zealot Translator (Score:2, Insightful)
"MacOS X is everything Linux wants to be."
Translation: "Mac OS X is everything some Linux distributions attempt to be: easy to install/maintain, with the power of a good *nix"
"Aqua makes me so much more productive!"
Translation: "The consistency in the way applications and the system look/react allowes you to focus on your work, rather than having to deal with finding out how everything works"
Re:Mac Zealot Translator (Score:3, Insightful)
Father Ted in the house! Alright!
...more about consistency (Score:2)
They also changed the behavior of the Shift / Command keys when making selections in the Finder, so that Shift-Click extends the selection and Command-Click toggles items in the selection. Much better in terms of consistency with the rest of the system. It also makes it more consistent with Windo
HIT RETURN TO RENAME ANY FILE (Score:2)
Re:Why dont they release it on X86? (Score:5, Informative)
It's the "monitor etc." that Apple wants to sell, not "just the OS".
used is where it's at (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Why dont they release it on X86? (Score:4, Insightful)
No you wouldn't, as the chances of all your hardware working would be miniscule.
You would have to repurchase all your software as well, unless you're going to dual boot every five minutes. How much value is in the software you have? I'm assuming you didn't just warez it all of course. MS Office alone is several hundred dollars.
There would be few games. Dual boot for them too? Use a console? Dunno.
Not to mention that it would cost way, way more than what Windows does - Apple can't lose the money from hardware sales, so the only option for a separate release would be high prices and to hope people would buy it.
Why is parent modded insightful? (Score:3, Insightful)
When was the last time that a speedbump to the lineup significantly raised the prices of any of Apples computers? It basically always just replaces the last top-of-the-line with a faster cpu, but basically the same configuration and price.
Try coming back when you have a clue, instead of just FUD.
Re:20 percent is nice (Score:2)
Re:Nothing to read here (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Nothing to read here (Score:3, Insightful)
You'd probably like a modern Windows computer better than that beige G3. Of course, you'd probably like a modern Macintosh better than that beige G3, but you've already ruled that out.
Re:Nothing to read here (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Nothing to read here (Score:2)
Companies that ignore their users in favor of their shareholders go down the crapper real fast. Shareholders want a quick buck; users need the company to persist and be profitable long-term. A company has responsibilities to BOTH it's users and its shareholders - ideally, what it is doing for its users makes it a good investment for shareholders.
Re:Apple's problem (Score:2, Interesting)
Take a look at the Itanium, which is the correct processor to use as a comparison, being as it's also the 64-bit high-end next-generation (blah blah) processor. Likewise, AMD fans should not compare the 970 with the Athlon, but with the Opteron.
And lo and behold; Intel's release schedule for Itanium indicates the latter is somewhere around the 1.5
Re:Apple's problem (Score:2, Informative)
Not true (it appears Apple is finally starting to reverse the trend, although they remain woefully behind to this point), and a non sequitur. Speed differences are not directly correlated to cost, and would probably be inversely proportional if they were, not directly proportional as you suggest.
Intel also has much more differentiation
Irrelevent --
-1, Insightful (Score:2)
You mention latency in programs starting...how sad. Most people are concerned with latency while the program is running - try encoding a video on a 1.5 GHz machine, then on a 3GHz machine. Astonishingly, there is a difference!