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Apple Businesses

G4 Bug Keeps Them at 500MHz 165

Posted by CmdrTaco from the ain't-that-a-bummer dept.
Hal-9001 writes "I saw this link over at Ars Technica; apparently, the G4 has a bug that keeps it from running at 500 MHz or above. The story is over at MacWeek. "
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G4 Bug Keeps Them at 500MHz More

G4 Bug Keeps Them at 500MHz

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  • microway.com is one place
    look to the net, there are many others
  • 1. Like I said, most. Sure, you can get Linux, NetBSD, etc. on a G4. However, you still rarely see them, because the G4 desktops generally are Macs, and Macs run the MacOS. Out of all the shops selling G4s, do you really believe most of its customer's run Linux or another non-Apple OS? And again, this is a Mac site, so they're talking mostly to MacOS users. If I'm only a BSD user, do I care if MS Windows crashes?

    2. No, but as I said, its a side effect. The OS is poor, something I noted at. The new BSD derived OS should be far better. I'm sure Mac users would be happy to have the front end they love, and a back end that's worth they're love.

    3. Sure it seems odd, but if we take them at their word and that it doesn't effect chips under 500mhz, than its ok. It sounds like it does, but they don't want to admit it.. or that they are giving an excuse for while the G4 500mhz chips will be delayed, but that its not a horrid problem that should scare customers away.
  • Yeah it's pretty fast enough if all you do is browse the web and use a word processor but if you are interested in rendering 30 fps 3D with at least a million polygons in each frame, it's not going to be enough. I'm pretty sure an athlon+geforce combination (or even intel) would do much better
  • I agree with TheGreek, the folks at LinuxPPC have managed to make an OS that runs on Apple Hardware without ANY HELP FROM APPLE AT ALL. Are Be some kind of weirdo corporate wusses that need a company to hold their hand? Why can they just port it themselves? How do you KNOW that BeOS is better for video and audio, have you benchmarked it or something? And guess what, Mac OS X has alot of the features you are whining about. Also, it really pees me off when people put MACos or BEos, since when are the meant to be capitalized? It's Mac OS and Be OS. Well I've had my say. Mr-Ikari gendou@crosswinds.net
  • Yet another moronic generalisation from a spotty little game freak. Games DO NOT define the high end of computing, as clock speed has absolutely NO relevence to performance between different families of chip sets. The feature set of AltiVec is far more functional and accessable than the arcane and mentally retarded MMX family of instructions. The GeForce is a card optimised for DirectX 7, the idiot-child of OpenGL, I expect it to be just as useless for programs such as SoftImage as its predecessor the TNT2.
    Get out of your basement, there are users with more pressing needs than getting 600 fps out of QuakeIII who welcome real technological advancements such as AltiVec.
  • I agree with you. When I read that comment I had an instinctive urge to grab a baseball bat (LART) and hunt down the idiot that thinks a system crash or cache corruption is no big deal.

    People have gotten so used to systems that crash on a regular basis that they don't realize that systems could be much more reliable than the crap sold at the local computer store.

  • AS opposed to Linux where a stray pointer in kernel space or a power failure can lead to serious disk corruption? THe disk repair utilities for Linux are so crude that I have more problems with losing ext2fs partitions than I ever have had with losing HFS partitions.

  • Unfortunately, Alphas have a reputation of being refridgerator-sized machines with

    • AlphaLinux.Org [alphalinux.org]
      A good starting place. They have tons of links to vendors, list-archives, news, FAQ's, etc.
    • DCG Inc. [dcginc.com]
      I've had good luck/great service from these guys. Alpha pricing starts at $1295 for a 533-mhz bare-bones kit.
    • Compaq's DS10 (21264-500mhz) [digital.com]
      The 466mhz model does over twice as well as a G4 in SPECfp. I seem to remember stumbling across a sale (from Compaq) for these little monsters for $2999, though I can't find the link now.
    • Microway [microway.com]
      Never dealt with them personally, but they have fast machines and a all-around good reputation. They also sell quadputers and compilers
    • eBay [ebay.com]
      You can often find cheap Alpha hardware on eBay. Over 6 months ago, I put together a PC164-500/64mb system for about $600. Read the AlphaLinux.Org FAQ's, HOWTO's and HCL before you buy anything.

    For reference, here are a few (single-cpu) spec*95 figures... (mostly from spec.org)
    INT- FP-- processor
    20.3 13.3 Mac G3/466mhz
    22.3 15.1 Intel P-III/550mhz
    21.4 20.4 G4-450 Mhz 7400
    16.2 23.9 UltraSparc/450mhz
    18.0 27.0 Alpha 21164/600mhz (very old now)
    24.6 47.9 Alpha 21264/466mhz (new "low-end")
    32.1 53.7 Alpha UP2000/667mhz

  • The same people that are flamming G4s now, will be buying G4s after they fix this bug. A .18 micron copper RISC chip with a128 bit FPU engine?


    minor correction: G4s => 450MHz are .15 copper

  • >Also, it really pees me off
    >when people put MACos or BEos, since when are the >meant to be capitalized? It's Mac OS and
    >Be OS. Well I've had my say.


    Thank you for finally pointing out the whole capitalization thing. Glad it's not just me thinking that. You can always tell an underinformed _____-bigot by their capitalization of the word MAC. For instance.

    "MAC is going to go out of business any day now."
    "If MAC had multitasking i'd use it."
    "MAC's are too expensive and they dont have any software.

    Huddle up to your nice warm Athlon Beowulf cluster running Linux, or go play with NetPositive under BeOS or whatever you prefer to rant off-topic about, and get your damn facts straight before you start trashing things. Even windows.

  • good luck finding something with "equal processing power" at a comparable price, more OR less than the g3/g4 (macOS or not).
  • but i have an amd processor and linux, although i have to run 98 for stupid school stuff (they sold out to the devil, so i have to use vc++). damnit, i need a valid response here.
  • Hola AC!,

    Yes I didnt mean it as a flame bait. I was refering to this add [apple.com]. Which I find hilarious :) I'm an alltime mac user and love the macs. The slight tongue and cheek was due to the fact that I cant afford those g4's :(
    --
  • Ok, are there any benchmarks that i could look at, instead of redundant "mac rules" responses?
  • Please God, get IBM to come onboard. The people at Motorola couldn't get up clock speed to save their lives. IBM is talking 500-700MHz G3s. If they start making G4s using SOI and using their amazing talent, Apple won't get screwed.



    Steve Jobs should be on his knees begging IBM to make G4s. Motorola has made it abundantly clear that they can't meet deadlines, can't produce enough chips to meet even Apple's small demand, and can't keep up with Intel(much less AMD) in terms of clock speed and processing power

    C'mon IBM, you can do it!
  • These supercomputing Mac's _are_ more powerful than the average PC, even most Dual Processor machines.

    I believe they are 1 GigaFlop machines (or at least at the high end), and they are value for money in speed terms.

  • No reboot is ok. No matter what.

    eh...i disagree. if youre developing some program that makes heavy use of system resources and/or performs some extremely low level functions, it wouldnt be too unheard of for you to have to reboot after you discover a bug in your software that makes the system unstable or unusable.
    slightly more reasonable, what if you (for whatever reason) decide to build a new kernel for your snappy open source OS?

    People who think that copmuter can be rebooted to fix problems should be taught properly.

    well, ive heard early version(s) of windoze95 had memory leak issues. so what do you suggest those who are stuck using the affected version(s) do once their system starts bogging down for lack of available memory? (note: answers like 'use [insert alternate os here]' are not acceptable for this question :P)


    the point is, no system is perfect. they all need a reboot every now and then, be it to fix a problem or to upgrade. the real issue is the length of time between reboots.


    --Siva

    Keyboard not found.
  • this is a direct quote from the famous 6 page G4 Ad in every major magazine

    ...with performance inscreasing at its usual pace, the new Power Mac G4 woudn't have arrived until 2003. Unfortunately, breaktroughs do happen...

    maybe they should have waited till 2003 and done some more testing...

    I know the quote refers to speed, but sometimes you have to slow down and make sure you aren't messing some things up too much...
  • Thirdly, Apple kindof wants to have a notebook presence. Putting a 50watt chip in a notebook would likely yield several McDonald's-like lawsuits.
    This is true ASSUMING you can get the machine to run for more than 10 minutes on a battery. ;-)

    --bdj

  • I recall it being mentioned about a year or so ago (sorry, don't remember the source) that IBM was pretty much the red-headed step-child of the PPC development group.

    Back when PPC was being developed, there was alot of hype how these three companies (IBM, Motorola, Apple) were going to revolutionize computing, to the benifet of the entire world (And IBM, Motorola, and Apple).

    What has happened is there is colaboration amongst all three in the design phase. When it comes to actually SELLING the things, Motorola becomes Apple's "Preferred" supplier (i.e. 100%) and IBM gets left out in the cold.

    Big Blue has refocused in more recent years to create embedded PPC, and has been doing a pretty damn good job of it. I'm sure there are still plenty of burned asses over at IBM that would love to stick it to Apple and Motorola, though...

    Maybe one of the reasons IBM signed up with Nintendo to design and fab Dolphin?
  • The folks who bought 400's and 450's hoping they had some headroom are out of luck, I guess. Although I believe the motherboards are jumperless in the Sawtooth 450's to begin with. I hope Apple is on IBM's back over their non-support of AltiVec. They can't be happy about being stuck with a single source for 7400's.

    Apple is ordering a couple million PowerPCs every year. I honestly don't see why IBM isn't taking that account more seriously. I'm sure there are good reasons for it. But they must be pretty serious for IBM to turn away all that business.
  • Okay, I'll buy that 233 MMX of ya from $100. Last I remembered it they were at least $300 or so. Second, Your G300 tower is reletivly recent. Current Macs are only at 400 or so now, (G4s are still pretty hard to find) or 450 if you want to quibble. PCs are at 700 MHz, so what do you think is going to happen to the price of the 233? Your G3 300 is comparable to a 450Mhz PII in terms of how out of date it is. Second, a mac does crash every 10 minutes. My windows install has not crashed in two days. (I was rendering in Truespace, while coding in Visual Studio.) Yes it is a piece of junk, but that is why you have things like BeOS. We have an old 180Mhz MacOS 7.6.x (which I hear is supposedly pretty stable) which has a problem running Netscape 4.0
  • This 11 fellow is already violating at least one of the rules that he sees every time he posts: "use a clear subject that describes what your message is about." Hardly a role-model for the community.

    Unless I'm off-topic (in which case I'll promptly be moderated out of everybody's way), the subject line is always on topic. Would you prefer I put in a different meaningless filler line instead? How about for this one "G3 CPU" instead of "..." ? "..." is easier. Unless I'm going off-topic, I really don't even see the need to include a subject line - slash already breaks this down for you.

    people will learn that character is one's greatest asset, that hurting others is wrong, and that there's no "i" in "Slashdot Comment System"

    ... Funny how just before this you run off and say I'm an arrogant bastard hell-bent on some kind of popularity contest... and then turn around and post a few lines of mean-nothing text, which is essentially a personal slam and get moderated up 2 points! Oh, the twisted irony...

    Anyway, I find it just laughably funny that anyone would believe that I'm here to 'be popular'. Yeah.. right. Online? With a bunch of anonymous people I'll never meet? Just think about that alittle. I'm not sure whether you're the same person, or another, but alot of ACs have complained that my posts are "meaningless". I've even had a few moderators mark down perfectly good comments lately. Does this bother me? Not really. It's a curiosity, but little more. The only reason I mention it is because so many of you find it interesting.

    Bottom line: If you disagree with me, fine. If you think my posts suck, fine. But the majority of people here don't believe that, and this is just a fact you are going to have to live with, unpleasant though it may be. If you really feel strongly about it, e-mail this guy [mailto] and let him know how you feel. While you're at it, how about suggesting an alternative moderation system.. maybe one that's more fair to people like you?

    My e-mail address is, as always, attached to any post I make. Contact me off slashdot if you have some constructive criticism.

    --

  • Freeze (Score:5)

    by Yebyen ( 59663 ) on Sunday October 10, 1999 @02:39PM (#1624617) Homepage
    Even if data corruption should occur, a source said, the result would be nothing more than a system freeze, easily fixed with a restart.

    Statements like this worry me. Restarts are NOT ok, and i'm sickened that people think they are. Especially when they're frequent like it sounds like this bug would make them. The world is not windows, if it were then everyone including me would have no problem with an occasional restart. But more importantly, G4's are usually going to be used as servers. Reboots are NEVER acceptable in a server, it can mean 20 minutes of downtime on a website which can mean lost revenue. It can mean lost e-mails within a company which is a VERY bad thing. Get the picture? I'm glad they're delaying the release, of course, as this is not a good bug. OK my rant is done :-) thanks for reading.

    Patrick Barrett
    Yebyen@adelphia.net

  • Re:Freeze (Score:3)

    by Siva ( 6132 ) on Sunday October 10, 1999 @02:44PM (#1624618) Homepage Journal
    actually that whole paragraph worries me:

    Indeed, another source said, this issue might never evince itself in Macs, since the OS doesn't manipulate data rapidly enough to cause the problem -- the glitch would more likely effect more-efficient embedded operating systems. Even if data corruption should occur, a source said, the result would be nothing more than a system freeze, easily fixed with a restart.

    #1) i dont like the fact that they assume MacOS is the only os that runs on macs
    #2) this seems to suggest (to me anyway that current versions of MacOS arent fast enough to keep up with the faster G4s..
    #3) yes, rebooting, while an "easy" task, is not something id gladly do often, especially since its entirely possible i could lose data in any open applications that hadnt been saved

    all in all, this whole article makes it seem like theyre taking a rather relaxed attitude toward this.

    --Siva

    Keyboard not found.
  • Yea you did. BeOS. Pure elegance.

  • Better than Intel (Score:3)

    by Max von H. ( 19283 ) on Sunday October 10, 1999 @02:45PM (#1624620)
    At least we know Motorola is thoroughly testing it's processors before letting them on the market.

    Intel hasn't been *that* kind (read: professional) with the Pentium class processors... Remember the first series (60, 66, 90)??? They tried, but ultimately had to replace a helluva lot of them...

  • Damn sysadmins. EVERYONE NEEDS A VECTOR PROCESSOR. Vector procs rock for 3D. Even the ARM10 architeture is putting a vector engine in a proc made for handhelds. YOUR PALMPILOT NEEDS A VECTOR PROCESSOR!!!!
  • Why not have Slashdot automatically moderated by those grading programs some teachers are useing to grade student papers? (See slashdot from a few days ago.)
  • It's a easier task for Motorola than Intel. According to passage, the current G4 can run at speeds of 400 and 450, so Motorola can still sell them as 'underclock' G4.
  • What is this "foo"? Is it overclockable? Where can I get it? I want some!!

  • I'm writing this on a G4/450 MHz. Believe me, this machine does NOT need any overclocking. It's so darn fast, I have a hard time not using it all the time. Responsiveness makes the computing experience so very sweet.

    IBM did not want to support AltiVec way back when Apple was in more dire straits and the market could not be foreseen as being so lucrative. I'm sure the 'Its' over at IBM are kicking themselves now.

    "That kind of errata isn't unusual for new ships from any manufacturer," said Keith Diefendorff, editor in chief of the Microprocessor Report in Sunnyvale, Calif. He said that Motorola's warnings don't necessarily portend serious problems: "Motorola, as a company, is relatively conservative, and they like to have everything perfect." --from the MacWeek article

    I agree with the poster down below that people wanting to buy these machines are lucky that Motorola takes its quality so seriously, so they don't have to be replaced later (like the pentiums).

  • The bit you quoted was preceeded by "the glitch would more likely effect more-efficient embedded operating systems."

    Could it be that Linux on Macs can be affected it is more efficient than MacOS(X)? Or is that just non-embedded OS's against embedded ones?
  • ...And let's not forget that even if MacOS can't keep the processor buried now, when MacOS X comes out next year with MACH's cousin under the hood, problems like this can (and I'm sure will) become quite nasty.
  • Ok, let me start out by saying i know that Mac is the better computer, and i seriously wish i owned one.

    That said, i am currently a PC owner, and as such still have some loyaylty to intel.
    I feel this must be said.
    Someone is bound to, it might as well be me.
    Wintel/Linux on Intel/AMD PC's rejoice. For once more, we have a legitamate reason to feel supperior (though, whether this reason will last for long, i know not...
    We can, now, if for a brief moment, stick our tongue's out at Mac users and brag about us being able to get higher processor speeds (yes, yes, BYTEmark integers would love to argue with me, i know, but then this isn't exactly a serious post)!
    That said, i have a few opinions on why Mac's are worth the extra price (not that i'd complain should they decide to price *more* competitively)
    1st: They crash less
    2nd: No need for Virtual Memory (or atleast you can turn it off and still be able to run your MacOS of choice) and 3rd: Power...they *are* faster, and in general run smoother.

    I no doubt have now invoked the wrath of users of any computer, and as such, will now sit peacefully, hoping that my mail client doesnt tell me i have 100+ new messages!

  • Amen (Score:3)

    by ToastyKen ( 10169 ) on Sunday October 10, 1999 @04:24PM (#1624629) Homepage Journal
    I'd rather have a processor a month or two later than have a crappy one that causes me headaches and likely a few months to replace.

    I mean, people can live without the 500 MHz version for a couple of months.

    It would be far worse if they just decided to quietly go ahead and release it and hope no one notices. (Or if they didn't even do enough testing to detect it in the first place.)
  • Check Gnucash [gnucash.org] in the feature list I found this "Quicken files are automatically merged to eliminate duplicate transactions". Let me know if it is what you need.

  • I know this bug!!! (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 10, 1999 @04:28PM (#1624631)
    The G4 suffers from analog noise, causing
    cache corruption. This happens, to some extent,
    at lower frequencies too!

    That's right. G4 processors from Motorola crash.
    IBM adds capacitors and other junk on top of
    the chip to deal with this, but even they don't
    really know the cause.

    Thus, the G4 is a bad buy.

    I'm serious, and have fairly direct inside
    knowledge of this -- please fix the score on
    this post, since I obviously must be an AC.
  • >Statements like this worry me. Restarts are NOT
    >ok, and i'm sickened that people think
    >they are. Especially when they're frequent like
    >it sounds like this bug would make them.
    >The world is not windows, if it were then
    >everyone including me would have no problem
    >with an occasional restart. But more importantly,
    >G4's are usually going to be used as
    >servers. Reboots are NEVER acceptable in a
    >server, it can mean 20 minutes of
    >downtime on a website which can mean lost
    >revenue. It can mean lost e-mails within a
    >company which is a VERY bad thing. Get the
    >picture? I'm glad they're delaying the
    >release, of course, as this is not a good bug. OK
    >my rant is done :-) thanks for reading.

    A few points here:
    1. The server model of the G4 (as I recall) isn't even shipping yet. (someone correct me as I'm wrong.) Currently, the G4 isn't as much intended as a server as it is for home use. (See recent Apple TV ads.)
    2. You make it sound as if the bug is already hurting people... unless someone *actively* overclocks their G4, there doesn't seem to be any indication that this error would do any harm at all. And anyone with the skill to overclock a G4 would surely be able to research about the bug.
    3. The reason the article is lax about the bug is that, other than a possible shipment delay, the bug isn't important yet.

    - James Schend
  • There are so many things wrong with this post I just don't know where to start.

    I'm really sick of Apple apologists...

    I'm really sick of Apple critics that don't understand what they're offering advice on.


    A hokey press release claiming that this might not affect MacOS users is just plain stupid

    Who put out a press release? This was all from MacWeek's "sources." Apple and Motorola had absolutely nothing to do with MacWeek's analysis that "this issue might never evince itself in Macs."


    Not to mention that atop all of this, Apple isn't offering any highly-clocked, discounted G3, nope

    Pretty off-topic, but I'll address it. You can get a G3/400 for $1299 with DV stuff of in the form of an iMac. I'm sure there are still G3 towers around from various retailers. Selling G3s and G4s at the same time would cause unnecessary product line confusion.

    just more G4 marketing hype... "Yeah, the AltiVec velocity engine will help AppleWorks with all of that vector math you'll be doing".

    Right. Most people buy a G4 to use AppleWorks.


    The least Apple could do would be to investigate the possibility of selling real workstations, based on MacOS X and powered by a Power3, Alpha, or maybe K7.

    I agree. Apple should spend 6-12 months porting Mac OS X to Alpha, Power3 or K7, and concince developers to do the same. In the process they can alienate and confuse their customers, piss off wallstreet by radically altering their business strategy without warning, and lose the ease of administration Macs enjoy from tight software/hardware intregration, and ultimately elminate Apple's value proposition.

    By why stop there? Why not just outsource the hardware manufacturing to Dell and just focus on software? Maybe Apple could work on some applications to compete head-on with MS Office, or maybe write a web browser. It should also open source everything and just sell the service contracts.

    One more thing -- Linus should be the CEO. :)


    - Scott


    ------
    Scott Stevenson
  • nor is it an "errata" (who dug that word out of its grave?)

    RedHat. :)

    - Scott
    ------
    Scott Stevenson

  • Why do they even bother telling us??? (Score:3)

    by HydroCarbon10 ( 40784 ) on Sunday October 10, 1999 @04:51PM (#1624635) Journal
    Why do they even bother telling us there is a bug if it hasn't been released yet? Anyone with half a brain would quietly fix the problem and go on.
  • What makes these "supercomputing macs" so great that they're worth paying more for than a pc with equal processing power?

    The integer performance, while quite good, is not vastly different than the G3. But you'd be hard-pressed to find a match in the wintel world with the kind of performance you get from the AltiVec (Velocity Engine) vector unit. It is the vector unit that pushes the G4 past the sustained one gigaflop mark (burstable to 4 gigaflops I believe).

    For example, every G4 comes with a Photoshop plugin on its hard drive that allows the application to take advantage of AltiVec. I have no benchmarks handy, but the results are phenominal. The same is true for SETI@home and Media Cleaner Pro (digital media encoding) -- the performance is incredible with a G4. And those were just the optimized apps announced at Seybold. I haven't kept tabs on what has popped up since them.

    If you're just running xterms, it probably doesn't matter, but if you're doing a lot of digital media manipulation or scientific calculations, it's a little slice of heaven in a cool-looking case.

    - Scott
    ------
    Scott Stevenson
  • If the bug can only result in a freeze, then that is better than a bug which can result in data corruption. Freezes are bad, but at least you know something is wrong. Data corruption is BAD. If, for instance, the bug caused, say, div instructions to occasionally be off by a little bit, it could cause any calculations done on the chip to be suspect.

    /peter

  • Look who is being moronic. Game, to some extent, DO define the high end of PC programs. Games are the whole reason that PCs have enough power to run SoftImage instead of you having to buy an SGI to do it. The TNT2 was not built to run softimage. That does not make it any less powerfull however. Gaming cards are fill-rate optimized, Workstation cards are geometry optimized. Combine the fill-rate of a TNT 2 and the Geometry excess of a WildCat 4000 and you'd be in heaven. Try running a low poly high texture scene on your workstation card an you will see what I mean. A TNT2 could kick workstation ass if you want high texture, but gets beat on high polys, choose whatever floats your boat, but do not belittle a card that could beat your precious workstation card in fill-rate. Second, MMX was good. However, it focused on rasterizing, at a time when hardware rasterizers had been coming into the market. SSE and 3D Now! do wonders for geometry, and 3D Max will really fly on a K7 when they release a 3D Now! patch. With the K7s higher clock speed and bigger FPU, it is probably slightly faster than AltiVec. Although AltiVec is wider, K7 has a higher clock speed and a bigger FPU. Third, DirectX is the most increadible API ever. It is integrate, fairly low-level, and getting faster every day. Even some low-end 3D editors are using DirectX as their rendering engine. Don't put it down, becuase DX 6 and 7 are not your mother's directX. Lastly, many 3D editors are taking the ideas of gaming people to improve their programs. I know Truespace at least has made its rendering preview more game-like, thus increasing their speed 6 times. Finally, gamers are among the most computer knowledable people in the computing market, and in a world full of iMacs, you can't afford to insult them.
  • Funny how just a little above someone posted SPEC scores that show the PII kicking the G3s ass. And real world stuff backs this up. Boot did a test pitting a 300MHz GC against a 400MHZ PII. The PII was cheaper and had more ameneties (bigger monitor, better speakers, bigger hard-drive, better graphics card, etc.) They tested Inspire, Quake, Photoshop and some other stuff. The MAC won Photoshop. Lost inspire and really lost quake.
    Second the SPEC for a G4 costing 3000 is around the SPECS for an Athlon 700 costing 2000
  • A. As I recall the Alpha can juggle 80 out of order instructions, Intel 40, and AMD 70 something. B. Why are you comparing OSX to W2k, why not to BeOS, by far the fastest OS for x86. C. It compiles slower because Solaris 7 x86 is crap.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Actually, why is it that when Linux people can't do something cuz they don't have specs they cry foul, but when Be can't do it they call it laziness. Apple does not WANT Be on their piece of junk platform. It has great hardware melded to a braindead OS. Your choice is to either use Linux, and give up media, or do media and put up with MacOS. Be was a glimmer of hope and if the iditots at apple had half a brain they would have realized that giving people an alternative would not hurt MacOS. The same people who use BeOS aren't the same people who would use MacOS. Home users would not use BeOS, they would stay on mac. Only the people who needed it, (Stienberg, all the manner of media companies porting to Be, etc.) would use it. Intel likes Be cuz it helps show of its hardware. Apple
  • A. Yes I have done benchmarks. Encode an MP3 under Be, try playing 12 MP3s under Be (at the same time) try editing video without waiting for previews, plug in new hardware and watch it magically work, feel the elegance of the UI. Look at the fact that BeOS is a hell of a lot more stable than any other OS except the *nixes, and it is pretty close to them too. (Linux 4 crashes 2 months, Be 3 crashes in 1.5 months. 1 due to the fact that I killed the app server, the other 2 due to a consistant bug in sound recorder.) And Be takes Apples refusal to help them as a sign that Apple is hostile to them. (Which they are) Linux people have an army of hackers working on LinuxPPC. Be has 100 engineers. What would be more important to you. Supporting a platform that %5 of people use and that doesn't want you or getting HW accelerated GL on an equally powerful platform (Look at the Athlon vs. G4 SPECs) that more people use? Or getting multi-user into the OS, or fixing that bug in sound recorder, or writing drivers, etc? PS. Spelling bigots point out bad spelling becuase they feel superior to you. Spelling does not really matter in this day and age as long as you get you message across.
  • I would like to state for the record that although I am a Mac user/supporter, I don't put myself behind this post. :)

    "No need for Virtual Memory?" Help! :P

    - Scott
    ------
    Scott Stevenson
  • Well, it is a joke afterall...
    In terms of Virtual Memory, the G3's and G4 at my school run with 96mb of ram and do not recquire Vitrual Memory turned on, in fact they run fantasticly.
    As for older macs at school (which have 64 mb of ram), they can run without wm as well, but, truth said it does help perfomance

  • Re:Why do they even bother telling us??? (Score:3)

    by loki7 ( 11496 ) on Sunday October 10, 1999 @05:03PM (#1624651) Homepage
    They didn't tell us. They released a technical errata for manufacturers of G4 systems. The is normal operating procedure for a chip manufacture. They need to do this to keep their (Motorola's) customers informed about what's happening with the chip. This errata was not intended for the end customer. (Oh, and if they had covered it up Apple would have sued Motorola, and Motorola's shareholders would have sued the board.)

    Why MacWeek decided to publish it is another question. They did so because it appears that this will delay Apple's plans to ship 500MHz G4 systems. Obviously Apple can't ship these until the bug is fixed, and that's not scheduled to happen until after Apple's planned shipping date. Thus it looks like Apple will be forced to delay the introduction of the new systems.

    /peter
  • All alpha processors support big and little endian numbers, from the first chip produced, you just flip a flag in the load/store instruction called.

  • OK true a freeze is better than corruption, but if freezes are common then what good is a G4 as a server platform? You'd have to have a guy on it all the time just making sure it didn't freeze, you might as well just go with alpha or some other stable platform. Stability IS important, even if it's not the most important. In my opinion, stability is more important than security. What good is a totally secure box (impossibility, unless it's underwater, off, and in 30 feet of cement, even then it might be possible...) What good is a totally secure box if you can't get it to do anything without freezing every 2 hours? OK this rant wasn't as exciting as my last one but it's an important rant nonetheless.

    Patrick Barrett
    Yebyen@adelphia.net

  • So what? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Okay AMDS athlon(stupid name) is now overclockable to 1 gig. Yes I know you need extra cooling. The pentium III has also been pushed up to 1 gig. When the G3 came out they released bogus benchmarks trying to prove that it beat the pentium II. I don't believe that Gx processors are really better than x86 processors. They just go about their buisness in different ways. This whole advertismant campain from apple is just a way for them to try and convince people that the MAC is better than any thing else and that justifies apple charging way the hell more that clone pc makers do.I would be very curious to see how BEos on a really fast x86 chip would compare to the MACos on a G4.
  • Even if data corruption should occur, a source said, the result would be nothing more than a system freeze, easily fixed with a restart.

    Statements like this worry me. Restarts are NOT ok, and i'm sickened that people think they are.

    Yes, *but*, although not well written, in its original context, the rest of your comment isn't really relevant.
    The bit you quoted was preceeded by "the glitch would more likely effect more-efficient embedded operating systems."
    Its not clear what the original "source" was asked, or talking about, but an "embedded operating system", is not what you're going to run your e-commerce website on.

    (tho maybe it _is_ what you'd use on a $170 million probe going to mars :-)
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • On PowerPC Macs, having virtual memory on forces applications to leave their resource forks on disk rather than loading them into RAM.

    This is incorrect.

    The reason that Mac OS applications (appear to) consume less memory with virtual memory on is that enabling virtual memory allows the OS to swap out the application's code with file-mapping. With VM off, the code data must always remain resident because the MMU is inactive and thus cannot deal with page faults (accesses to inactive memory). Thus, while you have precisely the same amount of data with VM off instead of on, more of it can be paged out to disk, reducing real memory concumption (somewhat).

    It's worth noting that, while with VM on, applications do use less memory, it's not as much less as the Get Info window's memory panel advertises or the About This Computer window reports. This is because some of the code has to be resident for the programs to run. However, none of the memory pages mapped to code are part of the application's heap and thus precisely zero of them are reported in heap-based memory usage statistics (such as the Finder's About This Computer window).

    If you have enough RAM, though, there's no reason to run your Mac with VM on; the Mac OS has fairly static memory requirements and generally deals with memory exhaustion more reliably than UNIX applications (where not checking for null pointers is quite common). Turning it off removes one more slight performance hit.

    Addressing the resource fork memory usage issue, purgable resources (and handles in general) are always purged if memory constraints are encountered. This mechanism is made possible by the wonderfully screwed up world of handle-based memory allocation.

    Handle h;
    /* ... */
    if (!h) {
    throw SomeNullHandleException();
    }
    HLock(h);
    if (MemError() != noErr) {
    throw SomeMemoryError(MemError());
    }
    if (h && !*h) {
    reallocate(h);
    }
    if (!h || !*h) {
    HUnlock(h);
    throw SomeMemoryFullException();
    }
    /* Now you can actually use the fucking thing safely! */
    HUnlock(h);
    if (MemError() != noErr) {
    throw SomeMemoryError(MemError());
    }

    Just be glad you don't have to make the above code pre-emptable and/or re-entrant.

  • heh - MacOS memory management is pretty bad. Every time you allocate memory, you have to designate it as moveable or non moveable, and put it into specific places in the heap, it's a huge pain in the ass, and after reading about it in chapter 1 of the "how to program for the macintosh" book (PDF, actually), I decided it wasn't for me. I suspect a lot of commercial Windows developers thinking of porting over to Mac OS went through the same thing, and that's probably why there isn't a whole bunch of software for the Mac

    "The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
  • > Such users (non power users) should be content with a mildly souped up Amiga, if we are to accept your position.

    I can't afford much more than a 9 year old mildly souped up Amiga, I'd like to think of myself as a power user none-the-less. Lest it be forgotten that the only major problem with this platform (aside from its age, which isn't really a major problem) is the
    'buggy closed-source shareware net application that uses a crappy non-OS GUI API movement'.

    Amigans get to use G4s too!

  • I really didn't mean for that to be a Troll. I just thought that the article was written in an unintentionally humorous way.

    I'm a Mac Bigot, and I'm typing this on a rev. A iMac.

    Seriously, this is a non-story. A chip has been delayed because of a bug. Even if you clock-chip your current G4 it won't matter because the OS can't load the chip enough to cause the error.
  • Helloooo flamebait...

    and G4s aren't out yet

    G4/400s are quite available. G4/450s supplies are constrained, but are out there. This really is more of Motorola's problem, but it gets handed down to Apple.

    Isn't it time for Jobs to jump ship, sell all his shares, and send the company plunging into oblivion again?

    Yes. That makes lots of sense.

    Maybe he's waiting until they are a bit more over-valued.

    Many analysts feel that Apple is actually a bit underated at this point. Just start doing a survey of analysts, and watch all the "buy" recommendations pop up.

    - Scott
    ------
    Scott Stevenson
  • If G4's aren't out, then why does our school have one? and why does the apple store list them as shipping/available?
  • Actually I know a way of bringing my linux box to its knees then breaking its back.

    alt+sysRQ + l

    that sigkills everythign including INIT. rather silly mind you. :)
  • I don't think delaying release until it's fixed indicates a relaxed attitude. It's not like other CPUs from Intel etc are bug free, either. Look at the RAMBUS debacle, Xeon teething problems, etc.

  • IBM supplies the powerpc processors for the iBook.
  • I'm really sick of Apple apologists...

    I am really sick of PC bigots jumping the gun without reading the article.

    first of all, the processor is soldered down

    First of all you are wrong. These things are on Zif sockets.

    This is not better than Intel

    Secondly this bug is affecting nobody because Motorola is delaying release. Unlike Intel which releases stuff then does field replacements.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Wow. People are crazy. The thing's already fast enough. 1.5GFLOP? My science teacher has one. I would kill for that and this is on a 600MHz PIII.
  • Although I believe the motherboards are jumperless in the Sawtooth 450's to begin with

    It doesn't matter. The G3 upgrades don't require changing the jumpers - upgrade manufacturers came up with their own way to reclock the CPU. I am sure that the same techniques would work with G4's.

  • Ummm.... the general rule on the Mac is that you leave virtual memory on unless you really need the .5% of extra performance taken up by the overhead. As long as you're not pushing applications beyond your actual, built-in RAM, you really don't notice the speed hit, even in Photoshop.

    On PowerPC Macs, having virtual memory on forces applications to leave their resource forks on disk rather than loading them into RAM. Resource forks can get mighty huge. Photoshop 5.5, for example, requires about 7000 K more RAM with VM off than it does on and I think Excel 98's RAM usage ballons by 11MB with VM off. (Then again, this is from the same company that brought us Microsoft RAM Gobbler 4.5, the web browser which, when left running for 6 hours, will suck every last bit of RAM for itself.)

    Of course, I always turn VM off when doing a render :-)


  • I believe that Alpha based Crays (T3E) use the Alpha in big-endian mode.

    BTW, PPC is also bi-endian.
  • thanks
  • gracias a.c. hombre
  • I'm really sick of Apple apologists...

    I'm really sick of Anonymous Coward flamebait. I mean, there is nothing remotly intelligent in your post. Kindly grab your ears and pull your head out of a dark place! (I'll leave the rest of that image up to the reader, and there is more then one way to interpret that. <g>)

    This is not better than Intel... first of all, the processor is soldered down to a processor card, so the whole card would need to be replaced if the processor were to be replaced... which I'm sure Apple/Motorola won't do (I feel sorry for the G4 400/450 users).

    Bzzzt! And our runner's up will recieve... a whack in the head! You would of been right a few years ago, but Apple has been using ZIF sockets for awhile now.

    A hokey press release claiming that this might not affect MacOS users is just plain stupid, as I'm sure there'll be at least one intelligent user who'll install either OS X Server or the latest developer release of OS X (client).
    1. True, the press release was bad. However, it was correct. Too much old code and bit rot in the Mac OS.
    2. Oh, so those of us who don't shell out the cash for OS X Server that don't actually need a server arn't intelligent? So those of us who arn't registered Apple developers and can't get at the OS X client dev. releases (legally) arn't intelligent?

    Kindly take your BS elsewhere. Thank ye.

  • Please don't get me for offtopic or flamebait, i don't need to lose any karma, but i'd just like to make note of something that's not right about this guy's post. He posted and then threatened to moderate. Any moderator or slashdot reader worth his salt knows you can't post and moderate in the same article. Do research before you make idle threats, lol.

    Patrick Barrett
    Yebyen@adelphia.net

  • Don't get too worried about the comments. MacWeek attributed the comment to "another source."

    This kind of attribution means the writer didn't talk to someone worth naming. Had the comment been from Apple or Motorola, it would have been attributed that way. Evidently, the "information" came from:

    1) someone at the MacWeek watercooler
    2) someone on IRC or comp.sys.mac.geek.at.home
    3) a bum on the street (there's lots in SF)
    4) the writer's kid

    MacWeek frequently attributes quotes to nobody in such a way as to make it sound authoritarian. (e.g. "according to sources close to Apple"--what the hell does that mean? Nothing!)

    Don't put too much stock into journalism. It's just an exercise in creative writing to fill pages.
  • article. Have you never noticed the button labeled "Log Out" on the "Post Comment" screen?

    Simply selecting the "post anonymously" checkbox won't allow you to moderate and post in the same article. However, logging out does allow such a thing. I've done it.

    Learn a bit about how Slashdot works and you will learn these things!

    I guess the fellow does have a point, it's painful seeing all these "..." subjects, usually with no real content attached, always moderated up to 5. It reaffirms the dream of a Slashdot killfile!!

    This 11 fellow is already violating at least one of the rules that he sees every time he posts: "use a clear subject that describes what your message is about." Hardly a role-model for the community.

    Maybe someday, arrogant bastards won't be moderated up for being arrogant bastards, moderation won't be based on popularity, and moderation WILL be based on whether or not someone has something productive to say. Maybe someday, people will learn humility, people will learn to serve others before they serve themselves, people will learn that character is one's greatest asset, that hurting others is wrong, and that there's no "i" in "Slashdot Comment System"

    Yeah, right!

  • Re:Freeze (Score:3)

    by um... Lucas ( 13147 ) on Sunday October 10, 1999 @08:18PM (#1624701) Journal
    #1 - If you buy a Mac, you get the MacOS. An extremely low percentage of purchasers buy a Mac so they can run Linux on them

    #2 - What's wrong with the suggestion that the current Mac OS isn't capable of keeping up with the G4? Mac OS 8.6 (I haven't used 9 yet) is a great OS in terms of usability, but if it were capable of saturating a CPU 100% of the time without crashing, then there'd be no need to wait (and wish) for OS X to arrive...

    #3 - You use Macs, I use Macs. It's a fact of life, not all apps are well behaved. You can force quit som "cleanly". Others will take down your machine when they crash. It's a sad fact of life. I just reconcile that by setting all my apps to autosave every 5 minutes. I rarely have to reboot my machine, but when I do, "Oh no! I only lost 5 minutes worth of work...". No matter which OS you use, you need to save your work regularly, because a great OS does not subsitute for poorly written apps.
  • G4's are usually going to be used as servers

    No, they're not. Apple is not aiming at the server market. The people buying G4's are users of Photoshop, Illustrator, Freehand, Infini-D, Strata StudioPro, Premiere, Quark, et al.

    You only realize how slow your machine is when you're sitting there, watching the progress bar crawl across the screen. And don't blame the MacOS for it. It's simply that the hardware is still trying to catch up with the demands of publishing professionals.

  • Re:Freeze (Score:3)

    by A Big Gnu Thrush ( 12795 ) on Sunday October 10, 1999 @03:01PM (#1624703)
    G4's are usually going to be used as servers

    I'm not apologizing for the reboot problem - it's unacceptable from any standpoint - but I think there will be a lot of workstation usage out of G4's. Even with MacOS X, it's just not a big server platform...

    ...yet.

  • Indeed, another source said, this issue might never evince itself in Macs, since the OS doesn't manipulate data rapidly enough to cause the problem -- the glitch would more likely effect more-efficient embedded operating systems.

    Ouch.

    Press Release: The new bug will not likely affect your computer, the OS blows so hard you'll never notice.

  • Back when computers first started coming around,
    lockups and crashes were adamantly avoided at all
    costs. Even today it's a vital role and is the way OS's should be designed.
    This blatant statement:

    Indeed, another source said, this issue might never evince itself in Macs, since the OS doesn't manipulate data rapidly enough to cause the problem -- the glitch
    would more likely effect more-efficient embedded operating systems. Even if data corruption should occur, a source said, the result would be nothing more than a
    system freeze, easily fixed with a restart.

    Makes me sick to hear as it's read by people
    who don't know better (having used buggy OS's for years)
    and take it as a norm, thus compounding the problem
    of getting companies to write apps and OS's that DON'T
    crash every time you turn around.

    I LIKE setting up a server, firewall, workstation
    what have you and having it run for a year without
    a re-boot.
    I find it ridiculous that a popular OS must be rebooted
    every other time a new program is installed.

    Fortunately things are starting to turn around.
    Linux (for me) is becoming more and more viable as
    an alternative every day. Why.. it's been a week
    since I had to boot into lose98. :> This makes me
    quite happy.

    OSS clone of QuickBooks/Quicken, anyone?
    Please??!!

  • errata? (Score:3)

    by noah_nelse ( 22700 ) on Sunday October 10, 1999 @03:07PM (#1624707) Homepage
    while i can appreciate that motorola actually admits when it has a problem, i don't think it's too much to ask that a company use conventional words in describing the problem...this is not an "outstanding performance issue", nor is it an "errata" (who dug that word out of its grave?) it's a bug, or at least an error. slowing a processor down is not a "workaround"...it's a defective product...just admit it and move on.
  • 1. Considering that this is MacWeekly, I'm not surprised they noted its effect on the Mac OS. They did say other OSes, more commonly found for their embedded systems, would have a problem. Very rarely do you see a desktop G4 running anything but the MacOS.

    2. The MacOS was critisized before OS-8 that it had an extremely poor backend. The OS still isn't that great, but far better than it used to be. One has to wonder why the MacOS doesn't do it at top speed, but obviousely, here, it helps stability.

    3. Rebooting is only if your on a 500mhz chip, which isn't availalbe. If your overclocking, than you made the choice. Motorola obviously is concerned and is taking the steps so you don't have to reboot. They merely said that for most users, it would be a minute annoyance at worsed.
  • Heh. PowerPC chips are bi-endian too, actually support 3 modes... big endian, little endian, and a pseudo mode in-between. Pseudo mode simply reverses the bit order, rather than byte order.

    Yes, it's changable via a simple flag switch (meant to allow emulation, so task switching can easily put the processor in the right mode).

    Heh. Talking about 50W processors... I used to remember when the Pentium MMX came out, several manufacturers put the *real* chip in, not the "mobile" version.

    I think it's time to optimize the x86 so they don't draw so much power, on the processing-power/electrical-power ratio.

  • Re:Question (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    For those interested in benchmarks, here are some SPEC numbers from motorola for a 450Mhz G4:

    21.4 SPECint95
    20.4 SPECfp95

    For those who care they claim typical power dissipation of 5W @ 400Mhz.

    For comparison a Pentium III @ 500Mhz:

    20.6 SPECint95
    15.1 SPECfp95

    So the integer performance looks comparable and floating point is better for G4.

    One of the big features of the G4 that doesn't show in these benchmarks is the altivec simd/vector unit. There are no standard benchmarks I am aware of for extensions like these (or MMX/SSE/3DNOW). Apple has posted some results here that compare Pentium III/SSE @ 600Mhz to G4/altivec @ 500Mhz and show the G4 to be 3X faster on this subset:

    http://www.apple.com/powermac/processor.html

    Obviously YMMV but for some algorithms altivec is much faster than the Intel SIMD unit.

  • Re:So what? (Score:3)

    by Herr Direktor ( 94380 ) on Sunday October 10, 1999 @06:32PM (#1624715)
    Megahertz is a poor measurement of speed. It's not even valid when comparing Celeron to Pentium III, much less between chip families from very differnt designs, like the PPC 7400 and x86.

    In addition, mindless Mhz comparision fails to take into consideration things like different operating systems, application quality and the design of the surrounding PC hardware system.

    The fact the x86 processors have higher clock speeds isn't useful in itself. Apple has frequently advertised various other measurements that the idiot public hasn't paid much attention to. Besides the BYTEmarks the PC-lovers love to hate, you can take a look at:

    a) independant testing that shows Mac users are more effecient that Windows users because the OS is more consistant and easier to use.

    b) Intel benchmarks that Apple ran against the new G4s. Mostly Photoshop filters, which the G4's Velocity Engine is best at, that whomp the PIII. (Look at apples' G4 web pages).

    Because the idiot public would rather rely on megahertz, Apple now is pushing PPC development to higher clock speeds rather than just higher performance (note they are not the same goal).

    Of course, the Wintel group can boast faster speed in certain areas due to flaws in the MacOS. Or features: Windows is often faster at file system "Finder" work, because it isn't managing a desktop database of metadata, doesn't handle resource forks, and doesn't calculate the size of directories. This speed trade off means you lose much of the Mac feel and features of the Finder. But it's marginally faster.

    Apple can charge more because they're doing more. They sell a whole product, not just clone a basic design and outsource the software to Microsoft. In turn, you have a richer system that's less crapped together. It's suprising that Macs aren't more; this is another result of the idiot public buying only by price, not by quality. Imagine if the BMW M3 was within 10% of the price of the Ford Escort. What would you drive?

    I'd like to see BeOS on both x86 and G4 for comparison. Comparing two OS on the two chips is already doable, and pointless as a hardware comparision.

    Compare Mac Word98 to Win Word2000. Then compare QuickTime4 on the PC and Mac. That's interesting.

    Then compare FinalCut Pro on the Mac to... the PC just sitting there overclocked to 1000Mhz creating heat. Task: edit video. The Mac wins!

  • Getting Impatient (Score:3)

    by scherrey ( 13000 ) on Sunday October 10, 1999 @06:32PM (#1624716) Homepage
    Forgetting about the Macs for a while (I can't even fit the damn things in my rack mount!), this delay will likely also delay the availability of really fast inexpensive PowerPC boxes based on the spec that IBM released and several manufacturers are (or expect to be) working on.

    From a software development and architecture view, I much prefer the Motorola product line to Intel's. Its so much cleaner and IBM/Motorola have really taken a lot of the best ideas and put them into a single core without having to carry the baggage of the 8088 along with them.

    The availability of Linux for the new platforms will make platform-independence a critical decision point from a marketing perspective. To translate for you Anti-BillGates types, this means that Windows will likely start losing serious marketshare as they're really tied into the Intel architecture and other proprietary PC technologies that Linux can pretty much ignore. If you're a commercial software developer and you have to decide what OS to write for, Linux starts looking all the more attractive if you see customers buying up those PowerPC boxes.

  • Typical Slashdot reaction -- anything remotely bad happens to Apple and it's immediately Apple's fault. Steve Jobs could have a cold and, by gawd, Apple is going to go down the crapper.

    Let's look at this at face value, okay?

    1. This is not Apple's fault. Does Apple fab or design the chips? No. That's Motorola, hence this is Motorola's fault

    2. Motorola isn't the only company that occassionally has problems with their chips--How late is Merced? AMD doesn't have a clean record either...

    3. The 500MHz + systems aren't even shipping yet. This is complaining about a problem with product foo when product foo hasn't even been tested as it will ship let alone shipped to the public.

    I'm not saying that this isn't a bad thing -- just saying that everyone is making it out to be far worse than it actually is.


  • Good question and I that I have to deal with. With regard to Linux, the main benefit is the flamebait topic of big versus small endian. Most unix workstations (e.g., hp, sgi, sun) generate binary data that are incompatible with a intel-based linux system. We are converting to xdr i/o to make this transition.

    I'm one of the mac idiots. While other ppl in my groupt are bitching about i/o problems, I get to bitch about problems with linuxppc. I think that I'm winning the battle as linuxppc is pretty good if you have prior experience with linux. However, just mentioning that using a PowerPC chip based system makes ppl that I have to work with, want to puke.

  • The anti-Apple comments here at /. have greatly declined in the last two months. There may be various to this. I would like to believe that it is because Apple hardare has become more industry standardized (agp slot), and because the ppl here recognize when good technology gets produced (g4).

    Of course, the enemy of my enemy is my friend, may play a role in all of this.

  • ... (Score:4)

    by Signal 11 ( 7608 ) on Sunday October 10, 1999 @03:29PM (#1624733)
    This doesn't strike me as odd - it hasn't shipped yet (right?), and they're planning on fixing it (unlike a certain well-known software company). I'm not that suprised either - CPU design has largely been focused around symetric processing, timing signals, and other such things to keep the processor 'in sync'. From what I've read, new processor designs (like the G4) are trying to become asymetrical, parallel, and generally doing alot of things that haven't been done before - things that up until now had alot of timing issues.

    What suprises me is that they haven't had more problems!

    --

  • Re:Hehe, hope Apple had fun while it lasted (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 10, 1999 @03:37PM (#1624736)
    While I probably shouldn't respond, I will anyways.

    A LOT more goes into selecting a microprocessor than mere performance benchmarks:

    In this case, Apple was migrating from M68k's. A big-endian processor. Both x86 and Alpha are little endian and while Alpha (at least the newer ones) can mode switch to bid-endian. I doubt that DEC's chipset didn't support it. More cost there.

    Also, DEC doesn't have the fab capacity to meet Apple's demand - not even close.

    Thirdly, Apple kindof wants to have a notebook presence. Putting a 50watt chip in a notebook would likely yield several McDonald's-like lawsuits.

    Tom
  • Even if data corruption should occur, a source said, the result would be nothing more than a system freeze, easily fixed with a restart.

    Windows users could get very used to this.
  • Imagine if some pipeline-controlling software went awry, or some sort of medical monitoring devices crapped out if this bug had gone unnoticed.

    - A.P.
    --


    "One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad

  • Not every Mac comes with the standard MacOS. MacOS X Server has been available for some time, and somehow people are overlooking it and saying things like, "when MacOS X comes out". Now, I know OS X and OS X Server aren't the same thing, but they're very close, and - most importantly - they're not MacOS in the traditional sense. They're Mach-driven BSD. What I'm concerned with is that these machines, which, when used as a server, will probably be running OS X Server. If the MacOS is offsetting the problem with the CPU like this article says it is, then it follows that running OS X Server on this same CPU may not be entirely stable. (especially if this problem is indeed RF-related, as someone else indicated. Most servers sit in a machine room with lots of other RF-emitting equipment.) This could be a very bad thing. (I know *I* don't like getting paged in the middle of the night and being told that one of my servers is down.)
  • Errata is and has been the term used to describe issues with a CPU (or other piece of hardware).

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