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Apple's Dual 2GHz By The Numbers 776

Posted by timothy from the schmohkin' dept.
mallumax writes "ComputerWorld has an exciting review of Apple's Dual 2GHz machine." An excerpt: "It's clear from two weeks of testing that Apple's new Power Mac G5 dual 2-GHz machine is the fastest thing the company has ever produced. And while you can debate benchmarks until eternity, it certainly appears poised to meet or beat anything now out on the Windows side."
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Apple's Dual 2GHz By The Numbers More

Apple's Dual 2GHz By The Numbers

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  • yesss... (Score:4, Funny)

    by potpie ( 706881 ) on Sunday October 05, 2003 @03:03PM (#7138532) Journal
    come to the other side of computing... join us... don't be afraid!

    • Re:yesss... (Score:5, Funny)

      by jerkychew ( 80913 ) on Sunday October 05, 2003 @04:10PM (#7139001) Homepage
      It's not me that's afraid. It's my wallet.

    • Other side of computing: Linux running on G5 (Score:5, Insightful)

      by reporter ( 666905 ) on Sunday October 05, 2003 @05:31PM (#7139522) Homepage
      The article states the following.
      It's clear from two weeks of testing that Apple's new Power Mac G5 dual 2-GHz machine is the fastest thing the company has ever produced.

      The new G5 from Apple is more than merely "fast". It is a workstation in its own right. In "Byte of the Apple [businessweek.com]", "Businessweek [businessweek.com]" notes that the new Macintoshes are, in fact, UNIX workstations. The notebooks based on G5s are, in fact, portable UNIX workstations.

      Steve Jobs, if he had any sense, would be marketing these machines as workstations instead of mere personal computers. With 64-bit processors, these machines are fully capable of handling engineering workloads like Verilog, HSPICE, fluid-dynamics simulation, etc.

      Right now, a tidal wave of Linux-on-x86 machines is drowning Sun Microsystems in the workstation market. It sure would be nice to see a G5 take some market share bled from Sun Microsystems. In fact, it would be ideal to see a Linux-driven G5 take market share.

      ... from the desk of the reporter [geocities.com]

      • Why would a G5-linux machine be ideal?

      • Re:Other side of computing: Linux running on G5 (Score:5, Funny)

        by Ohreally_factor ( 593551 ) on Sunday October 05, 2003 @08:40PM (#7140562) Journal
        I was just saying the other day how much my G5 notebook was like a portable Unix workstation. It's not as cool as my G6 notebook, though. I think of that as my portable TIME MACHINE.
      • The problem is from what I understand Mac OS X hasn't been compiled or optimized for 64 bits, it is still running in 32 bit mode. This is why Jobs has the sense to not market these as 64-bit workstations. There's no doubt that these are fast machines and great computers but until the software running on them actually takes advantage of the 64 bit processor these are no different than running Windows or Linux on the new Athlon64 in 32 bit mode (granted you can run Linux in 64-bit mode now and MS has some b

      • Apple merging with SGI or Sun (Score:5, Insightful)

        by swb ( 14022 ) on Sunday October 05, 2003 @09:17PM (#7140771)
        Steve Jobs, if he had any sense, would be marketing these machines as workstations instead of mere personal computers.

        There's loads of reasons why it won't happen, but I always thought that Apple should have bought SGI.

        It'd be a huge engineering task, but having a consistant Unix with a good UI from laptop, to desktop, to machine room would be excellent, and SGI would give Apple the entree to research/corporate data centers they lack now, as well as some industrial-strength computing power they don't have now. This would give Apple a huge unified market in visualization.

        The time for this would have been a couple of years ago when OS X was being developed so that it could have been developed for both platforms (and stuff from SGI merged into OS X). It's probably too late for it to be meaningful now.

        The other option would be a merger/takeover by Sun. It's a poorer fit, though, as Sun is more datacenter/DB than visualization, but it would give Sun the ability to market a complete alternative solution to MS, including a really good end-user desktop.

        Whenever I posit this, most people say "Apple's doesn't want to be a business/corporate platform". This may be true, but long-term its easier to see Apple's CPU development being less dependent on the good graces of a third party as well as having more compelling high-end computing driving their CPU development.

        There's also nothing that says Apple should stop their consumer/botique marketing or market niche -- it would be important to a $UNIX+Apple company to keep the consumer/end user desktop viable, and staying in that market makes that happen.

        It'd be good for "big Unix" as well, since Sun and SGI can't offer the lower end of the spectrum to the customers and end up bouncing off of MS-centric operations at a lot of places. With a total package that extended a viable, well-known platform to the desktop, their server offerings would get a better advantage, as well as giving them better lower end server offerings in Xserve variants.

  • My tests (Score:3, Funny)

    by tcd004 ( 134130 ) * on Sunday October 05, 2003 @03:03PM (#7138534) Homepage
    The G5 is great, but it doesn't hold a candle to my Powerstack 5000. [lostbrain.com]

    Maybe because it's processor is based on this bad boy. [lostbrain.com]

    Tcd004
  • Is pure speed enough? What factors are most important to "real" consumers?

    Stories like this appeal to the geeky "need for speed" undoubtedly ramoant at /., but offer little insight into real consumer thought/need.

    That said, this is pretty cool; not cool enough for me to switch to Apple, but cool.

    • RAM and Video RAM. Cpu cyles arent too important anymore >1GHz (in my opinion at least) for normal computing. Higher end processors are more suitable for servers, research platforms and clusters. Just my two cents though.
      • RAM is dual-channel DDR400, and the video card is basically the ATI Radeon 9600 Pro or 9800 Pro. The FSB is 1GHz, which is pretty nice, too.

        I imagine that the next version of SimCity will really like the G5. ;)

    • Re:The question is then (Score:5, Interesting)

      by tulare ( 244053 ) on Sunday October 05, 2003 @03:48PM (#7138858) Journal
      Hmm. I think you are missing just about every possible point here. I'll try to hit some of them without trolling.

      First of all, you've got the people who do media editing... sound/video/still... They are going to continue to shell out the big bucks for the best Apple hardware because it will continue to put them in a competitive advantage over their collegues who need to spend more time every day waiting for numbers to crunch. In the case of this market, the dual G5 will pay for itself quickly, on speed alone.
      Then there's the sciences, which if you'd read the article is one of the very things being tested on this monster. I've got a friend who works in bioinformatics, and I can't wait to tell him that BLAST is being compiled for the dual G5. He will curse me as he picks up the phone to call Apple =]
      Finally, there's this myth of incompatibility... for your average desktop luser, what applications are important to run? Well, hello, we have the Suite of the Beast, which runs natively, and rather well, on OS X... Exchange connectivity included, thank you very much. What else? Oh, you mean something that doesn't already exist on the unix side and has been ported by the Fink project? Hello? Are you still there?

      I was helping a frind of mine to try to save his win98 box from an inevitable wipe-and-reinstall, and I asked him how he liked OS X on his dual-G4. This guy used to flip front-panel switches on PDP-8s for a living (but only when the tape reader was shredding paper), and hasn't left the industry since... I regularly pick his brain on "bigger-picture" type issues, and his ignorance of how to keep his teenaged children from b0rking win98 configs notwithstanding, he really knows his s**t. His reply about OS X:
      ...what I've always thought a computer ought to be like.
      So true. I use and enjoy Linux on my peecee, and have no intention of leaving it behind as an OS - it's still much too useful for me for lots of things - but I have to say, Apple has done a fantastic job with OS X. It is fantastically easy to teach n00bs on, and I have found it to be superb for administering a very heterogenous network consisting of various windoze clients and servers, Apple machines from ][e to current models, and various *nix servers and a few clients... best of all, I can do all this with tools native to OS X - I've got the windoze Remote Desktop Connection, Apple Remote Desktop, and X11 or even Terminal.app for the real work =]

      I don't want to sound like a cheerleader, although I admit I've probably done just that. It's just that when you find a really useful tool to get your job done, it's hard not to wax enthusiastic.
    • Is pure speed enough? What factors are most important to "real" consumers?
      Noise!

      I have a nice, new dual G4 powermac sitting in my office with a nice cinerama display, and it never gets used. It's just too loud.

  • hmm... (Score:4, Funny)

    by ILoveMyGeeky1 ( 699004 ) on Sunday October 05, 2003 @03:05PM (#7138550)
    "it certainly appears poised to meet or beat anything now out on the Windows side."

    Doesn't anything somewhat stable meet or beat anything running windows?

  • "you can debate benchmarks until eternity" (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 05, 2003 @03:06PM (#7138557)
    and i'm sure slashdot intends to.

    So, to what productive end do we expect this particular slashdot thread, perhaps the third or fourth on the subject of the G5's supposed speed, to go?

  • G5 Rules (Score:3, Interesting)

    by thedillybar ( 677116 ) on Sunday October 05, 2003 @03:07PM (#7138560)
    After seeing benchmarks for the G5, I'm actually considering switching to Mac, which I once thought to be a mortal sin (or is it still?).

    I certainly can't think of a better desktop machine that the majority of people are familiar with and yet kicks out that kind of performance. Then again, why should I care if anyone else can figure out how to use my machine?
    • After seeing benchmarks for the G5, I'm actually considering switching to Mac, which I once thought to be a mortal sin (or is it still?).
      No, now that it has a decent shell it is just fine.

    • Re:G5 Rules (Score:2, Informative)

      by imsabbel ( 611519 )
      sorry, if you only need performance, stay in the pc area.
      With the arival of the g5, the performance of macs has finally catched up with x86. But while on the paper the chip looks like a killer, it looses to the a64. and most likely prescott,too, but thats speculation.

      Yes, the g5 has dual fpus capable of doing a mac each per cyle. But people should realize that even with 32 registers you need 2 loads and one store per MAC. Thus whenever you could really use the power of the 2 fpus, you will be so hopelessly
  • a question: how does this compare to a intel's hyperthreading processor.
    any benchmarks on that?
    When comparing against a hyperthreading (HT) processor, do you count a HT CPU as one or two.
    Linux kernel sees HT CPU as two, so SMB kernel has to be used.

    • Re:benchmark against hyperthreaded CPU (Score:4, Interesting)

      by jo_ham ( 604554 ) <joham999@gma[ ]com ['il.' in gap]> on Sunday October 05, 2003 @03:24PM (#7138701)
      The first benchmarks released comparing the G5 to an Intel box had notes on this.

      The PC folks wailed and moaned because Hyperthreading was turned off on the Intel boxes when the benchmarks were performed but they neglected the footnote that mentioned that the PC actually performed worse on the benchmarks when HT was on, so to be fair they took the best score.
    • When comparing against a hyperthreading (HT) processor, do you count a HT CPU as one or two.

      it's one processor. it represents itself as two logical processors with no instruction cache to trick the operating system into letting the hardware take care of optimizing instruction scheduling. even though linux identifies two full speed processors, there's only one chip doing the work, so it would be silly to expect it to perform twice as well.

  • News flash! (Score:4, Funny)

    by dtfinch ( 661405 ) * on Sunday October 05, 2003 @03:08PM (#7138572) Journal
    New processor is faster than its predecessor.

    • Re:News flash! (Score:3, Informative)

      by Duckman5 ( 665208 )
      What would seem to be simple logic isn't always the case. If you will direct your attention here [zdnet.co.uk], you will discover that, depending on the task, an early Pentium 4-M could actually be outperformed by the higher end Pentium 3-M of the time.

  • Yes, yes. What of it? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Latent IT ( 121513 ) on Sunday October 05, 2003 @03:10PM (#7138592)
    And while you can debate benchmarks until eternity, it certainly appears poised to meet or beat anything now out on the Windows side.

    Well, uh... what?

    I mean, maybe I'm just "debating benchmarks" here, but how do you pull the above statement out of the linked article?

    On the G5, Photoshop launched in 8 seconds, and relaunched in 4. Yes, 4. On the Dual G4, it launched in 24 seconds, and relaunched in 12.5. And on the Powerbook, Photoshop was ready to go in 25 seconds the first time around, and in 17 seconds on relaunch.

    Yes, but what of it? This has nothing to do with Windows, Windows Desktops, or even anything non-apple. It compares the G5 to other, older Apple products. Unsurprisingly, the *new* Apple product beats the *old* Apple product. And clicking a stopwatch, and measuring how long launching a program takes, or how long a reboot lasts isn't that much of a "benchmark".

    And, just to give you an idea of the technical competence of the reviewer who wrote the article, check out this snippit:

    One final note: I whined in my first review about the G5's weak Airport wireless signal. Several readers promptly (and pointedly) wrote to ask if I'd installed the Apple-supplied external Airport antenna. I had not.

    I'm sorry. The article is lousy, and the clown who submitted this article to /. clearly has an agenda to push. Why waste our time like this?

  • Benchmarks with 8GB Ram (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 05, 2003 @03:10PM (#7138594)
    Why hasn't someone benchmarked this? Or at least why would apple not publicize this one? I would think apple could use a benchmark with very large datasets that would show the G5 with 8GB Ram and a Dual Xeon with 8GB Ram(using PAE). The G5 would clearly kick the $#!t out of the Xeon in this case.

    The fact that the G5 can handle more ram without resorting to the PAE b.s., is a clear advantage and I think Apple should market that a little better.
    • The G5 _can_ handle more RAM, but then, not with the current OS X revision, can it, at least without resorting to similar tricks as the PIII and up have?

      I want to see real independent benchmarks (like that will ever happen), and I want to see it compared to Athlon 64, a dual Operon, a P4 EE and a dual Xeon. And with the P4 and Xeon, I want to see results for hyperthreading turned on AND off. I've seen hyperthreading help some things, and hurt other things, so it really is important to try it both ways.
    • They haven't benchmarked that probably because no one seems to have bothered anything on Macs that would make 8GB of memory worthwhile. Almost all of the tests I've seen have just been Photoshop and iMovie. If you're lucky they throw in some other media encoding tests, but that's it.

      If you want to show off 8GB of memory, you need either some high-end workstation applications or some server applications. The G5 should be able to run some of this stuff, though I don't know how widely available the softwar
    • Why hasn't someone benchmarked this? Or at least why would apple not publicize this one? I would think apple could use a benchmark with very large datasets that would show the G5 with 8GB Ram and a Dual Xeon with 8GB Ram(using PAE). The G5 would clearly kick the $#!t out of the Xeon in this case.

      The fact that the G5 can handle more ram without resorting to the PAE b.s., is a clear advantage and I think Apple should market that a little better.

      Or even better, how about an AMD64 or Intel Itanium with 12GB

  • Use the best tool for the job (Score:5, Interesting)

    by charnov ( 183495 ) on Sunday October 05, 2003 @03:13PM (#7138619) Homepage Journal
    I got the chance to play with the mid-model (single 1.8 GHz) G5 and it is VERY fast compared to the older models (roughly about the same if not faster than the previous top model). The owner of said machine (a video editor) uses it as a front end for some of his editing work mainly because he wanted a Mac to use for the interface. The back end is comprised of two large SGI's and dozens of linux boxes (all AMDs).

    The best tool for the job. My hats off to Apple for a great machine.

  • Fastest thing ever? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by gilesjuk ( 604902 ) <giles@jones.zen@co@uk> on Sunday October 05, 2003 @03:13PM (#7138626)
    Of course it's the fastest ever, CPU speeds are increasing all the time. If I go out and buy a new AMD CPU it'll be the fastest ever....for about 2-3 months.

    Plus there's the "it beats anything on the PC market", erm quad CPU Xenon? it's a PC ain't it? where do you want to draw the line?

    Macs are cool but speed doesn't convice people to buy a computer, the price often does. Mac users were once ridiculed for knowing very little about computers, however I think this isn't true these days. Mac users know enough about computers to be able to choose between a computer running Windows and a Mac.

    • Re: Fastest thing ever? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by gidds ( 56397 ) <`slashdot' `at' `gidds.me.uk'> on Sunday October 05, 2003 @04:25PM (#7139093) Homepage
      Macs are cool but speed doesn't convice people to buy a computer

      For a long time, many people have been citing the relative lack of speed as a reason not to get a Mac. In some cases, that may have been a genuine reason, in which case this speed increase would persuade such people to get a Mac.

      In other cases, I suspect that speed is merely an excuse used by people who have other reasons (conscious or not) for avoiding Macs; this excuse is now no longer valid, and those people will need to either find a better excuse, examine their real reasons, or reassess their preferences.

      It's interesting to see how many reasons/excuses have been pretty much crossed off in recent years: 'Apple's dying', 'The OS isn't up to it', 'It's not compatible with Unix &c.', 'There's no software', 'It's not compatible with XYZ piece of hardware', and 'It's not fast enough' are now non-issues for many (most?) people. Of course, there are still some genuine concerns amongst those, but I suspect that more people dismiss Macs through ignorance, crowd-following, or inertia than from genuine need.

  • People miss the point (Score:5, Informative)

    by emerrill ( 110518 ) on Sunday October 05, 2003 @03:14PM (#7138635)
    This is they type of thing that shouldn't make front page. Its good for the apple section but not front page. It is only a good article for apple users (which I am). But then you get all these ppl saying 'so what' which if you aren't a apple user, is true. This article doesn't give hard benchmarks, and specifically says that. So when ppl come in here and say my xxx boots quicker then that, all I have to say is, So what? This isn't meant to compare different platforms, just Macs.

  • So far (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Paradise Pete ( 33184 ) on Sunday October 05, 2003 @03:15PM (#7138643) Journal
    I've had one for a few days now. Extraordinarily responsive. I used a firewire cable to connect my powerbook to it via "target disk mode." I started a huge copy, like 30 GB or so. While this was going on I was able to continue use the computer as if nothing were happening. In fact I had to stop a few times and check the progress of the copy, because it seemed like it must have stopped or something. But there it was, chugging along.

    It's just fast fast fast.

  • Mars or Bust (Score:5, Informative)

    by Graymalkin ( 13732 ) * on Sunday October 05, 2003 @03:32PM (#7138757)
    What a disappointing article. His "speed" tests consisted of the ridiculously unscientific "boot time" test and application launch tests. Lopped on top of that were hand crafted Photoshop and Bryce "tests" which verify that the dual G5 kicks the crap out of the 17" G4 and 1.25GHz PowerMac. My 12" Powerbook is faster than the Lombard I bought in 1999. Yay.

    What about running real stuff like FCP's Compressor or Maya's mental ray renderer plug-in? Maybe even a After Effects render speed. Using iMovie to test anything isn't very fair to the people who would buy a G5. They're not using iMovie to work on SD video. Photoshop users aren't using a bunch of filters picked at random.

  • Obligatory reality check. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by thatguywhoiam ( 524290 ) on Sunday October 05, 2003 @03:34PM (#7138770)
    Before we all freak out - once again - about the comparisons of G5 vs. whatever, may I offer a suggestion:

    Let's all take a nice deep breath, and remember that this is simply yet another offering, in a huge selection of products; that these products are different in many ways, for many people; that purchasing one or more of these products is not indicative of your mental health, penis size, sexual orientation, or anything else... okey?

    G5 fast, mmm, nice G5. Athlon also fast, mmm, nice Athlon. I want both, for different reasons. They are not mutually exclusive.

    (As for all the 'so fuckin' what' posts; this is Slashdot. No one made you click More.)

  • what I like... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 05, 2003 @03:34PM (#7138772)
    ...is all the Mac haters who used to say "yeah, the Mac is cool, but I need something a little faster than 1GHz, like my IntelAMDAthlonXP 5500MHz box. You should see how FAST Explorer pops up on that puppy!!!1111"

    Now that Apple has a arguably *fast* machine, they've switched back to complaining about the price.

    I guess those folks just go between price, speed, and the number of mouse buttons, in circles.

    I think the Macs are great machines and reasonably priced. My 500MHz iMac is perfectly usable and sits aside my 1.8GHz P4 Linux box with pride. The iMac cost me $1300 and the P4 cost around $1400 (I bought all quality components like Intel mobo, Antec case, 1GB Crucial RAM, etc), and it was purchased about 2 years after I got the iMac, and didn't even come with a monitor, so I think the iMac was a good deal. *shrug*

    I don't know or care precisely how fast the G5s are. I just know they are fast, well-designed machines with a beautiful operating system and tools (have any of you ever written a program using the apple devel tools? I had a harder time taking a shit this morning!!) and they are worth the few hunder dollar premium.

  • Upgrade treadmill - is it slowing down? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by silverhalide ( 584408 ) on Sunday October 05, 2003 @03:38PM (#7138802)
    Food for thought:
    Back in the 386 and 486 days, I was in the 18-month upgrade cycle, simply cause my comp couldn't run the latest and greatest apps. Now, I am currently using a computer from 1999 - a p3-500. And, I have no immediate plans on upgrading. I consider myself among the power users -- graphic design, MSOffice, many programming suites, even an occasional game. And ya know what? It all works like a champ. Tell me, what's the reason for upgrading? So Photoshop loads in 4 seconds and not 20? Obviously, a new system would be NICE, but I don't really NEED it like we used to (new version of windows wouldn't run, office would crash, etc).

    Before you answer with "To play games!" Please note that you can buy a brand spanky new Gamecube for $99 now. I will never play games on my PC again at that price!

    Obviously this also doesn't apply to video editting as that needs every drop of power you can get it.

  • Startup and reboot
    Er, yes, great. You do that what, once a day? And so are you telling me that by shaving 20 seconds you will now make the decision to sit and stare at the screen during the remaining 55 seconds of bootup rather than grabbing a beverage, finishing your sandwich, or going across the room to talk to someone?

    Application launch times
    Ok, yes. Again, wonderful. And so with your 512MB to 2GB of RAM you don't suppose you will just leave your email client and productivity app running?

    Photoshop ma

  • You just don't get it. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by CountBrass ( 590228 ) on Sunday October 05, 2003 @03:45PM (#7138839)

    Reading some of the comments I've come to the conclusion that they just don't get it.

    Despite the review, the point of a Mac is not the horsepower (and comparing completely different CPUs using gigahertz is just stupid).

    The point is: Macs and OSX just work and they're beautiful! If you don't value quality then you won't value a Mac.

    But please, don't bore the rest of us with your attempts to justify sticking with an inferior product.

    "Yeah my Ford Ka is just as good as any Ferrari - it can do the same speed in town AND does more miles to the gallon! That means my Ka is better than a Ferrari!".

    The difference is at least the Ka owner pays a lot less for his car. The pee cee users PAY THE SAME PRICE and get an inferior product ! Got to love Michael Dell and Bill Gates. And people say Apple is great marketing company.

    Edward

  • Where the dual processors come in handy (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ducomputergeek ( 595742 ) on Sunday October 05, 2003 @03:58PM (#7138927)
    Apple caters to a Niche market folks. Most mac users could give a flying leap about the frame rate of Quake or other such applications. If they are playing Quake, maybe its for a little fun. Mac caters now to two types of end users. 1) Graphics & Video, 2) Unix developers.

    I know of more people in the last year to 18 months that abandoned Linux as their desktop for OSX. I am one of those because at the end of the day, I like Photoshop much better than GIMP, and the ablity to develop PHP/MySQL apps on my iBook and still have powerpoint is exactly what I need.

    I do come from a video/graphics systems admin background. I worked during college part-time at a friend's father's architecture firm where they had a small 24 unit ALPHA rendering farm.

    Now I do indy technology consulting, mainly to small businesses and video firms. I had a number of clients switch to PC's (Dell's mainly) in the last two years because the hardware costs were so much less, however they quickly found out that programs like Premeire suddenly crashed a lot more and the time in lost work was far greater than what it would have cost for a mac. ALthough this was mainly due to Adobe Premeire 6 generally being a piece of junk, not really windows itself.

    I have one customer that is going to order the dual G5 after 10.3 is shipping. He is semi-retired, but does some commercial and wedding video work. He has a six year old G3 400 with 1GB of ram to run Final Cut Pro and he has upgraded X.2 and some of his rendering output times are 6 hours. No big deal to him, clicks render, goes out the back of his house onto his boat and goes fishing the rest of the day. Well, the local apple store was flying a specialist from apple over FCP and DVD studio pro and we were in the store and had my client's last video, which took about 4.5 hours to render. We imported the file from a DVD onto the new G5 with an enhanced version of FCP and then on a single 1.8Ghz G5 and the difference was about 15% for the same footage in favor of the dual compared to the single G5 and about 1/3d of the time that it took on his G3.

    Granted configured with a new 23" HD and 17" flatpanel, the dual box is about $15,000 with all the software he needs as well. Add in about another $3000 for upgrades over the next 5 years in software and and the new box he will be buying is cheaper that his old G3.

    Now granted, in video production, you can spend $20k on a mac and it will do just about anything you want, or you can jump and spend $250k on an Avid. Even dedicated editing boxes are $3500, so this industry will & must spend the money and for many graphic/video firms, that 15% difference means 15% more money because they can turn around and start the next job that much faster. Couple the increase in turn around with the prices some of these firms charge, that can pay for a couple dual G5's real quick.

    Then finally, there is TCO. Most small wedding video/indy video companies I know of tend to hang on to their equipment for a long time. I know a lot of people that purchased G3's and still are using them because they knew a year ago that the G5's were going to be out, so they decided to wait. Some have already purchased the G5's and have been extremely pleased with their purchase and the dramatic increases in speed. Another video company in town switched from their Casablance/Kron editing tools to FCP on G5's and after about a month, their turn around times for videos has gone from about 14 days to 7 or 8. Many of their editors are full time college students and FCP is what is being taught in the classrooms, so the cost of time in retraining was extremely low. Now they purchased Single 1.8Ghz boxes with 2GB of Ram, but it seems to be more than enough for them.

    So will the average "user" need dual processors...um, no, but there are those out there were it such high end specs can be usefull and profitable.

    I have to admit that I was not a fan of Apple until a year ago and bought this iBook. The main reason why I switched was I wanted something that worked and thus far everything has worked perfectly and I have no complaints.

    • What is really amazing to me is that for the first time in history Apple has an enterprise story to tell. A dual G5 machine for 3K is cheap compared to similarly configured 64 bit unix machines and it comes with the backing of a large company which can sell care packs to ease the minds of CIOs. You can buy a two terrabyte xserve raid with fiber channel for 10K try and shop for something like that on the compaq/hp site and see how much you'd have to pay. Apple also happens to be selling a real server operat

  • uhh... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Transcendent ( 204992 )
    it certainly appears poised to meet or beat anything now out on the Windows side.

    Uhh, Windows doesn't make computers, nor does Microsoft...

  • Just wonder if anyone out there actually buys things because it's "The Fastest" computer available. The Fastest Computer changes at least every month, plus most of us can get by with significantly less the the fastest. Not to mention that people always argue over just what it is fastest at.

    Personally I look at MIPS / $$ and my $400 machine with maxed out ram does everything I could want super cheap. Even doing a full build every few minutes doesn't keep the CPU at 100% for more then a few seconds. I st

  • Scope of price differentials (Score:4, Insightful)

    by benwaggoner ( 513209 ) <ben DOT waggoner AT microsoft DOT com> on Sunday October 05, 2003 @05:34PM (#7139535) Homepage
    I'm always startled to see people getting excited about three-digit price differences between base machines for things meant for the video market.

    I'm building a HD editing/compression system. When you add in storage, displays, audio, etcetera, even a cheap setup makes a $500 difference pretty tiny.

    For my needs, I'm shaving THOUSANDS off by going Mac. Why? Xserve RAID. I can get 2.5 TB for about $12K, that's fast enough for 1920x1080i60 at 10-bit uncompressed capture. I haven't been able to find anything that's close to that price performance on Windows.

    This is an edge case, granted. But for anyone who bills by the hour, a few hundred bucks in a system that's going to be making you money for a couple of years is nothing - like a quarter a day. Downtime for one tech support incident could eat up the entire differential.

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