90nm 3GHz PPC 970FX by Summer 447
dmdimon sent in linkage to a Forbes story on the upcoming PPC chips and notes "IBM is said to be ready to deliver a new version of its PowerPC processor to Apple by the end of this year in from sizes of 130 nanometers to 90 nanometers...
Apple CEO Steve Jobs has already gone on the record saying that the G5 computer will contain PowerPC chips that run at 3 GHz by the summer of 2004. A mid-step between the current systems, which top out with two chips running at 2 GHz, and systems with chips as fast as 2.6 GHz would be a logical move come January..."
You know a women didn't come up with this idea... (Score:4, Funny)
Apple (Score:5, Funny)
wow... with this Apple will be dying much faster !
Sweet (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Sweet (Score:5, Funny)
Great for consumers (Score:5, Interesting)
It's a boon for consumers. Now we have a real choice in architecture (ppc vs. x86) as well as brand (amd, intel, ibm) without sacraficing performance.
Perhaps this will force Intel to to up the ante.
Re:Great for consumers (Score:2)
Re:Great for consumers (Score:2)
That depends on what consumers we are talking about.
If we are talking about the only ones that really need(want) some kickass performance, the gamers, they will not be interested, there is not support enough for Windows games. Not even Linux, which cured my AIDS, could solve this problem.
Re:Great for consumers (Score:2)
No, it won't. People who are interested in getting a mac will probably already have one or be getting one soon. People with Intel PCs are probably staying with Intel PCs. I think the market divisions are strong enough that Intel doesn't need to worry about this too much.
Re:Great for consumers (Score:3, Informative)
Since no one gets my username, I must educate the world] Dave Cutler, NT 1.0's chief architect (and a rabid unix hater
btw, there was no NT 1.0. The first version of NT was NT 3.1, magically version-synced with Windows 3.1.
Re:Great for consumers (Score:3, Informative)
You should read this (Score:3, Insightful)
OS/2 and NT share a considerable code base, the first three versions of OS/2 and the first version of NT. OS/2 v3 became Windows NT 3.0.
Re:Great for consumers (Score:2)
Re:Great for consumers (Score:2)
Re:Great for consumers (Score:2)
Re:Great for consumers (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Great for consumers (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Great for consumers (Score:2)
Re:Great for consumers (Score:2)
There are like what, 3 closed source applications that could be useful to more than 3 people that are natively designed for linux?
Not to say that the open source stuff doesn't meet or beat the closed windows equivelents, just the opposite. But there isn't at present a whole lot of interesting closed stuff. Unless you count games.
Re:Great for consumers (Score:3, Interesting)
PPC simply isn't a real choice for many.
Apple could not ramp up to 10% marketshare, not anytime soon.......
I mean, they could not physically ship that many systems, nor adequately support them.
Beyond that, if they did have the infrastructure, it would lead to a holy price war from the x86 players like you would not believe (watch Dell literally give machines away).
x86-64 looks like it will be the mainstream future--eventually, Yamhill
A small milestone (Score:5, Interesting)
One thing that caught my eye is that the term "open-source" is used without any explanation, presumably because readers are expected to know what it means. It's a relatively technical article for Forbes, but they did provide a definition for "compiler".
Is there a name for this IBM compiler? Is there any word as to Apple's long-term plans for it versus gcc?
Re:A small milestone (Score:5, Informative)
not moving from GCC (Score:2)
also they can change objc compiler when they plese
if Apple want CONTROL freakery then they should stay with gcc
regards
JJ
Interesting... (Score:2)
This is interesting because you could probably ask yourself if the concept of "open source" is so simple and obvious to a non-technical editor that they would delete it from an article then why is it so difficult for some many companies to understand?
I'm asking this question because of my conversations with a senior technical manager at
Re:A small milestone (Score:2)
Smile and be happy.
Manage... (Score:3, Interesting)
I think that if Apple would invest only a little bit more in managing their current products, they would be much more successful, and would therefore have more resources with which to innovate.
Think of it this way: Why is it that Apple has, what, 2% of the market, when Dell, which doesn't innovate at all in its product, has a huge chunk of the market? Dell does nothing but manage.
I'm saying all of these things because Apple's product is very promising, and I would be very happy if they would gain a larger chunk of the market, so that more people would use Apple computers, so that more software would be released for them, so that more hardware options would become available for them, and basically so that the computer world, as regular folks see it, won't be the monotonous Wintel platform...
Of course, I want to see my favorite OS (BSD) getting a big boost.
Apple: The Promising Newcomer (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm not really sure what you mean by this comment. How do you invest a little more in managing your current products?
Do you mean that Apple doesn't market their products aggressively enough? Maybe you haven't seen their ads everywhere. Remember that Apple is one company marketing an entire platform, while Dell, et. al. only have to market their products, not the OS.
Dell owns a huge chunk of the market because of their assembly and distribution mechanism. Dell started out with no retail mechanism to support, which allowed them to beat other Wintel OEMs on price. When a price war heats up, Dell can take a smaller margin on each unit sold without going under.
Apple is not "promising". It has led the personal computer industry for a quarter of a century. The fact that you're saying, "I would be very happy if they would gain a larger chunk of the market, so that more people would use Apple computers, so that more software would be released for them, so that more hardware options would become available for them..." reveals that you haven't used a Mac lately.
There are over 17,000 software titles [apple.com] available for the Mac. There are zillions of Open Source packages you can use with OS X. Besides that, how many crappy "me too" Windows programs do you really need? There are great software choices in every category for the Mac, and a lot fewer shovelware products than in the Windows world. Mac users just don't tolerate that sort of sloppiness for long.
As for hardware options, Apple is able to make computers that are relatively problem-free specifically because they control the hardware and the OS. Apple has tried the hardware licensing thing in the past, and it only cannibalized their own sales. The Mac will never dominate computing, but then again, Apple's desire to grow and profit has never been predicated on wanting to rule the world.
For that, look north to Redmond. ;-)
Re:Manage... (Score:2, Interesting)
1999: 3.45 million Macintoshes shipped; 112.70 million total personal computers shipped.
2002: 3.10 million Macintoshes shipped; 132.00 million total personal computers shipped.
Jobs rejoined Apple in 1997. Macintosh annual unit sales are down 22% from the year before he came back while the overall market is up 83%. And yet Macheads have yet to call for his removal in favor of somebody like John Sculley. Sculley was,
Re:Manage... (Score:3, Insightful)
The big profits are to be made in high end, near-workstation class machines, and high end laptops. In both of these markets, Apple's machines not only compete favorably, but surpass the competition in power, usability, and reliability.
Apple is in business to make money, not to compete in the low-to-no-profit arena of commodity boxes.
Re:Manage... (Score:3, Insightful)
powerbook upgrades (Score:2)
if they take care of heat issues, this would be awesome. even though they will be somewhat pricey, apple will sell a ton of these. i'll buy one.
Re:powerbook upgrades (Score:3, Insightful)
"There are no technical hurdles to producing a Powerbook G5. It could easily appear in January," Glaskowsky says.
I dunno ... that sounds more like rumor-mill feedstock. 'No technical hurdles'? Seems far-fetched. Reducing the heat output is a good start, but the 970 still eats power. Something like 74W, IIRC. Most portable chips draw something in the 20W range. Again, reducing the transistor size is a good start, but there are significant hurdles still to b
Re:powerbook upgrades (Score:2)
Unofrtunately... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Unofrtunately... (Score:2)
Re:Unofrtunately... (Score:2)
Yeah, and it'll make your computer go throught time! Course, the clock crystals'll probably be destriyed till you can raise the funds to rebuild them...
Time traveling computers? (Score:2)
Go IBM! (Score:2)
This year!? (Score:5, Funny)
So, within the next week? (:
Fobes just reads the rumor sites (Score:5, Interesting)
See MacRumors.com [macrumors.com] for Forbes' "sources".
Megahertz Myth no longer needed (Score:4, Insightful)
However, non-technical people are still buying Intel/AMD-based computers because they have the largest processor speed posted on the shelf (More MHz/GHz = more power, right?).
It's interesting that Apple's upcoming 3+GHz G5 processors will now tout the same speed numbers as Intel/AMD chips.
Surprisingly enough, if "3.xGHz" is on the Mac's box, Apple just might win a few Joe Sixpacks and a few PC converts.
Only time will tell.
Re:myth was a myth (Score:3, Informative)
Smaller feature sizes mean ... (Score:3, Informative)
... that they can fit more chips on a wafer. Which means that the price per chip is reduced. That's the REAL reason for die shrinks and moving to processes with smaller feature sizes.
Not that cheaper PPC970s are a bad thing, mind you...
90nm Soft Error Rate (Score:5, Interesting)
I wonder how many software errors will be caused by neutrons hitting the processor and upseting logic gates? I have not seen any test results from Los Alamos for 90nm processors using EIA JESD 57, (1996) JEDEC Standard - Test procedures for the measurement of Single Event effects in Semiconductor Devices from Heavy Ion Irradiation. Unfortunately the Radhard server at NASA is down right now so I can't check the server for the latest test results.
Some people think Failures in Time (FIT) rates will get better at 90nm than 130nm. Some think the opposite. Xilinx and Actel are arguing over it [indiana.edu]. Caches are epecially vulnerable. In a critical software application, this is unacceptable, and sometimes the cache needs to be disabled altogether.
One method of addressing this is built in checksumming on the cache, and triple redundancy on certain registers like program counter, etc... This does induce a performance hit.
Re:90nm Soft Error Rate (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, it'd be better stated that Actel is arguing with the rest of the FPGA industry, as Actel's the only one that makes antifuse FPGAs. Xilinx is vocal, but almost everyone else would agree with them as well.
I've got a guess that Actel might be a little bit biased.
If you had to believe one or the other based on equal information, you'd tend to believe Xilinx: they can afford to give up the rad hard market, as it's not that large, so they really have very little incentive to lie. Actel, however, is completely unable to compete on price issues (god, their development kits/hardware/programmers are insane!) and so they'd have a strong incentive to lie about the reliability of the competition to get people to switch to them.
However, I also know that if I had wanted to fly a PLD on any NASA mission, I'd have to choose Actel. So someone believes them...
I wonder how many software errors will be caused by neutrons hitting the processor and upseting logic gates?
Er? I don't see many free neutrons running around in a normal environment, unless you're working near a nuclear reactor. That 11-minute half-life tends to make them go away - they're a negligible component of cosmic rays. Do you mean alphas? Alpha particle strikes on electronics are a known thing - that's why ECC is around.
Re:90nm Soft Error Rate (Score:4, Interesting)
Keep in mind that Itanium is an HP architecture, Itanium2 is an HP designed chip. I don't know what it is about Slashdotters, from what I've seen, I2's performance is generally second only to Alpha EV7.
Re:90nm Soft Error Rate (Score:4, Interesting)
Buying Big Blue (Score:3, Interesting)
When I saw this article, I followed the procedure that I've done whenever I saw something new with the Power4 (Apple calls it the G5) chip - I went to IBM's site to see if they sell their own
workstations on it.
This time, however, I was incredibly happy to see that this was the case! The IBM website advertises Intellistation POWER series available for purchase. There are two large buts, though - and are probably related. Firstly, they are ridiculously expensive. As in, 8K+ for a 1 CPU at 1.0 GHz. Without a monitor. Secondly, they aren't running Linux - they're running AIX.
Does anybody know this situation? Has Linux been ported to the Power4 chip? I remember reading that it has, but I've never heard any success stories. Secondly, is IBM planning on releasing a workstation running Linux? I imagine the AIX license is a big part of the hardware and hopefully this would make the package much more affordable.
Re:Buying Big Blue (Score:5, Informative)
The Power4 is not the same chip as the PowerPC 970. IBM will probably begin selling PPC 970 machines eventually, but they haven't begun to ship them yet.
But I want it now! (Score:3, Funny)
Or maybe a laptop for around $1200.
The longer it takes them to bring it to market the lower my pricepoint drops. So.. Hurry!
Re:speed (Score:5, Informative)
Why my friend converted: Final Cut Pro [apple.com], he's in the movie/TV biz.
Re:speed (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, but... (Score:4, Interesting)
In my end of the market, mid-low end, nobody hires a second person to do the extra jobs. Once you get the raw goodness, that's it. You get to do it all, and then do it over when the producer changes his mind.
That being said, horsepower is very important in video editing. It seems that everybody wants multi-layer titles, stuff flying around the screen, translucent layers, and then we get into color correcting. Tonight for instance, I will probably give my Dual 500mhz G4 two or three hours of tendering to do, and this is just for a couple of dozen titles on two half hour programs! I could very easily keep two computers busy with work.
Graspee Leemoor was talking about the home user, not the pro, but the difference is narrowing. The full version of Final Cut Pro is not that expensive, and Final Cut Express is only $300! With signifigant editing goodness being that cheap, people are starting to do more than just chopping together their clips. Once they get a tast of all the fancy crap that these programs can do, they start loading up their video with all kinds of stuff, and that's what will perk up their appetite for computing power.
I'm not saying that this is a good thing, by the way. Most people would be better served by getting a decent tripod, spending some bucks on microphones and recording equipment, and spending time thinking about whether they really need that fourth shot of little Jim-Bob playing in the mud. Quality production is never easy or cheap, and people think post can fix anything, damn it.
Basically, the DV video format has broken the prosumer market wide open. This will introduce people to decent video editing that wouldn't have had a chance before. Some of those people will start playing around and feel the need for more power.
When a post production facility is paying editors big bucks per hour, ten grand for a machine that saves just a little time per day is nothing. This is good for everybody downstream. Sadly I don't get paid much so the bosses don't see the need for anything faster than what we have..
Need some video help?
Re:speed (Score:5, Interesting)
Macs have been the native platform of artists and designers doing serious image creation/manipulation, video editing, and music composition for a long time. OS X just continues that tradition, but makes it simple for the end-user to also get into how powerful a multimedia machine the Mac is with tools such as iMovie, etc. And of course, on the other end, you've got these [alias.com] two [apple.com].
So, to answer your question, ramping up speed on the G5 chips is not only good for the whole marketing "Mine is bigger" approach, but there is also real value to Mac users, from casual to hard core.
Re:speed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I am ill-informed, apparently... (Score:2, Insightful)
I'd say for most consumer editing, the iLife Suite [apple.com] (free or $49 with iDVD) is a pretty compelling package. And power users can get their paws on Final Cut Express [apple.com] if they want to shell out some more bones for something a little more full featured.
Re:I am ill-informed, apparently... (Score:4, Insightful)
Windows Movie Maker (free).
Since everything bundled with windows is free (IE, mediaplayer, explorer, the kernel and whatever) why isn't the cost 0.0 USD. Nothing is free, thats the answer.
Re:speed (Score:2)
Re:speed (Score:2)
iqu
Re:speed (Score:5, Interesting)
Does anyone even care about the leetness of their speed with Apple stuff? I always thought the sort of people who used "the other computer" were more interested in doing normal everyday things that don't require much cpu power: word processing, email, web etc. Most of the people encoding audio and video and playing games are running x86.
Well, a huge number of design people use Macs, and image processing can be very processor intensive. Everyone knows Apple always quotes Photoshop benchmarks when trying to say that their computers are faster (with this version of photoshop! with these patches! with this filter! On Tuesdays! In March!)
That being said, there's one interesting point here - there are a lot of people who, after OS X, are switching to Apple because it's a Unix derivative that, for desktop use, is more polished than Linux. The scientific project I work on has just ported all of the analysis tools to OS X, because they like the Mac desktop better than the Linux one, so I think in addition to image processing/design tasks, developers may slowly switch to Mac as well.
One other interesting point now is that the reasons for sticking with x86 are quickly dwindling. It used to be a joke that Macs were faster. Macs, in many things, were three to four (yes, 3 to 4!) times slower at general-purpose tasks. Ever since the G5 was introduced, maybe it's still a joke because of Jobs's overzealous description of Apple's prowess, but it's not that much of a joke anymore. A dual 2GHz G5 is not a slow machine. Not by any stretch of the imagination.
At this point, the only things that can seriously keep people on x86 are software and price, and considering people still pay more than $1K for computers, I think it's safe to say that people are perfectly happy to spend way too much money on computers if they look nice and are well supported.
I think Apple is quite healthy: I'd be really surprised if Apple's market share doesn't continue to grow. If you're willing to shell out the money to shift to a Mac for the ease-of-use of OS X, then I don't think you're likely to shift back to x86.
Re:speed (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, I'm willing to bet that the people who make 80 million dollar movies with them [apple.com] do. Your friends who encode Simpsons episodes into DivX don't count, sorry.
Re:speed (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes I do... The more speed, the faster my photoshop projects render.
Mac users and horsepower (Score:2)
Re:speed (Score:5, Funny)
Re:speed - Pixlet (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:speed (Score:3, Interesting)
But there's getting to be quite a leet-geek crowd using Macs now, thanks to OS X. It's a huge draw for people who understand the advantages of UNIX, but don't want to get
Re:speed (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:speed (Score:5, Interesting)
In fact, it wasn't until I *left* x86 (linux) that I got a platform where opengl worked well enough that I could write a proper display layer on top of my system, not to mention that my PB g4 was actually cheaper than the pIII thinkpad it replaced and in my tests was significantly ( e.g. more than 3x) faster.
Now, I don't do any audio, and I don't do any video; but my simulation is pretty f*cking heavy on the cycles -- and it rips. I have no complaints.
People who gripe about mac performance just haven't actually *used* one. And they certainly haven't written any code for one.
Re:speed (Score:4, Funny)
Macs are everywhere, turn on the TV, go to the movies.
Now if you want to be a bad guy, buy a PC, but all the good guys and hot chicks use macs.
QED
Re:speed (Score:5, Interesting)
We upgraded from a DP 450 G4 box (which was no slouch itself) to a DP 2.0GHz G5 recently and we've more than quadrupled our productivity when it comes to big renders, mpeg2 encodes and multiplexing.
I don't know of anyone in our business using x86 for video editing. None seriously anyway.
I know a couple of shops who use x86 boxes as cheap horsepower in render farms - but ultimately controlled by a Mac at the nose end.
We use our DP G4 as a Quake III server for company LAN matches when it's not encoding mpeg2 on a job. I know Q3A isn't exactly a taxing game on today's graphics cards (none of our client machines even break sweat) but you can't beat it for gameplay.
Re:speed (Score:4, Funny)
There are lots more uses for computers than browsing the web, playing games, and making DivX rips of netflix DVDs, but, hey, your world is pretty small when you're 13."
I am extremely confused by your comment, because all the statements in it are wrong. Please reply with the source of this misinformation so I can correct their computer records.
graspee
Re:speed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:speed (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:POWERBOOK EATS YOU. (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree with the wisdom of letting others find the flaws in a first generation laptop--It's too easy to get burned with a brand new laptop design, pun intended.
That said, Apple puts more effort into laptop design than just about any other manufacturer I can think of. I seriously doubt they'd slap a G5 processor into a G4 design and call it done.
Re:POWERBOOK EATS YOU. (Score:2)
well, they've done it in the past on the desktop model... when the g4 debuted the first model was the "yikes [lowendmac.com]" line that was, essentially, a g4 chip on a g3 motherboard. it was a couple of months until the "sawtooth" line with the g4-specific mobo came out.
Re:POWERBOOK EATS YOU. (Score:2)
The G4 is to the G3 as the Pentium III is to the Pentium II. That's why a Slot 1 P3 worked on a P2 board, and also why a G4 CPU ran on a G3 board.
The G5 is to the G4 as the Athlon 64 is to the Athlon XP. Apples to oranges (no pun intended).
WARNING: Known Troll, and do not click sig link (Score:4, Informative)
SIG IS REDIRECT FROM SONY.COM (Score:2, Insightful)
Mod this asshole down as a troll, plz
Re:SIG IS REDIRECT FROM SONY.COM (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:POWERBOOK EATS YOU. (Score:2)
Re:POWERBOOK EATS YOU. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:POWERBOOK EATS YOU. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:With no Volume. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:With no Volume. (Score:2)
Re:With no Volume. (Score:5, Insightful)
It takes a lot of R&D whenever you move from one feature size to a smaller one and since chip fabrication R&D costs $$$ that's why unless AMD have some kind of technology sharing agreement I doubt they would just "give away" something they've put a lot of money into.
Spot the troll... (Score:5, Insightful)
Right... How does the *size* of the market relate to the yield? If a certain fraction of the chips you produce are exceptionally good, Intel/AMD can "hand pick" just as much, or as little as Apple. Their chips aren't 3% hand picked from 100%, they produce 3%, and a fraction of those again could be "hand picked".
The rest are just unsubstantiated rumors, following up a good troll. And the moderators are falling for it hook, line and sinker.
Kjella
Re:That's Process size (Score:4, Funny)
Dont need 64 bit OS (Score:5, Interesting)
My understanding is that applications are free to use 64 bit instructions if they wish.
Am I mistaken? Does the system, stack organization or memeory management some how preculde the use of 64 bit instructions?
thats right you dont need a *fully* 64 bit OS (Score:2)
things like the VM subsystem and the dynamic linker etc....
but really you need a compiler and a good ABI (look at sgi n32 O32 been there a long time)
they have the compiler (PPC64 linux has the same back end )
really if you want speed on these things run linux....
(check out the data access using ext2)
the real niceness is thet you can run photoshop 8
(cs or whatever adobe want to call it )
and then munch through a bunch of filters hmmm floating point goodness.....
regards
JJ
The article is wrong on this, as are you ;) (Score:3, Informative)
Where 32-bit chips are limited to addressing only 2 gigabytes of memory, 64-bit chips can theoretically address thousands of gigabytes of memory, though Apple's G5 boxes are limited to 8 gigabytes. Secondly 64-bit chips can perform complex calculations in fewer steps than 32-bit chips.
So far Apple's machines can see all the memory, they can't yet do 64-bit calculations. Present it with a 64-bit calculation, and a Mac with a G5 chip still breaks it into two 32-bit pieces.
First of all 32
Re:Need OS (Score:5, Informative)
You don't need a "fully 64 bit OS" to get the speed improvements (although there still are memory limitations. see below). It would break a LOT of things, and really wouldn't be any improvement over the current offering. Unlike x86, PPC was designed for the 64bit transition from the start (even though it remained unused in Apple's product line for almost a decade), and so there is no speed penalty, whatsoever for running 32bit PPC code on a PPC970.
Specifically, the article states:
So far Apple's machines can see all the memory, they can't yet do 64-bit calculations. Present it with a 64-bit calculation, and a Mac with a G5 chip still breaks it into two 32-bit pieces. That's because, Glaskowsky says, Apple doesn't have a 64-bit operating system
Among it's other inaccuracies, it claims that a 32bit machine can only address 2GB.
They fault Apple for only allowing 8 GB of RAM in a desktop enclosure, even though this is still a significant improvement. This limit is still physical, there are 8 slots, and the largest capacity chips are 1024MB right now. They will work when 2048MB chips are released, increasing the max capacity of the existing line to 16GB.
As for the 64bit calculation bit, that's also incorrect. If the binary is compiled for the g5, then 64bit calculations will not be split as they are on 32bit architectures. The downside is that this binary will no longer work on 32 bit machines, for the obvious reasons. For best performance/compatability, two binaries, one 32bit, one 64bit, can be compiled and placed in the same Application bundle, making the difference between the two irrelevant to the user (only a single icon to click on, works on both systems, full 64bit calculation on the g5)
The biggest limit of the G5s at the moment is (and it's quite severe), to my knowledge, a single processes can still only address 4gb, because the size of void* is still 4bytes. Apple will need to duplicate all the libraries in 64bit form to make this work seamlessly, which will probably have to wait until 10.4.Re:Need OS (Score:3, Insightful)
Already the G5 gives a huge performance boost on all apps and an even greater one on those that are optimized - mainly the pro apps (FCP, Photoshop, Logic,
So while it's perfectly possible to keep buying G4 processors in iBooks, Powerbooks and iMacs, there's no reason to go looking for G4 towers when you can buy very reasonably priced G5
Re:What I love about Apple (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What I love about Apple (Score:2, Funny)
Re:What I love about Apple (Score:3, Funny)
Credit where credit is due (Score:5, Informative)
The two things you quote are very mundane and ordinary ways to get more performance from a CPU. Barring redesign, miniaturization and voltage drops are the ways to make hardware faster, and compiler optimizations are the way to make software faster. These are the bread and butter of performance improvement, and you give Apple/IBM entirely too much credit for doing these things. (And this is coming from someone who works on an IBM compiler.)
Having said that, the PPC compiler team's work has been amazing, and congratulations are due for the sheer magnitude of the performance boost. In a field where a 2% improvement is an achievement, 50% is incredible.
Re:ooo surpise! (Score:5, Interesting)
Realistically speaking, though, performance increases have slowed down in the x86 camp. The jump from 2.8GHz to 3.0GHz came with a much larger increase in power than than the 7% increase in raw clockrate. Ditto for the 3.2GHz P4. Now Intel is apparently having a lot of trouble just getting bumped up to 3.4GHz, a CPU that dissipates over 100 watts. I'm not saying Intel won't break past this barrier--of course they will--but diminishing returns have kicked in hard. A 4GHz P4 is going to dissipate 150W at this rate. How long can it keep up? These are not the kind of CPUs you can easily put in a desktop, let alone a small-form-factor PC or notebook.
IBM is going to have the same troubles with the PPC970, but at least they're ahead of the game. The cleaner design of the PPC line has suddenly become a powerful advantage.
Re:Forget Powerbooks (Score:3, Interesting)
It would also be nice if they put back Quartz support over tcp/ip (they took it off in the NeXTStep days because of security issues). Apple has lousy market presence in the business/office world, but a high-powered QuartzTerminal(tm) and a headless imac might be nice. In the meantime, I buy my Macs used on ebay!
Re:New Console War (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Disappointing progress with laptops.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Now, while I would rather recommend holding all iBook/powerbook purchases (I think that major speed progress is intevitable in 2004), you would actually notice huge difference between your iBook and a contemporary one, sometimes even surpassing the "at least twice as fast" condition. Your old iBook uses ATI RAGE 128 with mediocre 8 megabytes of video RAM, the new one is a RADEON 7500 with 32 MB VRAM. If you play games, the difference is huge. But even if you don't, MacOS X GUI heavily relies on the GPU support, so your CPU has to sweat a lot just on calculating all those pretty widgets. And finally, many applications actually take the full advantage of the G4 architecture and they also could have a ~2x boost on a new iBook (a megahertz of G4 is not the same as a megahertz of G3).
Re:Yet another Apple hardware beta test? (Score:3, Informative)
I ordered a dual G5 2GHz for the office and I've only noticed 2 issues...
1) It used to hang when the plastic cover was removed and replaced while the machine was running (Apple specifically says I shouldn't do this so it's my own fault). I thi