holy crap! (Mac content)

Yeah, being hte mac-geek I am. I've known about this for a couple days now.


But seeing it officially, is awesome.

What can PC users possibly say now?....the only thing that is a strike against it is the price, but for once you are actually paying for what you get.

this thing is a BEAST, and did you hear that in the next 12 months they will be dual 3 ghz..that means 1.5 ghz FSB, not to mention highest end graphics cards...etc.

Apple is on a role.


of course, as much as I would like one, my current computer fund is for a powerbook

 

So essentially it's a RISC chip with a high fsb (of which, no RAM can handle in sync) and 64bit (of which no home-user applications are coded in)?

I don't know, it should be fast for a couple years as all RISC chips are, but as far as longetivity, it's probably next to nil.

Mac has interesting concepts but rarely puts them in practice properly. Their proprietary components doom them, usually.

 

The Chip was deisnged by IBM, it is a derivitive of their Power4 server chips.


Here is an indepth look at the chip:
(note this is of the chip before it entered the powermac g5, before the g5 was confirmed, it was apparent they would use this chip)

http://arstechnica.com/cpu/02q2/ppc970/ppc970-1.html
part II
http://arstechnica.com/cpu/03q1/ppc970/ppc970-0.html

and it's fully backward compatible with all 32 bit apps, so all consumer apps will be fine. While pro apps that WILL feature 64 bit code in the future will take a large benefit from this.

 

Crap! I just dropped $2k on a new G4 box, too!

I read something awhile back that the system architecture would not be truly optimal - at least not on this first generation of new machines - due to the fact that the Mac was designed around the 32-bit Motorola chipset and is being shoehorned into this new environment. The article gave technical details about why this was the case, but I wouldn't pretend to understand them...

I do think Motorola had gotten a bit lazy on chip design (we're starting to really fall behind the new ultra-fast Pentium iterations), and the IBM partnership is a good, smart move for Apple.

 

I'm not a mac person, but those specs are just jaw dropping, and shrinking in some places

 

I know it is. It's not Itanium or anything. It's more similar to AMD's upcoming Hammer series. Even so, the fact that it 'can' use 64bit code isn't really effective or worth-while, considering there are no current 64bit applications and very few OS's that will even benefit from it.

I'd rather go with Intel's hyperthreading technology.

 

for one, OS X "panther" is fully 64 bit aware.

also, the next PS revision will be 64 bit, as well as shake and most likely pro tools.

those are some apps, for the "pro market" I talked about.


Also, the bandwidth in these machines is just obscene. 6.4 gbs RAM throughput, 2.2 gbps for all the Pci stuff.

and the motherboard has internal hypertransport that connects all components at around 3.2 gbps

these are damn impressive machines, fast as hell.

 

Most all 'boards today use hypertransport. Take a look over at Intel.com or SiS.com at their developers notes.

6.4gbps for bandwidth isn't bad, but you also have to consider, what RAM can do 6.4gbps with one channel? If you're talking about dual or quad channel, that's nothing big yet, as Intel's are 4x200MHz fsb, which is 800MHz. Considering they can run in sync and provide globs of bandwidth, I'd take that. You may notice a bit more efficiency but that aside, you're not going to get the full 6.4gbps.

Another thing to consider is this: How much of a bonus will Photoshop get from 64bit? In all probability, relatively none. PS generally loves tons 1) more instructions 2) tons of bandwidth.

A RISC chip with a single memory channel isn't going to provide much of either of these. I think Apple really needs to play catch-up. I hope IBM gives them the edge they need. Motorola was really slacking off, they've been getting killed in SPEC benches the last couple years.

 

Well, as for SPEC benchmarks.


http://www.apple.com/powermac/performance/

 

Doesn't look like SPEC results to me. It's about as credible as tomshardware.com is for 3D Mark or SiSandra results.

Further more, why did they compare it a P4 (northwood) and not a P5 (prescott)?

Unless of course, these are available to the public currently??