Lt Major Burns said:
the G5 is a pathetic chip. real world benchmarks (not apples desperate propaganda) proved this. good riddance.
Generalizations are usually wrong. The G5 is an excellent chip, especially if you're into running very very numerically intensive code. Take a look at the
FFTW speed benchmarks and see how a 2GHz G5 does against every other processor out there. A G5 running binaries compiled with GCC compares very favorably against a P4 Xeon nearly that has 40% clockspeed advantage that was running binaries compiled by Intel's heavily optimizing compiler. In double precision operations, the G5 and P4 were nearly equal with the G5 being slightly better. Moving to single precision and Altivec, the G5 absolutely blows the P4 and SSE out of the water. If the G5's used IBMs own compiler, which is reported to be much better than GCC, you can expect even better performance. If you think FFTs are merely synthetic benchmarks with no applications, do a Google search.
The G5s are fantastic chips. Who cares if they can't hit 3 GHz? The only reason the P4 can reach 3+ GHz is because of it's architecture. The Athlons/Opterons which share more similarity with the G5s are struggling to go past 2.5 GHz as well. If Steve Jobs really dropped the G5 because he feels IBM dropped the ball, my opinion of him will seriously drop. This will definitely be a case of smart people letting ego get in the way causing them to make stupid decisions.
I thought Apple was trying to break into the scientific and high performance computing segments. Witness their trumpeting of the Virginia tech cluster. The G5s with their incredible Altivec vector units were a God send. The G4s had good vector units but were held back by the poor FSB. The G5s with their GHz+ FSB largely made up for this short coming.
Part of my understanding for the switch to x86 is because there is little hope of getting a G5 into a laptop. This couple with the fact that Intel has the lovely Centrino makes a switch look very attractive from a laptop POV. However, the new G4 processors from Freescale (ex Motorola) have dual cores, and a built in DDR memory controller, fixing what could be all the flaws of the original G4. Why switch? Did Steve piss off Motorola too?
Like texanpenguin says, the PowerPC is really starting to take off. With all the next generation consoles using the architecture, you can bet that things will only get better. PowerPC chips could come down in price due to the extra volume. Compilers will definitely get better as the demand increases for better compilers than the current GCC. In short, this is the worst time to drop PowerPC.
Sometimes, I think Steve has
'the Voice'. It's amazing how he is able to convert the thinking of the masses in less than two days. The G5s are good chips.
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