intel cranks out 3 ghz chip.
- Thread starter boi
- Start date
Originally posted by simX
In other news, azosx continues his pointless trolling!
(If you are so hell-bent on "proving" that the Mac sucks, why don't you just ditch your two Macs you claim to own? Like that will happen before hell freezes over.I wonder why....)
When have I ever said Macs suck? Good grief, I just bought my PB G4 DVI and love it. I could care less if it takes 3 more years before the G5 comes out. If by the time i need a new computer, and the a G5 whatever can't cut it, I'll buy a PC instead.
I'm not a PC/Mac-fanboy. I use what works and I'm not afraid to point out the problems with anything, PC or Mac. The G5 is funked up. It's my opinion that's it's going to hurt Apple BIG TIME. So what? Do you have a different opinion? Let's hear it!
Actually, we as Mac users should be concerned. Let's not stick our heads in the sand just because we dismss the "megahertz myth" and Intel propoganda.
The fact is, Intel is making huge strides in Pentium performance and driving down prices at a far faster rate than Motorola can even dream. If Intel has a 3 GHz P4 out by Christmas and the best Apple can show is a 1.5 GHz G4, it's going to be really hard to get people to switch over.
Design counts a lot, OS X will count a lot, but let's face it, legions of Best Buy, Circuit City, and CompUSA sales guys will be out there chanting, "3.0 Gigahertz! 3.0 Gigahertz!" It's an easy and effective selling point and once millions of people buy those new 3.0 GHz PCs, Apple will have lost the change to get them to switch for another 2-3 years.
This is a HUGE marketing problem for Apple, and some serious butt-kicking at Motorola. There's simply no excuses for measily 50% performance increases every year.
So unless Apple comes out with an 8-way processor desktop G4 for the same price as a dual-processor G4 in the winter, I'm afraid Apple will continue to experience stagnation in pro desktop sales....and seriously, unless we see 2.0+ GHz G5s by Christmas, anything less than an 8 processor model will look (emphasis on look) pretty anemic to Intel's offerings
The fact is, Intel is making huge strides in Pentium performance and driving down prices at a far faster rate than Motorola can even dream. If Intel has a 3 GHz P4 out by Christmas and the best Apple can show is a 1.5 GHz G4, it's going to be really hard to get people to switch over.
Design counts a lot, OS X will count a lot, but let's face it, legions of Best Buy, Circuit City, and CompUSA sales guys will be out there chanting, "3.0 Gigahertz! 3.0 Gigahertz!" It's an easy and effective selling point and once millions of people buy those new 3.0 GHz PCs, Apple will have lost the change to get them to switch for another 2-3 years.
This is a HUGE marketing problem for Apple, and some serious butt-kicking at Motorola. There's simply no excuses for measily 50% performance increases every year.
So unless Apple comes out with an 8-way processor desktop G4 for the same price as a dual-processor G4 in the winter, I'm afraid Apple will continue to experience stagnation in pro desktop sales....and seriously, unless we see 2.0+ GHz G5s by Christmas, anything less than an 8 processor model will look (emphasis on look) pretty anemic to Intel's offerings
vanguard
Registered
SimX,
Respectfully, it seems like you've been jumping on anybody who posts anything that's even slightly anti-apple. I think the current state of affairs is fairly well known and agreed upon.
Apple has a very nice Operating System that runs on attractive but slow hardware. Also, their warranty isn't as long as what you normally see in the PC industry.
I would guess that you find the lack of speed a small price to pay for the other benefits that Apple provides. Other people are finding the performance problems too much to ignore. The fact that performance is critical to some people doesn't make them bad, it's just makes Apple's machine insufficient.
Vanguard
Respectfully, it seems like you've been jumping on anybody who posts anything that's even slightly anti-apple. I think the current state of affairs is fairly well known and agreed upon.
Apple has a very nice Operating System that runs on attractive but slow hardware. Also, their warranty isn't as long as what you normally see in the PC industry.
I would guess that you find the lack of speed a small price to pay for the other benefits that Apple provides. Other people are finding the performance problems too much to ignore. The fact that performance is critical to some people doesn't make them bad, it's just makes Apple's machine insufficient.
Vanguard
I think you put on there a G5 when you meant to put G4. Id like to offer this correction for you.
Yes Apple should come out with faster G4's soon and next spring it should begin preparing us for the 64 bit version of the G5. As we all know G5's are 64 bit and would require even more development to convert apps from 32 to 64 bit. Putting a 64 bit chip in a machine with a 32 bit OS and apps would be like having a 16 lane highway but only letting people drive on 8 lanes and just doing nothing with the other 8. Even if you get a 64 bit clean OS, the OS would use all the lanes but the apps would only be allowed to use half.
Let's stick with the G4 just a tad bit longer, mkay?
Personally i would like to see Apple Sparq it up. Sell off its AIM assets and just go with an Oracle/Sun/Apple Alliance. Continue to use the G4 for another year and a half but rather than moving to the G5, go ahead and count its losses and just move to Suns 64 bit chip.
simX
Unofficial Mac Genius
vanguard, I very much appreciate it when someone like you addresses me respectfully with regards to my opinion.
It's not that I jump on everybody that's slightly anti-Apple. It's just that lately in these forums, azosx has been going around trolling every little thing that the Mac platform doesn't offer, chanting like those analysts did last year that Apple is going to die out in a month. That's what I hate.
Yes, Apple is between a rock and a hard place. I never said it wasn't. Apple needs to ditch Motorola AS SOON AS POSSIBLE, and Apple knows it. But moving to AMD (like azosx is chanting everywhere) is NOT the best and only solution at this point. Apple still has some life left with the G4 (and contrary to what azosx seems to think, Altivec DOES have a measurable performance benefit)
So Apple still has some time to decide on what it's going to do. Maybe Apple will snatch up the PPC assets from Motorola (which are up in the air soon, aren't they?) and couple with just IBM to crank out better and faster processors than Motorola ever could or ever wanted to. Maybe Apple WILL end up going to AMD. I'm not against that. I just think that the G4 is not getting as much respect as it should be around here, lately. It is a perfectly acceptable chip at lower clock speeds than what Intel and AMD offer. Yes, the performance gap is starting to widen a bit again, and like I said, Apple needs to find someone other than Motorola to rely on, soon.
But I don't need to hear all of these shallow and across-the-board complaints about the G4 from someone who claims to have two Macs. If he had a bit of sense about him, he'd realize that the software that Apple provides makes up for the slightly worse performance of the G4 chip compared to Intel and AMD chips out there.
The situation that Apple is in right now is not as bad as azosx makes it out to be. And that's why I am "jumping" on him whenever he opens his mouth, because all he can seem to do is troll around here and start blabbing about how Apple needs to release 482193951293.39203952035 GHz AMD Macs this afternoon.
boi
official breaker of macs.
in that respect, every thread would be pointless. it's just a thread, i'm just informing people. don't be so negative, man; it's not like it costs you money to read it or something. don't read it if you don't want- better yet, don't reply to it
. 3GHz is a pretty big number. i'm just informing those who aren't on top of things. i for one thought they just hit the 2GHz mark.
LordOphidian
Adjutant On-Line
Umm.. how would going to sparc (not sparq!) help? It runs at a slower clock speed than the G5 will run at, and even if its faster than the G5, it won't help the mhz myth.
It also is a totaly different arch, so you would have to get all new apps. With the G5, while your apps might not be 64bit clean, they will still run just fine. Transitioning to the G5 (or Power4 for that matter) would me quite a bit smoother and more cost effective than going to the Sparc.
If you're so concerned with whether I really "have" 2 Macs, ask the admin for my weblog which will show I post using Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.0.0) Gecko/20020529.
As for AltiVec, if only Apple and Adobe optimize their software for it, then no, it's not a good solution. Unless of course Apple is only wanting to cater to a specilized market like Sun and SGI do with their SPARC and MIPS processors. I don't think this is the case though considering their recent Switch campaign.
Apple wants to compete against the PC and they aren't going to do it with a dual 1GHz G4 with AltiVec. Do you own an SMP box? I do. And unless programs are optimized to take advantage of SMP, you're in the same boat as AltiVec. 2 1GHz G4s is not the same as 1 2GHz G4.
Basically, if your apps aren't optimized for SMP, the CPU will assign them to CPU0 or CPU1 to run off of. Not many apps are optimized to run off of dual processors. The main benefit of SMP is that you can open more apps at a time with less system slowdowns.
I don't know why you're always so angry. Relax.
Javintosh
Meember
I'ts been a while since I've posted, but I wanted to point out a couple of things...
1. About the Velocity Engine: I think this is a problem (not enough applications are optimized for AltiVec), however there are some applications that *are* optimized for AltiVec. Furthermore, these tend to be the apps that benefit the most.
The most important to me? iTunes and QuickTime. These are optimized for AltiVec.
I also think that this will get better after 10.2. Why? here's a quote from the Apple web site:
"Apple engineers have optimized the standard suite of math libraries to use the vector instructions on the PowerPC G4 chip (also known as the Velocity Engine). That means you can get optimal performance for your applications without writing assembly or platform-specific code."
2. As for the Mhz difference. As a very rough rule of thumb, I consider an Intel Chip equal to a G4 chip if it has 2x the Mhz rating. So, I personally consider a 1.5GhzG4 and a 3.0Ghz to be roughly equal. Im my experience, this comparison has proved to be roughly accurate. Maybe I should say that it has been accurate enough for me.
I also wanted to make another point, some people seem to think apple should go to other IBM chips, like the Power4.
Have you seen the Mhz rating for the Poewr4? That thing tops out at 1.3Mhz!! I'm certain both Intel and AMD run circles around the Power4. (yes, that was sarcasm) We obsess over the Intel/PowerPC Mhz when in reality, the huuuuge pipeline in the P4 negates much of hte Mhz advantage... We must have short memories not to remember that the 50% boost in Mhz between the P4 and the P3 did not yield significant speed increases...
3. about moving off the PowerPC. Not even worth talking about until Classic is *dead*. I think the move is feasible for OSX and native OSX apps, but classic needs to be truly and inexorably dead. Classic may be dying, but it is still too important to dump outright. Steve said himself that apple would have choices in about 18 months or so. My guess is that he expects Classic and OS9 to be yesterday's news by them....
as for the chip, I think the best choice would be AMD with proprietary apple hardware. However, there would be some caveats to this... As I understand it, the AMD chips are actually RISC chips that appear as x86-type chips to software. I'm sure that there is some sort of penalty for that. I'd love apple to use chips from AMD if apple could get in under the tent and access the RISC chip directly (with presumably a major speed boost for apple vs intel).
1. About the Velocity Engine: I think this is a problem (not enough applications are optimized for AltiVec), however there are some applications that *are* optimized for AltiVec. Furthermore, these tend to be the apps that benefit the most.
The most important to me? iTunes and QuickTime. These are optimized for AltiVec.
I also think that this will get better after 10.2. Why? here's a quote from the Apple web site:
"Apple engineers have optimized the standard suite of math libraries to use the vector instructions on the PowerPC G4 chip (also known as the Velocity Engine). That means you can get optimal performance for your applications without writing assembly or platform-specific code."
2. As for the Mhz difference. As a very rough rule of thumb, I consider an Intel Chip equal to a G4 chip if it has 2x the Mhz rating. So, I personally consider a 1.5GhzG4 and a 3.0Ghz to be roughly equal. Im my experience, this comparison has proved to be roughly accurate. Maybe I should say that it has been accurate enough for me.
I also wanted to make another point, some people seem to think apple should go to other IBM chips, like the Power4.
Have you seen the Mhz rating for the Poewr4? That thing tops out at 1.3Mhz!! I'm certain both Intel and AMD run circles around the Power4. (yes, that was sarcasm) We obsess over the Intel/PowerPC Mhz when in reality, the huuuuge pipeline in the P4 negates much of hte Mhz advantage... We must have short memories not to remember that the 50% boost in Mhz between the P4 and the P3 did not yield significant speed increases...
3. about moving off the PowerPC. Not even worth talking about until Classic is *dead*. I think the move is feasible for OSX and native OSX apps, but classic needs to be truly and inexorably dead. Classic may be dying, but it is still too important to dump outright. Steve said himself that apple would have choices in about 18 months or so. My guess is that he expects Classic and OS9 to be yesterday's news by them....
as for the chip, I think the best choice would be AMD with proprietary apple hardware. However, there would be some caveats to this... As I understand it, the AMD chips are actually RISC chips that appear as x86-type chips to software. I'm sure that there is some sort of penalty for that. I'd love apple to use chips from AMD if apple could get in under the tent and access the RISC chip directly (with presumably a major speed boost for apple vs intel).
Since Darwin is based on a mach kernel, making it run on a different platform is the biggest hurdle in getting apps to work on it. The nice thing about Mach is that "in theory" you could essentially have it so that when you compile a binary it compiles FAT for both platforms with no rewrite of code.
The technology has been there all along. If we remember, NeXT ran on x86 and 68k. You used one binary for both platforms because they were compiled FAT. If darwin was based on a monolithic design then there would be issues in converting apps from one platform to another.
Oh yeah, and moving to x86 would be easier in this regards because darwin already includes the necessary information to compile x86/PPC FAT binaries.
Does anyone know if the current core unix binaries are FAT in the darwin distrobutions?
hulkaros
The Incredible...
Apple and its technologies indeed suck...
-Their G4 cpus do not run above 1GHz while intel has 3GHz coming out...
-They don't have USB2 support
-They don't have Firewire2 support
-They don't have DDR support or even worst RIMM support
-They don't have 2-button mice+wheel support
-They don't have Windows XP
-They don't have Dell at their side
-They don't have ATA-133 support
-They don't have MANY games
-Jaguar is way too expensive at $130
-.Mac is way too expensive at $100/year
-They don't have 5.1 sound support
-G5 is nowhere to be found!
-They don't have enough P2P software
-Where is our spyware?
-They don't have Microsoft at their side for crying out loud!!!
Yep, Apple sucks! I would sell anything Apple and buy a fresh new Dell at 3GHz when it will be out because it is, in every area that a computer user needs, years ahead, of Apple ever will be!
Wintel rules!
PS. I'm writing this on Win2K Server with a PentiumIV running at more than 1.7GHz with IE 5.5 and everything feels a lot better than Mac OS X.1.5 and that simpling G4... And it will be the same even after a year or even more!
-Their G4 cpus do not run above 1GHz while intel has 3GHz coming out...
-They don't have USB2 support
-They don't have Firewire2 support
-They don't have DDR support or even worst RIMM support
-They don't have 2-button mice+wheel support
-They don't have Windows XP
-They don't have Dell at their side
-They don't have ATA-133 support
-They don't have MANY games
-Jaguar is way too expensive at $130
-.Mac is way too expensive at $100/year
-They don't have 5.1 sound support
-G5 is nowhere to be found!
-They don't have enough P2P software
-Where is our spyware?
-They don't have Microsoft at their side for crying out loud!!!
Yep, Apple sucks! I would sell anything Apple and buy a fresh new Dell at 3GHz when it will be out because it is, in every area that a computer user needs, years ahead, of Apple ever will be!
Wintel rules!
PS. I'm writing this on Win2K Server with a PentiumIV running at more than 1.7GHz with IE 5.5 and everything feels a lot better than Mac OS X.1.5 and that simpling G4... And it will be the same even after a year or even more!