Poll: new PowerMacs?
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AdmiralAK
Simply Daemonic
Even though I simpathize with the poor misinformed souls that think we should "up the Mhz" on the macs, I think that is a bad move for apple, and I think that they wont be releasing any new macs any time soon.
There are 2 reasons.
1) No new processor yet, the 733 came out less than 6 months ago (if memory serves me right)
2) The "new macs" came out less than 6 months ago when the 733 processors rolled out and apple needs to unload those and get some profit. I think it is highly unlikely that you will see a new mac design...at least not for three or four months.
Admiral
There are 2 reasons.
1) No new processor yet, the 733 came out less than 6 months ago (if memory serves me right)
2) The "new macs" came out less than 6 months ago when the 733 processors rolled out and apple needs to unload those and get some profit. I think it is highly unlikely that you will see a new mac design...at least not for three or four months.
Admiral
Get some profit? Apple has the highest margins in the Industry! Plus, their PMG4 has the highest margin of all of their products. I think they could stand to lower their margins in the interest of gaining market share. If I can easily clock a 733 to 866 with no extra cooling, then Motorola can make them and Apple can sell them.
chad.channing
Registered
Well, here I go again... 
I work everyday with some of SGIs finest (32 CPU Origin, anyone? ... )
I also own a nice little box that cost me a whole £250 - a 1993 Indigo Elan with 96mb Ram, 20 inch monitor and about 2.5gb of hdd.
I use this machine for coding/compiling, acting as a firewall for my spanky G4 powermac and a whole host of other things, too (BZFlag anyone? )
The point is this machine relies on a 150MHz cpu. I use an SGI Indy R5k at work with about 128mb ram and it kicks the bejesus out of the Pentium III 450 next to it. The same goes for the Mac/G4 issue - the fact is that a macintosh (especially a G4 ) is capable of making an x86 machine look very silly indeed. GIVEN THE RIGHT TASKS.
Just as I wouldn't use my Indigo to render anything in a hurry (although I plan on getting a Crimson/Onyx or Octane to keep her company...), similarly it is a BAD idea to match my G4 400 with 512mb ram against an athlon 900 with 256mb ram in gaming terms, simply as the G4 motherboard has AGP 2x at best and the Rage Pro sucks.... 4x AGP and a GeForce2 mx in a machine costing half the price my mac cost and I look like an idiot...BUT (see, there is hope )the important factor is that like my SGI, I can be sure that Apple won't suddenly decide that the minimum requirement for OSX 1/2 is a Twin G4 500 with 768mb ram. Unlike Windows users who accept that they get about two years out of a pc until MS decide that their bloated code requires another 400MHz and an extra 256mb ram just to boot up the OS.
For the 3D/Web-design/Animation and oter stuff I use my G4 for it was worth every penny. I wouldn't take two x86 machines for her, and I reckon that if properly implemented a quad G4 machine would give ANYTHING a run for its money ( apart from the fact SGI machines pipeline the graphics work so that the CPU is actually rather secondary to the Immense Video Hardware pipeline they have developed ).
Long Live Apple. and sorry for the huge post
I work everyday with some of SGIs finest (32 CPU Origin, anyone? ...
) I also own a nice little box that cost me a whole £250 - a 1993 Indigo Elan with 96mb Ram, 20 inch monitor and about 2.5gb of hdd.
I use this machine for coding/compiling, acting as a firewall for my spanky G4 powermac and a whole host of other things, too (BZFlag anyone? )
The point is this machine relies on a 150MHz cpu. I use an SGI Indy R5k at work with about 128mb ram and it kicks the bejesus out of the Pentium III 450 next to it. The same goes for the Mac/G4 issue - the fact is that a macintosh (especially a G4 ) is capable of making an x86 machine look very silly indeed. GIVEN THE RIGHT TASKS.
Just as I wouldn't use my Indigo to render anything in a hurry (although I plan on getting a Crimson/Onyx or Octane to keep her company...), similarly it is a BAD idea to match my G4 400 with 512mb ram against an athlon 900 with 256mb ram in gaming terms, simply as the G4 motherboard has AGP 2x at best and the Rage Pro sucks.... 4x AGP and a GeForce2 mx in a machine costing half the price my mac cost and I look like an idiot...BUT (see, there is hope
)the important factor is that like my SGI, I can be sure that Apple won't suddenly decide that the minimum requirement for OSX 1/2 is a Twin G4 500 with 768mb ram. Unlike Windows users who accept that they get about two years out of a pc until MS decide that their bloated code requires another 400MHz and an extra 256mb ram just to boot up the OS.For the 3D/Web-design/Animation and oter stuff I use my G4 for it was worth every penny. I wouldn't take two x86 machines for her, and I reckon that if properly implemented a quad G4 machine would give ANYTHING a run for its money ( apart from the fact SGI machines pipeline the graphics work so that the CPU is actually rather secondary to the Immense Video Hardware pipeline they have developed ).
Long Live Apple. and sorry for the huge post
chad.channing
Registered
<sarcasm >
nice to see that you actually read the post I wrote....
< /sarcasm >
The point I was trying to make is, that YES, I would love to see a quad-733 machine with 4gig of ram and two GeForce3 / Radeon 2 cards and two wide-screen 22 inch LCD panels siting on my desk, but it isn't actually necessary....
My G4-400 is not the latest and greatest, but I have yet to find it struggle...the endless chase for more power that is just under-utilised is a waste of time....so what if AMD have 1.3Mhz or more? the x86 architecture sucks...it's a pipe-doubled extension to an update of a 16 bit core cpu....in fact x86 core has not changed since the 486....(or maybe even the 386 with the integrated 387 FPU ...). Silicon Graphics have shown that with an efficient RISC 64bit CPU running at most 450MHz they can make machines absolutely fly....sure a Dell PC will beat it at Quake, but that is because Quake was WRITTEN ON A PC....therefore all the graphics routines, etc are optimised for PC hardware...if you wrote a game to take advantage of the SGI/ G4 style systems a PC would not come close. It's not about hardware, guys, it's about software to support it either a) natively or b) truly independently of platform, so the hardware can actually flex its' muscles.
I should know, I write the stuff..... and all of our clients have chosen to use the SGI/HP-UX builds over the NT versions as they know that while you can build a wall of x86 boxes for the price of one Octane, the SGI will get the job done more efficiently and more reliably over the longer term....
It's a mater of what you want - if you want a machine for Q3Arena or Tribes2, buy yourself a Tiny PC for £900 an expect no reliability or long-term usability, if you want a machine that works, and bridges the gap between home/office pc and the high-end Unix machines, buy a Mac G4, install OSX and fill it full of memory.
I get the impression that a few people on this forum as a rule like to say a lot without actually knowing what they are talking about, it is not MHz, but MFLOPS that count for real-world computing power, you only need more clock cycles if A) your code sucks or B) your architecture can only handle little bits of data at a time....hence the shift to 64-bit cpus.... ( or 128-bit altivec on a 64-bit G4 core...). SGI did it with the MIPS R4k series, apple have done it with the G3/G4 shift and Intel/AMD have done....oh, nothing, except make more ineffiecient cpus that go a bit quicker.....
I don't say this as I hate PCs - I don't, I used to work for a PC manufacturer and I think they have their place, but a Mac G4 is a different animal, the sooner you realise that, the better...as for the future: multi-processing is the best way forward, as it makes better uses of OSX, better use of multitasking and is more efficient...and I think the newly-touted Radeon 2 will be something a bit special.
Oh, and by the way - I have seen posts moaning about the Boot time of OSX - yes it takes a while, but that is becase it is UNIX.....in fact it is better not to shut down at all, merely log out, or go to power-save. UNIX schedules things itself for night-time, etc and any UNIX box can complain if you shut it dwn..and it will boot slower , as it runs all it's tasks before letting you log on....
Just thought I would pass on the advice
One last thing - a hint, buy the book "Hacking Exposed", as it will give you a good idea of A) how to protect your Mac OSX (read: UNIX) machine and B) give anyone a better understanding of networking, etc just thought it might be useful
There. Rant over. And a bit of help too. lol
nice to see that you actually read the post I wrote....
< /sarcasm >
The point I was trying to make is, that YES, I would love to see a quad-733 machine with 4gig of ram and two GeForce3 / Radeon 2 cards and two wide-screen 22 inch LCD panels siting on my desk, but it isn't actually necessary....
My G4-400 is not the latest and greatest, but I have yet to find it struggle...the endless chase for more power that is just under-utilised is a waste of time....so what if AMD have 1.3Mhz or more? the x86 architecture sucks...it's a pipe-doubled extension to an update of a 16 bit core cpu....in fact x86 core has not changed since the 486....(or maybe even the 386 with the integrated 387 FPU ...). Silicon Graphics have shown that with an efficient RISC 64bit CPU running at most 450MHz they can make machines absolutely fly....sure a Dell PC will beat it at Quake, but that is because Quake was WRITTEN ON A PC....therefore all the graphics routines, etc are optimised for PC hardware...if you wrote a game to take advantage of the SGI/ G4 style systems a PC would not come close. It's not about hardware, guys, it's about software to support it either a) natively or b) truly independently of platform, so the hardware can actually flex its' muscles.
I should know, I write the stuff..... and all of our clients have chosen to use the SGI/HP-UX builds over the NT versions as they know that while you can build a wall of x86 boxes for the price of one Octane, the SGI will get the job done more efficiently and more reliably over the longer term....
It's a mater of what you want - if you want a machine for Q3Arena or Tribes2, buy yourself a Tiny PC for £900 an expect no reliability or long-term usability, if you want a machine that works, and bridges the gap between home/office pc and the high-end Unix machines, buy a Mac G4, install OSX and fill it full of memory.
I get the impression that a few people on this forum as a rule like to say a lot without actually knowing what they are talking about, it is not MHz, but MFLOPS that count for real-world computing power, you only need more clock cycles if A) your code sucks or B) your architecture can only handle little bits of data at a time....hence the shift to 64-bit cpus.... ( or 128-bit altivec on a 64-bit G4 core...). SGI did it with the MIPS R4k series, apple have done it with the G3/G4 shift and Intel/AMD have done....oh, nothing, except make more ineffiecient cpus that go a bit quicker.....
I don't say this as I hate PCs - I don't, I used to work for a PC manufacturer and I think they have their place, but a Mac G4 is a different animal, the sooner you realise that, the better...as for the future: multi-processing is the best way forward, as it makes better uses of OSX, better use of multitasking and is more efficient...and I think the newly-touted Radeon 2 will be something a bit special.
Oh, and by the way - I have seen posts moaning about the Boot time of OSX - yes it takes a while, but that is becase it is UNIX.....in fact it is better not to shut down at all, merely log out, or go to power-save. UNIX schedules things itself for night-time, etc and any UNIX box can complain if you shut it dwn..and it will boot slower
, as it runs all it's tasks before letting you log on....Just thought I would pass on the advice
One last thing - a hint, buy the book "Hacking Exposed", as it will give you a good idea of A) how to protect your Mac OSX (read: UNIX) machine and B) give anyone a better understanding of networking, etc
just thought it might be useful There. Rant over. And a bit of help too. lol
chad.channing
Registered
<sarcasm >
nice to see that you actually read the post I wrote....
< /sarcasm >
The point I was trying to make is, that YES, I would love to see a quad-733 machine with 4gig of ram and two GeForce3 / Radeon 2 cards and two wide-screen 22 inch LCD panels siting on my desk, but it isn't actually necessary....
My G4-400 is not the latest and greatest, but I have yet to find it struggle...the endless chase for more power that is just under-utilised is a waste of time....so what if AMD have 1.3Mhz or more? the x86 architecture sucks...it's a pipe-doubled extension to an update of a 16 bit core cpu....in fact x86 core has not changed since the 486....(or maybe even the 386 with the integrated 387 FPU ...). Silicon Graphics have shown that with an efficient RISC 64bit CPU running at most 450MHz they can make machines absolutely fly....sure a Dell PC will beat it at Quake, but that is because Quake was WRITTEN ON A PC....therefore all the graphics routines, etc are optimised for PC hardware...if you wrote a game to take advantage of the SGI/ G4 style systems a PC would not come close. It's not about hardware, guys, it's about software to support it either a) natively or b) truly independently of platform, so the hardware can actually flex its' muscles.
I should know, I write the stuff..... and all of our clients have chosen to use the SGI/HP-UX builds over the NT versions as they know that while you can build a wall of x86 boxes for the price of one Octane, the SGI will get the job done more efficiently and more reliably over the longer term....
It's a mater of what you want - if you want a machine for Q3Arena or Tribes2, uy yourself a Tiny PC for £900 an expect no reliability or long-term usability, if you want a machine that works, and bridges the gap between home/office pc and the high-end Unix machines, buy a Mac G4, install OSX and fill it full of memory.
I get the impression that a few people on this forum as a rule like to say a lot without actually knowing what they are talking about, it is not MHz, but MFLOPS that count for real-world computing power, you only need more clock cycles if A) your code sucks or B) your architecture can only handle little bits of data at a time....hence the shift to 64-bit cpus.... ( or 128-bit altivec on a 64-bit G4 core...). SGI did it with the MIPS R4k series, apple have done it with the G3/G4 shift and Intel/AMD have done....oh, nothing, except make more ineffiecient cpus that go a bit quicker.....
I don't say this as I hate PCs - I don't, I used to work for a PC manufacturer and I think they have their place, but a Mac G4 is a different animal, the sooner you realise that, the better...as for the future: multi-processing is the best way forward, as it makes better uses of OSX, better use of multitasking and is more efficient...and I think the newly-touted Radeon 2 will be something a bit special.
Oh, and by the way - I have seen posts moaning about the Boot time of OSX - yes it takes a while, but that is becase it is UNIX.....in fact it is better not to shut down at all, merely log out, or go to power-save. UNIX schedules things itself for night-time, etc and any UNIX box can complain if you shut it dwn..and it will boot slower , as it runs all it's tasks before letting you log on....
Just thought I would pass on the advice
One last thing - a hint, buy the book "Hacking Exposed", as it will give you a good idea of A) how to protect your Mac OSX (read: UNIX) machine and B) give anyone a better understanding of networking, etc just thought it might be useful
There. Rant over. And a bit of help too. lol
nice to see that you actually read the post I wrote....
< /sarcasm >
The point I was trying to make is, that YES, I would love to see a quad-733 machine with 4gig of ram and two GeForce3 / Radeon 2 cards and two wide-screen 22 inch LCD panels siting on my desk, but it isn't actually necessary....
My G4-400 is not the latest and greatest, but I have yet to find it struggle...the endless chase for more power that is just under-utilised is a waste of time....so what if AMD have 1.3Mhz or more? the x86 architecture sucks...it's a pipe-doubled extension to an update of a 16 bit core cpu....in fact x86 core has not changed since the 486....(or maybe even the 386 with the integrated 387 FPU ...). Silicon Graphics have shown that with an efficient RISC 64bit CPU running at most 450MHz they can make machines absolutely fly....sure a Dell PC will beat it at Quake, but that is because Quake was WRITTEN ON A PC....therefore all the graphics routines, etc are optimised for PC hardware...if you wrote a game to take advantage of the SGI/ G4 style systems a PC would not come close. It's not about hardware, guys, it's about software to support it either a) natively or b) truly independently of platform, so the hardware can actually flex its' muscles.
I should know, I write the stuff..... and all of our clients have chosen to use the SGI/HP-UX builds over the NT versions as they know that while you can build a wall of x86 boxes for the price of one Octane, the SGI will get the job done more efficiently and more reliably over the longer term....
It's a mater of what you want - if you want a machine for Q3Arena or Tribes2, uy yourself a Tiny PC for £900 an expect no reliability or long-term usability, if you want a machine that works, and bridges the gap between home/office pc and the high-end Unix machines, buy a Mac G4, install OSX and fill it full of memory.
I get the impression that a few people on this forum as a rule like to say a lot without actually knowing what they are talking about, it is not MHz, but MFLOPS that count for real-world computing power, you only need more clock cycles if A) your code sucks or B) your architecture can only handle little bits of data at a time....hence the shift to 64-bit cpus.... ( or 128-bit altivec on a 64-bit G4 core...). SGI did it with the MIPS R4k series, apple have done it with the G3/G4 shift and Intel/AMD have done....oh, nothing, except make more ineffiecient cpus that go a bit quicker.....
I don't say this as I hate PCs - I don't, I used to work for a PC manufacturer and I think they have their place, but a Mac G4 is a different animal, the sooner you realise that, the better...as for the future: multi-processing is the best way forward, as it makes better uses of OSX, better use of multitasking and is more efficient...and I think the newly-touted Radeon 2 will be something a bit special.
Oh, and by the way - I have seen posts moaning about the Boot time of OSX - yes it takes a while, but that is becase it is UNIX.....in fact it is better not to shut down at all, merely log out, or go to power-save. UNIX schedules things itself for night-time, etc and any UNIX box can complain if you shut it dwn..and it will boot slower
, as it runs all it's tasks before letting you log on....Just thought I would pass on the advice
One last thing - a hint, buy the book "Hacking Exposed", as it will give you a good idea of A) how to protect your Mac OSX (read: UNIX) machine and B) give anyone a better understanding of networking, etc
just thought it might be useful There. Rant over. And a bit of help too. lol
You note, it is how the software is written, but at the same time, as Mac users still in the world of OS 9, we are slaves to the Mac OS 9 code. That means it is *only* the hardware that can make a difference at this point. Sure when apple finally gets an fully optimized Cocoa versions of the core of OS X, especially the finder, we will see a Mac OS that can truely fly, as well as apps to go with it, but for now we are mainly OS 9.
With that being said, the Mac motherboards need more memory bandwidth. This is one of the reason for the huge disparity between Mac and PC games. You also touched upon this when you noted that the SGI video hardware pipeline was optimized so well. The Mac hardware is still general purpose, it has OS 9 mainly, and has a a slow memory pipeline. This makes for slower 3D games, 3D modeling and animation, and video.
A 1Ghz G4 with OS 9 would surely be faster and better than a 400Mhz G4 with OS 9. For people running photoshop, final cut pro, formZ, Virtual PC, etc., etc., those Mhz do matter, it changes the day. But we all know just Mhz alone doesn't do it. More memory bandwidth, faster firewire (800Mbit spec please), faster buses, more megahertz, multiple processors, blazing video cards, and faster AGP *all* make a huge difference on a daily and hourly basis!
Give me a quad G4 (500-1000mhz, whatever), 2Gbit+ of memory bandwidth (733mhz has only 1Gbit), an optimized OS X and we are talking about a very fast machine that smokes in all of the intensive graphics, 3D and video apps that we expect our Macs to run.
If all I did was play games, surf and write email, I would get a PC. But if just did email and the web, it would iMac, iMac, iMac.
+joe
With that being said, the Mac motherboards need more memory bandwidth. This is one of the reason for the huge disparity between Mac and PC games. You also touched upon this when you noted that the SGI video hardware pipeline was optimized so well. The Mac hardware is still general purpose, it has OS 9 mainly, and has a a slow memory pipeline. This makes for slower 3D games, 3D modeling and animation, and video.
A 1Ghz G4 with OS 9 would surely be faster and better than a 400Mhz G4 with OS 9. For people running photoshop, final cut pro, formZ, Virtual PC, etc., etc., those Mhz do matter, it changes the day. But we all know just Mhz alone doesn't do it. More memory bandwidth, faster firewire (800Mbit spec please), faster buses, more megahertz, multiple processors, blazing video cards, and faster AGP *all* make a huge difference on a daily and hourly basis!
Give me a quad G4 (500-1000mhz, whatever), 2Gbit+ of memory bandwidth (733mhz has only 1Gbit), an optimized OS X and we are talking about a very fast machine that smokes in all of the intensive graphics, 3D and video apps that we expect our Macs to run.
If all I did was play games, surf and write email, I would get a PC.
But if just did email and the web, it would iMac, iMac, iMac. +joe
chad.channing
Registered
well, not that bizarre - tried to post a reply from my work pc at lunchtime and got a load of erros from this site..hence the reply is now a new thread in this forum called something like "thoughts on the poll...."