Low Power G5 Coming Soon? [Archive]

Lebannen

Nov 15, 2004, 11:15 AM

From the impression I got when I read this story over the weekend, MacInDoc is correct - the ThinkSecret article does NOT refer to a low-power variant. In fact, near the end they say:

"Low-power versions of the PowerPC 970 intended for use in the PowerBook G5 remain in development at speeds between 1.6GHz and 1.8GHZ, but little else is known."

The 970GX is the upcoming dual-core version of the 970FX - two processing cores in one "processor", which is almost like having two processors in one. This AntaresSP is the single-core version of that chip, so essentially a newer version of the G5s currently out on the market.

The benefits over the dual-core version would be less power usage, less heat, and cheaper - so suitable for iMacG5 use, say, or a low-end tower.

russed, the lack of level 3 cache does mean less performance than having a L3 cache; on the other hand, it's cheaper. The current G5s don't have a L3 cache either.

combatcolin

Nov 15, 2004, 11:15 AM

i dont own a PB .. but im moaning :) Im starting a job in a week that needs a laptop (not essential .. but v.helpful) but i cant bring myself to buy the current models
this waiting is killing me :)

im just hoping for a 13.3" screen that would be sweet
*sigh* ... ok , this isnt a powerbook thread , so i should shutup now :)

Rob

Christ that was a quick reply!!!
Anyway, just get a mid-ranged iBook - much cheapness.

I too stared a new job recently and am waiting for the next Rev PM.
(If i pay off £200 a month on credit card i should easily make room for one)

gekko513

Nov 15, 2004, 11:16 AM

The good news is that either way (Freescale or low-power G5) the PowerBook will get a processor with a faster front-side bus. It's about time.

Rincewind42

Nov 15, 2004, 11:18 AM

does someone whish to tell me what it means not having any L3 cache?

The L3 cache is basically another place near the CPU where it can keep data that it may need again soon. Generally additional levels of cache are only useful if memory/bus is sufficiently slower than the CPU, or if the CPU is always working on very large data sets. There could be cases where the G5 would benefit from an L3 cache, but since the bus is so fast and the rumored 970GX will have a larger L2 cache the situations where this is true are far fewer than with the G4.

gekko513

Nov 15, 2004, 11:19 AM

The 970GX is the upcoming dual-core version of the 970FX - two processing cores in one "processor", which is almost like having two processors in one. This AntaresSP is the single-core version of that chip, so essentially a newer version of the G5s currently out on the market.

I read it as the 970GX IS the single-core version of the upcoming Antares architecture.

GonzoRob

Nov 15, 2004, 11:21 AM

Christ that was a quick reply!!!
Anyway, just get a mid-ranged iBook - much cheapness.

I too stared a new job recently and am waiting for the next Rev PM.
(If i pay off £200 a month on credit card i should easily make room for one)

... being without a job means I hammer www.macrumors.com :)

As for money,I know the feeling mate. I have a ton of student debt to pay off *and* rent
I do like the ibooks (my g/f is about to buy one) but, as a total nerd , i cant bring myself to buy one when i know a new PB is around the corner.

I think i just want a laptop that will play doom3 and run maya well ......

Rob

Rincewind42

Nov 15, 2004, 11:23 AM

So how is it that IBM make make a LOW POWER version of the G5 that starts around 3GHz, but they can't get a good version of a higher-powered G5 that runs around the same speed? It seems unreasonable to me to think that a 3GHz PowerBook G5 will be available before or even at the same time as a 3GHz PMG5.

Well, if the CPU uses too much power, then it will fry itself. And the faster the CPU goes, the more power it uses, so a high-power usage CPU can't go faster than a certain point. So if they can reduce the power-usage of the CPU, then it can go correspondingly faster.

As such, I expect the 3Ghz part will be the low-power version running as fast as possible, whereas the PowerBook will use a slower version of it to conserve battery power (say around 2Ghz).

GonzoRob

Nov 15, 2004, 11:35 AM

GENERAL_SMILEY on macnn.com forum:

"During my brief wander round 1 Infinite Loop last week I was shown the revised Powerbooks, due to come out in the new year. They will continue to be G4 based, 2GHZ being the top end processor (use up stock?).

However the new thing, and this will no doubt turn some of you old schoolers on, is that they have ditched the silver shell, for some sort of ultra light, super hard, unscratchable carbon fiber black case, with red LED styling.

This will happen, and for the many doubters (and who can blame you), I will bring up this post when they are released"

---

does the 2Ghz claim sounds realistic ?... what are peoples views on this post ?

lots say its bull****t :)

Rob

Lebannen

Nov 15, 2004, 11:38 AM

I read it as the 970GX IS the single-core version of the upcoming Antares architecture.

Oops, quite right. Antares is the dual-core "970MP", 970GX is the single-core version. My bad!

It's still not low-power though :D

combatcolin

Nov 15, 2004, 11:42 AM

Do-able.

FreeScale have really hit the ground running since their birth, consider that the eMac went from a 1Ghz to 1.25Ghz -a 25% speed increase and a lower price.

Although to be honest the new PB could come with a years free entrance to the Playboy mansion and they'll since moan.

GonzoRob

Nov 15, 2004, 11:49 AM

wdlove

Nov 15, 2004, 11:49 AM

The really good news is that they are actually talking 3 GHz. This should make the new year very exciting.

afields

Nov 15, 2004, 11:49 AM

YAAYYY!! Powerbook rumors!! :D

After all the iPod attention, I was beginning to wonder....

swissmann

Nov 15, 2004, 11:59 AM

I really like the G5 chip. It is nice to see it making improvements. If we can increase the speed and lower the power (noise) even more I'll like the chip that much better.

Jalexster

Nov 15, 2004, 12:13 PM

Seeing as Intel have given up on Mhz recently, and are going for optimisation, we could trick all the stupid users by making a G5 over 4Ghz (Intel's fastest is 3.8Ghz).

Remember, the G5 is already fully optimised. Push the clock speed past Intel, and then all the stupid PC fanboys who belive that Mhz is everything, will think that Apple is better.

Apple is already better. All of us "Smarts" know that, but now the PC MicroDrones will know it.

Little Endian

Nov 15, 2004, 12:14 PM

thatwendigo

Nov 15, 2004, 12:15 PM

Jesus, I hate how I have to do this every time the G5 is talked about...

Some common misconceptions and outright lies:

1) There is no inherent performance increase from 64-bit processors, unless you are doing one of a tiny handful of very specialized tasks. If you use a lot of very highly detailed and demanding math with enormous integers that require a 64-bit length, you will get speed improvements. If you're using more than 4GB of RAM on a single task, you will get some improvement. For prety much everything else, being coded in 64-bit is a slowdown.

2) The system itself is already multithreaded in OS X, and many of the professional applications that people whine about are also SMP-aware and benefit from having more than one processor. For them, a faster dual-core 32-bit processor is far more likely to provide performance in a portable, since the likelihood of having more than 4GB of RAM in that form factor is next to nothing at the moment. In addition, the 8461D will have dual 128-bit double precisions AltiVec units, 2MB of interleaved and sharable cache, and an on-die memory controller. Even at 1.5-1.8ghz, it will probably demolish anything in the single processor portable market for getting actual work done. Anything, including AntaresSP, unless IBM has some kind of miracle surprise up their sleeve.

3) The 7448 part is pin-compatible with current PowerBooks and goes to 1.8ghz, giving an intermediate step for Apple while a solid tapeout and redesign is made for next-generation technologies. If they move to the 8461D, this is necessary and inevitable, while the AntaresSP is comparatively similar to the older motherboards - north and southbridges, AGP bus, PCI bus, and so on. You could cut out a lot of the complexity of the motherboards with the 8461 by killing the southbridge chip, moving peripherals to the PCI-Express bus (which adds future compatibility for graphics and data paths), and using DDR2 memory for reasons of cooling and power consumption. Unlike Antares, that's all on the chip and needs no motherboard space for controllers.

--

What's more likely is that the AntaresMP will end up in PowerMacs and xServes as the high-end workstation chip, with AntaresSP in the iMac and eMac. Portables should roll to the 8461MP for PowerBooks and the 8461SP for iBooks. Of course, I wouldn't cry any tears if Apple were to take the 8461MP and put it in the 4-way tower with two chips and four cores, since I think that it's a far superior design to the 970.

We won't see a mature PowerPC offering from IBM until the Power5 derivatives show up, whenever that will be. The 970 is, was, and will be a kludge to fill the gaps.

AmigoMac

Nov 15, 2004, 12:17 PM

MWSF 05, G5, iLife 05, next year I will be 25... that will be awesome...

csubear

Nov 15, 2004, 12:22 PM

We won't see a mature PowerPC offering from IBM until the Power5 derivatives show up, whenever that will be. The 970 is, was, and will be a kludge to fill the gaps.

Wow, I'm suddenly reminded of the 601,603....

phreakout13

Nov 15, 2004, 12:23 PM

Does anyone know if prices on powerbooks will rise dramatically? I want a G5 PB, but not if it's gonna be even more expensive.

Frobozz

Nov 15, 2004, 12:31 PM

Looks like it'll be time to buy a new PowerMac come Feb/Mar of next year. At that point I would expect x800 and 6800 series graphics card prices to fall and perhaps even come standard. I bet we also see FireGL class cards as BTO options. I'm sure we'll see the move to PCI-E graphics cards and HyperTransport 2.0. Here's my wish list for the new lineup:

ULTIMATE:
3.0 GHz Dual Core
1.5 GHz HyperTransport 2.0 FSB
PCI-E / 256mb ATI x800 Pro or nVidia 6800GT
250 GB SATA HD
$2999

FASTER:
2.8 GHz Dual Core
1.4 GHz HyperTransport 2.0 FSB
PCI-E / 128mb ATI x600 Pro or nVidia 6600
160 GB SATA HD
$2499

FASTER:
2.5 GHz Dual Core
1.25 GHz HyperTransport 2.0 FSB
PCI-E / 128mb ATI x600 Pro or nVidia 6600
160 GB SATA HD
$1999

FAST (based on existing architecture?):
2.0 GHz Single CPU
1.0 GHz HyperTransport 1.0 FSB
AGP 8x / 128mb ATI 9800
80 GB SATA HD
$1499

crakly

Nov 15, 2004, 12:37 PM

However the new thing, and this will no doubt turn some of you old schoolers on, is that they have ditched the silver shell, for some sort of ultra light, super hard, unscratchable carbon fiber black case, with red LED styling.

That sounds absolutely gorgeous, I hope its true!

Maybe it'll look a bit like this:
http://www.weblogsinc.com/common/images/2115770689167556.JPG

GonzoRob

Nov 15, 2004, 12:40 PM

That sounds absolutely gorgeous, I hope its true!

Maybe it'll look a bit like this:
http://www.weblogsinc.com/common/images/2115770689167556.JPG

lol .. perhaps ...

i dont know about going back to black... i like the current PB looks .. it sets it far apart from the millions of other black laptops

i guess we will have to wait :)

crakly

Nov 15, 2004, 12:47 PM

lol .. perhaps ...

i dont know about going back to black... i like the current PB looks .. it sets it far apart from the millions of other black laptops

i guess we will have to wait :)

jonathan ive's gotta be cooking something up.
we've had coloured plastic (iMac G3, iBook G3, PowerMac G3), white double-shot plastic (iBook G4, iMac G4, iMac G5, iPod), titanium (PowerBook G4) and aluminium (PowerMac G5, PowerBook G4, iPod Mini)

I think a glossy double-shot black like the U2 iPod could be right. What else could there be? Wood?

GonzoRob

Nov 15, 2004, 12:49 PM

jonathan ive's gotta be cooking something up.
we've had coloured plastic (iMac G3, iBook G3, PowerMac G3), white double-shot plastic (iBook G4, iMac G4, iMac G5, iPod), titanium (PowerBook G4) and aluminium (PowerMac G5, PowerBook G4, iPod Mini)

I think a glossy double-shot black like the U2 iPod could be right. What else could there be? Wood?

actually, wood would be quite nice

no pun intended :)

bring it back to the old school .. it could also be driven by gears and cogs ..

ncbill

Nov 15, 2004, 12:50 PM

It has been awhile since G4s in shipping systems have even supported L3 cache, and I don't think G5 processors ever had L3 cache support.

Considering the next G4/G5 chips will have 1MB of L2 cache...who cares about L3 anymore?

>the lack of level 3 cache does mean less performance than having a L3 cache

crakly

Nov 15, 2004, 12:51 PM

actually, wood would be quite nice

no pun intended :)

bring it back to the old school .. it could also be driven by gears and cogs ..

polished mahogany finish would be cool, although it would look like the sides of GarageBand which everyone hates...

Joshvar

Nov 15, 2004, 12:53 PM

1) There is no inherent performance increase from 64-bit processors, unless you are doing one of a tiny handful of very specialized tasks. If you use a lot of very highly detailed and demanding math with enormous integers that require a 64-bit length, you will get speed improvements. If you're using more than 4GB of RAM on a single task, you will get some improvement. For prety much everything else, being coded in 64-bit is a slowdown.

I see this used a lot. The "64-bit is useless" arguments. They, themselves, are worthless. One side of the coin: There are PLENTY of cases where it's useful, and they apply to a lot of Mac users. Scientific and highly-precise mathematic calculations (education), video and graphic manipulation, and software.

The other side of the coin: Aside from Intel, the 64-bit processors have been complete redesigns, so their legacy performance is typically a full generation ahead of the processors they are replacing. The AMD64 processors and the 970 are both in this category of offering excellent performance in legacy applications either through higher per-clock efficiency OR through better speed scaling due to their architecture.

earthtoandy

Nov 15, 2004, 12:54 PM

i really doubt a change to black. The aluminum look is apples "pro" look and i dont think they would drop it at this point. besides its beautiful. if they mess with the design too much i might be sad.

Heres hoping for dual core g4's!

Macmaniac

Nov 15, 2004, 12:59 PM

I will assure you this, there will be no 3ghz PBs before the PM hits 3.0ghz. We are so desperate to believe anything that may hint at G5 PBs. Something tells me the next revision will be a faster G4.

SiliconAddict

Nov 15, 2004, 01:03 PM

Originally Posted by gola
The problem is that a 1.6 og 1.8 Mhz G5 is not that big a difference from todays G4 as long as the applications are not up for 64 bit processing. But the word G5 itself will still sell a hell of a lot of machines.

Not true at all. Even the old 1.6 Ghz G5 fairs favorably against most of the G4 line. 64-bit processing is hardly used at all currently. Optimizing for the G5 will of course improve things, but still the G5 is generally a much more powerful CPU than the G4.

That and people keep forgetting the massive disparity in FSB speed between a G4 and a G5. In all likelihood a Mobile G5 will bring a FSB of at least 200-400Mh. Imagine a toll road that has a single booth on it and that booth can only take lets say 1 car per minute. Now imagine that same booth taking 80 cars per minute. That would speed up your ability to get from point A to B would it not. Esp since a FSB can effect not only your CPU but the communication to and from your RAM as well. The top of the line G4 PowerBooks have a 167Mhz system bus. The RAM that is installed in it has PC2700 that runs at 333Mhz. Think about that a second. 333 vs 167 notice a problem here? At this point Intel's Pentium M is running at 90nm 2Ghz chip , 400Mhz FSB, and a 2MB L2 cache. which translates into just about any Dothan Pentium M kicking the the living crap out of any PowerBook out there.
As tired as some of you are of me bitching about this, the fact remains that the PowerBook is EXACTLY where the PowerMac was before its transition to the G5 and no amount of hemming and hawing about how pretty it is, how good the OS is, how stable the system is, or how current the other components are will change the fact that the PowerBook is dieing when it comes to competition with the PC world.
Until something drastic is done to narrow the ever widening gap between the PC laptops and PowerBooks I, and I have to imagine more then a few others, aren't going near a PowerBook. Come on Apple! Show me something I can wet myself over!!

Mord

Nov 15, 2004, 01:12 PM

remember when the powerbook go's g5 it will be cheaper as g5's are cheaper than g4's as motorola are skanky basterds

visualanté

Nov 15, 2004, 01:29 PM

im confused..dont pc's have 64bit laptops out? the powerbook is loosing fanfare do to the ibook

myapplseedshurt

Nov 15, 2004, 01:36 PM

970 doesn't have a HT FSB. The FSB is a proprietary IBM spec.

Looks like it'll be time to buy a new PowerMac come Feb/Mar of next year. At that point I would expect x800 and 6800 series graphics card prices to fall and perhaps even come standard. I bet we also see FireGL class cards as BTO options. I'm sure we'll see the move to PCI-E graphics cards and HyperTransport 2.0. Here's my wish list for the new lineup:

ULTIMATE:
3.0 GHz Dual Core
1.5 GHz HyperTransport 2.0 FSB
PCI-E / 256mb ATI x800 Pro or nVidia 6800GT
250 GB SATA HD
$2999

FASTER:
2.8 GHz Dual Core
1.4 GHz HyperTransport 2.0 FSB
PCI-E / 128mb ATI x600 Pro or nVidia 6600
160 GB SATA HD
$2499

FASTER:
2.5 GHz Dual Core
1.25 GHz HyperTransport 2.0 FSB
PCI-E / 128mb ATI x600 Pro or nVidia 6600
160 GB SATA HD
$1999

FAST (based on existing architecture?):
2.0 GHz Single CPU
1.0 GHz HyperTransport 1.0 FSB
AGP 8x / 128mb ATI 9800
80 GB SATA HD
$1499

Rincewind42

Nov 15, 2004, 01:39 PM

I see this used a lot. The "64-bit is useless" arguments. They, themselves, are worthless. One side of the coin: There are PLENTY of cases where it's useful, and they apply to a lot of Mac users. Scientific and highly-precise mathematic calculations (education), video and graphic manipulation, and software.

Most users don't do scientific or highly precise mathematic calculation. And outside of super-computing operations, most educational research doesn't require it either. Heck, much of the research I've seen in education runs on (or could run on) old Dell PIIs. But then it isn't high powered stuff either :).

As for video/graphic manipulation, the size of the files means that you only get a performance boost if they stay in memory, which is much more likely if you have a 64-bit platform. But the processing itself isn't as highly affected as the possibility of keeping that data in memory for processing. Low to Mid-level editing will use 8 or 16-bit integer channels, and high-end editing will use 32-bit floating point channels -- both data types that can be highly optimized with Altivec. Leaving you again, with only 64-bit pointers as your aid. So beyond large memory spaces, you don't get anything else from 64-bit processing.

Basically, at this point in time there aren't a large number of tasks that work much more efficiently with 64-bit integers vs smaller integers. And large memory spaces aren't a particularly great optimization tool because even with the faster busses of the 970, access to memory is still much slower than the CPU.

The other side of the coin: Aside from Intel, the 64-bit processors have been complete redesigns, so their legacy performance is typically a full generation ahead of the processors they are replacing. The AMD64 processors and the 970 are both in this category of offering excellent performance in legacy applications either through higher per-clock efficiency OR through better speed scaling due to their architecture.

I'm not entirely certain what changes x86-64 bring, but what I have heard is that it generally reduces much of the legacy annoyance with coding for x86. Whereas, with PowerPC 64-bit was a part of the original specification. Therefore, a 64-bit version of PowerPC merely offers a few instructions specific to 64-bit integers and the larger memory spaces. The performance that the 970 brings to the table is a result of it's architecture, not of the fact that it is a 64-bit PowerPC. Just look at the performance gains that so many 32-bit applications gain when run on a G5 as opposed to a G4.

MacSA

Nov 15, 2004, 01:42 PM

Sun Baked

Nov 15, 2004, 01:47 PM

From my understanding of the article, the 970 GX SP expected in Q1 2005 is not the same as the low-power 970 IBM is working on for the PowerBook (which, according toThinkSecret, is in development at 1.6-1.8 GHz). However, it looks promising for 3 GHz Power Macs at WWDC 2005, exactly one year late, according the Steve's initial promise. Maybe even a Rev B iMac G5, depending on heat output.Bingo, to us it'll look like a bigger L2 cache FX -- with no low power variant.

There is a design/production problem keeping both the low power/high MHz versions at bay.

Which means a rework of the chip or process change to get those things working well.

The question remains, will IBM do it for the PPC970s, or bring on the Power5-UL which is supposed to include advanced power saving features along with the addition of low-k (which may be needed for low power at 90nm) features.

Dr. Dastardly

Nov 15, 2004, 01:58 PM

Finally something decent to rumor about instead of iPod, iPod, sock, iPod, flash, iPod. :rolleyes:

Frobozz

Nov 15, 2004, 01:59 PM

970 doesn't have a HT FSB. The FSB is a proprietary IBM spec.

The system controller has a HyperTransport bus to the I/O and PCI-X controllers. The dual independant FSB's go into the system controller. HyperTransport 2.0 is widely rumored to be used as the technology for most of the remaining interconnects. Specifically, with a dual core CPU setup it can be used unaltered as the FSB.

deputy_doofy

Nov 15, 2004, 02:02 PM

Finally something decent to rumor about instead of iPod, iPod, sock, iPod, flash, iPod. :rolleyes:

I hate to say it, but I agree. I'm beyond bored with iPod rumors. Admittedly, I need to buy a new iPod since I did sell my 1g 10gig about a month ago. However, I want to hear more G5/dual-core G4 news. I have to update my laptop next year, after all. The 2 year mark is coming. :D

~Shard~

Nov 15, 2004, 02:08 PM

Wow, great news, and very promising for the PowerMac, PowerBook and iMac lines! (Probably just the former two for starters...) I was wondering what the next G5 news would be, and how Apple would improve on the chip, and this looks like it might be it! As for a G5 PowerBook, I stand by my claim that is it still a ways off... Great news though, I'm eager to hear more!

AmigoMac

Nov 15, 2004, 02:09 PM

Come on Apple! Show me something I can wet myself over!!

:p :p :p ... iPee ...

Back on topic: That will make Tiger awesome, the powermac was at this point, before the G5 (more or less, I'm not sure), and the Powerbook was where my iBook is now, it doesn't look that outdated at all :) ...
I will save the $129 of tiger, and will get it with my 13" PB G5 ;)

Frobozz

Nov 15, 2004, 02:10 PM

As tired as some of you are of me bitching about this, the fact remains that the PowerBook is EXACTLY where the PowerMac was before its transition to the G5 and no amount of hemming and hawing about how pretty it is, how good the OS is, how stable the system is, or how current the other components are will change the fact that the PowerBook is dieing when it comes to competition with the PC world.

You're right. We are tired of it. :-) However, I think it's a hard sell to say the PB G4 1.5 GHz is slower than the vast majority of PC laptops. I'm not talking desktop replacement P4 based "luggables" that are $3,500-$4,500+, either. I know a lot of people with PC laptops and most agree the Mac is more compelling and cost effective. It's also faster for the things they do, and if the interface isn't slow then it doesn't matter to most people. Ergonomics, efficiency, and portability are higher factors.

Sure, more power is always good but the performance disparity in a laptop (versus a desktop) is not a major selling point for all people. After all-- I'm not buying a laptop to do high end rendering weather it be 3D or 2D. A 1.5 GHz G4 is a pretty decent chip for most everything else. I could see your arguement being more relevant to desktop replacement consumers. Perhaps this is you?

Personally, my friend's 1.5GHz Powerbook is ideal as a second machine. I would get one if I had more need... but for me, at least, my primary machine must be a desktop anyway.

Frobozz

Nov 15, 2004, 02:14 PM

I hate to say it, but I agree. I'm beyond bored with iPod rumors. Admittedly, I need to buy a new iPod since I did sell my 1g 10gig about a month ago. However, I want to hear more G5/dual-core G4 news. I have to update my laptop next year, after all. The 2 year mark is coming. :D

I risk being flamed here... but how about the fact that no new rumors come out of Macrumors.com anymore. They're always from other sources and quoted here. Gone are the days when Macrumors was the one breaking the stories ...

It's too bad, too. It took me a long time to hit the 500+ post mark so I could have my sweet Avatar.

Sun Baked

Nov 15, 2004, 02:16 PM

The system controller has a HyperTransport bus to the I/O and PCI-X controllers. The dual independant FSB's go into the system controller. HyperTransport 2.0 is widely rumored to be used as the technology for most of the remaining interconnects. Specifically, with a dual core CPU setup it can be used unaltered as the FSB.The FSB is a variant of IBMs elastic I/O -- which turns out to be quite a power hog.

Everything in the Southbridge (KeyLargo2/K2 and Shasta) is strung together with a PCI bus.

As you said the HT bus is just an interconnect between the U3, HT Tunnel and the Southbridge chips.

Most likely you'll find some sort of IBM bus technology inside the Memory Controller (if Apple used the IBM Blue Logic portfolio.)

MacSA

Nov 15, 2004, 02:17 PM

MacSA

Nov 15, 2004, 02:19 PM

I risk being flamed here... but how about the fact that no new rumors come out of Macrumors.com anymore. They're always from other sources and quoted here. Gone are the days when Macrumors was the one breaking the stories ...

This news has been on ThnkSecret since November 12th.

Sun Baked

Nov 15, 2004, 02:24 PM

What could this mean for future revisions of the eMac? Could some of this hardware make it's way into any future revisions - they still haven't released any upgrade to the eMac and it's now way past it's average update cycle time.Actually the eMac came out with an all new architecture during the last update...

So it's not due for an architecture change for quite awhile now.

Plus the speed bumps didn't exactly come quick for the education class units.

Zigster

Nov 15, 2004, 02:30 PM

<------ soon to be switcher waiting patiently for new G5 emac.

myapplseedshurt

Nov 15, 2004, 02:46 PM

but that's not how it's going to work. ;) :cool:

The system controller has a HyperTransport bus to the I/O and PCI-X controllers. The dual independant FSB's go into the system controller. HyperTransport 2.0 is widely rumored to be used as the technology for most of the remaining interconnects. Specifically, with a dual core CPU setup it can be used unaltered as the FSB.

AmigoMac

Nov 15, 2004, 02:53 PM

<------ soon to be switcher waiting patiently for new G5 emac.

those will be the longest 3 years you will ever have.... :eek: :p

TorbX

Nov 15, 2004, 03:01 PM

Sorry if I'm off topic, but why is a PB with 13" the magic number? Whats wrong with 12"?

virividox

Nov 15, 2004, 03:07 PM

now that its nearing the 3 ghz and intel has stopped increasing clock speeds and also low power, hmmm looks like machines are gonna start becoming equal :D

Eric_Z

Nov 15, 2004, 03:07 PM

Sorry if I'm off topic, but why is a PB with 13" the magic number? Whats wrong with 12"?

The 13" that they are talking/fantasizing about would be wide screen.

quagmire

Nov 15, 2004, 03:07 PM

To end the stinking dual core G4 Pbook by January or whenever the next pbook revision is. Freescale sampled it in October. It will most likely ship around WWDC-Paris time. So unless you want to have the PC world gain more ground in the notebook world by having 1.5 Ghz G4 for over a year that is fine for you. The PPC 7448 won't be sampled intill January. It will most likely start being in production between Paris '05 to MWSF '06.

Eric_Z

Nov 15, 2004, 03:18 PM

But to get back on topic, it seems like a PB G5 becomes more and more likely, unfortunately IMO. Since the 8641D and 8641 isn't due untill H1-06 :-/

And please, please, pretty please with shugar on top IBM 1) "Fix" the poxy integer preformance in this iteration of the 970 and 2) Add an integrated memory controller, the preformance of the current one is far far from stellar.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Oh and if the multicore version comes out in something that resembles a reasonable time frame Apple would IMO have room in there lineup for another model.

Think:

Powermac: SLI PCIe, Dual dualcores, 4(hopefully more)HD bays + RAID (0,1,0+1,10,5), 2 optical drives

Cube/shuttlemac: Single PCIe slot single dualcore, 2HD bays(Raid 0,1), 1 optical drive

iMac: 970GX (you trade preformance/expandabillety for the nifty formfactor/screen), 1HD, 1 optical

eMac: 7448, 1 HD, 1 optical

macuser05

Nov 15, 2004, 03:25 PM

At this point Intel's Pentium M is running at 90nm 2Ghz chip , 400Mhz FSB, and a 2MB L2 cache. which translates into just about any Dothan Pentium M kicking the the living crap out of any PowerBook out there.

I think you need to check some things. I just did a marathon music re-encoding session with the following machines:

1) iMac G4/800 superdrive
2) iBook G3/800
3) IBM A31p (Pee4, 2Ghz)
4) IBM T42 (Centrinwho 1.7)
5) AMD Duron 700

Ripping and encoding to AAC @ 224k the speed results were:
1) T42 ~ 8-11x
2) A32 ~ 7-8x
3) iMac - 5-6x
4) iBook 5-6x
5) Duron - ~ 2-3x

All laptops were running off AC power.

However, I wonder what the iMac could have done if it had a better CD reader (I don't think the Superdrive is all that fast ripping). And the shocker was the iBook, which really held its own, despite being a G3....

Now, I would imagine a Powerbook at almost 2x the clockspeed of these Macs with a better memory architecture and bus (both are @ 100 mhz) would be able to come darn close to the Centrinwho laptop (sorry, I hate Intel CPUs). The shocker was the Duron, which I would have thought would have had a better showing as AMD's FPU's and Integer performance on the Athlon series was AWESOME.

So, I would think the Powerbooks should come darn close to a new Peee-M CPU, especially in their current form. Needless to say, I was not at all impressed with the Pee4 laptop. Only confirms what a POS the P4 really is, especially when an 800Mhz CPU is right on its heels...

dawntreader

Nov 15, 2004, 03:27 PM

Rincewind42

Nov 15, 2004, 03:29 PM

And please, please, pretty please with shugar on top IBM 1) "Fix" the poxy integer preformance in this iteration of the 970

What is wrong with the integer performance of the 970? Seems to me that it fairs pretty well, in general on par with a P4 that has a 50% clock speed and the P4 is generally considered as one of the fastest integer work horses (I'm recalling from when the 2 Ghz G5 was introduced, I would assume that the 2.5 Ghz G5 beats the fastest P4 most of the time on integer).

jj2003

Nov 15, 2004, 03:29 PM

Low Power 3Ghz 970 variant sometime during the first Quarter of 05.... More Like 2nd Quarter of 05 for sure considering Apple and IBM still can't even catch up with 2.5Ghz 970FX.

I would not make too long going assumptions on two different processors.

It should be noted that Apple Predicted during it's last Conference Calls that they would still be playing catchup with 2.5Ghz supplies well into quarter 1 of 2005.

Yes, the Q1/05 is now, Apple tends to talk about financial quoarters in their Conference Calls, and Apple's financial quarters are not the same as calendar quarters.

jj2003

Nov 15, 2004, 03:32 PM

However, I wonder what the iMac could have done if it had a better CD reader (I don't think the Superdrive is all that fast ripping).

He he, let's do a CPU benchmark and not remove the biggest bottleneck, CD reader.. :)

AirUncleP

Nov 15, 2004, 03:38 PM

Finally something decent to rumor about instead of iPod, iPod, sock, iPod, flash, iPod. :rolleyes:

Here.Here........by the way, What's up with the iPod Micro?

bentmywookie

Nov 15, 2004, 03:48 PM

I've heard from a friend of a friend that works at Apple (sounds crazy I know) that the new PB will be carbon fiber. He had no other details. This sounds quite possible to me.

This simply adds fuel to that fire, but that was going to be my guess for the next case - simply because it follows the line of materials being used for bikes (as you move up the chain).

JOD8FY

Nov 15, 2004, 03:52 PM

I also think that the new PB's could have a carbon fiber case.

Aside from that, this news sounds great. Can't wait to see how it turns out.

JOD8FY

mfacey

Nov 15, 2004, 04:29 PM

I also think that the new PB's could have a carbon fiber case.

Aside from that, this news sounds great. Can't wait to see how it turns out.

JOD8FY

Carbon Fiber sounds awesome. It'll definitely keep up the jaw dropping wow factor that even my busted up old titanium still has.

I just hope and pray they won't paint it or cover it with something. I think seeing the carbon fibre weave would look seriously cool! Plus if they did they might fall into the crappy paint problem they had with the titanium.

AmigoMac

Nov 15, 2004, 04:29 PM

I've heard from a friend of a friend that works at Apple (sounds crazy I know) that the new PB will be carbon fiber. He had no other details. This sounds quite possible to me.

I do hope you're right, I will wait for the PB and then I'll order the mountain bike... they have to match ;), it's a pretty logical step as the theory of the 13" PB instead of the 12" ...

Eric_Z

Nov 15, 2004, 04:30 PM

What is wrong with the integer performance of the 970? Seems to me that it fairs pretty well, in general on par with a P4 that has a 50% clock speed and the P4 is generally considered as one of the fastest integer work horses (I'm recalling from when the 2 Ghz G5 was introduced, I would assume that the 2.5 Ghz G5 beats the fastest P4 most of the time on integer).

It's got a two cykle latency wich hits small simple integer code hard (ie most integer code).

maxvamp

Nov 15, 2004, 04:38 PM

The next powerbook will actually be made from the same material as the American Stealth Fighter and Stealth Bomber...

How do I know you ask?

Well, I got a pre-released prototype, and was playing with it for a couple of days. Very fast and blew my socks off! Unfortunatly, I set it down, and now I can't find it...

Anyone seen my Stealth PowerBook?

Max.

GonzoRob

Nov 15, 2004, 04:44 PM

Sun Baked

Nov 15, 2004, 04:51 PM

IBM's Latest 2.5GHz PPC970FX Info (http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=85979)

_Today, a functional limitation exists in the 90-nm design, preventing operation below 1.0 V_. This raises the lower edge of the power envelope from 0.8 to 1.0 V and the lower power line in our example to 27 and 19 W for f/2 and f/4, respectively. _At the same time, the 1.3-V application condition can only be applied to products with <50 000 power-on-hours (POHs)_. To accommodate the reliability requirements of a 100 000-POH system, the upper voltage must be limited to 1.2 V .Wasn't a simple errata to be fixed in the next mask like quite a few of the G4 problems we had with voltage which would affect specific sections of the G4 like a L3 cache controller with certain DDR RAM...

SiliconAddict

Nov 15, 2004, 05:09 PM

Now, I would imagine a Powerbook at almost 2x the clockspeed of these Macs with a better memory architecture and bus (both are @ 100 mhz) would be able to come darn close to the Centrinwho laptop (sorry, I hate Intel CPUs). The shocker was the Duron, which I would have thought would have had a better showing as AMD's FPU's and Integer performance on the Athlon series was AWESOME.

So, I would think the Powerbooks should come darn close to a new Peee-M CPU, especially in their current form. Needless to say, I was not at all impressed with the Pee4 laptop. Only confirms what a POS the P4 really is, especially when an 800Mhz CPU is right on its heels...

Hehe.

You are really lame with excuses. You do realize that right? I wrote up close to a page in response explaining exactly why you are off on your extrapolations before I realized that you don’t know anything about system architecture, drive performance, etc. You post itself shows this. So why bother right.

I will say this because I think this much you can understand:

You can throw out any specs you want. The reality, something Mac users love to distort to make it look like everything is perfectly fine, is the G4 sucks flying monkey dung. This is another aspect of the G4 PowerMac that occurred prior to the migration to the G5. This rooting for the losing team mentality. I don’t play those games. If an intel CPU sucks (Like the entire desktop line.) I don’t beat around the bush. If a mobile line rocks. (Like the Pentium M.) I will sing its praise. The G5 desktop is a solid, spectacular piece of hardware. I have no issues with it because other then needing LC for the high end it’s a solid system. But I’m not in any way shape or form going to play the apology game with the PowerBook. It’s not keeping up. Period. End of story. Close the book and wait for the next novel from Apple to appear.

I’ll leave you with some pretty pictures taken last fall from www.barefeats.com a fairly credible pro Apple site.

http://www.barefeats.com/image04/al15-pc2.gif
http://www.barefeats.com/image04/al15-pc.gif

Now that was from last year. Amazing that barefeats hasn't run another comparison test since then. Maybe that's because barefeats shows that the speedbumps to 1.5Ghz shows negligible performance increases in actual CPU intensive benchamarks (They did a much better job in the GPU marks due to a new ATI card update.) Why? One word: bottleneck. Again you can only force so much data through a 167Mhz FSB.

PS How about you get past the kindergarten speak and actually join the adults on the forum.

plinkoman

Nov 15, 2004, 05:25 PM

is all this talk of a 13" pb just wishfull thinking, or is there an actual chance of there being one? to me it sounds like it'd just be more expensive for apple, they'd have to design a new display, and would then have to produce it whereas now they already have the 12" and its shared with the ibook thus less production costs. i would certainly love a 13" display though...

maxvamp

Nov 15, 2004, 05:40 PM

you're kidding about actually playing with one right ?

Yes....tongue in cheek...

Max.

Windowlicker

Nov 15, 2004, 05:49 PM

This sounds quite promising.. I'm still very critical about the PBG5 though.

tortoise

Nov 15, 2004, 06:43 PM

If we do see 3Ghz in the new year, I hope we see some faster RAM too - PC3200 is starting to get a bit long in the tooth.

The current G5s don't really use the memory they currently have. Opterons get half the latency (~65ns vs ~130ns) and almost twice the real-world bandwidth (~5.5 vs ~3.0 GB/s) to RAM with the exact same memory sticks. In other words, the problem is architectural and short of an overhaul of the memory controller subsystem you will not see much improvement in G5 memory performance even if they supported faster RAM sticks. This remains the Achilles Heel of the PPC970 series processors.

rdowns

Nov 15, 2004, 07:22 PM

Finally something decent to rumor about instead of iPod, iPod, sock, iPod, flash, iPod. :rolleyes:

Just wait until they introduce the new PBs with the PB sweaters.

Roller

Nov 15, 2004, 07:35 PM

I also think that the new PB's could have a carbon fiber case.

JOD8FY

Anything would be an improvement over the Ti and Al PowerBooks, which look great until you actually use them. My 5-year-old Lombard held up better than my year-old Albook.

Rincewind42

Nov 15, 2004, 07:53 PM

The current G5s don't really use the memory they currently have. Opterons get half the latency (~65ns vs ~130ns) and almost twice the real-world bandwidth (~5.5 vs ~3.0 GB/s) to RAM with the exact same memory sticks. In other words, the problem is architectural and short of an overhaul of the memory controller subsystem you will not see much improvement in G5 memory performance even if they supported faster RAM sticks. This remains the Achilles Heel of the PPC970 series processors.

Hmm... this is probably due to the dual uni-directional busses on the G5. The 2.5 Ghz machines with 1.25 Ghz busses would probably top out around 4.4 GB/s and around 4 GB/s real world (in each direction, if the RAM/controller supported it). I would suspect the controller before the CPU for this though. But if we hit 3 Ghz, then the CPU's bus would top out over 5 GB/s in each direction. This is definitely going to make the RAM chips feel slow. Opteron can probably pull off better performance because it uses a bi-directional bus, but outside of benchmarking that has it's own inefficiencies.

Rincewind42

Nov 15, 2004, 08:03 PM

It's got a two cycle latency wich hits small simple integer code hard (ie most integer code).

How do you come to this conclusion? For the most part, the 970 like most other CPUs executes simply integer instructions in one cycle. Where you get a two cycle latency is if the instructions are dependent, but the compiler or software writer can usually produce code that avoids the latency (or at least masks it). Obviously, code that was optimized for non-970 PowerPCs may have code sequences that expose this issue, but code optimized specifically for the 970 should be fine.

jouster

Nov 15, 2004, 08:06 PM

Jesus, I hate how I have to do this every time the G5 is talked about...

Then don't do it. Save yourself the effort if it annoys you so much.

themacman

Nov 15, 2004, 08:47 PM

Ive been talking bout these since i joined mac rumors!! Yea

Dr. No

Nov 15, 2004, 09:26 PM

Is it very likely that we will see a new G5 desktop in March? :confused:

AidenShaw

Nov 15, 2004, 09:33 PM

Then don't do it. Save yourself the effort if it annoys you so much.

No, let him do it. It saves me the effort of pulling out my "64-bit myth" soapbox! :)

Prom1

Nov 15, 2004, 09:57 PM

Jesus, I hate how I have to do this every time the G5 is talked about...

Some common misconceptions and outright lies:

1) There is no inherent performance increase from 64-bit processors, unless you are doing one of a tiny handful of very specialized tasks. If you use a lot of very highly detailed and demanding math with enormous integers that require a 64-bit length, you will get speed improvements. If you're using more than 4GB of RAM on a single task, you will get some improvement. For prety much everything else, being coded in 64-bit is a slowdown.

2) The system itself is already multithreaded in OS X, and many of the professional applications that people whine about are also SMP-aware and benefit from having more than one processor. For them, a faster dual-core 32-bit processor is far more likely to provide performance in a portable, since the likelihood of having more than 4GB of RAM in that form factor is next to nothing at the moment. In addition, the 8461D will have dual 128-bit double precisions AltiVec units, 2MB of interleaved and sharable cache, and an on-die memory controller. Even at 1.5-1.8ghz, it will probably demolish anything in the single processor portable market for getting actual work done. Anything, including AntaresSP, unless IBM has some kind of miracle surprise up their sleeve.

3) The 7448 part is pin-compatible with current PowerBooks and goes to 1.8ghz, giving an intermediate step for Apple while a solid tapeout and redesign is made for next-generation technologies. If they move to the 8461D, this is necessary and inevitable, while the AntaresSP is comparatively similar to the older motherboards - north and southbridges, AGP bus, PCI bus, and so on. You could cut out a lot of the complexity of the motherboards with the 8461 by killing the southbridge chip, moving peripherals to the PCI-Express bus (which adds future compatibility for graphics and data paths), and using DDR2 memory for reasons of cooling and power consumption. Unlike Antares, that's all on the chip and needs no motherboard space for controllers.

--
.....

OK 1st question "There is no inherent performance increase from 64-bit processors, unless you are doing one of a tiny handful of very specialized tasks"
--->please explain to us little people why the computer & database industry years ago went onto 64-bit chips? I doubt it was for more memory alone; I believe that ALL data base apps (from SAP, Oracle, PeopleSoft, M$, MySQL) benefit immensely when hosting databases and serving up dynamic intranets/internets for thousands or millions of hits during a day or even hundreds of requests simultaneously. Am I wrong on this??

2nd question, what chip is the "8461D" that you mentioned above?? I have no idea what that is. Is it Freescales future solution or the PPC unions solution via IBM? Or is it even a cpu for Apple at all??

Eliminating the Northbridge to memory card controller being external sounds promising.

I side question >> I've tried to research on ArsTechnica.com whether or not the Opteron64bit/Athlon64 cpu's if they TRUELY are 64 bits or just EMULATE 64-bit processing via code extensions.???

thanks for the knowledge and insight but a good thread or even clarity in lamens terms with real-world examples of applications current & setups in use would be helpful for us , well you know cpu hoodlums.

cheers.

PS: carbon-based Powerbook (sweeet rumor there, bring us back to the sweet design of the Pismo)

budugu

Nov 15, 2004, 10:18 PM

OK 1st question "There is no inherent performance increase from 64-bit processors, unless you are doing one of a tiny handful of very specialized tasks"
--->please explain to us little people why the computer & database industry years ago went onto 64-bit chips? I doubt it was for more memory alone; I believe that ALL data base apps (from SAP, Oracle, PeopleSoft, M$, MySQL) benefit immensely when hosting databases and serving up dynamic intranets/internets for thousands or millions of hits during a day or even hundreds of requests simultaneously. Am I wrong on this??

You answered it yourself ... they went 64 because thousands of millions of hits require 64! how many keyboard hits do you expect on a day on your PC or mac?

2nd question, what chip is the "8461D" that you mentioned above?? I have no idea what that is. Is it Freescales future solution or the PPC unions solution via IBM? Or is it even a cpu for Apple at all??

It is a dual core G4 with freescale is developing. Frescale and IBM have nothing to do with one another. IBM developed G5 on their way to POWER5 which is will be their main server processor (now power4). Freescale and IBM make chips for a lot of stuff! take gamecube/ps2, embedded systems etc. Apple used few solutions modified. but a Dual core G4 is primarily for apple or power hungry hdware like gamestations that use PPC. G4 is one of the most widely used embedded processor.

I side question >> I've tried to research on ArsTechnica.com whether or not the Opteron64bit/Athlon64 cpu's if they TRUELY are 64 bits or just EMULATE 64-bit processing via code extensions.???

I think (read as: i read some where!!) Opteron is a 64 bit processor which can emulate or transcode at a much native hardware level a 32 bit instruction!

budugu

Nov 15, 2004, 10:29 PM

"Opteron is the first ever x86, 64-bit processor that can also run 32-bit programs."

MORE OVER

The advent of 64-bit computing only means that the transistors can manipulate binary numbers that are 64-bits wide, compared to 32-bits wide, or even 16-bits using IBM's PC and AT machines with Intel's 8088 processors that were sold in the 1980s.

Using binary notation, transistors create binary information depending on whether a transistor receives electrical current or not. A `1' designates that the transistor has received current, a `0' means that it has not. In binary notation, a 10 represents a 2, 100 represents a 4, 1010 represents a 10, and so on. Devices based on 16-bit processing, thus, involve binary numbers with 16 places, compared with 64 places for 64-bit devices.

64-bit computing, in fact, has been pervasive in the server community for years, such as with RISC processors by Sun. It has just taken that long for the x86 environment community to agree that the timing was right. The technology largely involves no more than adding more transistors to accommodate the additional bits -- a 64-bit processor represents over 2,000 additional registers and 25,000 additional transistors.

Mr. Anderson

Nov 15, 2004, 10:33 PM

Don't know if this has been discussed, but if its low power 3GHz - that mean they're going to get rid of the water cooling?

D

macuser05

Nov 15, 2004, 10:36 PM

You are really lame with excuses. You do realize that right? I wrote up close to a page in response explaining exactly why you are off on your extrapolations before I realized that you don’t know anything about system architecture, drive performance, etc. You post itself shows this. So why bother right.

Actually, you are quite wrong. You see, before I got a Mac I was a diehard PC geek. Used to read all the hardware sites every day. Could rattle off the differences between Athlon, P3, P4, K6, etc. And I still follow them quite much as I make my living fixing them, building and reccomending systems, etc.

I know quite a lot about system architecture. Problem is, little of it matters for day to day operations of most people. The Quad-pumped 133-Mhz P4 bus benefits little when all you're doing is surfing the net, writing in Word, and listening to an MP3 in iTunes. Same with HyperThreading. These things help with memory and CPU intensive operations (Games, hardcore math operations, 3d modelling, etc.), but have little to no effect on day to day operations. I remember when the P4 came out with it's 400 Mhz (Quad 100 Mhz) bus, it was supposed to kill the Athlon on it's dual 100 Mhz bus (or was it dual 133).... It didn't even come close.

I've had many systems in my day, and all from the 500 Mhz P3 I had to the present 2Ghz P4 have seemed about the same on day to day tasks. Just load 'em up with RAM and a fast disk and I'm happy.

You can throw out any specs you want. The reality, something Mac users love to distort to make it look like everything is perfectly fine, is the G4 sucks flying monkey dung. This is another aspect of the G4 PowerMac that occurred prior to the migration to the G5. This rooting for the losing team mentality. I don’t play those games. If an intel CPU sucks (Like the entire desktop line.) I don’t beat around the bush. If a mobile line rocks. (Like the Pentium M.) I will sing its praise.

Where did I throw out specs? Just pointing out my observations with 5 different computers over the weekend. On a fairly standard operation using the exact same software across platforms. I'm sure my test would cook on a G5 or an AMD64 machine, but none were available to me.

The iMac/800 was never really a top of the line G4, and the iBook G3 was, well, a budget machine. I found it interesting that they kept pace with a P4 @ 2Ghz and even Intel's newest and latest Centrino. I was really expecting them to tank, especially given the lack of FSB speed on the G3/G4....

But I’m not in any way shape or form going to play the apology game with the PowerBook. It’s not keeping up. Period. End of story. Close the book and wait for the next novel from Apple to appear.

Again, on most real world tasks you'd be hard pressed to tell the difference. I know I can't - each feels about the same for me. Now, if you're doing 3d modelling or gaming, a laptop really isn't for you (on either platform)

PS How about you get past the kindergarten speak and actually join the adults on the forum.

If you're a sampling of the "adults", I'll stay in kindergarden. Or with the real adults, thank you. :rolleyes:

maxvamp

Nov 15, 2004, 10:39 PM

Don't know if this has been discussed, but if its low power 3GHz - that mean they're going to get rid of the water cooling?

Naw!! They will just replace it with 64-bit kool-aid.

Max.

macuser05

Nov 15, 2004, 10:46 PM

He he, let's do a CPU benchmark and not remove the biggest bottleneck, CD reader.. :)

That would have been great, but it was interesting to see the results, nontheless. I was thinking that the Mac would not be much faster than the Duron (the Mac had a 100Mhz speed advantage, but a bus speed disadvantage (Duron is duble-pumped 100Mhz). The actual shocker was that the Duron was so slow - they were awesome CPU's in their day and I was ripping on a decent CD burner (16x10x40x) and CD-ROM (52x LG), neither of which made a difference.

The fact that both G3 and G4 Macs at 800 Mhz kept pace with a 2Ghz P4 was a huge shock to me, especially given the fact that both IBM laptops had relatively recent CD drives.

But a raw CPU test would be of little value to the general population, whose computer work is mainly I/O limited (hard drive, Internet, CD, etc.)...

AidenShaw

Nov 15, 2004, 10:51 PM

;) --->please explain to us little people why the computer & database industry years ago went onto 64-bit chips? I doubt it was for more memory alone; I believe that ALL data base apps (from SAP, Oracle, PeopleSoft, M$, MySQL) benefit immensely when hosting databases and serving up dynamic intranets/internets for thousands or millions of hits during a day or even hundreds of requests simultaneously. Am I wrong on this??

Your observations are correct, but your conclusion is wrong.

Databases are the big "killer app" for 64-bit because large databases benefit tremendously from keeping more than 4 GiB of the database cached in RAM.

It's for memory alone.

The 32-way IBM Power4+ system that did over a million transactions per minute on TPC-C had 1 TiB of RAM (http://www.tpc.org/tpcc/results/tpcc_result_detail.asp?id=104021701).

You don't even need 64-bit for big memory on a system - many 32-bit Xeon systems support more than 4 GiB, in fact up to 64 GiB on a single Intel 32-bit server. The problem is, however, that no single task can easily use more than 4 GiB.

32-bit systems can easily handle 64-bit integer arithmetic - they're just a little bit slower at it than a 64-bit CPU, since the compilers use pairs of 32-bit operations to synthesize 64-bit integer operations. Almost all of the time, this is good enough, since few programs *depend* on 64-bit integers in their main algorithms.

AidenShaw

Nov 15, 2004, 11:01 PM

im confused..dont pc's have 64bit laptops out? the powerbook is loosing fanfare do to the ibook

Quite a few of them already, even a new one that hit the news today:

Acer revs new Ferrari notebook (http://news.com.com/Acer+revs+new+Ferrari+notebook/2100-1044_3-5453161.html)

http://global.acer.com/products/notebook/images/icon_fr3400_pic01.gif

http://global.acer.com/products/notebook/fr3400.htm

Hmmm, and it's lighter than a 17" PB....

Unfortunately, since it tops out at 2 GiB of RAM the "64-bit myth" is what they're marketing!! (Although, unlike the PPC970, an Opteron or Nocoma is faster when compiled for 64-bit vs. 32-bit - so they are selling the speed of the 64-bit instruction set, even though they aren't using 64-bit memory.)

sankara

Nov 16, 2004, 12:01 AM

Hmmm, and it's lighter than a 17" PB....

and it's just a 15" Display... a lot havier than 15.2" PB. :)

MacinDoc

Nov 16, 2004, 12:12 AM

Don't know if this has been discussed, but if its low power 3GHz - that mean they're going to get rid of the water cooling?

D
I still think the 3 GHz chip and the low power chip are 2 different chips (the low power being 1.6-1.8 GHz for PowerBooks). With the extra L2 cache, the 3 GHz 970 GX will probably still put out as much heat as the 2.5 GHz 970 FX.

sjl

Nov 16, 2004, 12:40 AM

(Although, unlike the PPC970, an Opteron or Nocoma is faster when compiled for 64-bit vs. 32-bit - so they are selling the speed of the 64-bit instruction set, even though they aren't using 64-bit memory.)

And here's a bit more detail on that. Your base x86 CPU (going back to the days of the 8086 and 8088) is a 16 bit CISC (complex instruction set computing) CPU. In comparison, the Motorola 68000 is a RISC CPU (I think it's 16 bit, but I could be wrong; my memory on that CPU's a bit hazy.) Modern day CPUs combine the "best" features of both CISC and RISC, but it's safe to call x86 a CISC descendant, and PowerPC a RISC descendant.

For various reasons (handwave, handwave), RISC CPUs had a lot more registers than CISC CPUs. x86 has four general data registers, four segment registers, and four addressing registers -- all 16 bits in size. The four general data registers could be split into eight 8 bit registers if you were so inclined. The move to the 386 introduced two more segment registers, and extended the twelve original registers to thirty two bits; since then, it's remained pretty much unchanged. Net result: your typical compiler has four registers it can rely on; maybe up to eleven if it's really careful about the way it does things, but that's really pushing things, and I doubt that gcc (for example) would play around like that.

In comparison, PowerPC has thirty-two general purpose registers, not counting a bunch of registers that are only accessible in supervisor (roughly equal to kernel) mode. More handwaving ensues (I haven't looked at IBM's PDF in depth. :D)

Now, a brief digression. There are a bunch of places from whence data can be sourced. In order, from slowest to fastest, you have your hard drive (or floppy, or CD-ROM); main memory; level three cache (if present); level two cache; and level one cache. If a CPU needs data, it will load it from one of those sources, and into a spare register. If it doesn't have a spare register, it will push a register's data out to level one cache (and from there to main memory) to free it up. (Well, the compiler will; again, handwaving ensues.) In other words: if you need data, and it's already in the register, you save a lot of time, because you don't need to pull it from cache, or, heaven forbid, main (SLOW! at least relative to the CPU) memory.

So let's suppose you have a function that does something. In the course of doing this something, it needs to manipulate some dozen pieces of data. On x86, it'll be constantly swapping data in and out of memory so it can play around with the registers -- kinda like if you're trying to correlate several documents, but only have room for two on your desk at once. On PowerPC, on the other hand, it can load the bits of data into the general purpose registers once, play around with them to its heart's content, and flush the end result out to memory at the end. Net result: you lose a bunch of memory accesses, and everything's a lot faster.

How does this tie in with x86-64? Well, AMD took the basic registers -- all fourteen of them -- and extended them to 64 bit. They also introduced another eight compiler-accessible registers. All of a sudden, provided you target the opcodes that provide those registers, you've got a lot less data shuffling going on, and you don't need so many memory accesses. (Compiler-accessible refers to the fact that what the compiler can see and manipulate is a very different beast to what's actually on the CPU. Again, more handwaving.)

So. If you compile x86 code, you can compile it in 32 bit mode (presumably to be compatible with the P3, P4, etc.), and have four data registers; or you can compile in a mode that's only compatible with the 64 bit CPUs, and have twelve. (I don't know if the 32 bit mode has been extended to include the new registers, or not. I'm guessing not, but I won't swear to it. IMO, it should have been, but I wasn't involved in the design. :D) Therein lies the reason (or a very large part of it) for the speed boost when you compile code for x86-64 over x86-32: the extra registers. Yes, you lose out on the amount of data you're shuffling around -- 64 bits vs 32 bits, you've got a lot more data coming over the memory bus -- but you gain because you cut the amount of data shuffling you need to get the work done. The latter outweighs the former in the vast majority of cases.

maya

Nov 16, 2004, 12:53 AM

WoW, this is good news all this means is that maybe just maybe the PM will not need a liquid cooled CPU at 2.5 GHz ---> onwards since it consumes less power and delivers the same performance. This is also good news for the iMac G5 since it soon advance to in the REV B version to:

G5 1.8GHz 20 inch

G5 2.0GHz 20 inch

G5 2.0GHz 23 inch

Why do I believe the iMac G5 will have a 23 inch lcd screen since with the iMac G4 there was *added* dead weight to the base and with this new design they can accommodate a 23 inch lcd at no added dead weight.

Since the 17 inch has been dropped from the Pro Cinema Display line and the iMac is considered as a Prosumer PPC with the eMac as the Consumer PPC Mac.

I am still very happy with my iMac G5 1.8 Ghz :D

Still wondering when will they release a 2Gig PC3200 DIMM unbuffered for the iMac G5 since Samsung already has developed it and would really benefit "Tiger OS" 64-bit to a minimal amount <-- maybe, maybe not. :)

-----------

Even though the iMac G5 1.8 Ghz runs at 2/3 the processor speed it is quite fast load it with ram since the SATA drive is great as well. :D

gop007

Nov 16, 2004, 01:08 AM

Blah blah blah...... Low Power 3Ghz 970 variant sometime during the first Quarter of 05.... More Like 2nd Quarter of 05 for sure considering Apple and IBM still can't even catch up with 2.5Ghz 970FX. It should be noted that Apple Predicted during it's last Conference Calls that they would still be playing catchup with 2.5Ghz supplies well into quarter 1 of 2005. Let's be realistic and hope for 3Ghz at WWDC July 2005 at the earliest. The Powerbook update seems to be imminent though as I can't see them not being updated in Jan. I'm betting it will still be using a 74XX series Freescale Variant though.

I could not agree more. You summarized it very well. Apple is making a ton of money on everything but PowerMacs. There is no need for an update for another 10 months. That is how long it might take IBM to jump to a 2.8. Powerbooks have been selling well without upgrades as well. The dual core rumors might become reality giving the PowerBook another full year before we see a G5.

Don't get too excited folks.

JRM

Nov 16, 2004, 01:11 AM

If Apple decides to release a new G5 PB in January (IF) would they possibly support 4GB of DDR2 and also have PCI Express graphics. It would seem to be a logical step as while they have rejig the architecture they may as well intergrate the latest and greatest. The reason for this is i don't see Apple releasing a Rev(B) G5 PB with such a substatial change or Rev(C) for that matter. I don't know, but it would seem that the first G5 PB whether we see it in Jan '05 or June '05 is going to have to incorporate such technologies.
(Just a thought from downunder) :)

JRM

Nov 16, 2004, 01:18 AM

Does anyone believe we will see graphics support for a 30" Display in the next PB whether they be G4 or G5's. Does anyone know of portable DDL card? I know Alienware have a 256mb 6800 in one of their laptops but i don't think that it is DDL compliant. Or will apple leave the 30" Displays to the high high end desktop users? :)

Yvan256

Nov 16, 2004, 01:29 AM

You're absolutley right, they need to announce something spectacular next year.

5th generation iPod, 250GB with a color holographic 3D display! :D

Yvan256

Nov 16, 2004, 01:37 AM

I think you need to check some things. I just did a marathon music re-encoding session with the following machines:

1) iMac G4/800 superdrive
2) iBook G3/800
3) IBM A31p (Pee4, 2Ghz)
4) IBM T42 (Centrinwho 1.7)
5) AMD Duron 700

Ripping and encoding to AAC @ 224k the speed results were:
1) T42 ~ 8-11x
2) A32 ~ 7-8x
3) iMac - 5-6x
4) iBook 5-6x
5) Duron - ~ 2-3x

All laptops were running off AC power.

However, I wonder what the iMac could have done if it had a better CD reader (I don't think the Superdrive is all that fast ripping). And the shocker was the iBook, which really held its own, despite being a G3....

Now, I would imagine a Powerbook at almost 2x the clockspeed of these Macs with a better memory architecture and bus (both are @ 100 mhz) would be able to come darn close to the Centrinwho laptop (sorry, I hate Intel CPUs). The shocker was the Duron, which I would have thought would have had a better showing as AMD's FPU's and Integer performance on the Athlon series was AWESOME.

So, I would think the Powerbooks should come darn close to a new Peee-M CPU, especially in their current form. Needless to say, I was not at all impressed with the Pee4 laptop. Only confirms what a POS the P4 really is, especially when an 800Mhz CPU is right on its heels...

Sorry to say, but your test is meaningless because you were ripping from different CD/DVD drives. Your test is not only about the CPU power.

What you should do is test the same machines again, directly from an already-dumped WAV/AIFF file. Even then it wouldn't really be a good test because iTunes on Windows could be running on some kind of emulated platform (is it *really* a native Windows application? I find the page scrolling in iTMS incredibly slow)

Of course, it would be a good iTunes test, just remove the CD ripping part of the test.

earthtoandy

Nov 16, 2004, 02:01 AM

tortoise

Nov 16, 2004, 02:05 AM

Hmm... this is probably due to the dual uni-directional busses on the G5. The 2.5 Ghz machines with 1.25 Ghz busses would probably top out around 4.4 GB/s and around 4 GB/s real world (in each direction, if the RAM/controller supported it). I would suspect the controller before the CPU for this though. But if we hit 3 Ghz, then the CPU's bus would top out over 5 GB/s in each direction.

The problem is ultimately latency. If you take the total bandwidth available and divide it by the number of cache fills possible per second given the latency constraints, you would have to fetch atypically large memory chunks to actually come anywhere close to actually using the bandwidth available. By "atypical" I mean substantially larger than what your average C/C++ program will require when it needs to fill a cache line in practice (I vaguely remember calculating it being on the order of 1-kB for the G5 to use all the bandwidth), and there are other restrictions in the cache that make this a non-starter. The much higher number of cache fills possible on the Opteron architecture in a given second means that it can fetch larger quantities of smaller objects, which in real-world code means that it actually is able to use more of its memory bandwidth -- the PPC memory objects are about the same size as Opteron objects for the same software, but the Opteron can fetch a lot more per second. Looking at my own C/C++ codes, most memory references are 40-200 bytes in size, which puts it just a bit under the edge of the sweet spot for the Opteron and an integer factor off for PPC970.

The bus speed is only loosely related to latency. IMO, latencies need to get down into the 50ns range before we'll really be able to use the bandwidth we already have. The Opterons get close, which is why their memory bandwidth is reasonably close to theoretical in practice. Giving the the PPC970 more bandwidth without improving the latency performance won't help much because all that will allow us to do is fetch the same number of even bigger objects per second, which most codes really can't use as it is. My supercomputing codes are actually bound by memory latency performance (as are most actually), and while we use the PPC for workstations, it really falls on its face performance-wise next to Opterons (which do the heavy lifting) on these codes. It takes as long for a PPC970 to access its local memory as it takes for an Opteron to fetch remote memory across the NUMA fabric. That's gotta hurt when you are trying to keep the pipelines full. Of course, if your codes are mostly CPU bound (e.g. LINPACK), memory performance matters a lot less.

I've stated before and still maintain that IBM has not put a high-end memory system into the PPC970 to differentiate it from their Power line, which looks a lot more like the Opteron system architecture.

ObTrivia: GCC 2.9x gives the best memory performance on the G5 in most benchmarks. Substantially better than both IBM XLC and GCC 3.x (which is the worst by a fair margin).

Mord

Nov 16, 2004, 05:36 AM

And here's a bit more detail on that. Your base x86 CPU (going back to the days of the 8086 and 8088) is a 16 bit CISC (complex instruction set computing) CPU. In comparison, the Motorola 68000 is a RISC CPU (I think it's 16 bit, but I could be wrong; my memory on that CPU's a bit hazy.) Modern day CPUs combine the "best" features of both CISC and RISC, but it's safe to call x86 a CISC descendant, and PowerPC a RISC descendant.

the 68000 is a cisc chip as is all 68k moto chips the first risc chip that made it's way to the mac was the ppc 601.

Eric_Z

Nov 16, 2004, 06:25 AM

How do you come to this conclusion? For the most part, the 970 like most other CPUs executes simply integer instructions in one cycle. Where you get a two cycle latency is if the instructions are dependent, but the compiler or software writer can usually produce code that avoids the latency (or at least masks it). Obviously, code that was optimized for non-970 PowerPCs may have code sequences that expose this issue, but code optimized specifically for the 970 should be fine.

After reading this from Ars Technica (Bad Andy)

me (I have inserted some small clarifying parenthetical remarks):
That 2-cycle {simple integer latency} comes from the "extra cycle of cross-over latency" imposed throughout the design, due to the duplicated register-file/execution unit systems.

IBM has clearly stated (somewhere, I can't find it) that the fundamental simple-integer pipeline latency is one (and by god at these frequencies it would be really, really embarrassing if the simple integer pipeline latency WEREN'T one. ) The extra cycle is the cost of communicating the pipeline result to the OTHER register-file/execution system in the pair. IBM keeps the latency fixed at this worst case (whether dependent instruction is in the same unit's issue queue or not) as a matter of issue-logic simplicity (it also avoids what otherwise would be another compiler optimization.) IBM stated publicly that they studied the cost of allowing dependent instructions in the same queue to issue on the next cycle, and decided "it wasn't worth it.")

Of course "wasn't worth it" depends on who is doing the looking and what their metric is. It is really goddam clear how badly that 2-cycle latency impacts serialized small-integer code... worst-case the 970 becomes a 1/2 IPC processor. This just slays some types of common code (simple ill-optimized compilers and interpreters particularly)... and we see this in performance scores.

With power5 IBM uses SMT to further bury this ... (two serially-dependent threads running simultaneously at least manage 1 IPC Frown ... but more fundamentally it is statistically far less probable to have two serially-dependent code sections working at the same time, and more generally the integer section is often a work-rate limiter for other poorly optimized codes (even FP!) ... so if one thread is serially-dependent there is a good chance the other thread can advantage itself of the 1.5 integer IPC available!)

And it would seem like you where right about the simple integer bit, looks like I remembered wrong. :(

netherfred

Nov 16, 2004, 07:16 AM

I also think that the new PB's could have a carbon fiber case.

Aside from that, this news sounds great. Can't wait to see how it turns out.

JOD8FY

Alas, carbon fiber glass has very poor heat conducting properties.

My guess is they will use a magnesium alloy. It's a bit more expensive than aluminium but has better heat conduction and it looks even more exclusive (brown/gold glow). The only problem is that it also shields EM radiation better, so prob bye-bye to Airport reception, unless they use some sort of external antenna.

zwida

Nov 16, 2004, 07:47 AM

The only problem is that it also shields EM radiation better, so prob bye-bye to Airport reception, unless they use some sort of external antenna.

Something other than the exisitng external antennas they employ on the sides of the screen? I would hope this would suffice...no point having some silly thing protruding from the back or side of a laptop.

nmk

Nov 16, 2004, 07:49 AM

Look, I haven't done any hardcore benchmarking, but my experience with the the Pentium M isn't very good. I bought a 1.5 Ghz (or was it 1.6) Pentium M VAIO for my mother a few months ago. I really was under the impression that the Pentium M was a pretty fast chip, so I felt that speed wasn't something that would be an issue. However, I was surprised to discover that in terms of overall responsiveness the system was quite slow. Application launching and switching take forever (compared to my PB). Almost every part of the system that would contribute to the general perception of speed is slow.

So I'm not sure how the two computers would fare in a Photoshop showdown or Unreal Tournament botmach. I'm quite willing to accept that the Pentium M would own the G4. However, what's the point of having a fast processor when the system just feels slow as ****. This is just a continuation of the age old problem, it doesn't matter how much faster your computer gets, Windows just keeps getting slower.

This has got nothing to do with being apologetic for Apple, it's a very simple real life observation. I would NOT want to invest in a Pentium M laptop after the experience with this one (and a few older windows laptops I've used). I don't care how many frames a second its running in Unreal if the responsiveness of the system is pathetic. Quite frankly, if you had anyone use the two systems for general everyday tasks (without giving them any prior information about the supposed speed of the two systems) I think just about anyone would come to the conclusion that the Powerbook is substantially faster.

AmigoMac

Nov 16, 2004, 07:59 AM

Look, I haven't done any hardcore benchmarking, but my experience with the the Pentium M isn't very good....

Wrong thread! Go back there! (http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=97464&highlight=Pentium)

;)

Ohh yeah, the PB G5 ... 13" PB with backlit keyboard, AE & BT are standard now, optical audio output, 100 GB HD... (RDF ??) :p

Rincewind42

Nov 16, 2004, 09:07 AM

I still think the 3 GHz chip and the low power chip are 2 different chips (the low power being 1.6-1.8 GHz for PowerBooks). With the extra L2 cache, the 3 GHz 970 GX will probably still put out as much heat as the 2.5 GHz 970 FX.

I know it's hard to believe, but it is possible that they are the same chip. IBM's own slides show that if they could drop the voltage to 0.8V then power consumption of a 1.25Ghz 970FX would be only 15 watts (from 100W at 1.3V & 2.5Ghz). I doubt Apple will be selling a 1.25 Ghz G5 soon, but assuming that the 970GX can reduce wattage further then it might not be unreasonable to see a 970GX in the range of 1.6 - 2.0Ghz that might be suitable for a PowerBook. And it makes more sense to put your resources into making one power efficient CPU than one low power and one really fast, because if you have a CPU that can work at a really low power, then if you cool it enough then you can make it really fast too :).

And yes, I consider the P4 vs P-M from Intel an anomaly. They designed the P4 for one purpose - to crank the clock as high as possible to dupe consumers into thinking that Mhz was all that mattered. Now they have P-M machines that are beating P4 machines at half the clock speed and can't crank the P4 up any higher so they have to go to model numbers to get them out of the situation :D.

AidenShaw

Nov 16, 2004, 09:30 AM

Net result: your typical compiler has four registers it can rely on; maybe up to eleven if it's really careful about the way it does things.

Ars technica says 8 general purpose (within your 4 to 11 range).

The P6 and P4 actually have 40 to 128 internal general purpose registers for the micro-engine to use (depending on how you define them), a technique called "register renaming" is used to alleviate issues caused by the small number of GPRs.

"Register renaming allows a processor to have a larger number of actual registers than the ISA specifies, thereby enabling the chip to do more computations simultaneously without running out of registers. Of course, there's some sleight-of-hand involved in fooling the program into thinking that it's using only eight registers, when it's really using up to 40, but this isn't conceptually much different than the sleight-of-hand that fools the program into thinking that it's running sequentially when it's really running out-of-order."

From: http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/pentium-1.ars/5

"The x86 ISA has only 8 GPRs, but the P4 augments these with the addition of a large number of rename registers: 128 to be exact. Since the P4 keeps so many instructions on-chip for scheduling purposes, it needs these added rename resources to prevent the kinds of register-based resource conflicts that result in pipeline bubbles."

http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/p4andg4e2.ars/2

PPC970 has 48 rename registers (http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/powerpc-g5_13.html).

I know that you hinted at this as "hand waving" in your message, but in context I feel that it's an important detail.

On x86, it'll be constantly swapping data in and out of memory so it can play around with the registers -- kinda like if you're trying to correlate several documents, but only have room for two on your desk at once. On PowerPC, on the other hand, it can load the bits of data into the general purpose registers once, play around with them to its heart's content, and flush the end result out to memory at the end. Net result: you lose a bunch of memory accesses, and everything's a lot faster.

Many benchmarks fail to substantiate your claim of "much faster". The internal architecture of the P6 and Pentium 4 overcome some of the constraints of the baroque x86 architecture.

(I don't know if the 32 bit mode has been extended to include the new registers, or not. I'm guessing not, but I won't swear to it. IMO, it should have been, but I wasn't involved in the design. :D)

Therein lies the reason (or a very large part of it) for the speed boost when you compile code for x86-64 over x86-32: the extra registers. Yes, you lose out on the amount of data you're shuffling around -- 64 bits vs 32 bits, you've got a lot more data coming over the memory bus -- but you gain because you cut the amount of data shuffling you need to get the work done. The latter outweighs the former in the vast majority of cases.

There wouldn't have been a lot of value to extending the 32-bit mode - you'd have x86 incompatible code that would require a 64-bit processor to run in 32-bit mode. As long as you're forcing a recompilation, byte the bullet and compile to 64-bit mode - overall it keeps things simpler (and one would expect that over time 64-bit becomes the predominant target).

Also, using the 64-bit general purpose registers doesn't imply moving more data to/from memory. You can still use those for 8-bit, 16-bit and 32-bit data - no additional data movement required for the extra registers.

Pointer are always 64-bits, however, so that there is more memory traffic when loading and storing address data. This makes your claim of the advantages (of the extra registers) outweighing the cost of additional memory traffic even stronger.

Tom's Hardware has a nice graphic of the registers (new and old) at http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20030422/opteron-06.html.

macuser05

Nov 16, 2004, 09:40 AM

Sorry to say, but your test is meaningless because you were ripping from different CD/DVD drives. Your test is not only about the CPU power.

What you should do is test the same machines again, directly from an already-dumped WAV/AIFF file. Even then it wouldn't really be a good test because iTunes on Windows could be running on some kind of emulated platform (is it *really* a native Windows application? I find the page scrolling in iTMS incredibly slow)

Of course, it would be a good iTunes test, just remove the CD ripping part of the test.

I know it's not the best test, but if the Mac was as CPU bound as I would have thought, I would have seen results similar to the Duron (which most definitely was CPU-bound) of 2x. If I have some time this weekend I may try it again with the same files on all computers. Extract to AIFF and convert and import in iTunes.

I'm sure iTunes is a native Windows app. Apple does know how to do Windows apps - look @ Quicktime...

dlastmango

Nov 16, 2004, 10:55 AM

Is it very likely that we will see a new G5 desktop in March? :confused:
If we see these things come out in march how long will it take for shipping??? say... 4 months later??? so now it is june/july? And what about heat issues? will the fans be running at full speed all the time... i think they have a few issues to work out before getting this to the market.... unless this is the fix. I hope not

Chris

combatcolin

Nov 16, 2004, 11:21 AM

the 68000 is a cisc chip as is all 68k moto chips the first risc chip that made it's way to the mac was the ppc 601.

2nd this.

Regarding the itunes encoding session posting, my sisters stock eMac 1.25Ghz routinly hits 18X encoding speed. (With Error checking)

A lot quicker than the 7.2X (Error checking disabled) my 2Ghz XP Win 2000 max's out with.

dual64bit

Nov 16, 2004, 11:52 AM

What does this mean for the powermac?

Does anybody think there is going to be any revisions soon with that?!

I am going to an IBM conference tomorrow that deals with the Power5 processor, so I hope to hear some stuff there.

Manatee

Nov 16, 2004, 12:26 PM

Great! Finally a possible path to a G5 Powerbook.

I can't wait to get one, so Virtual PC will run a little faster. ;)

lukelukeluke

Nov 16, 2004, 12:42 PM

I need to buy an imac within the next few months. I'll be going for the 17" model. What do y'all think the chances of some of those faster G5's making it into an imac anytime soon?

~Shard~

Nov 16, 2004, 01:27 PM

I need to buy an imac within the next few months. I'll be going for the 17" model. What do y'all think the chances of some of those faster G5's making it into an imac anytime soon?

Doubtful. The new G5 iMac was just released, they would not introduce an update of this nature so quickly to the product line. Don't expect another iMac update until spring, is my guess. :cool:

maya

Nov 16, 2004, 02:27 PM

I need to buy an imac within the next few months. I'll be going for the 17" model. What do y'all think the chances of some of those faster G5's making it into an imac anytime soon?

The iMac G5, is a fine machine IMHO.

Load it up with ram and you will be pleased. :D

The 17 inch 1.8 Ghz model seems likes the BEST DEAL from the product line, reasons being that unless you are working on PRO VIDEO, and GRAPHIC work you are paying extra for the 20 inch screen in which case you are better off settling for a PMG5.

I hear some people buy the 20 inch iMac G5 to use as a TV if you plan on doing so then settle for the 20 inch however I still feel the middle model has the best of both wolds. :)

Best of Luck on your purchase since the iMac G5 will not be revised and given with Apples pushing its revisions longer in the recent you will most likely see a new iMac G5 rev B by WWDC05.

And of note these NEW chips will be making they way first to the PMG5 and or maybe wishing the PowerBook line.

It will be a good 6-10 months before we see these chips in an iMac G5 AFTER the PMG5 has these, again all depending on production.

Mord

Nov 16, 2004, 03:01 PM

2nd this.

Regarding the itunes encoding session posting, my sisters stock eMac 1.25Ghz routinly hits 18X encoding speed. (With Error checking)

A lot quicker than the 7.2X (Error checking disabled) my 2Ghz XP Win 2000 max's out with.

useing itunes encodeing is totaly flawed, it runs like crap on pcs.a better benchmark would be visualiser fps if your useing itunes, better still somthing more mac and pc friendly like cinebench or an open gl game

gekko513

Nov 16, 2004, 03:50 PM

useing itunes encodeing is totaly flawed, it runs like crap on pcs.a better benchmark would be visualiser fps if your useing itunes, better still somthing more mac and pc friendly like cinebench or an open gl game
I agree that it isn't really a fair benchmark in many ways but it is OK on two points.

First of all it is one of the few common task that normal Windows and Mac users do and notices if it goes slow. Many Windows users use iTunes because it is one of the better music organizer apps + if you have an iPod ...

Second of all it's not any worse than benchmarking how fast Word is able to build a table of contents, or something like that, which PC Magazine did on one of their first G5 vs P4 tests.

wrldwzrd89

Nov 16, 2004, 03:57 PM

useing itunes encodeing is totaly flawed, it runs like crap on pcs.a better benchmark would be visualiser fps if your useing itunes, better still somthing more mac and pc friendly like cinebench or an open gl game
I've got a counter-example for you. On my 3.2 GHz P4 desktop with 1 GB of RAM and a 200 GB HD, I hit 50x encoding speed once - this happened when making AAC files @ 128 kbps. My iMac, on the other hand, never gets above 15x, and averages around 11x. The wierd thing is that I never got that 50x encoding again - I have been consistently getting around half of that (25x) - which still beats my iMac by a fair margin.

ASP272

Nov 16, 2004, 05:07 PM

I've got a counter-example for you. On my 3.2 GHz P4 desktop with 1 GB of RAM and a 200 GB HD, I hit 50x encoding speed once - this happened when making AAC files @ 128 kbps. My iMac, on the other hand, never gets above 15x, and averages around 11x. The wierd thing is that I never got that 50x encoding again - I have been consistently getting around half of that (25x) - which still beats my iMac by a fair margin.

The question is what are your iMac specs compared to your P4? Is the ram the same? Is the HD the same speed? Is the processor speed even close? If you want to compare Macs to Personal Confusers, compare with similar machines.

wrldwzrd89

Nov 16, 2004, 05:16 PM

The question is what are your iMac specs compared to your P4? Is the ram the same? Is the HD the same speed? Is the processor speed even close? If you want to compare Macs to Personal Confusers, compare with similar machines.
The specs are on my website - look in my signature if you're interested. Anyway, the point of that post was to show that iTunes encoding on Windows doesn't necessarily have to be horridly slow. I included my iMac purely as a point of reference and not as a benchmark. I'm sorry if that wasn't very clear.

AliensAreFuzzy

Nov 16, 2004, 11:06 PM

AidenShaw

Nov 16, 2004, 11:37 PM

When I read that title, I thought: "How the hell would you lug around a PB with a 30" display!?!?"

The 17" is already too big for many people - why not 30" ???

ps: 14" 4:3 is fine for me - fits on the airline tray with room for the USB mini-mouse. I don't *want* anything wider or taller!

maya

Nov 17, 2004, 01:21 AM

with these new chips the iMac G5 rev B will be more silent as with the situation with the PMG5 rev A ---> rev B situation.

iMac G5 more silent = priceless :D

sjl

Nov 17, 2004, 02:01 AM

the 68000 is a cisc chip as is all 68k moto chips the first risc chip that made it's way to the mac was the ppc 601.
You could be right. I was reasonably sure it's RISC, though; I honestly don't know for certain.

Ars technica says 8 general purpose (within your 4 to 11 range).
Yes and no. The problem is that some of those general purpose registers are actually used to keep track of where the current base of the stack is (EBP, in conjunction with SS); the top of the stack (ESP); and a bunch of other such stuff -- basically, state data that is needed to support C code. That means they're not available for general data within C programs. That's why I was somewhat handwavy about the number; it depends on what the C compiler does, and whether you're prepared to put up with the inability to easily debug your code (you can choose whether or not to have a frame pointer, which makes debugging easier if present, but frees up a general purpose register if it's not, for example.)

I know that you hinted at this as "hand waving" in your message, but in context I feel that it's an important detail.
I won't argue the point. I just felt it wasn't quite so relevant to the general discussion and the points I was making, is all. :D As I understand it, the register renaming tends to be used for "speculative branching", although I don't see any reason why it couldn't be used to reduce the memory shuffling instead. This is getting into black magic, though, and I don't really understand all the ins and outs of this stuff. I can mostly understand CPUs of the 6502 vintage; anything more recent (say, Pentium onwards in particular) is a black box to me. :D

There wouldn't have been a lot of value to extending the 32-bit mode - you'd have x86 incompatible code that would require a 64-bit processor to run in 32-bit mode. As long as you're forcing a recompilation, byte the bullet and compile to 64-bit mode - overall it keeps things simpler (and one would expect that over time 64-bit becomes the predominant target).
I'm not so sure. SPARC is a case in point: UltraSPARC is a 64 bit processor, but you still see a great deal of software compiled in 32 bit mode for Solaris. This isn't so much for compatibility -- a lot of this stuff is certified for later versions of Solaris that generally run on UltraSPARC-based systems -- as it is for performance, AIUI. If you don't need the 64 bit stuff -- ie, your memory needs are modest, and your integer arithmetic fits fine in 32 bits -- the odds are good that any appropriate Solaris stuff will be 32 bit code, not 64. This is basically where I was coming from. If the CPU works fine with both 32 and 64 bit code, I don't see a general need to recompile 32 bit code to 64 bit code just for the sake of it. x86-64 is a case where it wouldn't be for the sake of it -- you'd be recompiling to take advantage of the extra registers.

Tom's Hardware has a nice graphic of the registers (new and old) at http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20030422/opteron-06.html.
Nifty. Thanks for that.

wrldwzrd89

Nov 17, 2004, 06:10 AM

with these new chips the iMac G5 rev B will be more silent as with the situation with the PMG5 rev A ---> rev B situation.

iMac G5 more silent = priceless :D
I thought the iMac G5 rev. A was quiet enough as it is. How could Apple make it produce even less noise while still upgrading it? Also, as far as I'm aware, there wasn't THAT big of a difference in noise between the two revisions of PowerMac G5.

maya

Nov 17, 2004, 09:10 AM

I thought the iMac G5 rev. A was quiet enough as it is. How could Apple make it produce even less noise while still upgrading it? Also, as far as I'm aware, there wasn't THAT big of a difference in noise between the two revisions of PowerMac G5.

The "noise issue" is shared by some iMac G5 users maybe not all however some. We all have different levels of sensitive when it come to hearing. And I fall in that group.

Since I have an iMac G5 and have used and owned other Mac's in the past, I feel that its false that Apple markets the iMac G5 as "more silent than a whisper."

Even on the "Automatic" setting the system can rev up and can get quite loud.

here are other smaller issues here and there also pertaining to noise issue(s). Changes to the rev B iMac G5 would be great if the G5 ran cooler (as mentioned in this article in regards to low wattage being), with the first will bring fewer "fans" as with the rev A PMG5 had more fans than the rev B PMG5 thus it is more quite to the end-user, better placed speakers (where it doesn't sound as if the noise was resonating from a hollow box), and an "audio headphone jack" no the keyboard would be GREAT. :)

Other than that the iMac G5 is quite well indeed.

The iMac G5 is not "silent" even under what Apple states as "normal" working load and noise. Silence is Bliss. :D

ASP272

Nov 17, 2004, 09:32 AM

A G5 powerbook would be like an UGM! An efficient Halo 2 machine perhaps!

AidenShaw

Nov 17, 2004, 09:41 AM

I'm not so sure. SPARC is a case in point: UltraSPARC is a 64 bit processor, but you still see a great deal of software compiled in 32 bit mode for Solaris. This isn't so much for compatibility -- a lot of this stuff is certified for later versions of Solaris that generally run on UltraSPARC-based systems -- as it is for performance, AIUI. If you don't need the 64 bit stuff -- ie, your memory needs are modest, and your integer arithmetic fits fine in 32 bits -- the odds are good that any appropriate Solaris stuff will be 32 bit code, not 64. This is basically where I was coming from. If the CPU works fine with both 32 and 64 bit code, I don't see a general need to recompile 32 bit code to 64 bit code just for the sake of it. x86-64 is a case where it wouldn't be for the sake of it -- you'd be recompiling to take advantage of the extra registers.

OK, I see your point. There are a couple of differences with the SPARC case, though.

The 32-bit Solaris code is compatible with older 32-bit SPARC systems - so you could get by with one "thin binary" for apps that didn't need 64-bits. The "32-bit x64 with extra registers" would not run on x86 machines - so you'd have to build two.
The first 64-bit SPARC machines were SLOW - memory was pre-SDRAM 60ns (that's 16 MHz). Reducing memory bandwidth was important - today's PCs have far more bandwidth available.
Sun ships both 32-bit and 64-bit Solaris in the same kits - so many people are still running 32-bit Solaris on 64-bit capable hardware. (Just like most people run 32-bit O/S on x64 and only 32-bit O/S is released for OS X.)

On the other hand, your "32-bit x64 with extra registers" would require a recompilation, and would not be compatible with either 32-bit hardware or 64-bit operating systems (unless the OS makers included a third set of libraries and APIs).

In addition, the extra memory traffic due to 64-bit pointers is really noise for most applications. You'll need a very carefully run benchmark to separate the 64-bit burden from the noise.

Of course, there are some applications where it is noticeable - for example if your data is a huge doubly-linked list or doubly-linked tree with very small data payload per structure.

For those applications, most systems have compiler/linker options to allow 32-bit pointer usage on a 64-bit system. (If you can guarantee that the data structure resides in the low 4 GiB of virtual address space, you can safely truncate the pointers when you store in memory, and extend when you fetch.) In other words, you can do what you want today (at least with Windows - haven't looked at gcc).

So, your proposal has some merit - but IMO the disadvantages outweigh the advantages.

ps: There's a good PDF from AMD describing x64 at http://www.amd.com/us-en/assets/content_type/ white_papers_and_tech_docs/x86-64_wp.pdf. It goes into detail about the 16/32/64 bit modes and register usage. Your new mode is not provided in the hardware - the extra registers require the full 64-bit mode.

cb911

Nov 17, 2004, 05:36 PM

sjl

Nov 17, 2004, 07:39 PM

On the other hand, your "32-bit x64 with extra registers" would require a recompilation, and would not be compatible with either 32-bit hardware or 64-bit operating systems (unless the OS makers included a third set of libraries and APIs).

In addition, the extra memory traffic due to 64-bit pointers is really noise for most applications. You'll need a very carefully run benchmark to separate the 64-bit burden from the noise.

[snippage by sjl]

So, your proposal has some merit - but IMO the disadvantages outweigh the advantages.
Ah, ok, I see where you're coming from. (See, kids? People with differing opinions can come to an agreement. :D) Your comments do have merit. Certainly, I'd now be looking at benchmarking to compare the performance of an appropriate load before making a firm and fast decision on such a matter. :D And besides -- playing around with benchmarking of this sort for the sake of playing around with the benchmarking is fun! :p

MacinDoc

Nov 17, 2004, 08:02 PM

aawww.... i'm confused now. :(

i was seriously hoping for a dual-core G4. :D that would have been an awesome chip... but i guess everything is still up in the air? at least it's good to have options. but if it's a 3GHz G5, i won't be complaining... :D

but either way, it seems that it' will probably be about March, more likely April at least before we see a PowerBook revision. :(

also someone mentioned about the 'lack' of L3 cache, would that affect performance? i don't know if someone else has answered this... but no. the current PowerBooks (& iBooks i guess?) don't have any L3 cache, simply because there is no need for it, and it doesn't negatively impact performance.
I hope you're not expecting a 3 GHz PowerBook. The source suggests that the PowerBook will be clocked at a much more modest 1-6-1.8 GHz. And, to reduce heat, it will likely have a 3:1 bus ratio, similar to the iMac. So, it probably would benefit from L3 cache, but I don't expect any L3 in the next rev.

Having said that, if Apple did come out with a 3 GHz PowerBook this spring, it would shock the computer world, and it would likely be the best-selling Apple product of all time. Well, we can always dream...

Rincewind42

Nov 17, 2004, 08:36 PM

I hope you're not expecting a 3 GHz PowerBook. The source suggests that the PowerBook will be clocked at a much more modest 1-6-1.8 GHz. And, to reduce heat, it will likely have a 3:1 bus ratio, similar to the iMac. So, it probably would benefit from L3 cache, but I don't expect any L3 in the next rev.

Truthfully, I'm expecting more like a 4:1 bus ratio. Not the fastest, but faster than any Powerbook to date at least. I do hope they can get up to 2Ghz though, as I don't think too many people will be impressed by a 1.33/1.5 to 1.6/1.8 but the same people would probably buy a 1.8/2.0 split.

Having said that, if Apple did come out with a 3 GHz PowerBook this spring, it would shock the computer world, and it would likely be the best-selling Apple product of all time. Well, we can always dream...

Heh, Dual 970MP 3Ghz PowerMac and 970GX (or better yet 970MP!) 3Ghz PowerBook - we certainly can dream :).

MacinDoc

Nov 17, 2004, 08:51 PM

Heh, Dual 970MP 3Ghz PowerMac and 970GX (or better yet 970MP!) 3Ghz PowerBook - we certainly can dream :).
Now you're talking! ;)

maya

Nov 17, 2004, 09:46 PM

Apple/SJ is going to introduce the new PowerBook G6 that is faster than any PPC or x86 to date, they have a time machine and brought the lowest spec laptop they can find and will market it to all they users and call it a Blade Server with a screen and will keep your coffee, tea. legs and palms warm in the winter. ;) :D

or you can buy the

new "SpacePod" that will hold 10,000 passengers and reach Mars in 15 battery hours. ;) :D

thatwendigo

Nov 18, 2004, 05:01 AM

Truthfully, I'm expecting more like a 4:1 bus ratio. Not the fastest, but faster than any Powerbook to date at least. I do hope they can get up to 2Ghz though, as I don't think too many people will be impressed by a 1.33/1.5 to 1.6/1.8 but the same people would probably buy a 1.8/2.0 split.

Or, you know, it could just not have a front side bus at all by using on-die memory control and eliminating the northbridge... Gee, two cores, DDR2 667mhz, two 128-bit dual precision AltiVec units, on-die network control, on-die memory control, and roughly 15-15 watts for the whole package? Nah, let's just try to shoehorn a processor that was cooked down from big iron into a laptop instead, since that makes so much more sense than using a newer and more power efficient core design!

~Shard~

Nov 18, 2004, 08:03 AM

Or, you know, it could just not have a front side bus at all by using on-die memory control and eliminating the northbridge... Gee, two cores, DDR2 667mhz, two 128-bit dual precision AltiVec units, on-die network control, on-die memory control, and roughly 15-15 watts for the whole package? Nah, let's just try to shoehorn a processor that was cooked down from big iron into a laptop instead, since that makes so much more sense than using a newer and more power efficient core design!

Thanks thatwendigo, you just broke my sarcasm detector - now I have to go and fix it again.. :(

And good thinking by the way - I like it... :cool:

Mac-Xpert

Nov 18, 2004, 08:46 AM

Heh, Dual 970MP 3Ghz PowerMac and 970GX (or better yet 970MP!) 3Ghz PowerBook - we certainly can dream :).Yeah, that would be great, for all sort of things.. :rolleyes: :p

AidenShaw

Nov 18, 2004, 09:45 AM

Or, you know, it could just not have a front side bus at all by using on-die memory control and eliminating the northbridge... Gee, two cores, DDR2 667mhz, two 128-bit dual precision AltiVec units, on-die network control, on-die memory control, and roughly 15-15 watts for the whole package? Nah, let's just try to shoehorn a processor that was cooked down from big iron into a laptop instead, since that makes so much more sense than using a newer and more power efficient core design!

Wow - that would be a great design for a laptop. Power efficient *and* dual core - it'd blow any PPC970-based system right out of the water.

It wouldn't be 64-bit, but until you can put 8 GiB of RAM in your laptop you won't need 64-bit!

Cindy O.

Nov 18, 2004, 01:09 PM

....The source suggests that the PowerBook will be clocked at a much more modest 1-6-1.8 GHz....

If Apple does attempt to save some face quickly in January with a 1.6 / 1.8 PB to hold all waiters over till the big PB update next summer, I'd be interested to know on a technical note how the last of the great G4 powerbooks will fair running Tiger? Will Tiger put a time stamp on how long the strongest G4 PBs (even current 1.33 & 1.5's) will be able to keep up with the next version of MAC OSX?

dacloo

Nov 18, 2004, 01:43 PM

I guess Tiger will just run as well as 10.3, perhaps even better, but certainly not worse.

Try 10.0 running on a G4 PB. Now THAT is unoptimised.

oingoboingo

Nov 18, 2004, 04:13 PM

Or, you know, it could just not have a front side bus at all by using on-die memory control and eliminating the northbridge... Gee, two cores, DDR2 667mhz, two 128-bit dual precision AltiVec units, on-die network control, on-die memory control, and roughly 15-15 watts for the whole package? Nah, let's just try to shoehorn a processor that was cooked down from big iron into a laptop instead, since that makes so much more sense than using a newer and more power efficient core design!

That is a really crap idea. Your first suggestion was way better, you grubby G5 fanboi you.

thatwendigo

Nov 18, 2004, 06:18 PM

Wow - that would be a great design for a laptop. Power efficient *and* dual core - it'd blow any PPC970-based system right out of the water.

It wouldn't be 64-bit, but until you can put 8 GiB of RAM in your laptop you won't need 64-bit!

Features of the MPC8461D:

Dual-cores that begin at 1.8ghz and ramp up from there, using the modified e600 design that will maintain compatibility with POWER and PowerPC instruction sets. The pin-out is wholy incompatible with previous generations, and the processor itself is manufactured on CuSSOI2 at 90nm with a heat output of 15-25 watts under full load.
The on-die memory controller eliminates latency by removing the northbridge, giving direct access to RAM up to DDR533 or DDR2-667. The advantage to using DDR2 in a laptop is its far lower voltage, and therefore a greatly reduced heat consumption. Also, with time, the new format for DDR2 will yield denser memory chips to fill the PCB on a ram stick, helping to pave the way for the e600's 64-bit sucessor, the e700.
The processors are fully SMP and SMT enabled, with each one hosting an independent, low-latency 1MB of L2 cache at core frequency. There are inbuilt sharing routines to allow the processors to fetch from each other's cache in order to keep the pipelines full, rather than going to memory or the drives. The single chip presents itself as at least 2 separate processors, with the interesting addition that each one can be booted into a fully independent system, running a separate OS at time of power-on. Also, the L2 cache can be enabled in ECC mode.
Included in the System-On-Chip design are four hardware MACs at gigabit speed, providing for low-latency control over networking tasks. In addition, hardware support for major encryption standards will speed security tasks involving hashing and verification of MD5 checksums.
The superior (to IBM, at least) implementation of AltiVec in Freescale's design is further enhanced with dual-precision (important for many scientific tasks) math units that can handle 128-bit vector operations, one attached to each core.
The support fabric for the processor is an on-die controller for both FreeScale's RapidIO and Intel's PCI-Express channels, supporting throughput in excess of the PCI-X and AGP currently in use in Apple's systems. It's not necessary that both be included in a motherboard layout, as they serve a very similar function.

That's just off the top of my head, too. So, if you ignore the hype and FUD about the bitness of a processor and just look at features, the dual-core chip from FreeScale offers far more bang than a single processor 970 would. This is assuming that IBM hasn't managed some kind of incredible feat in their labs and held out on us in the meantime, which is a distant possibility. Without major architectural improvements that go far beyond just turning the clock up a bit, the current G5 will most likely be left crying in the dust, especially in a mobile platform where power draw is important.

Really, you'd think mac users would be wise to the megahertz myth by now. :rolleyes:

cb911

Nov 18, 2004, 06:41 PM

each version of OS X has brought speed improvements no matter what the hardware it's been running on... so there's definitely no need to worry about Tiger having more system requirements. but that's going slightly OT...

Mac-Xpert

Nov 19, 2004, 05:59 AM

Features of the MPC8461D:
..........
I think you mean the MPC8641D :rolleyes: based on the e600 core (http://www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/site/overview.jsp?nodeId=018rH3bTdG7249)
This could certainly be a attractive alternative to the current G5 offerings. But I do think they will not be available till second quarter next year, although I couldn't find anything about that on the Freescale site, so I could be wrong.

EDIT: Update:
Reading more about it online, I'm under the impression that this chip is or available now or soon, since no one seems to indicate any release dates.

However the chip seems to be running on 1.5 GHz and expected to exceed that. The 15-25 watts power consumption seems to be for the 1.5 GHz speed.

bobelmore

Nov 19, 2004, 09:54 AM

~Shard~

Nov 19, 2004, 10:42 AM

Like many of you, I am waiting for that right time to buy a new Powerbook, or more correctly, avoid the wrong time (like a month before new models are announced). My G4-667 will be three years old in March. I was hoping to wait long enough for a G5, but now I am not sure if that makes sense. All we can do now is wait and see what is announced at Macworld in January.

As I've said a million times before, if you always wait for the next best thing, you'll always be waiting.

That being said, I know it's frustrating when a new model is released just after you make a significant cash committment to the older model - these things aren't cheap. Nonetheless, if you have bought a machine that you like and one that does what you need it to, you can't let yourself fall into that trap of feeling ripped off. Buy the machine you need, when you need it, and you should never feel disappointed. :cool:

wrldwzrd89

Nov 19, 2004, 03:49 PM

As I've said a million times before, if you always wait for the next best thing, you'll always be waiting.

That being said, I know it's frustrating when a new model is released just after you make a significant cash committment to the older model - these things aren't cheap. Nonetheless, if you have bought a machine that you like and one that does what you need it to, you can't let yourself fall into that trap of feeling ripped off. Buy the machine you need, when you need it, and you should never feel disappointed. :cool:
I couldn't agree more. If you need a machine now, buy one now - don't worry about how soon Apple will release another update. If you need to, just stay away from MacRumors for a while ;)

For those that want this kind of info, there's always the Buyer's Guide right here (http://buyersguide.macrumors.com/).

mai

Nov 20, 2004, 08:29 AM

a dual core g4 is not available at the moment,
if its true, then what would u prefer?
a g5, at 1.6/1.8 ghz, 90nm, 512kb l2 cache, at 400/450 mhz (1:4) fsb or
a g4, at 1.6/1.8 ghz, 90nm, 1mb l2 cache, at 200 mhz fsb

not a big differece, hm?
maybe just the power consumption/heat generation
and i think g4's would be much cheaper than a new generation g5 with new casing, anything else would be a surprise

thatwendigo

Nov 20, 2004, 10:45 AM

a dual core g4 is not available at the moment,
if its true, then what would u prefer?
a g5, at 1.6/1.8 ghz, 90nm, 512kb l2 cache, at 400/450 mhz (1:4) fsb or
a g4, at 1.6/1.8 ghz, 90nm, 1mb l2 cache, at 200 mhz fsb

There won't be a dual-core "G4" any time in the near future. The MPC8641D is a derivitive in the same way that ther Pentium-M is a derivitive of the Pentium 3, in that the core logics are more advanced versions of a very efficient design. Also, if you'd been paying any attention to what people have been saying, the 8641 cores won't have a frontside bus, thus eliminating that potential slowdown. Just to be fair to both sides, I'd also like to point out that the AntaresMP and AntaresSP 970 cores are supposedly going to have 1MB of L2 cache per processor, as are the 8641 and 8641D.

not a big differece, hm?
maybe just the power consumption/heat generation

In a laptop, "just the power consumptuion" is an enormous consideration that defines the entire system. Dismissing something like that completely misses the entire point of portable computing.

wdlove

Nov 20, 2004, 12:08 PM

There won't be a dual-core "G4" any time in the near future. The MPC8641D is a derivative in the same way that there Pentium-M is a derivative of the Pentium 3, in that the core logics are more advanced versions of a very efficient design. Also, if you'd been paying any attention to what people have been saying, the 8641 cores won't have a frontside bus, thus eliminating that potential slowdown. Just to be fair to both sides, I'd also like to point out that the AntaresMP and AntaresSP 970 cores are supposedly going to have 1MB of L2 cache per processor, as are the 8641 and 8641D.

Are you also saying that we shouldn't expect a significant upgrade to the PowerBook line any time in the near future? Because it also seems that there are many things to overcome with the use of a G5 also.

mai

Nov 20, 2004, 01:25 PM

Also, if you'd been paying any attention to what people have been saying, the 8641 cores won't have a frontside bus, thus eliminating that potential slowdown. Just to be fair to both sides, I'd also like to point out that the AntaresMP and AntaresSP 970 cores are supposedly going to have 1MB of L2 cache per processor, as are the 8641 and 8641D.
oh yes, i did pay attention: i were talking about a "possible" processor for the next powerbook revision/generation (in the headline) next jannuary:
that means maybe the MPC7448 as the g4 or the PPC970FX as the g5 (and no 3 ghz, 1mb l2 cache SP or MP)
In a laptop, "just the power consumptuion" is an enormous consideration that defines the entire system. Dismissing something like that completely misses the entire point of portable computing.
and yes mr. teacher, i were talking about the difference between g4 and g5 in power consumption and not if its the point, thank u for your attention ;)

thatwendigo

Nov 20, 2004, 01:41 PM

Are you also saying that we shouldn't expect a significant upgrade to the PowerBook line any time in the near future? Because it also seems that there are many things to overcome with the use of a G5 also.

I am.

Here are my predictions, should anything change soon:

PowerBook 12" - 1.5ghz 7448 (200mhz bus), 256MB PC2700 SODIMM, 60GB UltraATA, nVidia GeForce Go 5200 64MB, Airport Extreme, Bluetooth - $1,499 Combo and $1,699 SuperDrive
PowerBook 15" - 1.66ghz 7448 (200mhz bus), 256MB PC2700 SODIMM, 60GB UltraATA, ATI Radeon 9700 Mobile 64MB, Combo Drive, Airport Extreme, Bluetooth - $1,899
PowerBook 15" - 1.8ghz 7448 (200mhz bus), 512MB PC2700 SODIMM, 80GB UltraATA, ATI Radeon 9700 Mobile 64MB, SuperDrive, Airport Extreme, Bluetooth - $2,399
PowerBook 17" - 1.8ghz 7448 (200mhz bus), 512MB PC2700 SODIMM, 80GB UltraATA, ATI Radeon 9700 Mobile 128MB, SuperDrive, Airport Extreme, Bluetooth - $2,699

Then, sometime between WWDC and November of next year, what I think the best path would be:

iBook 12" - 1.6ghz 8641S, 512MB DDR2-500, 40GB SATA 5400RPM, nVidia Geforce Go 6400 64MB, Combo Drive, Airport Extreme, Bluetooth - $999
iBook 14" - 1.8ghz 8641S, 512MB DDR2-500, 60GB SATA 5400RPM, nVidia Geforce Go 6400 64MB, 4x SuperDrive, Airport Extreme, Bluetooth - $1,399

PowerBook 12" - 1.6ghz 8641D, 512MB DDR2-667, 60GB SATA 7200RPM, ATI Radeon x600-M 64MB, 8x SuperDrive, Airport Extreme 108, Bluetooth - $1,599
PowerBook 15" - 1.8ghz 8641D, 512MB DDR2-667, 80GB SATA 7200RPM, ATI Radeon x800-M 64MB (BTO for 128), 8x SuperDrive, Airport Extreme 108, Bluetooth - $2,199
PowerBook - 1.8ghz 8641D, 1GB DDR2-667, 100GB SATA 7200RPM, ATI Radeon x800-M 128MB, 8x SuperDrive, Airport Extreme 108, Bluetooth - $2,799

There are a number of factors to consider in these choices, but my reasoning is pretty easy to follow. The Freescale cores are far cooler than even the 970FX, as are DDR2 over conventional DDR, 7200RPM drives over traditional laptop drives (especially with increased throughput from SATA meaning less access time and more time parked), ATI making cooler chipsets than nVidia (they'd still get more unit sales from iBooks than PowerBooks, as a mollifying measure), and existing laptops can currently use a dual-channel 802.11g transmission to increase their speed by transmitting on one and receiving on the other, hence my inclusion of the "Airport Extreme 108." This could easily be replaced if 802.15.3 or one of the other wireless standards comes to market before then.

Perhaps the least plausible is the drop in prices across the PowerBook line, but I think this might be reasonable by then. The components Apple is currently using are on their way out of volume production, being replaced by a newer generation. Their per-unit prices could be significantly lower if a complete retool of the system is made to take advantage of emerging technology and a new processor that will be pushed until its successor is ready.

~Shard~

Nov 20, 2004, 01:55 PM

~Shard~

Nov 20, 2004, 02:00 PM

Here are my predictions, should anything change soon:

<snip>

I could go along with that. Still though, "significant upgrades" will not be happening until WWDC or later, as I see it. The earliest we will hear anything about an overhauled PowerBook will be spring, then by the time it's formally announced, released, actually ships, and consumers actually have it in their hands, you're looking at half a year in the future for sure, if not later....

maya

Nov 20, 2004, 10:53 PM

Well all this waiting is making me sick. What are we going to get with the PowerBook:

G4 = same old branding name. :P

G4.5 = It could happen :)

G5 = I will be overjoyed :D

maybe Apple and IBM are keeping hush about all this, and just releasing trickles of information due to some contract arranged by Apple.

What ever we will get in Jan 05, in a portable case I will be taking notes since I need a portable really soon in the next 6 months or less. :)

Now bring on that 8 gigs or ram already :D

thatwendigo

Nov 21, 2004, 12:02 AM

Now bring on that 8 gigs or ram already :D

You're out of your mind, to be frank.

Kingston ValueRAM PC2700 1GB SO-DIMM - $310 (http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=20-172-105&depa=1)

Planning on paying $2400 for your RAM, on top of the PowerBook, even if there were eight slots in the machine to plug it into? I have an eMac with a lot more potential internal volume than a PowerBook and it would be hard to fit that many slots into the chassis.

maya

Nov 21, 2004, 01:11 AM

You're out of your mind, to be frank.

Kingston ValueRAM PC2700 1GB SO-DIMM - $310 (http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=20-172-105&depa=1)

Planning on paying $2400 for your RAM, on top of the PowerBook, even if there were eight slots in the machine to plug it into? I have an eMac with a lot more potential internal volume than a PowerBook and it would be hard to fit that many slots into the chassis.

That was a joke hun. noticed the --> :D

the imac g5 even with 2 Gig of ram will never use its G5 64-bit chip to the fullest its 6 Gigs short :p

ah marketing its all in the marketing :)

wrldwzrd89

Nov 21, 2004, 08:10 AM

That was a joke hun. noticed the --> :D

the imac g5 even with 2 Gig of ram will never use its G5 64-bit chip to the fullest its 6 Gigs short :p

ah marketing its all in the marketing :)
There are 2 GB RAM chips out there, but they're about 2.33 times as expensive as the 1 GB chips. For example, if a 1 GB RAM chip costs $300, a 2 GB chip will set you back $700 (300 x 2.33 = 699, which is close enough to 700 for me). If PowerBooks supported these chips (which they can't since they're too tall), they'd still max out at 4 GB of RAM.

jared_kipe

Nov 22, 2004, 12:14 AM

Do we think the new version will be in both the powermac and imac? Cooler is more important in both, but maybe speed is slightly more useful in powermac.

Mac-Xpert

Nov 22, 2004, 04:20 AM

PowerBook - 1.8ghz 8641D, 1GB DDR2-667, 100GB SATA 7200RPM, ATI Radeon x800-M 128MB, 8x SuperDrive, Airport Extreme 108, Bluetooth - $2,799
The Freescale cores are far cooler than even the 970FXI'm not so sure about that. As I mentioned in my previous post the 15-25 watts power consumption is for the 1.5 GHz version. There is currently no information available (or maybe you could give us a link if i'm wrong) that gives us any prediction on the power consumption of a possible 1.8 GHz MPC8641D, but if you scale it linearly than it would take 30 watts at 1.8 GHz. But in reality it likely won't scale linearly, so it is probably going to use more power than even that. Also most people thought before the introduction of the Powermac G5 rev B's that the 970FX would not run that hot because it is fabed at 90nm. Now we all know that this isn't true, and that the G5 in its current state can't be used in a laptop. From what we know now, I don't see how you could be so sure that the MPC8641D will do so much better at the 90nm process.

Rincewind42

Nov 22, 2004, 08:10 AM

Mr Maui

Nov 22, 2004, 10:53 AM

I think I'll just go consult the iTarot cards (recently released) and the iCrystal Ball (a bit older but still functioning) ... and get back to everyone on what is "really" going to be happening. :D

thatwendigo

Nov 22, 2004, 02:25 PM

I'm not so sure about that. As I mentioned in my previous post the 15-25 watts power consumption is for the 1.5 GHz version. There is currently no information available (or maybe you could give us a link if i'm wrong) that gives us any prediction on the power consumption of a possible 1.8 GHz MPC8641D, but if you scale it linearly than it would take 30 watts at 1.8 GHz.

I can't give you an exact, hard link, but there's at least anecdotal evidence to back my claim at this point. For one thing, Freescale has been in the embedded and low-power market and doing things that IBM's not been able to do - like keeping power consumption under 20 watts. The MPC7448 will be running approximately 10 watts as a discrete part (some claim that it's only at 1.4ghz that this is true, but there's no proof of that, either, and I maintain that they're misreading the releveant PDF), and the current MPC7447A is a modified MPC7455 that they managed to cut core voltage and core temperature on. As I recall, the MPC7455 ran at 1.85v and displaced a maximum of 50 watts at 1ghz, but the MPC7447A runs at 1.1v and displaces a maximum of 30 watts at 1.42ghz. Notice that it's higher clock, lower voltage, and also lower heat without even adding a die shrink to the mixture, since all of the 74xx cores after a certain point are 130nm.

However, even if the dual-core ran at 30 watts, it would be a superior choice to a single-core that runs at the same temperature. Cramming a 1.8ghz single core 970 that will need all kinds of support chips (causing more heat) into a laptop isn't any more sensible than using a dual-core chip that won't need nearly as complicated a tape-out for the motherboard. There's also that whole multithreading thing, what with OS X and most of Apple, Adobe, and the other profressional programming houses taking advantage of SMP... :rolleyes:

Also most people thought before the introduction of the Powermac G5 rev B's that the 970FX would not run that hot because it is fabed at 90nm. Now we all know that this isn't true, and that the G5 in its current state can't be used in a laptop.

Actually, I never thought that moving to 90nm would decrease the heat enough to put it into a laptop, or at least not once I realized just how kludgy the processor was. For quite a while, I was advocating waiting until the Power5 derivatives could be used, since they're supposedly coming from the ground-up and could possibly offer a mobile variant. Since they're nowhere in sight and Freescale's offered this lovely little parcel of joy, I think it's the obvious and best choice at the moment.

From what we know now, I don't see how you could be so sure that the MPC8641D will do so much better at the 90nm process.

From what we know now, I don't see how anyone who understand processors or systems could advocate the 970 in a portable, period. Without a miracle, it's not fit for portable computing.

sjl

Nov 22, 2004, 10:46 PM

Without a miracle, it's not fit for portable computing.
I know! We need to strap one of those miraculous Mother Mary Cheese On Toast things to the back of the G5! Then we'll have the whole thing running so cool, we could replace our fridges! Hell, they wouldn't even draw any current! It's amazing! Why didn't Apple think of this before?! :D :D :D :D

wdlove

Nov 23, 2004, 09:59 AM

If by "significant" you mean dual-core G4 or G5, then no - not in the near future (next ~3 months.)

That if just what I thought, thank you Shard. Maybe at WWDC. Now to see what happens with the G5 next.

Mac-Xpert

Nov 23, 2004, 01:00 PM

As I recall, the MPC7455 ran at 1.85v and displaced a maximum of 50 watts at 1ghz, but the MPC7447A runs at 1.1v and displaces a maximum of 30 watts at 1.42ghz. Notice that it's higher clock, lower voltage, and also lower heat without even adding a die shrink to the mixture, since all of the 74xx cores after a certain point are 130nm.Yes that's right, however what I was trying to say, is that the power/heat efficiency of the 90nm process is worse, not better than the 130 nm process of the current 74xx series. So if the same amount of watts (30) is used for the MPC8641D at the 90nm, there might be more of a cooling problem than with the current MPC7447A at the same power-rating.

This is best illustrated by the 2 GHz 970 at 130nm using approximately 50 watts and the 2.5 GHz 970FX at the 90nm process using approximately the same. As the machine on my desk shows, the 2.5GHz chips are hard to cool even with the liquid cooling, resulting in lots of fan-noise if the machine is pushed, while the 2 GHz 970 could do with ordinary fans, and run more quietly.

I think it has to do something with the concentration of power in the smaller space, that makes it harder to cool. It's a bit like using the same amount of power to heat up a soldering iron or a electric blanket. If you use 30 watts for the soldering iron, its probably going to be quite hot, burning your fingers if you would touch the tip, while the blanket is not even going be slightly warm yet. Now this example is somewhat extreme, but something similar (at a much smaller scale of course ;)) will be true when you compare the power-rating and heat production of the 130nm and 90nm process.

Now, I'm not saying that it is entirely impossible that the Freescale 90mn process is somewhat more efficient, but looking at Motorola's track-record with the G4 developments I'm not that convinced, although I do agree with you that they might be somewhat more experienced with low-power chips than IBM. But the 90nm process is new for them as well. Also other chip manufactures like Intel are having major issues with their 90nm process.

From what we know now, I don't see how anyone who understand processors or systems could advocate the 970 in a portable, period. Without a miracle, it's not fit for portable computing.I agree. However I never said that the current 970FX would be the right or even a possible choice for the next powerbook.

I guess we will just have to wait and see how successful Freescale will be, and what Apple's choice will be for the next Powerbook.

I think that they might indeed use the MPC7448 or the MPC8641 single core, but I remain sceptic about the MPC8641D, unless Apple finds a new way to cool these chips in the small space that the Powerbook offers.

However, if your right, it could indeed be a great machine with a 1.8 GHz MPC8641D. :)

~Shard~

Nov 23, 2004, 03:13 PM

That if just what I thought, thank you Shard. Maybe at WWDC. Now to see what happens with the G5 next.

I could definitely see an announcement before WWDC, but WWDC may be around the time one of those solutions actually ships (G5/dual-core G4). Mind you, Intel has publicly announced its dual-core plans, set for release next year as well, so we'll have to see how IBM compares and competes...

maya

Nov 23, 2004, 04:43 PM

That if just what I thought, thank you Shard. Maybe at WWDC. Now to see what happens with the G5 next.

what next?

DDR2 for RAM
SATA for HDD
PCI Express for Graphic Cards
1 MB L2 cache for chip
16X DVD and Dual-Layer Optical
NVIDIA SLI for even faster dual Graphic Cards

that would pretty much do it for now. :D

pocket525

Nov 23, 2004, 04:59 PM

That if just what I thought, thank you Shard. Maybe at WWDC. Now to see what happens with the G5 next.

Am I missing something? I am a newbie so be kind.

According to macworld:
G5 imac 1.6 GHz got a speed mark rating of 150
G4 Powerbook 1.5 GHz got a speed mark rating of 136

That performance increase seems to just be directly proportional to the increase in clock speed, not the fact that one is 64bit vs 32bit:
1.6/1.5 ~ 1.07, 150/136 ~ 1.10. Especially when you look at two G4 powerbooks

G4 Powerbook 1.5 GHz 136
G4 Powerbook 1.33 GHz 123
1.5/1.33 ~ 1.13, 136/123 ~ 1.10

From this it stands to reason that a G4 1.6 Ghz would be close to performance vs. a G5 1.6 GHz.

wrldwzrd89

Nov 23, 2004, 05:36 PM

Am I missing something? I am a newbie so be kind.

According to macworld:
G5 imac 1.6 GHz got a speed mark rating of 150
G4 Powerbook 1.5 GHz got a speed mark rating of 136

That performance increase seems to just be directly proportional to the increase in clock speed, not the fact that one is 64bit vs 32bit:
1.6/1.5 ~ 1.07, 150/136 ~ 1.10. Especially when you look at two G4 powerbooks

G4 Powerbook 1.5 GHz 136
G4 Powerbook 1.33 GHz 123
1.5/1.33 ~ 1.13, 136/123 ~ 1.10

From this it stands to reason that a G4 1.6 Ghz would be close to performance vs. a G5 1.6 GHz.
Look at the speed mark rating for the PowerMac G5 1.6 GHz and see if that changes your conclusions at all - that's all I'd suggest. Remember that the iMac G5 is somewhat hobbled compared to the PowerMac G5.

JRM

Nov 24, 2004, 01:46 AM

With the wait for this next generation Powerbook now being stretched for such a long time i suggest some radical improvements will be seen when released in January, low power G5 seems the go in my mind. I am writing this on my 1GHZ Titanium in my mind the greatest laptop seen yet. It was introduced with a 64mb Graphics and DVD-R drive unheard of or atleast very rare for the time. Such large improvements such as the the 8mb GPU to the eventual 64mb GPU that the 1GHZ Titanium saw also will be evident in the release of the G5 PB in Jan. It would seem that with the new architecture of the G5 in a PB would see the opportunity to intergrate DDR2 and PCI X graphics

Therefore my Predictions for the San Francisco in Jan are as follows

Powerbooks
-13"Widescreen 1.8GHZ G5 512mb DDR2 60Gig 5400rpm 128mb PCIX X600
(Superdrive and Combo Drive Models) Max Ram 2GB (450mhz FSB)
Combo $1699 SD $1899

-15"Widescreen 2.0GHZ G5 1GB DDR2 80Gig 5400rpm 128mb PCIX X800
(Only Superdrive) (100Gb option) Max Ram 4GB (500mhz FSB)
SD $2499

-17"Widescreen 2.0GHZ G5 1GB DDR2 100Gig 5400rpm 128mb PCIX X800 (Only Superdrive) Max Ram 4GB (500mhz FSB)(BTO 6800DLL (don't ask me how))
SD $2799

Power Macs
SP 2.0GHZ 512mb DDR2 80GB 128mb PCIX X600 $1699
DP 2.0GHZ 512mb DDR2 160GB 128mb PCIX X800 $2199
DP 2.5GHZ 1GIG DDR 2 160GB 256mb PCIX X800 $2699
DP 3.0GHZ 1GIG DDR 2 250GB 256mb PCIX 6800GT $3199
(ALL 16X DUAL LAYER DVDRW)
(EMACS WILL BE UPDATED PRIOR TO JAN)

GPU's on Offer will be
-128mb X600
-128mb X800
-256mb X800
-256mb 6800 GT DLL
-256mb 6800 Ultra DLL

Price Cuts (Displays)
20" $999 Save $300
23" $1599 Save $400
30" $2799 Save $500

MAYBE DREAMING, MAYBE SMOKED TOO MUCH OF THAT STUFF YOU GAVE ME - But all of what I have said is actually feasible. Cheers from Down under

(EDIT) : If they introduced a line up like this, with the support of the iPod Apple would be in a state of Windows kick ass, who could resist such an awesome line up?

thatwendigo

Nov 24, 2004, 02:55 AM

MAYBE DREAMING, MAYBE SMOKED TOO MUCH OF THAT STUFF YOU GAVE ME - But all of what I have said is actually feasible. Cheers from Down under

I'm not sure which one is the truth, but you've got to be either dreaming or on something. Here's why...

1) The 970FX is far hotter than a G4 at similar clockspeeds, and therefore not even remotely as good a choice for a portable. The 1.8ghz part dissipates roughly the same heat as a 4 year old MPC7455 that was used in the desktop towers and doesn't even come close to the power savings of the current MPC7447A. Meanwhile, the brand-new MPC7448 runs at 1.8ghz and dissipates only 10 watts, and that says nothing of the more advanced 8641 core.

2) Using DDR2 or PCI-Express (which is very, VERY different from PCIX) would require a completely new system controller that would increase the cost of the overall design. While changing the RAM format would likely provide heat and power savings, that would easily be offset by the processor. Also, there's no way that Apple will go to an all-ATI lineup across all of their machines, especially not with the recent willingness of nVidia to provide some of their top-end cores. Unless you're thinking that they'd somehow manage to cram extra RAM slots in, you can forget about their being a maximum of 4GB any time soon.

3) The x600M is a worse performer than the 9700M, unless there's been some kind of tomfoolery with the naming schemes agains. Generally, the x600 is roughly on par with the previous generations upper-middle level GPUs, and the 9700M is a top-end card that's only very recently been supplanted by the 9800M.

4) There are no 16X dual-layer DVD-RW drives, as all dual-layer parts are roughly 2-3X.

JRM

Nov 24, 2004, 03:04 AM

I just mean 16X DVD-R and 2.4 Dual Layer, but I probably should have stated that. Also I mean that they have DDR2 Ram and PCI Express Graphics. Sorry for any confusion but the likelyhood of these tech specs occuring dismisses any importance any way. :)

cb911

Nov 24, 2004, 06:25 AM

sounds like a sweet lineup JRM, but i'd have to agree that the chances of seeing that happen are slim. :(

oh well... maybe i'll just come down there and have a smoke with you. :cool:

mai

Nov 24, 2004, 06:37 AM

it would have been time now in oktober for a regular update of the pb g4 - maybe from 1.33 to 1.5 and 1.5 to 1.6 - neeee, didn't;

now it takes time 'til at least jannuary 05? that's almost half the regular product cycle more

but the mpc7448 is not expected to sample until h1 2005! (freescale itself said that, should they release much earlier?, mhh...)

ok, that's clear, the're developing something, but not a simple lousy g4 (7447) speedbump

maybe i am naive, i guess apple and ibm did find a way to put the g5 into the pb;
maybe with new cooling materials, passive and aktive, maybe a little thicker than 1 inch, maybe with a more air conducting case, maybe curbing the fsb and cpu, maybe with more powerful batteries, ...

i don't know, we'll see.....

Maxx Power

Nov 24, 2004, 11:02 AM

3) The x600M is a worse performer than the 9700M, unless there's been some kind of tomfoolery with the naming schemes agains. Generally, the x600 is roughly on par with the previous generations upper-middle level GPUs, and the 9700M is a top-end card that's only very recently been supplanted by the 9800M.

This isn't true. 9700M is the mobile version of the 9600XT, this I think we all know. Just as well, the x600 series is based on the 9600XT with PCIE as well, with the desktop version having much faster ram speeds. Just for kicks, see below:

http://www.gamepc.com/labs/view_content.asp?id=mrpcie&page=10&MSCSProfile=95385A1F52DEA1A229D5B3754205446442BCC82773B4A95B2F0D856C26C199B803C984ED55E633B219FFF1D5 AAD656DBAA6146103C5607CBBA4A22D5E66B1C573F8D35362CEFF84D753776BADF9ACBDA9C4EB920C6EF89E5EC57B0D62C6B ED7330AABB111D4AB3E4342734A8697B7FC63429097910067CE5B3418522EA8BB6A62BA0170FC23901B4

wrldwzrd89

Nov 24, 2004, 11:09 AM

This isn't true. 9700M is the mobile version of the 9600XT, this I think we all know. Just as well, the x600 series is based on the 9600XT with PCIE as well, with the desktop version having much faster ram speeds. Just for kicks, see below:

http://www.gamepc.com/labs/view_content.asp?id=mrpcie&page=10&MSCSProfile=95385A1F52DEA1A229D5B3754205446442BCC82773B4A95B2F0D856C26C199B803C984ED55E633B219FFF1D5 AAD656DBAA6146103C5607CBBA4A22D5E66B1C573F8D35362CEFF84D753776BADF9ACBDA9C4EB920C6EF89E5EC57B0D62C6B ED7330AABB111D4AB3E4342734A8697B7FC63429097910067CE5B3418522EA8BB6A62BA0170FC23901B4
How could that be? That doesn't make much sense. I'd think that the 9700M would be based on the 9700, not the 9600XT. Your comment about the X600 being based on the 9600XT does make sense, given the names.

Maxx Power

Nov 24, 2004, 07:01 PM

How could that be? That doesn't make much sense. I'd think that the 9700M would be based on the 9700, not the 9600XT. Your comment about the X600 being based on the 9600XT does make sense, given the names.

I know it sounds misleading, but the 9700M was the mobile variant of the 9600XT. ATI used a very confusing naming convention here, and they continue to mislead the consumers as well. For details read reviews done anywhere on the internet, AnandTech is a good source, or if you want, use the resources at ATI's website as well.

Maxx Power

Nov 24, 2004, 07:03 PM

How could that be? That doesn't make much sense. I'd think that the 9700M would be based on the 9700, not the 9600XT. Your comment about the X600 being based on the 9600XT does make sense, given the names.

Oh, and also do realize that the 9700M has four pixel pipes with 2 vertex pipes using 130nm process low-K. This practically screams 9600XT.

wrldwzrd89

Nov 24, 2004, 08:33 PM

I know it sounds misleading, but the 9700M was the mobile variant of the 9600XT. ATI used a very confusing naming convention here, and they continue to mislead the consumers as well. For details read reviews done anywhere on the internet, AnandTech is a good source, or if you want, use the resources at ATI's website as well.
That is VERY strange naming on ATI's part (they should have called it the 9600XT-M), but I believe you, Maxx Power.

Maxx Power

Nov 24, 2004, 11:43 PM

That is VERY strange naming on ATI's part (they should have called it the 9600XT-M), but I believe you, Maxx Power.

Thanks!! Hehe. Now, where's that kid with my latte ?

bryng

Nov 25, 2004, 01:24 PM

What, no Radeon Mobility 9800? I woulda thought it had a reasonable chance if being in an upgrade, particularly a G4 one ...

Maxx Power

Nov 25, 2004, 04:23 PM

What, no Radeon Mobility 9800? I woulda thought it had a reasonable chance if being in an upgrade, particularly a G4 one ...

I'm no expert, but looking at the target segment of the Radeon Mobility 9800, I'd say craming that into a PowerBook format, assuming they still keep their semi-thin-and-light profile, would be a chore and a half. It would be as hard as to put a G5 in the case if at least thermally, since the 9800M at full blast would consume upwards of 30 watts. Putting both a next gen CPU which would likely produce more heat and a next gen GPU that is targeted at hardcore gamers on the go gives you a laptop with a built-in coffee warmer.

There is no point to put that in a powerbook the way I see it anyway, that is intended to be a gamer's laptop replacement. And gaming is not Apple's cup of tea, especially in their laptops, besides, a lot of the games these days on the G4 platform is CPU bound in one way or another, putting in a faster graphics card doesn't make sense, although the PCI-E lane deduction technology pioneered by ATI in their newest series of mobile GPU's is definitely worth a good look. Good luck getting PCI-E to work fully on a G4 platform though, your bandwidth from CPU to the video card is limited by the FSB, which in this case would be 166, a huge bottleneck, or rather, a tiny bottle's neck.

WankerWeasel

Dec 10, 2004, 12:50 PM

We're not gonna see a low power consumption G5 chip any time soon that's for sure. Dual core, but not low power comsumption. Keep telling yourself that the G5 PowerBook is comming soon, mabe some day you'll believe it. :rolleyes:

wdlove

Dec 10, 2004, 05:13 PM

We're not gonna see a low power consumption G5 chip any time soon that's for sure. Dual core, but not low power consumption. Keep telling yourself that the G5 PowerBook is coming soon, maybe some day you'll believe it. :rolleyes:

Hopefully we will know something definitive a month from now. Sometime in the first quarter of '05 there should be a G5 update. We can be sure that someday we will see a G5 PowerBook. Could a Dual Core arrive sooner than we think! :cool:

Pringolian

Dec 18, 2004, 08:44 AM

I keep telling myself this, so I am starting to believe it! :D

There is going to be a G5 PowerBook between 1.6Ghz and 1.8Ghz in the first quarter of 2005.

* The PowerBooks were not updated when the iBook closed the gap between the machines about 4+ weeks ago. That is what I call 'a sign'

* If they are going to be updated in January, it has to be Keynote worthy and 166/200mhz doesn't cut it even with a tiny little bump in the bus speeds which is a dead cert whatver happens!

* If they don't update quite substantially in Jan then there are going to be a lot of mobile power users left very, very unhappy.

* There have been little leaks and lots of rumours saying that a low power G5 for the PowerBook is not as far off as we think

I believe that they will be announcing their introduction in January for shipping in March (delayed until April/May;)).

Tiger will not be released without Revised PowerBooks and PowerMacs, I think that is a pretty dead cert too....

Not long now - I N T E R E S T I N G.... :rolleyes: