From pure visual experience my applications on my g4 open faster than the core 2 duo imac i had did.
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Best PPC Computer
- Thread starter SuperKerem
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This might be an indictment of the software more than the hardware. For instance, generally speaking, OS updates continue to get more bloated and likewise, applications can become heavier as the devs know they have more CPU muscle at their disposal. A key example of this is the gaming industry -- it's really quite amazing the graphics and beautiful games that devs like Naughty Dog continue to squeeze out of the PS3; in contrast, some games like BF3 and Crysis when they came out are gorgeous, but have disproportionately high hardware requirements. PC developers are lazier and code sloppier because they can be, whereas console developers necessarily must optimize their engines to get every last ounce of performance possible.
As for the hardware themselves, while I dearly love my 1.67 G4, especially its cool thermal profile, it is probably around 3-4x less powerful than a 2.0-2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo in terms of pure power. Benchmarks don't tell the whole picture because they can skew towards multiple cores, but unlike the days of early 06/07, I would say a substantial % of programs can take advantage of at least 2 threads now.
The Sawtooth Power Mac G4. In my experience, it was one of the most reliable and most expandable Macs Apple made, a least for their time. It didn't suffer from the IDE slave issues that plagued the Yosemite Power Mac G3s (with their early revs anyway), and it didn't suffer from the ADC-related PSU issues that have now reared their ugly heads with the Digital Audio, Quicksilver, and MDD lines. Specs-wise they were far superior to the Yikes G4s, for which Apple was charging close to the same prices. I've heard and seen people hack, cut, dremel, and shoehorn everything in their Sawtooth machines, from watercooling, to SATA drives, to dual-1.6 Ghz CPU upgrades, and everything in between. It's amazing just how much staying power these machines have.
Just about the only thing they suffered from was Motorola's incompetence in effectively fabbing the G4 CPU. The minor debacle that Apple suffered with the G4 and later the G5 was arguably one of the key elements in Apple's history that led it down a path of seeking more and more control over its own destiny.
The early generation MacBooks, iMacs and MacBook Pros on the Core Duo CPU may have been slower than their PPC predecessors when running translated PPC code through Rosetta, but when running native Intel code they were far and away faster machines. Even excluding the fact that in terms of CPU architecture, the Core Duo was far more advanced than the 7447a, all of Apple's G4 machines suffered from chronic bandwidth starvation due to their small, slow processor busses.
The 970 was a great CPU with a great architecture, but there's no way they could have put that into a portable, not even the 970FX.
Just about the only thing they suffered from was Motorola's incompetence in effectively fabbing the G4 CPU. The minor debacle that Apple suffered with the G4 and later the G5 was arguably one of the key elements in Apple's history that led it down a path of seeking more and more control over its own destiny.
The early generation MacBooks, iMacs and MacBook Pros on the Core Duo CPU may have been slower than their PPC predecessors when running translated PPC code through Rosetta, but when running native Intel code they were far and away faster machines. Even excluding the fact that in terms of CPU architecture, the Core Duo was far more advanced than the 7447a, all of Apple's G4 machines suffered from chronic bandwidth starvation due to their small, slow processor busses.
The 970 was a great CPU with a great architecture, but there's no way they could have put that into a portable, not even the 970FX.
Absolutely priceless.
Clearly you don't live in the real word. A lot of people *need* Windows applications outside a commercial environment. Not everyone has the same needs as you. Are you really suggesting that anyone who needs Windows, only for a small percentage of their computing, should avoid macs entirely?
Pretty much true, but there is more to the story. The G4 drew way less power than a core duo, and may have been competitive on a performance per watt perspective... Problem is, it was at it's clock ceiling, and couldn't go much faster if it wanted to. The G5 was much faster, but did so with a much higher thermal output and power consumption. It went faster yes, but did so with a much lower performance per watt rating. I would've been interested in the PWREfficient processor if it had ever materialized, but the reality is IBM never had an interest in energy efficiency. They were all about raw power, regardless of heat output and power draw.
compare the g4 to the intel core solo and there is a massive performance difference
1.67ghz vs. 1.86ghz cap with a faster everything on the chip means that a intel core solo will blow a g4 single out of the water with only a slight difference in wattage
I mean in terms of architectural design. Apple would obviously have had to die shrink the G4 before it became low draw enough to actually compete with a core anything, but for the time it was made it was very good performance per watt and could have possibly been MADE competitive if apple had wanted it to, at that clock rate anyhow.
Hope that clears up what I meant.
I use both for world, real world cases. AMD HP Desktop PC + iBook G4. There are things that my ibook will never do, such as run Microsoft Visual Studio 2012/2010 or Microsoft MSQL 2012/2010 (required for work) Nevertheless, both are pretty useful. Both platforms can play happy together
BTW running an Intel Mac/PC is too Mainstream
Why emulate when you can get Windows running at full speed without the bugs of emulation. Just because your job might require multiple Windows applications doesn't mean you should get a Wintel. What if you want to run both the Mac OS and Windows, which most people running Windows on Macs do. I don't see any problems they cause you by running Windows, I see no cause to call them "idiots". Running Windows on a Mac does nothing to "taint" it.
Close, but not entirely accurate. Even on a performance/watt basis, the PPC G4s were lagging in comparison, but you're right, it is closer than one would think based on an absolute performance comparison. The problem isn't an actual clock "ceiling", but rather that performance (ie clock speed) does not scale linearly with power. The performance/watt of any processor is not a constant, but instead varies with clock speed. That is, once you started pushing G4s past 1.8, the heat and power requirements skyrocket beyond reasonable use. So if you wanted to, you could totally push a G4 as far as it could go without voltages frying the chip, the true clock ceiling, but it would have become absurd from a power standpoint long before then.
I actually believe the G5 is not much more impressive from a performance/watt standpoint than the G4, especially at lower clocks. Its just that the linearity of the performance ramp up persists to moderately higher clocks (maybe around 2) and the jump thereafter isn't as absurdly steep as it was with the G4. Its main performance advantages came actually with other improvements like 64-bit.
But yeah, after PPC lost to x86 years before the Mactel transition in terms of market share, they refocused their interests into the enterprise/server space.
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Have you used VPC7? Good lord, it was horribly slow and frustrating, and turned my PowerBook into a griddle.
But there's nothing inherently wrong with Windows. I don't like it myself, and avoid it when I can, but I see no reason why someone is inherently an idiot because they prefer it. Some people may think we're idiots for liking Mac OS X. It's an issue of need and then preference; both are modern, useful OSes and neither are inherently inferior to the other really.
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The Core Solo was not that much more powerful than a G4. It's maybe 10-30% more powerful in most tasks, but it really wasn't a game changer; probably the biggest advantage to it was the faster bus and memory. It's the dual cores that really blew PPC out of the water.
I use both for world, real world cases. AMD HP Desktop PC + iBook G4. There are things that my ibook will never do, such as run Microsoft Visual Studio 2012/2010 or Microsoft MSQL 2012/2010 (required for work) Nevertheless, both are pretty useful. Both platforms can play happy together
BTW running an Intel Mac/PC is too Mainstream
I do the same type of setup.
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I agree and i understand what you mean, btw i use qemu because i cant stand the speed of vpc7.
I would understand this if you could boot into windows without restarting but the restart really to be honest ruined my windows/osx dual boot experience. But my point that i want to get answered is why make a new partition for a few apps, just run emulators or virtualization. If you love windows and prefer it its fine to make a whole new partition but a pointless feature for the occasional use.
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Ive noticed that and i dont understand why. It even has more graphics, memory, processor, and os support.
Is this not a case for Intel Macs? On PPC, you had to rely on emulation, which was unbearably slow. With Intel Macs, now you can have hardware virtualization, which is a quantum leap forward in usability and features (including limited 3D acceleration).
A lot of what I said was hearsay from a friend admittedly, thanks for the corrections. It was an interesting read.
It wasn't like Apple didn't want the G4 to be competitive. For years Apple tried to figure out a way to get past the G4's limitations due to Motorola's problems; first it was an attempt to get around its frequency scaling problems by shipping multiprocessor Macs about two years too early, and then there was the system architecture introduced on the Xserve, which tried to shoehorn faster memory into a system architecture which couldn't handle it.
By that time, Motorola and later Freescale had been directing their efforts towards the embedded market anyway.
Hence the "At that clock rate" statement. It could never have competed directly, it would have to be at a performance per watt perspective. Sort of like ARM chips are doing now. Granted the G4 would've had to go through quite a few die shrinks, but this is all speculation really since it never happened.
No matter or what though most people here have dreamed of a g5 laptop regardless of how feasible it really would be.
It wasn't that Apple were not able to get a laptop friendly G5 processor. I think it was IBM fault.
IBM was working really close with Toshiba and Sony to get the Cell Processor up and running. And after getting the Cell Processor done, they had to mass produce it for Sony.
Not only that, it was a Win-Win situation to leave Apple in the dust. Now they use Cell Processor on IBM Main frames, and still produce for Sony.
Probably IBM could have come up with a better G4 processor, may be a dual G4 for the iBook/Powerbook line up. Why did they never come up with a dual G4 ibook/powerbook?
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Motorola and Freescale are like Italy... They leave you and do something else when you most need them...
IBM was working really close with Toshiba and Sony to get the Cell Processor up and running. And after getting the Cell Processor done, they had to mass produce it for Sony.
Not only that, it was a Win-Win situation to leave Apple in the dust. Now they use Cell Processor on IBM Main frames, and still produce for Sony.
Probably IBM could have come up with a better G4 processor, may be a dual G4 for the iBook/Powerbook line up. Why did they never come up with a dual G4 ibook/powerbook?
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Motorola and Freescale are like Italy... They leave you and do something else when you most need them...
I think it is a safe bet that having a dual processor laptop would not work out for a number of reasons- power consumption, heat production, size required, etc.