Were PowerPC Macs really as slow as they are now? (No Flame!)

[ybz90]

Originally Posted by Jethryn Freyman

AMD's FX 8350 is most certainly an 8 core processor, I can't see any way you could interpret it as anything else. 8 physical processing cores.

It's actually really not per existing naming conventions. Up to this point, processor cores each contain an integer core and a floating point core in a 1:1 ratio. To your point, there are actually 12 physical processing cores, but again, per conventions, an octo-core should have 16 total in 1:1.

AMD is hedging their bets as they are behind on the miniaturization process so they can't cram as much into a processor in a given die size constraint, so Bulldozer and co. emphasize integer over FP, as that is presumed to be the majority of one's processing. Each AMD module, which some consider to be true "cores" hence only 4 (I both agree and disagree with this in a sense), contains not 1 FP and 1 integer core, but rather 1 FP and 2 integer cores in a 1:2 ratio.

So what you really get in a "octo-core" like the FX-8350 are 4 modules for a total of 4 FP cores and 8 integer cores. Based on previous naming schemes, an 8 core would have 8 of FP and integer each. So like I said above, the reality is somewhere in between and you might consider it more like a 6ish-core-with-different-FP:int-ratios, as it's better than the old definition for quad-cores but cutting corners a bit too much to qualify as 8-core under the old definition/conventions. Hence, the confusion, disputes, and marketing mumbo jumbo.

[rjcalifornia]

Apple is fine with Intel, heck they couldn't be better! Intel has the capacity of mass delivering custom weird chips for small, mediums and large Clients. If Motorola/IBM were like Intel, we would be typing in our shiny Macbook Pro G5.

PowerPC is going to die this year(for normal consumers). Rumor has it that Microsoft and Sony are switching to Intel/AMD chips for their game consoles. Same rumor states that this has to be with Power Efficient Performance, which the current Xbox 360/PS3 IBM processors do not offer.

Remember the huge xbox 360 brick? or the size of the first PS3? It is Apple/Intel Switch all over again. IBM caring more about processing power rather than power efficiency... IBM is dumb.

[MisterKeeks]

Originally Posted by rjcalifornia

IBM is dumb.

Not so fast. If they want to stay in the console business, they would be dumb. However, there are markets that have different priorities and IBM is simply targeting them.

[rjcalifornia]

Originally Posted by MisterKeeks

Not so fast. If they want to stay in the console business, they would be dumb. However, there are markets that have different priorities and IBM is simply targeting them.

Console business? More like 'Providing chips to two big customers'

I don't know, but it is a bad sign that two Major Customers walk away from you, specially Microsoft which was a big surprise for everybody that they were using a PowerPC processor in their game consoles.

Think about it. IBM couldn't keep with Two Big Customers demands of Power Efficient chips (which is logic) It is Sony/Microsoft we're talking about. If they threat big customers like that, just picture how they will treat a small businesses?

IBM is dumb.

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Also if I were a shareholder, I would be totally mad for losing a customer like Microsoft

[ybz90]

Originally Posted by rjcalifornia

Remember the huge xbox 360 brick? or the size of the first PS3? It is Apple/Intel Switch all over again. IBM caring more about processing power rather than power efficiency... IBM is dumb.

I think this has more to do with the manufacturing process than anything else. The PS3's Cell is 90nm for instance. In today's world, where we're on the precipice of 14nm, or even AMD's upcoming 28nm process, this is gargantuan. Even 45nm is considered power hungry and inefficient, such is the nature of microprocessor technology. At its time, the Cell was tremendously powerful and efficient (USAF even built a supercomputer made of Linux PS3s), and it's part of why the PS3 at launch cost so much and cost Sony so much. PowerPC is not inherently inefficient as an architecture, in fact, it was designed to be more efficient than x86. It's just that as processes get smaller, the space savings that came with PPC are now rendered somewhat moot and x86 development has surged well ahead in technology and dollars spent. PPC computers continued to be used in a variety of applications, including military fly-by-wire computers, industrial equipment, and even missile guidance systems.

EDIT: Part of the reason of the rumored switch to x86, even though it would require a revamp of engines and loss of backwards compatibility, is simply because it would make games easier to develop. Again, I'm not sure this a consideration of PPC's capabilities, but simply that, AAA developers want to make cross platform games and they want an easier time doing it. If you recall, the PS3's Cell was notoriously difficult to program for. Also, another reason for the switch is just cost; if you believe the rumor mill, next-gen consoles will be pretty middling compared how in the past, they pushed the envelope. The reasons for this are two-fold: first, Microsoft and Sony are tired of getting kicked in the nether region when they see Nintendo profiting heavily on hardware; and second, we've reached a point where game development takes a really, really long time. If you double graphical capability of your console, you're not doubling the development time of the game, you're multiplying it closer to 4 or 8, not to mention the increased costs and staff needed. It takes exponentially more work to make a model more detailed, twice as large (in three dimensions), etc. It doesn't really make sense for console makers to push out something monstrous with Nvidia's next gen Titan 780 when nothing realistically can utilize it for several years, but which time, it will be mid-range, and Sony/Microsoft will have taken huge losses in the early years for nothing.

[ybz90]

Originally Posted by rjcalifornia

Console business? More like 'Providing chips to two big customers'

I don't know, but it is a bad sign that two Major Customers walk away from you, specially Microsoft which was a big surprise for everybody that they were using a PowerPC processor in their game consoles.

Think about it. IBM couldn't keep with Two Big Customers demands of Power Efficient chips (which is logic) It is Sony/Microsoft we're talking about. If they threat big customers like that, just picture how they will treat a small businesses?

IBM is dumb.

I consider the gaming (console hardware) industry trivial compared to enterprise. In terms of total profit and revenue over the entire ten-year (assuming that long) lifecycle of a console, it's really nothing compared to what IBM makes with server products. Like computers, consoles are incredibly low margin for the manufacturers, who often take losses for several years on the hardware in the hopes of selling enough software to make up for it. As a component supplier, there's plenty of money to be made, but in comparison to what IBM rakes in for their enterprise, government, and applied solutions, especially investments in cutting edge R&D like Watson, there is a comparative disadvantage in expending resources on something like console chip development.

Sony and Microsoft may seem like "big customers", but they're really not at all; console components are not tremendous in unit volume nor profit/margin per unit. At launch, when the processors were nascent, the PS3/Xbox processors probably cost around 100-200$ just for that component. Now, both Microsoft and Sony are no longer losing money on hardware sales, and the prices have plummeted to 200 and 250 MSRP respectively, not to mention the frequent sales. It stands to reason that there is very little profit to be had selling them chips anymore. Also, in its 7 year life, there have been about 77 million PS3s sold worldwide, so roughly 11M/yr. Apple, a relatively small vendor in terms of computer hardware, sold 4.1 million Macs this quarter, which is actually down 16% from last year.

I don't think IBM couldn't do it. I just think they didn't care or want to. Remember, they were the role model for HP during its epic fail of a transition; they got out of the low-margin hardware business, sold to Lenovo, and got into a high R&D, high level solutions industry. They're making bank, and have totally revitalized their corporate image from an stodgy, boring old-man suit-and-tie company, to one of intellectual aspirations and innovation.

[wobegong]

Interesting article here if you havn't seen it already on the console CPU PowerPC v x86 for next gen topic..

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2012/0...sole-industry/

[el-John-o]

I had a 250MHz professional Macintosh (it was when Apple was allowing others to build Mac's, this was a model from Power Computing aimed at high end pros). It had a fast 10k hard drive and tons of RAM (for the time). I continued to use it daily even alongside my 2GHz single core AMD Windows machine. But, eventually internet standards and software caught up and it became obsolete. That'a nowhere near the performance of a dual 1.25GHz PPC machine, and it kept up for a long time!

[PowerPCMacMan]

For someone who posts a lot in this PowerPC Mac forum you spew quite a bit of anti-powerpc sentiment. I think everyone else in this forum would agree with me. If you are not on the defense of the PowerPC for future use and or continuos use in PowerPC Macs we don't need to hear the negativity from those like you..

I am not rubbing feathers at all, just that if you are going to post in this forum please post positive stuff regarding PowerPC, not PowerPC is going to die and I highly doubt the game consoles will convert to x86 anytime soon.

Long Live PowerPC!

Originally Posted by rjcalifornia

Apple is fine with Intel, heck they couldn't be better! Intel has the capacity of mass delivering custom weird chips for small, mediums and large Clients. If Motorola/IBM were like Intel, we would be typing in our shiny Macbook Pro G5.

PowerPC is going to die this year(for normal consumers). Rumor has it that Microsoft and Sony are switching to Intel/AMD chips for their game consoles. Same rumor states that this has to be with Power Efficient Performance, which the current Xbox 360/PS3 IBM processors do not offer.

Remember the huge xbox 360 brick? or the size of the first PS3? It is Apple/Intel Switch all over again. IBM caring more about processing power rather than power efficiency... IBM is dumb.

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If this guy keeps spewing PowerPC hatred and saying "PowerPC is going to die, and such and such", I don't see this helping those in this thread. This is the PowerPC thread and its the only one we have to keep the PPC alive..

I am sure game console companies like Sony and Intel wouldn't dare at this point in dropping PowerPC for x86... then gaming would really go down hill.

Originally Posted by MisterKeeks

Not so fast. If they want to stay in the console business, they would be dumb. However, there are markets that have different priorities and IBM is simply targeting them.

[Jethryn Freyman]

This is a terrible thread, you don't compare 2001-2004 tech to 2008, let alone 2013/2013 tech.

FYI, my FireGL is still unbeaten in the PPC department, I am not limited by memory, disk speed or space, bus performance, or anything else.

The original Core Duos, I doubt they'd perform any better than a G5, if developers hadn't given up on the PPC platform and kept optimizing for PPC.

My G5 tower currently outperforms my Intel 4,1 Macbook, which includes 6GB memory and a SATA III SSD.

[turtlez]

I remember buying the iMac G5 and it was slow as hell compared to my PC that was two years older. Surprised I got anymore macs after that. I guess os x was just too nice to give up

[rjcalifornia]

No I'm not against, just thinking out loud It seemed like the perfect thread for it haha

I love PowerPC, I use my ibook G4 everyday. It is a good platform. One day we will see a new PowerPC macbook pro...

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Originally Posted by PowerPCMacMan

I am sure game console companies like Sony and Intel wouldn't dare at this point in dropping PowerPC for x86... then gaming would really go down hill.

I hope not, Xbox 360 and PS3 are powerful, and both Sony and Microsoft choose PowerPC over x86 because of high performance. We will know on February 20th

[rabidz7]

Mountain lion was all bloatware and no speed enhancements. it just slows down any mac that can run it.

[AlbertEinstein]

Originally Posted by rabidz7

Mountain lion was all bloatware and no speed enhancements. it just slows down any mac that can run it.

I beg to differ. Lion was completely crippled and ate RAM like the resource hog it is. Mountain Lion may not be the fastest, but it's closer in speed to Leopard than Lion.

Out of my 6 Intel Macs only one seemed slower when upgraded, but a clean install solved that. Must have been leftovers from 10.7.

[wobegong]

Originally Posted by AlbertEinstein

I beg to differ. Lion was completely crippled and ate RAM like the resource hog it is. Mountain Lion may not be the fastest, but it's closer in speed to Leopard than Lion.

Out of my 6 Intel Macs only one seemed slower when upgraded, but a clean install solved that. Must have been leftovers from 10.7.

Totally agree - Mountain Lion is without question snappier than Lion was.

[PowerPCMacMan]

Snow Leopard and Leopard were the best OS versions compared to the later ones. The truly LAST great OS versions!

Originally Posted by wobegong

Totally agree - Mountain Lion is without question snappier than Lion was.

[monkeybagel]

Originally Posted by Hrududu

Not at all. With the exception of Jaguar, install the original OS that came with the machine and use the software from that era and they run great. Also important to remember how much less CPU power the internet used back in the day.

This is very true for all machines and most people seem to forget it. Take a Pentium III machine and install Windows 2000 and Office 2000 on it and it will perform as fast as some current machines with current operating systems and applications.

Although not as true with Macintosh products, Windows was especially bad to slow down with registry bloat and security software over time, even if no malware was present and there were plenty of resources left.

This really makes the Macintosh an attractive platform. I have used Windows NT since 4.0 with dual processors and they were great machines and stable at the time, but the whole 9x line of operating systems really had its share of issues. I wasn't a Macintosh user back then until I had a 6400/200 for a while. I did enjoy that computer.

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Originally Posted by rabidz7

Mountain lion was all bloatware and no speed enhancements. it just slows down any mac that can run it.

It seems to me 10.8 was optimized a little better than 10.7. 10.7 reminded me of Windows Vista in many ways. It was usable and added several useful features, but didn't feel "complete."

I have 10.8 on my 2007 iMac and it actually runs really well for a computer that age.

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Originally Posted by MisterKeeks

Not so fast. If they want to stay in the console business, they would be dumb. However, there are markets that have different priorities and IBM is simply targeting them.

IBM has kept its head above water for many years and have made some good business decisions, although I don't work with their products in their current form. But they must be doing something right.

I can say some a few things I will always remember them for:

1) they made one of the best keyboards ever - Model M.
2) they made the best notebooks ever - the ThinkPad.

I must say I was really saddened when they sold their PC business to china.

[Jethryn Freyman]

Originally Posted by AlbertEinstein

I beg to differ. Lion was completely crippled and ate RAM like the resource hog it is. Mountain Lion may not be the fastest, but it's closer in speed to Leopard than Lion.

Out of my 6 Intel Macs only one seemed slower when upgraded, but a clean install solved that. Must have been leftovers from 10.7.

Pardon my language, but Lion sucked so bad on my 2008 Macbook [SSD, 6GB memory] that I went back to SL. Immense improvement. Also, I'd say that Snow Leopard on a mid-life Intel Mac or Leopard on a working G5 are the two best systems for Mac reliability/performance.

[clb1970]

Morning, new member here, so be gentle!

I think someone made the point well earlier, the software has changed markedly.

Programmers seem to want to add more and more bells and whistles to justify a new 'upgrade' to a program every year, satisfying their accountants. Coupled with a public which are increasingly wowed by style, who must have the latest 'thing' it's easy to see how development cycles can be shortened to get boxes on shelves.
Computers are so powerful now compared to 10 or 15 years ago that a 10% optimisation isn't as noticeable as it used to be. Knocking a program out quickly with animated bouncy characters seems more important than shaving cycles off the CPU or hogging less RAM.
Websites are even worse culprits it seems! Advertising, banners, flash, inbuilt video etc all murder resources.

If you take an example at random. MS office has very little in the way of 'useful' extras in the new 365 version than it did back in Office 97. However running the two on an old AMD K6 450 CPU would show a World of difference.

So no, PPCs haven't got slower, everything else has got more (too?) demanding.


Chris

[Jethryn Freyman]

Originally Posted by clb1970

Morning, new member here, so be gentle!

I think someone made the point well earlier, the software has changed markedly.

Programmers seem to want to add more and more bells and whistles to justify a new 'upgrade' to a program every year, satisfying their accountants. Coupled with a public which are increasingly wowed by style, who must have the latest 'thing' it's easy to see how development cycles can be shortened to get boxes on shelves.
Computers are so powerful now compared to 10 or 15 years ago that a 10% optimisation isn't as noticeable as it used to be. Knocking a program out quickly with animated bouncy characters seems more important than shaving cycles off the CPU or hogging less RAM.
Websites are even worse culprits it seems! Advertising, banners, flash, inbuilt video etc all murder resources.

If you take an example at random. MS office has very little in the way of 'useful' extras in the new 365 version than it did back in Office 97. However running the two on an old AMD K6 450 CPU would show a World of difference.

So no, PPCs haven't got slower, everything else has got more (too?) demanding.


Chris

My G4 466MHz runs Office 2004 like lightning, yet a 2.0GHz 20" Intel iMac is slower [by many times] to load Office 2008... and for what? The .docx format? Apparently it's more secure than plain old doc. Well, Micrisoft, nobody uses your password protection to keep anything safe. The whole .x file thing was just a money grabbing pointless exercise.

[ybz90]

I don't think many of the criticisms and Lion are fair. For the average user on the surface, you might not think anything changed, just useless iOS-ification, but many, many system level improvements have been made and tons of new frameworks, such as Core Storage. As more and more apps take advantage of these technologies, future applications will be a lot more powerful and much quicker. Bloat happens, but computers frankly are faster than you can use today as far as user experience goes. That's what iterative revisions are for (ML) -- to clean up the bloat while retaining new features. OS X has reached a point where novel, useful user features are hard to add (hence the iOS crap), but under the hood, there is a lot of great things still happening that the average user does not know about.

[MisterKeeks]

Originally Posted by Jethryn Freyman

and a SATA III SSD.

Your MacBook has a SATA II controller.

[Jethryn Freyman]

Originally Posted by MisterKeeks

Your MacBook has a SATA II controller.

Yep, it's a bottleneck there. GPU bottleneck is much worse though (GMA X3100)

[GermanyChris]

Originally Posted by ybz90

I don't think many of the criticisms and Lion are fair. For the average user on the surface, you might not think anything changed, just useless iOS-ification, but many, many system level improvements have been made and tons of new frameworks, such as Core Storage. As more and more apps take advantage of these technologies, future applications will be a lot more powerful and much quicker. Bloat happens, but computers frankly are faster than you can use today as far as user experience goes. That's what iterative revisions are for (ML) -- to clean up the bloat while retaining new features. OS X has reached a point where novel, useful user features are hard to add (hence the iOS crap), but under the hood, there is a lot of great things still happening that the average user does not know about.

While I'm generally inclined to agree with what you just said I'm going to reserve final judgement for 10.9. ML improved Lion in greatly but either are a particular improvement or SL for the stuff I use.

[cjmillsnun]

Originally Posted by LOLZpersonok

My PowerPC Mac's don't seem as fast as they should. It's my understanding that now that Macs are made with Intel processors they're much faster now, but were they actually as slow back then as they are now? I don't have a G5 Mac so I can't say for that, but it seems that my 500MHz Compaq Deskpro performs the same on Gmail as my Dual Processor 1.25GHz PowerMac G4...Idk, it could be just me.

Mine are generally slow now, but were they fast back in their time???

They were very fast back in their time.

Put Tiger on rather than Leopard. (I'm guessing your PC is running XP and not Windows 8!). Then install TenFourFox http://www.floodgap.com/software/tenfourfox/

It will give you a modern browser with a modern javascript engine but optimised for Tiger and PowerPC processors.