WOAH that's a LOT of G5s!!!

poiihy · Feb 23, 2015

Found this on ebay:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Apple-Power...321?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item463500a0c1

67 PowerMac G5s for $2,680; parts or repair.
That means $40 per Powermac.

If anyone has the time, I mean a LOT of time (and space) (LOL!), you can buy this and part out each one and sell the parts individually. G5 cases are hot

(not my auction)

Surrat · Feb 23, 2015

Sad, I see no dual core G5's and not one 2 slot video card.

bunnspecial · Feb 23, 2015

Surrat said:
Sad, I see no dual core G5's and not one 2 slot video card.

A couple of them are missing the graphics card completely and are also missing the slot cover over the AGP slot. If I had to guess, those may have had 6800 Ultras(were there any other double height video cards for the G5?) that were removed and sold separately.

If $40 is the bulk price for G5s, you can't blame them for pulling a handful of $50 graphics cards out of them.

robertdsc · Feb 23, 2015

Just imagine the XGrid possibilities. Mind blowing.

Anonymous Freak · Feb 23, 2015

robertdsc said:
Just imagine the XGrid possibilities. Mind blowing.

Sadly, a few last-gen quad-core Mac minis would beat the whole stack, and for a lot less energy.

They all appear at initial glance to be first-generation Power Mac G5s, which means, at best, they're dual 2 GHz. It would only take about a dozen Mac Minis to meet the performance. (And that's assuming they're all dual 2 GHz machines.) Geekbench rates the 2 GHz G5 (dual CPU) at about 1800-2000. The last-gen quad-core Mac mini at about 13000.

A dozen last-gen Mac minis would run you noticeably more money, of course. But they would pay off in power savings in VERY short order.

poiihy · Feb 23, 2015

Anonymous Freak said:
Sadly, a few last-gen quad-core Mac minis would beat the whole stack, and for a lot less energy.

They all appear at initial glance to be first-generation Power Mac G5s, which means, at best, they're dual 2 GHz. It would only take about a dozen Mac Minis to meet the performance. (And that's assuming they're all dual 2 GHz machines.) Geekbench rates the 2 GHz G5 (dual CPU) at about 1800-2000. The last-gen quad-core Mac mini at about 13000.

A dozen last-gen Mac minis would run you noticeably more money, of course. But they would pay off in power savings in VERY short order.

Yeah, it's amazing how much better newer technology is.

Just think, one small desktop optical computer would be so many times more powerful than today's world's most powerful supercomputer array which spans an entire building.

Soon we will be wearing optical computers.

weckart · Feb 23, 2015

My Raspberry Pi can stream internet TV in 720HD without skipping a beat, pegging the cpu or heating up noticeably and that on a piddly USB charger. I don't think my last generation G5 even with the beefed up card it has can do that without struggling.

Surrat · Feb 24, 2015

Comparing your Pi from 2012 to the G5 from 2003 is pretty unfair..

Its like comparing the performance of your G5, to a Quadra 800.

9 years of processor evolution makes a hell of a difference.

Zotaccian · Feb 24, 2015

robertdsc said:
Just imagine the XGrid possibilities. Mind blowing.

Imagine electric bill !

128keaton · Feb 24, 2015

Zotaccian said:
Imagine electric bill !

There wouldn't be one, just a constant flow of cash coming out of your bank account.

Gamer9430 · Feb 24, 2015

let me just grab some money off my money tree and buy the lot, then donate them to the members of this forum. Now everyone can be happy, and ill be poor. It's a fair price, but who is going to spend $2000 on broken G5s???

bunnspecial · Feb 24, 2015

They would be a good start on recreating Virginia Tech's System X...

redheeler · Feb 24, 2015

Gamer9430 said:
let me just grab some money off my money tree and buy the lot, then donate them to the members of this forum. Now everyone can be happy, and ill be poor.

Would you? I so despise my original DP G5.

Gamer9430 said:
It's a fair price, but who is going to spend $2000 on broken G5s???

Like the OP mentioned someone could part them and sell the parts, or put together some working machines and sell off the remainder as parts.

If it were me I'd be getting a refurb baseline nMP for that price

poiihy · Feb 24, 2015

Gamer9430 said:
let me just grab some money off my money tree and buy the lot, then donate them to the members of this forum. Now everyone can be happy, and ill be poor. It's a fair price, but who is going to spend $2000 on broken G5s???

I would if I could.

$40 each and you get all those parts!!!

----------

weckart said:
My Raspberry Pi can stream internet TV in 720HD without skipping a beat, pegging the cpu or heating up noticeably and that on a piddly USB charger. I don't think my last generation G5 even with the beefed up card it has can do that without struggling.

How does a Raspberry Pi compare to a 466mhz Powermac G4 or something like that in processing power? The PI has an ARMv6 clocked at 700MHz.

weckart · Feb 24, 2015

Surrat said:
Comparing your Pi from 2012 to the G5 from 2003 is pretty unfair..

Its like comparing the performance of your G5, to a Quadra 800.

9 years of processor evolution makes a hell of a difference.

Yeah. That was kinda my point, except my Pi is from 2015 and my G5 from 2005.

poiihy said:
How does a Raspberry Pi compare to a 466mhz Powermac G4 or something like that in processing power? The PI has an ARMv6 clocked at 700MHz.

It doesn't really, since we are talking different architectures. The clock cycles don't really mean anything except to gauge increments from lower or higher clocked chips from the same architecture. The RPi2 has a quad-core ARMv7 clocked at 900MHz for what it is worth.

It runs Kodi super smoothly except the menus slow down when a stream is playing but very usably even then. It cannot run Microsoft Office for toffee.

A.Goldberg · Feb 24, 2015

bunnspecial said:
They would be a good start on recreating Virginia Tech's System X...

AH remember that. Shortly after the G5's came out that video on Apple's website of the PowerMac G5 supercomputer.

Then shortly thereafter they replaced the G5's with Xserves if I remember correctly.

I wonder if there are any apple supercomputers out there these days.

Anonymous Freak · Feb 24, 2015

weckart said:
My Raspberry Pi can stream internet TV in 720HD without skipping a beat, pegging the cpu or heating up noticeably and that on a piddly USB charger. I don't think my last generation G5 even with the beefed up card it has can do that without struggling.

The big difference is that the Pi has a dedicated H.264 decoder ASIC. People have added those to the first gen AppleTV, too, allowing it to smoothly decode 1080.

bunnspecial · Feb 24, 2015

A.Goldberg said:
AH remember that. Shortly after the G5's came out that video on Apple's website of the PowerMac G5 supercomputer.

Then shortly thereafter they replaced the G5's with Xserves if I remember correctly.

I wonder if there are any apple supercomputers out there these days.

I think that the G5 towers only lasted a year or so before the Xserves came in.

I don't know about current Apple supercomputers-in all honesty, with both the Xserve and the old Mac Pro now gone, I think it would be awfully difficult to put one together. As much as there is to like about the new Mac Pro, I don't know that they have the connectivity or expandability to work well in a cluster. Plus, it would be awfully difficult to "stack" them in racks.

A.Goldberg · Feb 24, 2015

bunnspecial said:
I think that the G5 towers only lasted a year or so before the Xserves came in.

I don't know about current Apple supercomputers-in all honesty, with both the Xserve and the old Mac Pro now gone, I think it would be awfully difficult to put one together. As much as there is to like about the new Mac Pro, I don't know that they have the connectivity or expandability to work well in a cluster. Plus, it would be awfully difficult to "stack" them in racks.

My thoughts exactly. I suppose Apple knowingly got out of that game when they stopped making servers.

Anyone know what apple uses in their data centers and such? It seems odd such a massive computer company would outsource their products.

bunnspecial · Feb 24, 2015

By the way, if you want to see a lot of G5s...

http://www.arc.vt.edu/resources/hpc/history/sysXinit/IMG_2028.JPG

http://www.arc.vt.edu/resources/hpc/history/sysXinit/IMG_2400.JPG

http://www.arc.vt.edu/resources/hpc/history/sysXinit/IMG_2463.JPG

http://www.arc.vt.edu/resources/hpc/history/sysXinit/IMG_3651.JPG

At one time, there were 1100 of them in that room.

Gamer9430 · Feb 24, 2015

bunnspecial said:
By the way, if you want to see a lot of G5s...

http://www.arc.vt.edu/resources/hpc/history/sysXinit/IMG_2028.JPG

http://www.arc.vt.edu/resources/hpc/history/sysXinit/IMG_2400.JPG

http://www.arc.vt.edu/resources/hpc/history/sysXinit/IMG_2463.JPG

http://www.arc.vt.edu/resources/hpc/history/sysXinit/IMG_3651.JPG

At one time, there were 1100 of them in that room.

I could only imagine how hot that room was, and how expensive the electric bill was.

bunnspecial · Feb 24, 2015

Gamer9430 said:
I could only imagine how hot that room was, and how expensive the electric bill was.

As with most modern supercomputers, it had a fairly efficient room cooling system to keep things at a manageable temperature-a reasonably cool room makes for happy computers! If you look through the full photo gallery

http://www.arc.vt.edu/resources/hpc/history/sysX_construction.php

there are photos of the cooling system installation before the computers started going into the racks

As for the power bill-that's secondary

The big selling point was that at the time it was built, it was the #3 supercomputer in the world but was about 1/80 the cost of the #1 computer at the time($5.2 million vs $400 million). $395 million buys a lot of electricity.

weckart · Feb 25, 2015

bunnspecial said:
I think that the G5 towers only lasted a year or so before the Xserves came in.

I don't know about current Apple supercomputers-in all honesty, with both the Xserve and the old Mac Pro now gone, I think it would be awfully difficult to put one together. As much as there is to like about the new Mac Pro, I don't know that they have the connectivity or expandability to work well in a cluster. Plus, it would be awfully difficult to "stack" them in racks.

Not difficult, just expensive.

http://www.sonnettech.com/product/xmacproserver.html

poiihy · Feb 25, 2015

weckart said:
Not difficult, just expensive.

http://www.sonnettech.com/product/xmacproserver.html

Yeah... this new Mac Pro should be something like the "Mac" or "Mac Tower" and the big tower is the "Mac Pro" or "Mac Tower Pro" or something like that...

The trashcan mac (or ashcan mac if you are into art) is nice and all but it is so limited... it's just a solid-state cylinder; only moving part is the fan which soon will not exist anymore. But internal expandability? Get out of here! You cannot do much with a trashcan Mac except use it. If you want expandability you need to build an external box for it.
It seems that Apple let go of server stuff and now just make consumer stuff. Maybe because very few people actually use many Macs for server racks. Dell or IBM or homemade racks are probably much more reasonable to use.
Why do people even use Macs for server racks at all? It's not like they have to use OS X, they probably use a Linux distro for clusters; but you can do this with any server machine.

One thing that really irritates me about the nMP is the accelerometer specifically for turning the lights on and off!

WHY?!

128keaton · Feb 25, 2015

poiihy said:
Yeah... this new Mac Pro should be something like the "Mac" or "Mac Tower" and the big tower is the "Mac Pro" or "Mac Tower Pro" or something like that...

The trashcan mac (or ashcan mac if you are into art) is nice and all but it is so limited... it's just a solid-state cylinder; only moving part is the fan which soon will not exist anymore. But internal expandability? Get out of here! You cannot do much with a trashcan Mac except use it. If you want expandability you need to build an external box for it.
It seems that Apple let go of server stuff and now just make consumer stuff. Maybe because very few people actually use many Macs for server racks. Dell or IBM or homemade racks are probably much more reasonable to use.
Why do people even use Macs for server racks at all? It's not like they have to use OS X, they probably use a Linux distro for clusters; but you can do this with any server machine.

One thing that really irritates me about the nMP is the accelerometer specifically for turning the lights on and off! WHY?!

To reach back and plug your 15th LACIE drive into the thunderbolt port.

WOAH that's a LOT of G5s!!!

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