Originally posted by army_guy
Ohh please, this is the kind of people who make me laugh. Advantages ohhh over xeon/opteron, what are you talking about? your making out like these are crap machines?
Did I say that? Nice straw man you're setting up there. I outlined what Apple's serious problems are in the 3D space: no pro graphics cards; no optimised compilers or apps; and processor speeds that make them only competitive with Intel/AMD, not superior. (Numerous benchmarks have shown that a single 2 Ghz G5 is approximately equal to a 2.8 Ghz Pentium 4 or Xeon; sometimes faster, sometimes slower). I was responding to the rumour that they were planning a big showing at SIGGRAPH, and speculating that this might mean these issues would be addressed.
A dual 3 Ghz would, based on extrapolation from existing benchmarks, be a significant improvement on current and near future processors from Intel and AMD in terms of scalar integer and FP, as well as system bandwidth (if Apple manages to pull off a 1.5 Ghz bus...).
The major 3d tools major platform is still x86. They have moved from unix to linux and windows. 3D Studio Max is still windows and also Softimage is still linux/windows. I should also mention that Mental Ray also scales better than render man, Until these major tools come to OSX the "serious users" will still use the current platform.
The 3D market is extremely heterogeneous. Yes, there has been a definitive shift over the last ten years from Workstation vendors and OSes (SGI, SUN etc.; IRIX, Solaris, etc.) to commodity hardware and OSes (Windows, and to a far lesser extent, Mac OS). Major vendors on the software side are support the Mac OS: Alias, Maxon, Luxology, Newtek, Discreet (Combustion), Mental Ray, etc. More than 25% of Alias's sales of Maya are now to Mac OS seats.
I thought the G5 was a great machine and still is however the performance is exagarated when you see an Opteron running 64-bit linux ripping through an Hspice simulation with a power 4 sitting beside it id think hard about what your saying.
I wish I had a G5; maybe on my next grant. My regard for the Mac as a visualization tool has at least as much to do with the Mac OS; our cell systems visualization work just works better on the Mac, due to its superior memory management (over Windows at least). Our last simulation runs would constantly stall and crash on our Xeons and Pentiums, but it was smooth sailing on our dual G4s.
As for renderfarms i havent been keeping up to date with the subject but from personal experience id stick with the SUN systems.
Yes, you haven't been keeping up. PIXAR, which used to use SUN, currently uses Xeons for their render farm. The UltraSparc is currently topped out at 1.28 Ghz.
err iam afraid not, not for EDA applications it can never happen, if you wana enter this kind of market then you have to take on companies like SUN, IBM and INTEL. I doubt apple would considering pitting machines againt the SPARC and ITANIUM series not to mention the POWER.
You are aware the the G5 (PPC 970) is a POWER 4 derivative, right?
OSX doesnt even compare to an industry used OS such as Solaris/AIX/REDHAT ENTERPRISE AS/HPUNIX, other than the fancy graphics. I think you have a different idea of what dependable and stable is. IMO OSX doesnt have the grunt and punch, it still needs alot of work and it is still a pure 32-bit OS. OSX is good but theres lots of room for improvement, Apple will get here but its gona take time.
Mac OS X definitely has a different focus than those enterprise-focused OSes (witness Mac OS X's industry leading low audio latency: obviously not a high-priority for Solaris, but essential for an OS geared toward content creation). But with its FreeBSD underpinnings, its stable enough. And those "fancy graphics" are part of a OS framework strategy that should pay big dividends in the future, especially for visualization work.
Blark
