IBM and Motorola Diverging

[TechLarry]

Originally posted by rice_web


I completely agree. A PowerMac with RapidIO will kill just about anything, and a 64-bit G5 will easily kill the Hammer and Itanium. Why? Because of the advances that Apple is making, behind closed curtains, to increase the speed of other factors.

In other words, it's not only the CPU that Apple is worrying about. The new G4 that is supposedly coming in July will sport RapidIO and hella fast DDR memory. This, along with AGP ports running, I believe, at 2x the x86 counterparts. Imagine, a deal with ATI or NVidia to make the ultimate video card running on the fastest video card bus in the industry.

I'm just rambling right now, but with RapidIO, the speed gap will instantly be filled.

My God, we've been hearing promises like this from the PowerPC Camp for YEARS now.

I'm personally tired of reading the current collection of Buzz-Words, and then seeing NOTHING come out of it.

My position is not to convince anyone this is a good idea. I'm not even sure it's a good idea. I just know that Motorola isn't getting the job done, has had MORE than enough of a chance, and deserves to be shown the door.

TL

 

[TechLarry]

Re: LOL

Originally posted by gjohns01
I've owned an Apple computer since the IIc. I've always loved them and I still have one sitting under my desk at home next to my pc. Yes I use a pc and all of you Mac zealots out there keep one thing in your head. When the following things happen, you can claim ultimate superiority to the wintel world.

1) The "superior" G4/G5 or whatever you're waiting on hits the same Mhz level as Intel/AMD.
2) They offer DDR, ATA100/133 on the motherboard.
3) They offer enterprise class servers and enterprise apps and not just Microsoft Office and a tower machine with a server badge slapped on it.
4) You don’t have to work in an OS that has have the graphics subsystem accelerated and the other so slow you might as well draw on the screen with a pencil.

I won't keep going, because you get the idea. You can yap about how Macs are superior all you want. The fact is I built a dual gigahertz machine (with RAID) for less than 500 bucks. It works and it's never crashed on me. Ever. When Apple can show me a machine that blows away wintel performance on something other than Photoshop and it doesn't cost me $4000 to buy it then you can be as smug as you want. Until then, I’ll get paid for writing apps for Windows or Solaris. How many people want to be graphics designers anyway?

You make a few good points, but you destroy your credibility with your $500 dual-processor RAID rant.

I've built over 20 PC's in the last 3 years. Just finished one.

So you say you built a dual processor RAID system for $500?

You got a motherboard, two processors, RAM, case, video card, ethernet card, two hard drives, RAID controller, floppy drive, etc... for $500?

Either you personally know Tony Soprano, have one HELL of a discounter for a supplier, or are just plain full of doo-doo.

TL

 

[TechLarry]

Originally posted by dukestreet
I'm truly worried about this whole thing. Moto has dropped the ball and needs to get going on getting faster processors. Leaving Apple only one option to get faster machines by adding multiple processors is not a long term solution. MHz myth be damned, its hurting Apple not to have a single processor/motherboard/system bus that can stand up against the top end PCs.

Duke gets it...

TL

 

[eirik]

Originally posted by TechLarry


My God, we've been hearing promises like this from the PowerPC Camp for YEARS now.

I'm personally tired of reading the current collection of Buzz-Words, and then seeing NOTHING come out of it.

TL

Definitely!!! Promises, promises!!!

Now I know how all the women in my past feel.

Eirik

 

[alex_ant]

Re: Apple needs more leverage!!!

Originally posted by eirik
But who would Apple partner with such that they as a collective could command sufficient volume-demand to motivate a semiconductor supplier to achieve the desired results? SGI? Sun? IBM?

This reminds me of that rumor from macosrumors.com a few months back that mentioned SGI working feverishly behind closed doors to port IRIX 7.0 to PowerPC. It seemed pretty far-out to me at the time, but what you've said would make it seem a bit more plausible. The MIPS R1x000 is dying a slow and steady death. It would make sense for SGI to partner with a company that has the cutting-edge chips it needs to remain competitive.

IBM's PowerPCs may not be so hot at the moment, but what about it's POWERs? Power4 is currently one of the only high-end CPUs left in the massive wake of vapor the Itanium has left behind, and it's probably the best scientific chip in the world at the moment. Alpha is dying... MIPS (high-end MIPS, that is) is dying... PA-RISC is dying... Itanium sucks arse... what's left? SPARC, Power, and 64-bit PowerPC (which AFAIK doesn't exist yet). It could make sense for SGI to switch the big iron over to Power4, and switch the desktop boxes over to PowerPC... thus increasing demand for both chips, and creating a bit more incentive for IBM to be more active in its development of the PPC, thus providing fresh new fruit to Apple. (Minus AltiVec, though... Hmmmmmm..........)

Alex

 

[alex_ant]

Re: Re: LOL

Originally posted by TechLarry
Either you personally know Tony Soprano, have one HELL of a discounter for a supplier, or are just plain full of doo-doo.

He said 500 bucks. Not 500 dollars. You know - male deer. I can see how the meat alone from those could be worth thousands of dollars.

Alex

 

[Scottgfx]

Re: Re: Re: LOL

Originally posted by alex_ant

He said 500 bucks. Not 500 dollars. You know - male deer. I can see how the meat alone from those could be worth thousands of dollars.

Alex

Mmmmm, Jerkey!

I'm another one who can say that a dual for under $500 is complete BS. I have a Tyan Tiger with dual 1.2Ghz. Just the motherboard and processors alone were over $500. The guy did say Two hard drives... He just never mentioned that they were 1995 vintage 5.25" full-hight Micropolis drives.

 

[iGav]

Eirik

Definitely!!! Promises, promises!!!

Now I know how all the women in my past feel.

LOL There's alot of people who'd agree with that statement.........

I still think if the AIM alliance could actually be a*sed to work together and share the technology... it might me more conducive to fast processors than if either one went out on there own and developed their own cpu's!!!

The new G5 is going to have to be something special, as is the rest of the machine if it is going to re-address the current percieved imbalance between the Intel/AMD world and that of Apple and PPC!!

Apple will take up the challenge though........... Holdtight!!

 

[Mr. Anderson]

We already have a G4 in the iMac - Apple's consumer machine.
The G4s are in everyone of the desktops.
G5s will be in the proline/desktops someday.

What do all these have in common? They're all Moto chips!

If Apple keeps updating the other low end machines with newer processors, G4s, then that leaves IBM with zero, 0, nada, rien.

If the GHz G3 has been around why wasn't it put in the iBook or CRT iMac? Under the current view of the Apple progress scheme, it looks to me the IBM is out, which leaves us in the hands of Moto

I hate to say it, but I hope the G5 comes out soon and kicks some butt, because if it doesn't, start selling you stock now.

 

[mcrain]

Originally posted by eirik


Definitely!!! Promises, promises!!!

Now I know how all the women in my past feel.

Eirik

Frustrated and horny?

 

[eirik]

Originally posted by mcrain


Frustrated and horny?

You're very perceptive!!!

 

[mcrain]

Originally posted by eirik


You're very perceptive!!!

Sorry, I couldn't resist. It was like a slow pitch waiting to be whacked.

 

[Ifeelbloated]

Damn. Ya'll just gave ME some perspective! All I ever hear from her is I hear and I don't listen, blah blah blah, peck peck peck.

 

[gjohns01]

Re: LOL

TechLarry,

How did I hit the $500 dollar price point? Easy. I did something you can only do in the Wintel world. I cannabalized my previous machine for Memory, Case, etc. and bought the following.

1 ABIT VP6 Motherboard for $135 bucks
2 1Ghz CPUs for $140 bucks.
1 Geforce 2 MX for $50 bucks.

See. Brand new machine.

If you want to get technical, I added the RAID functionality later. I added 2 additional drives (there's 4 total) for $120 bucks. See I've got room inside the case too. 4 hard drives and a cd-rw. I couldn't do that in my Beige G3.

 

[gjohns01]

I've got your Micropolis right here

Scottgfx,

Obviously you don't know what you're talking about. A Tiger 230 S2507D can be had for about $100 bucks. 1.2Ghz P3s are $125. That adds up to $350. Maybe you should stop buying your PC parts from Comp USA too. Moron. Let me give you some help. Go to PriceWatch.com and see if you can save some money next time.

TechLarry look around. You can get a dual motherboard with RAID, NIC, Audio etc for cheap. Less than $150.

 

[Rower_CPU]

Re: I've got your Micropolis right here

Originally posted by gjohns01
Obviously you don't know what you're talking about. A Tiger 230 S2507D can be had for about $100 bucks. 1.2Ghz P3s are $125. That adds up to $350. Maybe you should stop buying your PC parts from Comp USA too. Moron. Let me give you some help. Go to PriceWatch.com and see if you can save some money next time.

Apples and oranges. In order to fairly evaluate them you have to start from scratch...meaning NO parts ahead of time. Scrapping a machine to make a second one is not really making a new machine. Obviously you feel that using old, obsolete technology to prove your point is a valid argument. You also forgot to add on the cost of the OS.

OS X servers are VERY robust machines. They will saturate a network LONG before they become overloaded. Enterprise, schmenterprise. Streaming gigabytes of video is enough to prove they are for real. It's even more astonishing that they do this in a desktop form factor, which doesn't require special cooling or storage requirements. But wait, there's more. Have you actually USED and setup an IIS server? It's utterly ridiculous compared to the ease and SECURITY of OS X.

Please save your wolf-in-sheep's-clothing antics for someone who's interested.

 

[alex_ant]

Re: Re: I've got your Micropolis right here

Originally posted by Rower_CPU
OS X servers are VERY robust machines. They will saturate a network LONG before they become overloaded. Enterprise, schmenterprise. Streaming gigabytes of video is enough to prove they are for real. It's even more astonishing that they do this in a desktop form factor, which doesn't require special cooling or storage requirements. But wait, there's more. Have you actually USED and setup an IIS server? It's utterly ridiculous compared to the ease and SECURITY of OS X.

This is kind of off-topic, but I guess if I needed a server and I had $5000 to spend, I'd first look at the likes of Sun IBM - and, if they weren't an option, I'd look at a solid x86 server vendor (w/ FreeBSD or OpenBSD for an OS) - before I looked at Apple. I don't want to start a flame war here, but while I think OS X is a great desktop and workstation OS, it's simply too slow, resource-intensive, and unproven for me to use it on a server. If I had to use it, I would probably turn off Quartz and run it from the command line - but if I were doing that, I would be cancelling out quite a bit of what makes OS X OS X, and in that case, it would be little more than a slow PowerPC version of FreeBSD with a Mach kernel and a filesystem that's horrible for servers. (Yes, I'm aware of UFS, but that's not much better...)

Alex

 

[Rower_CPU]

Re: Re: Re: I've got your Micropolis right here

Originally posted by alex_ant
This is kind of off-topic, but I guess if I needed a server and I had $5000 to spend, I'd first look at the likes of Sun IBM - and, if they weren't an option, I'd look at a solid x86 server vendor (w/ FreeBSD or OpenBSD for an OS) - before I looked at Apple. I don't want to start a flame war here, but while I think OS X is a great desktop and workstation OS, it's simply too slow, resource-intensive, and unproven for me to use it on a server. If I had to use it, I would probably turn off Quartz and run it from the command line - but if I were doing that, I would be cancelling out quite a bit of what makes OS X OS X, and in that case, it would be little more than a slow PowerPC version of FreeBSD with a Mach kernel and a filesystem that's horrible for servers. (Yes, I'm aware of UFS, but that's not much better...)

No flames from me...yet.

Are you saying you want to use OS X Server as a desktop? I'm not sure I'm reading your intent correctly...

You can buy the low-end Server G4 for $2800.

The thing about OS X Server is that Apache, PHP, MySQL, etc are all background tasks, running via the command line. I don't need to be logged in (in fact that's how you ensure no-one gets on and fools with it - leave it sitting at the login screen) in order for it to run. It's not worrying about all of the transparency and shadows when it's just sitting there waiting for someone to log in.

In my experience it has been VERY fast on our campus network, and it's _only_ a G4 500 w/ 1 GB RAM.

 

[TechLarry]

Re: Re: LOL

Originally posted by gjohns01
TechLarry,

How did I hit the $500 dollar price point? Easy. I did something you can only do in the Wintel world. I cannabalized my previous machine for Memory, Case, etc. and bought the following.

1 ABIT VP6 Motherboard for $135 bucks
2 1Ghz CPUs for $140 bucks.
1 Geforce 2 MX for $50 bucks.

See. Brand new machine.

If you want to get technical, I added the RAID functionality later. I added 2 additional drives (there's 4 total) for $120 bucks. See I've got room inside the case too. 4 hard drives and a cd-rw. I couldn't do that in my Beige G3.

First, pretty sleezy man, though we all pretty much figured out what you were talking about.

And I am well aware of the merits of canibalizing machines and building 'new' one's.

That's how I have two Win2K Servers running...

Finally, your situation now has absolutely nothing to do with what is being discussed here, now that we all know what you were _really_ talking about.

TL

 

[TechLarry]

Re: I've got your Micropolis right here

Originally posted by gjohns01
Scottgfx,

Obviously you don't know what you're talking about. A Tiger 230 S2507D can be had for about $100 bucks. 1.2Ghz P3s are $125. That adds up to $350. Maybe you should stop buying your PC parts from Comp USA too. Moron. Let me give you some help. Go to PriceWatch.com and see if you can save some money next time.

TechLarry look around. You can get a dual motherboard with RAID, NIC, Audio etc for cheap. Less than $150.

Oh, for CRYING out loud people!

Build me a WHOLE machine for $500, as the original poster insinuated, and THEN call me.

Using these guys methodology, I could say I own a Cadillac Eldorado ETC (which I dearly want), but in reality only own the floormats!

TL

 

[gjohns01]

Case closed.

I could still build the same machine from scratch for less than $1000. I could have paid an extra $1000 grand to get a server motherboard, cpus; SCSI drives and built a "real" server. I still would have come out cheaper than buying a brand new Apple G4 Tower/Server.

As for the OS. I paid for the MSDN Universal Subscription. Do you know what that is? For $2800 bucks I own every Microsoft App/OS/SDK/Dev Tool they make. Do I receive the same resources from Apple? LOL. Right!

Have I set up an IIS server before absolutely. Is my box secure? Absolutely! Can I run and Oracle database? (and Ellison is on the damn board) DB2? Sybase? Exchange server? Websphere? MQSeries? Use a Java IDE that doesn't suffer from redraw problems because the OS isn't completely finished? NO!

I can do all of that on my PC. I can run all of those applications in the comfort of my home so that I don't have to go to work everyday. Do I give a damn about streaming video? Using Photoshop? Do I care if I can arrange all of my photos nicely and order a book? Care if my machine runs hot? Hell NO!

What's your point? That you don't care about the enterprise because that's not what you do for a living? Well I do. And Apple isn't playing on the same level. Case closed.

 

[Rower_CPU]

Re: Case closed.

Originally posted by gjohns01
I could still build the same machine from scratch for less than $1000. I could have paid an extra $1000 grand to get a server motherboard, cpus; SCSI drives and built a "real" server. I still would have come out cheaper than buying a brand new Apple G4 Tower/Server.

Prove it.

I look forward to shooting it down...

 

[alex_ant]

Re: Re: Re: Re: I've got your Micropolis right here

Originally posted by Rower_CPU
Are you saying you want to use OS X Server as a desktop? I'm not sure I'm reading your intent correctly...

No, I'm just saying I'd rather use a tried-and-true Unix than OS X Server in the case where I need a server that's rock solid and under consistently very heavy load.

The thing about OS X Server is that Apache, PHP, MySQL, etc are all background tasks, running via the command line. I don't need to be logged in (in fact that's how you ensure no-one gets on and fools with it - leave it sitting at the login screen) in order for it to run. It's not worrying about all of the transparency and shadows when it's just sitting there waiting for someone to log in.

Yes, I know you can do that. When you do that, though, as I said, you're negating most of the advantages it gives you over other Unixes. (The GUI admin tools.) Running a Mac server headless puts it on the same playing field as all other Unix boxes, and on that playing field it *generally* is quite inferior as a server. Depending on the type of server, of course.

In my experience it has been VERY fast on our campus network, and it's _only_ a G4 500 w/ 1 GB RAM.

Depending on the task, I think Power Mac servers can be anywhere from very competitive to not competitive at all against equivalently-priced x86 servers. I'm not saying your G4 server isn't fast, I'm saying x86 at the same price is generally quite a bit faster. For lots of server applications, CPU speed is not the limiting factor, and the Mac's 32-bit 33MHz PCI really hurts... not enough bandwidth for Ultra160 SCSI. Not to mention the crappy memory bandwidth and the poor energy efficiency.

That said, I think a Power Mac server would be a good choice if you can't afford to keep a Unix admin around, or just don't want to deal with Unix yourself. the GUI tools are pretty foolproof, and just because it's a bit slower than an x86 server doesn't mean it's vastly less useful.

Alex

 

[alex_ant]

Re: Re: Case closed.

Originally posted by Rower_CPU
Prove it.

I look forward to shooting it down...

Actually I think he's got a point...

$100 Tyan Tiger dual P3 motherboard
$100 Full-tower ATX case w/ 500 watt power supply
$250 Two 1.2GHz Pentium IIIs ($125 each)
$250 1GB DDR SDRAM
$50 cheapo video & sound cards (this is a server after all)
$50 32X SCSI CD-ROM
$560 Two 50GB Ultra160 SCSI hard drives ($280 each)
$100 Ultra160 SCSI controller
$80 Dual gigabit Ethernet controllers ($40 each)
$20 Cheapo keyboard/mouse, if needed
$0 OS (Linux or one of the BSDs)
--------------------------------------
<$1600 for a machine that will match or beat a $4500 Power Mac server. These are not no-name parts, either (well, except for the keyboard, mouse, video, and sound cards, but none of those are important in a server). Add a monitor and a few other misc. parts and this thing is still less than half the cost of the Mac. Sorry but it's true.

Alex

 

[Scottgfx]

To: gjohns01

Ahh, I forgot to mention. I built a system from scratch. The Tyan Tiger was a dual ATHLON. 1.2Ghz Athlon MPs were a bit expensive at the time but faster than your PIII. The system has 512MB of the proper ECC DDR RAM that the MB REQUIRES. At the time that I bought the parts, the MB was $380. I'm sure it's cheaper now. And I know how to use PriceWatch, thank you.

I also put in in a nice $300 case, Enermax 400W power supply, Radeon 8500, Soundblaster Audigy. Your right, I am a moron. It's still not a mac!

And put down that micropolis, it's heavy and you'll hurt yourself.