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1.2GHz G4s

Re: 1.2 GHz G4s = Very Big Disappointment

Originally posted by Marianco
I would be very bitterly disappointed if Apple came out with 1.2 GHz Dual PowerPC Macs as their top end in MWNY. When the Pentium 2.5 GHz is outrunning the Athlon, and the Athlon far-and-away blows away the current Macs at Photoshop at 1.7 GHz, the Mac has to catch up.

Doubling the speed took Apple 3 years to accomplish. Much of the fault lies with Motorola's ability to develop faster chips. But Apple also has a hand in helping Motorola design the G4 and G5.

If the next model is a 1.2 GHz Dual G4, then I'm not upgrading. It will be so disappointing. I'll have to wait until 2003. Another year to wait. Hopefully the G5 is out by then.

The only way I'm going to buy a 1.2 GHz G4 is if it was a Quad Processor Mac.
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Go ahead, hold your breath for a quad processor Mac... 🙄

Do you think we care what the pentiums are at for speeds??? Personally, intel could put out a 5GHz processor and I wouldn't care.

Motorola is the one holding up the advancements in the G4 and release of the G5 processors, Apple has very, very little to do with that. Apple helped with the design of the chips, but has too little control over what moto does when it comes to production of the chips.

I guess you haven't really thought about what the L3 cache does for the system. I went from the rev. a TiBook (500MHz no L3) to the 800MHz TiBook (rev. c) with 1MB L3 cache. That 1MB L3 makes a HUGE difference. I'd say the new TiBook is at LEAST twice as fast as the Rev. A. My rev. a had more memory (1GB) then my rev. c (768MB). I can only speculate how much faster it would be at 1GB of RAM. Also, the rev. a had a 5400 rpm drive, where the rev. c has a 4200 rpm drive (I will be getting a replacement 5400 rpm drive from IBM in the next few weeks).

Don't go by raw numbers alone, or you will never be happy. Also I would take any site that compares two models with at least a grain or six of salt. When it comes time for me to upgrade a Mac, I look at MORE then just what the processor speed is. Just as when I went for the new TiBook (the mobile radeon 7500 was the deciding factor for me).

I might be ready for a new Mac tower come MWNY, but suspect it will be more like MWSF before I can get one. With the TiBook I really don't need to, it's more of a want.
 
Originally posted by Rower_CPU


I would hardly call that an attack...especially considering the source. 😛

If you can't take someone disagreeing with your post, then you have some serious issues you need to work on.
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LMAO!!! You know me too well Rower 😀

I guess the reality washing I gave was too much for him... 😀 Remember the old saying... if you can't take the heat... 😀
 
MWNY rumours

A jump from 1.0 to 1.5Ghz does not fit the established pattern. That is the only certain knowledge we have - anything else is speculation.

Also, if Motorola were able to release 1.5Ghz-rated G4s in July would that not suggest that they had say 1.2Ghz ready in, for example, April? If that were true then I am sure, given the concerns over the "Mhz gap", that Apple would release them as soon as such clock ratings were available.

Just a quick question for people - how many of you use even half of your processor's capability most of the time?

I think that the next "major" jump will happen when the G5 is released. Intel did a similiar thing when moving from the PIII (1Ghz) to the P4 (1.5Ghz) because the P4 was to a great extent engineered to enable much higher clock speeds, as is the G5 with its deeper pipeline.

These are great fora, keep up the good work people!
 
Re: Re: Re: Re: Clock speed

Originally posted by reflex


Now why would you go and do that ?
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Normally I have AlphaTech on my ignore list, but when people quote him, several of his sometimes worthwhile but mostly relentlessly inane paragraphs manage to creep their way out from invisibility and onto my screen, forcing me to read them. So, don't mind him, as he is apparently only being himself. 🙂
 
Re: Re: Clock speed

Originally posted by Catfish_Man
Figure on G3s equaling a P3 of 1.25-1.5x the clockspeed (this is a very rough guess), so the 700 ibooks are in the 750-1000 MHz P3 range (that's the mobile P3s), faster on a few tasks (floating point heavy ones).
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I know I'm helping to perpetuate an off-topic sub-thread, but I'm curious as to where you're getting the figure of a G3 performing 1.25 to 1.5x as well as a PIII of equal clock speed. I remember back in the ~450MHz days (not that long ago for Apple 🙂), the G3 was almost exactly dead even with the PIII according to both SPECint and SPECfp95. Has the 700MHz G3 been improved that dramatically?

Aside from that, my impression is that OS X will make a G3 seem substantially slower than a PIII of equal clock speed running XP or especially Win2k, simply because OS X is so slow.

Alex
 
apple will loose market share if....

If apple Is comming with a 1.2Ghz max update.... Apple will loose more market share and they will see an decreasement of their share.

If apple want to increase their market share they need to come with a 1.5, 1.8 and 2 GHz computers.

The distance is getting to big.
 
Originally posted by Curiousstrngmint
Everybody seems to make generalizations that G3=P3 and G4=P4, even though G3's seem to have about 75% the clock speed of their "equivalent" and G4's about half. But nobody seems to have any evidence to back this up, except faith.

I'm not saying it's not true--it's just damn hard to believe when a P4 has double or more the clock speed, DDR RAM, and a 533 MHz system bus. I really, desperately, want to buy a Mac for college, but I'm running XP on my home PC now, and I have to say I'm impressed.

I'm still definitely leaning towards Apple, but it's getting harder to maintain my convictions. It will be difficult to rationalize (personally, but even more so to my parents) buying a $3000 PowerBook, when for $2500 or less I can get a laptop with twice the apparent speed, and when the only advantage is "I like Macs better."
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Don't make a mistake thinking that the over-hyped PC Front Side Bus is a major speed improvement over the XServe with DDR.

This is a short definition of FSB:

At present, the connection between the processor and chipset, called the front-side bus, operates at 400 MHz on Pentium 4s, although with the 845G Intel is starting the move to the higher speed of 533 MHz. The nearly one-third jump in speed is expected to deliver performance benefits to users when coupled with Pentium 4 processors that support the new speed, which are also expected to be unveiled next month.

But take note that while the Intel Chipset (the I/O Controllers) are connected at 400 and 533 MHz to the CPU, the most important part - the I/O to the rest of the computer - is quite similar to the XServe and just as limited in bandwidth.

Rember the FSB is not equal to Apple's definition of System Bus. Compare a DDR PC to the XServe and you'll find the I/O is quite similar and looks dreadfully like a 133 MHz System Bus machine wrapped up in Wintel marketing hype.
 
Re: apple will loose market share if....

Originally posted by Gfour?
If apple Is comming with a 1.2Ghz max update.... Apple will loose more market share and they will see an decreasement of their share.

If apple want to increase their market share they need to come with a 1.5, 1.8 and 2 GHz computers.

The distance is getting to big.
Click to expand...

And it's people like you, that are blindly looking at MHz, and NOT looking at reality. If the label says 2 GHz, are you happy? I'm not. I care more about other things, like ease of use, stability, and the ACTUAL speed of the computer I am running.
I'm not trying to be picky, but we really need to look at computers without this narrow-minded view!

Lets all look at the big picture! If Apple comes out with 1.2 GHz G4's (which they might) they are NOT going to lose marketshare just because of that. A 1.2 GHz G4, with DDR ram, faster bus, new architecture, etc. a dual 1.2GHz G4 is NOT going to be a slow machine, and it can compete with P4s, and even beat them bigtime!
 
Re: apple will loose market share if....

Personaly I work with the apple for 14 years now, So I know all about the Mhz myth.

The only thing that I want to say is: if apple want's a bigger market share they need to increase the Mhz, otherwise starting comp users will buy a PC, why? they don't know anything about Mhz.

Their thought is how faster the better (Mhz) I know that the apple is faster but they don't.

That's all I
 
Agreed about the hard disk speed

Originally posted by Dr. Distortion
Well, I'm quite sure that any iBook apple sells right now will be faster than a Celeron equipped pc laptop. Also, the Apple portables are generally far more rigid and components won't fail as easily as in pc laptops. I speak out of my own experience, since I unfortunately had to buy a Toshiba Satellite pro 4600 for my study (haven't seen a mac running Solid Works yet...).

The biggest problem with laptops nowadays isn't processor speed. It's also not the video speed. What really counts is your harddisk speed. Since osX does multitasking, it can be quite demanding on your harddisk from time to time. At such moments you want to have a fast disk, or the entire computer will slow down.
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Apple is still using 4300 RPM hard disks for the most part. I upgraded my Wallstreet II (a.k.a. PDQ) 233 Mhz hard disk to a 5400 RPM drive, and don't see the usual slowdowns people experience with Mac OS X. Imagine if all the towers had 10000 RPM drives!
 
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Clock speed

Originally posted by Dr. Distortion


Some windows uninstall programs remove shared dlls...
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It is not a matter of why one would do this, but the fact that it can happen. Alpha may not be tactful in some of his statements, although in this thread he is more mellow than Jeff Spicolie. The problem with Windoze on a corporate network is that everyone using their systems are not the brightest people in the world. I cannot tell you how many times I have issued a virus alert to people on the network only for them to call the next day saying, "Remember that file you told me not to open, I opened it." Meanwhile BadTrans is running rampant through the system.

Look, the point that he was trying to make is that in IT costs, the Mac is far superior than a PC. They do crash more, they do have more problems. Macs outnumber PC's 2 to 1 on our network here, and yet the Macs account for only 5% of the problems, and know it is not 2 macs and 1 pc. More like 400 Macs over three different WAN's and 200 PC's over those same WAN's. The Apple file servers, install, and forget. The NT and 2000 servers, constant maintenance.

I equate the PC to a wire guided missle. You have to stay with it till it hits the target. The Mac is a FAF missle, or Fire and Forget.
 
I guess a lot of those "G5" generic boxes which have been sighted over the months are actually test boxes for xServe and (hopefully) the "MWNY" G4 motherboards.

Since all the rumours say these secret units scream compared to current models, I'm hoping the 1.13/1.5 issue is not so important (in raw speed terms) -- especially as those boxes were probably using G4s at or slower than the current crop. I agree that PSYCOLOGICALLY it remains important for Apple to narrow the speed gap, but it is also important to get the real-world gains the faster mobo alone promises.

Another speculation: maybe Apple does have faster G4s (1.4 - 1.6 GHz?) but didn't want to 'waste' them on the old mobo, when they knew the benchmarks wouldn't live up to the anticipated speed increase due to bandwith strangulation? If so, then we will see a big MHz jump at MWNY...
 
Theory of Incrementalism...

I've become convinced that there is a madness to Steve's method with regards to the Mhz advancements...

I think Steve has removed himself, somewhat, from the Mhz battle. He's decided to attempt to win new users through added features and benefits, a la digital devices and consumer apps.

In concert with this, I think he is following a strategy of incrementalism in hardware upgrades. With this line of thinking, why would one release a 1.4 ghz machine and get one sales bang, when you could instead get two sales bangs by releasing a 1.2 ghz update and then 6 months later release the 1.4 ghz machine. I think Steve has calculated that the majority of Apple customers are not counting Mhz in the way that we denizens of the rumor sites are, and that ANY increase in speed is just that, and worthy of an upgrade.

That being said...I think it's a partial mistake. I think the Mhz gap does need to be closed as quickly as possible. Mhz myth or not, even Apple still uses Mhz as the primary designator of their systems.

Finally...with the difficulty Apple has had securing faster chips from Motorola, I'm perplexed that Apple hasn't built in the fastest possible other components. Even if the fastest Mhz are not available to them, faster bus speeds, faster ram, and faster hard drives should have been standard 2 years ago.
 
doesn't anyone think that 1.2 ghz is pathetic?

that's the speed the tibooks should be, not apple's top of the line desktop.
 
Originally posted by TyleRomeo


new2macs your name serves you well

the 600iBook isnt slow at all and the new upgraded 700MHZ one cooks P3 labtops. those P4 1.5+ labtops will end up costing you more then the iBook will and you will still be running XP and not the lovely OSX.
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can you point me to the article that proves this? oh, you can't? well stop spewing crap.
 
This isnt happening!

I cant believe that there is still someone on this board that would post this type of statement!

Gaomay~
"Just a quick question for people - how many of you use even half of your processor's capability most of the time?"

Forgive my diatribe, BUT~

Is this supposed to be taken seriously or as a silly sarcastic joke or is it being used to merely point out the fact that as a user, you are incredible focused on doing nothing but typing!

I think that anyone that makes this statement should be driven to the nearest computer dumping area and be given the oldest computer there and sent back home to type out resumes.

When I use a computer I am certain that I am using all that it has to give.
When I am rendering I wish there was more speed, when a file transfer takes forever or a window resize gives me a beachball or when simple OS function taxes the system. That is when processor speed is all used up, and I need more.

Puhlease stop these pathetic and foolish statements.
Such as~
"Why would we even need more Processor speed"
"I dont need more speed, I get everything that I need done"
"No one uses all the speed that their processor can give"

The world isnt filled with lamers satisfied with the base line.
Thats what low end macs are geared at.

We're talking about high end powermacs aimed at pro's that have work to accomplish, on video and other high end processor intensive applications.

We talking about creating units that are capable of competing with Pcheese units in the professional field of video and graphics!
For gods sake, get a life and get some understanding because this isnt about
being able to type out some papers for high school.

Get an iBook for that!

This is about the Powermacs, that need as much power as possible to regain their rightful place in areas that have been taken over in a large degree by Pcheese and Apple needs to make their units a viable options for all those companys that are looking to return to the Apple world after having experienced Winblows. OSX is the leverage to get back in the game but the hardware needs to be there!

aww now I'ave gone and made a mess.

~enuff said!
 
Hey Grokgod, where have you been hiding????

Damn dude... relax... This started out because the 1.5GHz rumor is proving to be unrealistic (I know... realistic rumor?? go on...).

Judging by Apple's history/track record, I still think we will see top end speed close to 1.2GHz (1GHz low end, 1.13GHz mid range and 1.26GHz top end in a dualie).

There are applications that really benefit from the raw power the faster chips will provide, such as 3d apps and things like photoshop. Then again, most of those apps also can take full advantage of dual processor systems.

Who knows, we could all be wrong here and Apple could release the G5 at MWNY *cough*bullsheet*cough* 😀
 
Re: Grokgod

You have a point. Maybe my comments would be more appropriate to iMacs and not the Power line.

Could have been put a little more tactfully though.

Regards.
 
Jook,
WTF up dude and smell the coffee. Why would 1.2 be so bad, and don't say because the PIV is at 2.5 THZ or what ever it is at now days. Have you worked on a dual 1 GHZ with a GIG of ram? Have you tried it at all. Grok have you played with one?

Like Alpha said. This is about a rumor of 1.5 being to high. Wich it is. We will see at least 1.3, but I am told 1.4. Now that being said. How much of a differenct is there in a 667 PowerMac, and the Dual 1GHZ? how much to you think there would be between the 800, and a dual 1.4? Think about it, and then realize that yes, these are PowerMac's not iBooks.
 
Re: G4 1.4

Originally posted by Ovi
Once you drive a Mercedes you don't always need to get the latest model every year, unless you can afford one.
Click to expand...

Just like once you get a Harley, you don't even look at any other motorcycles... 😀
 
Coup des gras..........

1. Until I see all the various CPU's comared side by side on identical mobo's running identical Linux with identical RAM and drives THERE IS NO COMPARISSON.

2. A G4 running at 1.33 Ghz on a 133Mhz bus will be WAY more anemic than a 999Mhz G4 on a 266Mhz bus just in CPU to I/O clock ratio.

3. If you insist on comparing CPU's from various manufacturers, at least compare more similar chips: Motorolla G4s to Sun, SGI and MIPS chips. I think you'll find Apple's cost-to-Mhz ratio rather favorable in that light.

4. With Quartz Extreme freeing up cycles, probable DDR and even a modest increase in Mhz the new Towers will be more than capable of running rings around any production Wintel machine.
 
It will NEVER be a 50% increase.

Motorola has to keep stringing Apple along to keep it from jumping ship to a new supplier.

If they gave a 50% boost, that would represent 3 years of upgrades (in Motorola time) and it would appear that too much time has passed since an upgrade was released.

I know this sounds silly, but it's no more silly than Apple sticking with a Processor supplier that is so far behind X86 speeds that it isn't even comical any more.

TL
 
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