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1.5ghz G4 Road Map

Ensign Paris

Ensign Paris

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Nov 4, 2001
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Europe
MacMinute just posted this, looks like good news for us!

I think we will see G5s San Francisco 2003 which is only 10 months away!

PowerPC G4 roadmap sees speeds of 1.5GHz
February 11 - 17:10 ET: The Register has published a look at Motorola's recently updated G4 roadmap, which calls for three new variations of the G4 to be developed over the coming year. While laden with technological terms, the article notes processor speeds as high as 1.5GHz, and bus speeds of 266MHz, with a new RapidIO technology that could deliver even higher performance.
 
mixed review

10 months is a little depressing but if thats what it takes to deliver a FLAWLESS chip and a nice palateable price, so be it.

1.5 ghz g4's isn't doing anything for me. I want to see quad processor systems if we are going to be stuck with the g4 for a while. The os is built for it, many high end apps a designed for it. Come on apple, now you design a machine for it!
 
What concerns me most is whether or not we're going to see DDR and upgraded USB and Firewire anytime soon.

If we're stuck with the G4, Apple really needs to catch up with faster memory and a speeded up sytem bus.
 
Originally posted by Rower_CPU
What concerns me most is whether or not we're going to see DDR and upgraded USB and Firewire anytime soon.

If we're stuck with the G4, Apple really needs to catch up with faster memory and a speeded up sytem bus.
Click to expand...

i agree totally! I would like too see an 800 verison of firewire. what the hell is gigawire it never has come to existence!
 
really really really don't have the money for that. some programs wouldn't work with a cluster setup (final cut pro, photoshop) so it wouldn't be that great for my purposes. Also the closeness of the processors allows the processors to work together more eficiently.
 
earlier today I had 34 macs (G4 500, d500 and d800s) linked with parallel via firewire networking. it was amazingly fast.

I look forward to work on wednesday.

having tomorrow off for quicktime live stream just for the hell of it!
 
dude where do you get those things? are they firewire hubs or something? where can I get one and how much do they cost?
 
fire wire networking? i don't think i've ever heard of it before. sounds interesting though. put out a link or something so i can get some more info.
 
If the Motorola page...

...knew about this "roadmap" (they have a link to one, but it's quite old), I might actually believe this. As it is... maybe. A definite maybe.
 
Re: mixed review

Originally posted by Onyxx
10 months is a little depressing but if thats what it takes to deliver a FLAWLESS chip and a nice palateable price, so be it.

1.5 ghz g4's isn't doing anything for me. I want to see quad processor systems if we are going to be stuck with the g4 for a while. The os is built for it, many high end apps a designed for it. Come on apple, now you design a machine for it!
Click to expand...

...plus the quad g4 could be a realistic answer to the 3+ ghz chips intel and amd could have by the first of next year

i hope the average, non-techie consumer will not still be judging a computer by its clock speed...it seems to still be a hot issue, but has calmed down that many people have noticed their pentium 4s are not THAT fast
 
Originally posted by Rower_CPU
What concerns me most is whether or not we're going to see DDR and upgraded USB and Firewire anytime soon.

If we're stuck with the G4, Apple really needs to catch up with faster memory and a speeded up sytem bus.
Click to expand...

Ok, according to the start of this thread the 266MHz bus speed is what the systems that use DDR have. Also, a 266MHz bus allows you to run DDR memory as PC2100 (hellafast).

Whatever the 'RapidIO technology' is, it sounds fast (maybe deceptively so).

I can just imagine what a dp 1.5GHz G4 with PC2100 memory would do. I my opinion it would blow the doors off any systems with intel inside (someone mentioned before that 'intel inside' is really a warning lable).

Since I will be waiting for the G5 to get a new system, I will enjoy seeing the advances from the sidelines. I will also probably do something I have yet to do when purchasing a Mac... wait for reviews and real world opinions of them. I might even wait for the first update to the system (not sure if I will be able to wait THAT long).

Granted, I will probably have hands on experience with each revision, even if they are not top speed at the time. One of the benefits of being a tech at a company that buys Mac's for users. Looking back to last year, I think we purchased between 25 and 35 Mac systems (between G4 towers and iMac's). Considering how we didn't bring that many people on staff, many of them went to temps or to replace aged systems. We needed to get the pre-G3 systems off the floor since they were causing productivity isses finally.
 
I for one am excited

I personally hope that this rumor is true. If it is then we'll have DDR, a faster Bus and higher processor speeds. I'm waiting to buy a new computer to replace the 6500 im on right now. I'm a student and have a small budget (which I will spend a lot more) and so I want something really good cause it has to last me a while. If the Dual 1Gig had had DDR and a faster bus I'd have ordered one, but instead I'll wait for these features. Even if its not G5, I still want it. And you should too...these are pretty good upgrades.
 
Here we go again...

...With this G5/G4 discussion. To be honest, I'm not a tech geek, so maybe I've got it all wrong, but it seems to me there are lots of things that they will change in the G4 that make them G5-like. So why moan and groan just because they don't call the processors G5? Is there ONE SINGLE parameter in the processor architecture that determines the "generation" (3, 4, 5...) or what? The impression I've got is that it's the processor as a whole that, with enough changes made, sorta "leaps" to the next generation. See what I mean? If they keep callin' them G4 let them do it! As I said, I'm no techie, so please correct me if I've got it all wrong. I would just love to get this generation terminology sorted out. (And I've been trying for a year now so don't just tell me do do my homework better, please) Cheers!
 
I think the biggest difference between G4 and G5 is that the G5 will natively process 64-bit instructions, rather than the 32-bit instructions of the G4.

Once software has been recompiled to take advantage of this, it seems like this should really make a difference.

Of course it's hard to do a direct comparison (jast as it is hard to compare the G3 and G4 in 'real world' situations). Especially since no one has seen a G5 in the 'real world' yet.

Could be that other changes to the pipeline, etc, will add to or diminish the benefit of the 64-bit core.

Does seem as though some things highlighted for the G5 are migrating towards the G4, if the rumors are right (Rapid I/O, for example.)

We just have to wait and see. And hope some worms from inside give us a few more clues!
 
Here we go again

OK, yesterday I went up to one of the Apple retail stores within driving distance (there are three). One of the questions I posted to one of the tech's there was about the bit level of the G4 (current version). His answer was that it is natively a 64 bit processor. The altivec is like an 2x boost for applications written to use it (makes it 128 bit then).

Before anyone starts sending flames my way, and I have to done the fire proof clothing, this confirms what is within Apple's specifications database. They list all the G4 systems that I checked as 64 bit, not 128 (as shown on the information web pages).

This would explain why a dual 1GHz G4 can blow the pants off of a 2GHz+ peecee system. It makes sense, 2x the bit rate=2x the performance per MHz. As well as even more when it is software created to take advantage of the altivec engine.

As always, Mac's are superior. :D
 
Are we going to trust motorola or Apple on this??? I am leaning towards Apple, since they have been posting the information since the day the G4 was released. I remember looking it up when I first purchased my G4 500 (AGP) and then showed it to my cousin who was very impressed (peecee weenie). I also remember something being announced about the G4 being a higher bit rate then the pc chips of the day (those are/were 32 bit).

Also, it makes more sense that the Altivec engine is a 2x implementation of the code, instead of the 4x (if the G4 was only 32bit).
 
128 bit, 64 bit, 32 bit, blaargh...

I'm afraid you've all been "bitten" :) by the marketing folks.

If you think Megahertz is an inaccurate way to measure performance, don't even get started talking about "bit"ness.

Data width has been used by the marketing folks (primarily at the game console companies) as a way of claiming superiority. In reality, it's usually a load of crap. Many of these comparisons aren't even comparing the components of the machines they're attempting to compare.

However, if it matters, *usually* when a chip manufacturer says that a processor is 32-bit or 64-bit, they're referring to how much memory can be addressed by the processor (which is generally determined by the width of the registers). And the most significant thing that matters in this case is how much memory can be addressed by the processor (about 4GB with 32 bit addressing). It could also be used to perform floating point computations with higher accuracy (something that generally has no impact on performance).

However, sometimes "bit"-ness refers to the data path to memory, which is one of the primary factors in how fast you can move information from RAM to the processor (currently 64-bit in the PowerMacs). The other primary factor is the bus speed (133Mhz in the PowerMac).

The Altivec is a little bit interesting in the way it works. The Altivec unit does indeed use 128 bit registers. Wider is better because you can fit several smaller groups of information into the same register and then perform a computation on all the information at the same time. However, this is very unique to Altivec. It is not something that happens in general use. If you're using a 64-bit processor (the G4 is a 32-bit processor in the memory-addressing nomenclature), you're really only going to see an advantage if you need to address a *lot* of memory, or you have some other really unique situations.

If it's Sony marketing the Playstation, they're just finding the widest datapath in the machine and quote that number because it's the biggest. IE, if they have special graphics hardware with a 128-bit path to memory, suddenly the Playstation is a "128 bit" machine (regardless of the 20-year-old embedded processor variants used to run the machine.)
 
Different Numbers

Apple is not lying... Maybe just stretching the truth a little. :)

They just choose to quote the higher number, which refers to the data path to memory. Unfortunately, lots of hardware companies are doing this and it's become very confusing to the public. Blame Sony, Nintendo and Sega as they are probably the most flagrant violators.

Motorola is referring to the memory addressing, which is arguably the more classical definition for the "bit"-ness of a processor.

For example, the 6811 is an 8-bit processor, the 68000 was 16-bit, the 68020 was 24 bit and pretty much everything since then has been 32-bit, simply because the memory addressing capability is exponential as you increase the register width.

Not a lot of people are using more than 4GB of memory yet, which is why we are only now seeing 64-bit processors and they are primarily intended for server applications, where you can easily use more than 4GB.
 
I just popped onto Apple's spec. section which lists information about all systems they have produced. I am attaching the spec.'s as a two jpg files if anyone wants to look. I will have to put the second part as another post, since I am not sure how to do both here in the same post.

It lists the logic boards data path as 128-bit and then further down, software addressing as 32-bit. The only difference from the PCI graphics and QuickSilver models are the bus speed (100 vs 133). The PowerBook systems are listed as having a logic board data path of 64-bit.

I am going to attempt contacting people that are in the know about this to get confirmation either way.
 

Attachments

  • g4 spec1.jpg
    g4 spec1.jpg
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A couple of things...

...

1) Go to http://www.arstechnica.com and go to the "cpu theory&praxis" section. Read up on processors. It's quite interesting (in a nerdy sort of way) and will prevent you from sounding silly in discussions (to everyone who has the information right, ignore this).

2) The G4 is 32 bit, with a 64 bit wide bus, and 128 bit Altivec. Altivec uses the 128 bitness by doing the same instruction on four 32 bit chunks (32X4 = 128). You can't do this for normal operations. The G5 is theoretically 64 bit. This would have a performance improvement only when you needed variables larger than 32 bit (almost never), or when you needed more than four gigs of memory.

3) The reason the Itanium, Sun's MAJC, etc... are so fast is not that they are 64 bit. They have a lot of interesting new technologies in them (VLIW architecture, thread level parallelism, multi-core, predication, etc...) that are responsible for the insane performance (Also, the Itanium has 4MB [I think] of on chip level 3 cache. This is big, expensive, and fast).

4) I think that the MPC 7500 is actually the G5, I've posted my reasons in several other topics, so I won't repeat myself here.

5) To the person who trusted Apple's info over Motorola's: Apple uses the chip, Motorola makes it. Motorola knows what they're talking about.
 
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