2GHz IBM Processors

[Rocketman]

Dark days my a$$

Originally posted by alex_ant

I think if anything is making these times seem dark at the moment, it's Apple's business practices with regard to .Mac and Jaguar pricing. There is plenty of light ahead with regard to next-generation CPUs, and even more light when one considers what other options Apple has to stay competitive besides brute-force-quick CPUs.
Alex

1. Apple heard a backlash on .Mac re maintaining email addresses from people who do not use the premium services of that offering. They listened. They responded. In about 48 hours.

2. Apple heard a backlash on 10.2 (Jagwire) regarding lisencing upgrade pricing and responded with a "family pack" offer, which apparanlty they had planned to a strong degree all along. They also made minor concessions on other customers. More to the point Jagwire is universally considered a "major" increase.

3. Apple has now released significantly faster and more advanced motherboards in CONSUMER low price computers ($1700-$2500). They are "more than twice as fast as their prior counterparts".

4. Apple has released $1100 low end "supercomputers" (literally).

5. There are now verifiable rumours of a legit G5 processor on the "immediate" horizon.

It is hard to find the bad news here. I have looked really hard. I failed.

Rocketman

 

[beatle888]

Originally posted by giovanni
You know, I really wish some of you (most of you?) stopped once and for all teh b/s about windows computers. Do you really need to do that ? does it make you sleep better at night ?? Are you so frustrated you have to come up with all this pure b/s about windows ?

I mean, come on. grow up. To me it sounds like looking for excuses to justify something (like yours is bigger than mine but mine is curved).

Two things I fail to understand: (a) why some of you do that at all (b) wtf are your arguments ? On (b) what I mean is that I have worked now for quite a few years in companies with pc's only and I cannot recall having all these problems at all. I can't remember the last time I had a crash and I consistently run many applications at the same time and the things are pretty fast.

Then I come home and enjoy my Mac

I agree, the pc's are getting easy enough for ME to use. I think
that if I didnt have to repurchase all of my software titles, I would
definitely consider a PC. I know that sounds f'd up to my fellow mac
users but it's true.

 

[pgwalsh]

I don't see IBM taking a year to release this chip. They just spent 5 Billion on a new fab plant. They allow other companies to fab chips like Apple or Motorola.

I could see Apple using resources (ie licensing, engineers, etc) from Motorola and IBM and then using IBM's new plant to produce chips. The "plant" is supposed to allow extremely fast times to market since R&D is done in house. So take your damn embedded G5 or G3/G4/Power4, license the technology and use IBM's plant to produce the chip to your specs with Alti-Vec. Then follow suit with the rest of the industry and spruce up your FSB, Rapid I/O, Serial ATA or whatever.... But down get so down and disappointed. Good things are coming.

The plant will allow us more options, and we like options.

 

[ddtlm]

kenohki:

That lawsuit against Intel is pathetic. The P4 is in fact faster than the P3, and only for a short period of time was it in doubt. This has been very well shown by benchmarks. It seems that these people are claiming that it is wrong to make a processor that does less work per clock than one that came before, which is hard to believe. The whole point of the P4 was to trade per-clock performance for more clocks!

The Itanium would make a fine, in fact great platform for Apple if they did not have to worry about it's very high cost (minimum of $1300 for a single chip) and if they did not have the huge installed base of PPC apps already.

Like it or not, the Itanium II is one hell of a fast processor. (Plus, it can heat your house as a bonus.)

You also mention a "7470". Rumor. There is less proof of the 7470 than there is of the Power4-based G5, which we can't be certain of either until Apple says so.

The auto-vectorizing compiler will probably arrive in some version of GCC 3.

Rocketman:

Quite the optimist, aren't you? I'm waiting for benchmarks showing how the new PM's are "more than twice as fast" and I absolutely do not buy your "$1100 supercomputer" claim. A 100mhz FSB G4 without L3 sucks. I don't care how many gigaflops Apple tells you it could do in some contrived situation, the fact of the matter is that it has got a terrible memory system. To even call that a supercomputer is an insult to yourself. (Alternatively, we could just call every new consumer computer on the market a supercomputer since they are all capable of well over a gigaflop.)

 

[bretm]

sluggish?

My roommate is running an UPGRADED pc that the motherboard was upgraded to a 1.5 ghz. He's running IE 5 and win 98. It is hooked up to my airport which is in turn hooked up to fiber optic DSL. Anyway, his machine is just dang snappy. No wait for anything. Much snappier than a dual gig.

BUT BUT BUT. I just finished helping out a friend who has Windows XP running on a brand new 1.2ghz Sony VAIO laptop. It was sluggish. Much like OSX on my G4 350 (which I am perfectly happy with in operating speed - just not rendering speed).

So I think the dark side is suffering the same ailments. Windows 98 is graphically and systematically simpler, like OS9 and is therefore snappier. Both are matured. OSX and XP are heavy on graphics - one has drop shadows, tansparency, animaton. The other has the color palette of fisher price. Both are quite a bit more sluggish on machines that would smoke with their predecessors.

 

[aaroncd]

ok, i couldnt let this one pass

Originally posted by ElRayOX

Say what you want about the megahertz myth. Windows machines feel very snappy in use, Macs tend to feel more sluggish. We need the speed IBM can promise. It's unfortunate Motorola has dropped the ball (being a Chicago-based company, I have a TON of cousins working there ... wait a minute, maybe they've been laid off...), but maybe Big Blue can jack up the MHz and pull us out of this.

ok I could not let this pass, I have a 400Mhz G4 tower at home (in the US), I am working in Kosovo at the moment, using nice new Fujitsu-Siemens 1.6 Ghz P4's, and sluggish is not the word, they are painfully slow, I really cant comprehend people saying windows is faster at all, i have a 1 Ghz P3 Toshiba laptop here as well, and that is faster than this desktop, and it is still a LOT LOT slower than my G4 400, especailly in perceived speed. Yeah windows may win on gaming speeds, and some other things, but for every day usage, there is NO comparison to a Mac, period. Here i struggle to get work done, I need 2 computers to do what i could on one mac (server and client here for web development).

Aaron

 

[addsapple]

The whole Article I just typed out!

DESPITE IBM'S CHIP-MANUFACTURING ENTERPRISE, THE COMPANY HAS NOT PRODUCED A G4 PROCESSOR FOR THE DESKTOP. THAT IS DUE TO CHANGE IN OCOTBER.

IBM is set to inviel a new chip that may push the performance of future Mac beyond 2GHZ, and put and end to Motorola's monopoly on processors in professional Macs.
The as-yet-unnamed chip, which IBM intends to announce at this year's Microprocessor Forum conference on 15 October, will be the first 64-bit PowerPC-compatible processor intended for desktop computers. It will also include a system compatible with the AltiVec vector processing unit used in current G4's.
According to the conference programme, Peter Sandon, a senior processor architect at IBM's PowerPC organisation, will give the first technical description of the chip. Although the programme does not mention specific speeds for the new chip, IBM sources of 2GHz for any new PowerPC.
Significantly, the chip, which is described as 'designed for desktops at entry-level servers', has as 160-register vector processing unit similar to Motorola's AltiVec.
The inclusion of an AltiVec-like system indicates that the chip is destined for Apple, rather than for IBM's computers. Apple has coded much of its own software - inclding Final Cut Pro and Mac OS X - to take maximum advantage of AltiVec. If the IBM processor is compatible with AltiVec, it will allow Apple to take the company on as a second supplier of processors, alleviating its dependancy on Motorola.
The Chip will also be the first true 64-bit desktop PowerPC. This means that data travels around the processor in 64-bit chunks, leading to a potential improvement in speed. However, 64-bit chips must either have software rewritten for them or run 32-bit code in a form of emulation. It is likely that Apple would quickly rewrite parts of Mac OS X to be 64-bit compatible.
The Power4 architecture, on which the new processor is based, is a high-end multichip package designed for server applications. Each Power4 is capable of fetching and processing eight instructions per clock cycle, and of running at 1GHz. However, power consumption for the processor is far too high for it to be used unaltered in a desktop machine.
Despite the announcement, it is unlikely that Apple will be adopting the new processor in the short term. Usually, there is a gap of months and often years between the announcements of a chip at the Microprocessor Forum and its shipping to customers for testing.

 

[bretm]

Re: Dark days my a$$

Originally posted by Rocketman


1. Apple heard a backlash on .Mac re maintaining email addresses from people who do not use the premium services of that offering. They listened. They responded. In about 48 hours.

2. Apple heard a backlash on 10.2 (Jagwire) regarding lisencing upgrade pricing and responded with a "family pack" offer, which apparanlty they had planned to a strong degree all along. They also made minor concessions on other customers. More to the point Jagwire is universally considered a "major" increase.

3. Apple has now released significantly faster and more advanced motherboards in CONSUMER low price computers ($1700-$2500). They are "more than twice as fast as their prior counterparts".

4. Apple has released $1100 low end "supercomputers" (literally).

5. There are now verifiable rumours of a legit G5 processor on the "immediate" horizon.

It is hard to find the bad news here. I have looked really hard. I failed.

Rocketman

How am I supposed to take anything you say as serious or researched when you keep saying "jagwire." Please stop.

 

[SubFredZero]

Thanks for typing the whole article, addsapple...

 

[synp]

Rocketman said:

1. Apple heard a backlash on .Mac re maintaining email addresses from people who do not use the premium services of that offering. They listened. They responded. In about 48 hours.


Really? How have they responded? I might have missed something, but when I look at the pages on www.mac.com they say you need to purchase email-only accounts for $10 each. Has that changed?

Also, is that a one-time payment or an annual fee like the rest of .Mac?

Thanks

 

[pev]

Originally posted by SPG
Last night I installed four HD's into my new dual 867 and I realized that this is the best case design I have ever seen.
Well, I like the 2x867 I received this week too, and yes, two opticals and four hard drives is great. The problem is, I dont like the fact that two hard drives are sitting on end, and the other two are *upside down*. The upside down two annoy me the most as theres NO reason they couldnt have had the mountings on the carrier hold them the other way up.

Still. I think it was worth the money, and smokes my old G3. Roll on audio apps for Jaguar.

~Pev

 

[Pauls]

If apple is wooed by IBM's offering, I suspect that Macs may soon be split into 2 camps. IBM's powerPC for pro models and Motorola's G4 - G5 for iMac, eMac and laptops. Though motorola's chips aren't as powerful as Athlons or P4's there is a reason they are what they are - efficiency. They have half the transistors of the other chips and half to a 3rd the die size of the behemoths. This gives them advantages in radical motherbard profiles of the iMac (try fitting an Athlon in that canteloupe, you would probably only get a celeron) or the 5 hour battery life of the notebooks. Both aspects are industry leading. Mac notebooks are unique in their portablilty, but they still have decent power to edit 20Gb movie files without breaking a sweat. I don't think apple will give up this advantage just to catch up with a CPU rating.

The NeXt people at apple are said to have experience creating single binaries which run on various microprocessors. IBM and Motorola both collaborated on the Book E spec. You can sort of see a pattern emerging where macs have a larger range of processors and a greater degree of strengths.

Moto want to concentrate on an embedded strategy (thats their main customer base); there is no mention that G5 is shelved, rather what die size, POC features, power rating and efficiency do the bulk of their customers want.

IBM have conceded to making a desktop rated CPU with a vector processing unit similar to Altivec, contrasting one of the reasons why they left AIM in the first place. The power4 is a mighty beast, but IBM also wants greater market share for powerPC, and Apple can provide this.

I wouldn't however expect anyone but Intel winning the clock speed war.

 

[tazznb]

Conspiracy, I tell ya!!!

Originally posted by G4scott
Goodbye motorola


Personally, I've really given up all hope on Motorola...

Me? I seriously think that Motorola either (1) Wants to return the pain from the banned cloning business, or (2) Someone is compensating them to keep the chip slow as possible to keep them from being as attractive to users that don't know the Apple experience;

Intel / Microsoft could be lining Motorola's wallets for this.

 

[alex_ant]

Re: IBM Roadmap

Originally posted by daijones
We can but hope that by the end of December this plant will be churning out large quantities of 64-bit PowerPCs. Question is, who'll want to buy them? Apple is one obvious possibility, but the scary thought is that IBM may be planning it's own family of desktops and entry-level servers running Linux.

The thing is though, why would they have Linux machines with PowerPCs and not Pentiums? That just seems a little suspicious to me. Why spend all the money on R&D and manufacturing to put out a Linux machine with a PowerPC, and have to constantly struggle with Intel and AMD and Sun etc. for the performance crown, when they can just slap a cheap P4 inside all those boxes and be done with it. I can't imagine IBM developing a 64-bit PPC CPU just to run Linux. In all their existing workstations and low-end servers that have PowerPCs, these machines run AIX and the specific PPCs they use are byproducts of past developments, usually inherited from high-end servers. Power3, RS64, 604e, none of those were originally designed for an IBM desktop/low-end server.

Alex

 

[alex_ant]

Re: benchmarks

Originally posted by Gigglebyte
now here is a question for all of you...is there a COMMON benchmark that can be run between a Wintel and Apple system? I am not concerned about the video as I know my new 16VRAM iBook or even a new DVI PowerBook won't hold a candle in video to my GF4 Ti4600 but on the business side or just computational processing power is there anything?

SPEC_CPU2000 would probably be the best and most thorough benchmark, although if you have any emotional affinity towards your Mac, you would probably be best off not viewing the results, as they might make you want to cry.

www.spec.org

 

[alex_ant]

Re: Dark days my a$$

Originally posted by Rocketman
1. Apple heard a backlash on .Mac re maintaining email addresses from people who do not use the premium services of that offering. They listened. They responded. In about 48 hours.

I'm not sure about this. Are you referring to that out-of-date FAQ?

2. Apple heard a backlash on 10.2 (Jagwire) regarding lisencing upgrade pricing and responded with a "family pack" offer, which apparanlty they had planned to a strong degree all along. They also made minor concessions on other customers. More to the point Jagwire is universally considered a "major" increase.

And a fat lot of good that does us, right? The main thing people were complaining about was having no upgrade price, and what does Apple respond with? A family pack? Good golly, it's like Apple is almost trying to piss off its customers. Whether or not what Apple did was the right thing to do, people were still quite intensely pissed off.

3. Apple has now released significantly faster and more advanced motherboards in CONSUMER low price computers ($1700-$2500). They are "more than twice as fast as their prior counterparts".

"More than twice as fast as their prior counterparts" according to Apple. While in the benchmark(s) that have appeared so far, they are barely any faster at all and feature a broken DDR implementation alongside a barely-improved CPU with less L3 cache. Sure they're less expensive than they were, but people want fast.

4. Apple has released $1100 low end "supercomputers" (literally).

Yeah, keep lapping up that marketing jive. The fact that Apple continues to call them "supercomputers" when just about any idiot knows they're not is yet another point that continues to annoy Apple's customers.

It is hard to find the bad news here. I have looked really hard. I failed.

When you're a Mac zealot, all news is good news. Some of us who like to think we're a little closer to reality are seeing what we think have been questionable business practices on Apple's part lately. This is not only my opinion, this is a widespread sentiment that is easy to pick up whenever you browse the appropriate forums on this and other Mac-related sites.

Alex

 

[kenohki]

Originally posted by ddtlm
kenohki:

That lawsuit against Intel is pathetic. The P4 is in fact faster than the P3, and only for a short period of time was it in doubt. This has been very well shown by benchmarks. It seems that these people are claiming that it is wrong to make a processor that does less work per clock than one that came before, which is hard to believe. The whole point of the P4 was to trade per-clock performance for more clocks!

Yes, this is true but you have to keep the pipeline fed. Stretching it out to a billion stages and cranking up the clock is not always the best way to get things done. It's not all that efficient. Plus throw in bus multipliers and the P4 design philosophy doesn't seem all THAT smart. Intel clearly had their marketing department's input on some of the decisions on the P4.

The Itanium would make a fine, in fact great platform for Apple if they did not have to worry about it's very high cost (minimum of $1300 for a single chip) and if they did not have the huge installed base of PPC apps already.

Like it or not, the Itanium II is one hell of a fast processor. (Plus, it can heat your house as a bonus.)

I wouldn't consider that a bonus. Especially in these nice fanless and portable designs Apple has. Yes, Itanium 2 is fast, but there are a lot of fundamental questions about EPIC/VLIW designs that aren't answered yet. Many new and exciting technologies in microprocessor design (hyperthreading, MPSOC design, etc) are heavily based on dynamic scheduling. How is this going to be handled with the EPIC/VLIW design philosophy. Are they going to make it more RISC-like or can they make the compiler smarter?

My point with the original post was not to poo-poo Itanium 2 but to point out that there is more risk for Apple to move to that architecture. IBM clearly has a POWER4/5/6 roadmap which should eventually translate into PowerPC performance. PowerPC is still safe for Apple.

You also mention a "7470". Rumor. There is less proof of the 7470 than there is of the Power4-based G5, which we can't be certain of either until Apple says so.

Well, I wasn't talking about Apple product, but Motorola and IBM product. A POWER4 based PPC is not rumor, but a fact. IBM announced it. Whether or not Apple uses it in their desktop...well who knows. I like AIX machines though so it's good news for me.

As for the 7470 or 7500 or whatever...true, no product announcements as of yet. But I'd be willing to bet that there's one more revision of the Apollo in the works. (I mean, for chrissake, Mot is still revising 680X0 technology.) My original post wasn't meant to intend that Apple would use anything of the like but to point out that the 7450 family of processors will not likely be used in some sort of quad processing system because it isn't as efficient at the 7400 in SMP environments due to the fact that it uses MESI. If Apple wanted quads, they'd also want a chip revision that goes back to supporting full MERSI.

 

[topicolo]

As for the Motorola topic, our current situation seems pretty similar to that of late '93 to early '94, when the fastest macs were 68040s. These macs were being smoked by 486s and pentiums.

It was pitiful.

When the original 68000 was released, it was more advanced than any other desktop chip out there, but as usual, Motorola screwed up and was overtaken by Intel, trailing to the point where the fastest 68040 were almost 3 times slower than the fastest pentium. There were rumors of a new chip on the horizon that was extremely fast (the PowerPC) which kind of corresponds to the rumors we have today (the Power4 variant). When the PowerPCs were announced in April of '94 (?), they were definately superior to even the fastest Pentium, which topped out at a measly 66Mhz, while the fastest PowerPC was a whopping 80Mhz. This was a good 21% faster!

Let's hope that IBM's new chip will repeat the PowerPC launch, but not follow Motorola's path with the 68k and the G4.

 

[MacArtist]

a little info for you all to chew on...

For all of you complaining about the price of OS X.2 and their not being an upgrade option except for those who purchased on or after July 17:

Windows XP Home upgrade is $96.50 as per pricescan, while the full version is ~$199

So to get a full copy of OS X.2 for $129 and a 5 user home license for $199 isn't that bad.

As for those of you hell bent that MHz is the end all be all of judging a computer's performance, this is a little bit of info from specbench.org:

CINT2000
Company--System--Result--Baseline--# CPU

IBM Corporation--IBM eServer pSeries 690 Turbo (1300 MHz)--839--804--1

Dell--Precision WorkStation 340 (2.53 GHz P4)--922--893--1

AMD--Epox 8KHA+ Motherboard, AMD Athlon (TM) XP 2200+--765--738--1

CFP2000
Company--System--Result--Baseline--# CPU
IBM Corporation--IBM eServer pSeries 690 Turbo (1300 MHz)--1266--1202--1

Dell--Precision WorkStation 340 (2.53 GHz P4)--901--878--1

AMD--Epox 8KHA+ Motherboard, AMD Athlon (TM) XP 2200+--671--624—1

In the integer benchmark, the 1.3GHz Power4 is faster than the XP2200+ and only 10% slower than the 2.53GHz P4.
Where as, in the floating point benchmark, the 1.3GHz Power4 is clearly the superior processor.

So, if IBM and Apple were to team up and release this 2GHz, Power4 inspired, 64bit, Alti-vec compatible, Hyper-transport ready chip in a PowerMac, it would definitely give both AMD and Intel a run for their money.

Personally I couldn't care less what MHz/GHz my computer is as long as it does what I need it to do, and right now my PowerMac 933 does everything just fine.

 

[mrMahann]

state of mac promising, not great

= os =
growth is the key; being freeBSD under the hood makes it easier to get cred and functionality.

we're growing in the scientific community, hopefully will reverse teh slide in EDU if haven't already.

decent hardware will keep us in the game in the movie industry and arts and design...

= hardware =
there used to be talk of UMA and UMA2 providing one momboard for all segments of the matrix. for good reason; lesser resources tied to that than where apple can really innovate, which is form and ergonometrics.

tho, don't know why no USB/firewire up front on new cases (or USB2...)

pb, ib are still good and competitive or even leading the pack in lotsa ways. consumer, still competitive, tho would be nice to see emacs a bit cheaper.

but, pro desktop momboards are just behind, and have always been slower. am hoping there is some collusion w/ nVidia as they seem to have their noggin on straight w/ their new momboard; would be nice to see apple borrowing most of that tech from someone; this would save apple's tech to the adaptation and tothe portables in that the track record has not been good for jsut about ever. engineers, know how much would be to adapt an x86 board to power4? is it just techically undoable, or can stuff be borrowed?

gig is w/ power4, should it be the saving grace, ibm is proven. moto has been bleeding engineers for a long time, and stories of its corporate environ are not promising for a turnaround. if ibm can get into the driver's seat, that's even more promise for hte future.

itanium: well, mac app devs just switched over. are they gonna be willing to do it all again so soon? recompile, but there must still be lotsa tweaks.

= windows =
windows seems faster, and i/o seems faster but that's an x86 or rather momboard thing. like someone said, windows really isn't that bad; its just a kludgey interface. when things are working, they're great. when not, your screwed. to some extent, mac users are subject to same thing just its seems easier to me to fix my mac stuff. but, i'm still fixing things for others that they have no clue where to even start.

things seem to be getting better for windows people, tho gimme linux on my x86 boxen. windows is less the problem than m/s and horrible biz practices.

 

[Rocketman]

Re: Re: Dark days my a$$

Originally posted by bretm


How am I supposed to take anything you say as serious or researched when you keep saying "jagwire." Please stop.

Being a direct quote from Steve Jobs, I felt it accurate and amusing if not proper english

Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater!

Rocketman

 

[Chryx]

Originally posted by topicolo
When the original 68000 was released, it was more advanced than any other desktop chip out there, but as usual, Motorola screwed up and was overtaken by Intel, trailing to the point where the fastest 68040 were almost 3 times slower than the fastest pentium.

Except that the 68040 wasn't the fastest 68k chip, it was merely the fastest 68k chip that _Apple_ used.

the 68060 was a BEASTLY chip for it's time.

 

[Rocketman]

Originally posted by synp
Rocketman said:

1. Apple heard a backlash on .Mac re maintaining email addresses from people who do not use the premium services of that offering. They listened. They responded. In about 48 hours.


Really? Ho w have they responded? I might have missed something, but when I look at the pages on www.mac.com they say you need to purchase email-only accounts for $10 each. Has that changed?

Also, is that a one-time payment or an annual fee like the rest of .Mac?

Thanks

I do believe it is $10 per year forever. Compard to $99 that is a deal. Compared to $0 it is a steal.

But for those who converted all their mail to username@mac.com the ability to keep an email address is not bad at $10. To be charged for virtual disc and other services when ALL you use is email is silly and thankfully Apple recognized that if you are not wasting their bandwidth and server space they should not charge you for it either.

Rocketman

"Jagwire." - Steve Jobs
"Jaguar." - Product package and marketing department
"Jag-u-ar" - Queen's English pronunciation
TiG4 owners: NO Free or low cost upgrade. Foiled again!
o

 

[MacArtist]

Not to go off topic but...

The $10 mac.com email is for converting any itools account to an email only account. This is $10 per year and requires that you have a full .Mac membership ($49 for existing itools members, $99 for new members). So you can have up to 11 email addresses with one .Mac subsription for a price of up to $199 per year.

Back to the topic at hand...

Not that I really care about MHz, but I really want to see more powerfull processors in the PowerMacs so that the Mac community can have bragging rights for more than a great OS.

 

[topicolo]

Originally posted by Chryx


Except that the 68040 wasn't the fastest 68k chip, it was merely the fastest 68k chip that _Apple_ used.

the 68060 was a BEASTLY chip for it's time.

I don't know what your point is since that I didn't say that the 68040 was the fastest 68k chip at all. I said that the fastest 68040 was slower than a pentium. Besides, the '060 came out after the PPC 601 came out and by then, macs were going PPC all the way.