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Apple Releases Dual Core PowerMac G5s

alien said:
It's at an apple reseller. I don't know what it's like in other parts of the world, but here most places that sell apple computers (minus apple stores, and "big box" stores like Best Buy etc.) will take your old computer, give you a price for a trade-in and then knock it off the price of the new machine.

As for what they're giving me... let's just say that it's comparable to what you would get when you trade in a car (ie. not much). For my old machine I'm only getting around 500 bucks (other places offered 300). I'm not too sure if I could get more, but then again, I don't want the hassle to advertise in the paper or anywhere else.
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I see, I think I remember seeing something similar at CompUSA, I don't know whether it applied to Apples or not, but its not a bad idea.
Have fun with the new Dual Core 🙂
 
EricNau said:
Assuming HT stands for Hyper Threading (I hope to God it does otherwise I must be sounding like an idiot), I would have to agree that it is a joke. I've looked into what it actually does and what the differences are, and assuming what I read was right, it seems pointless. I read that (in simple terms) it just tricks the computer that it has dual-cores, and in theory that might allow the computer to multi-task better.
Sounded like a gimmick to me from the day it came out. (and it worked too, look at all the people with HT).
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yup, HT = Hypre Threading


AidenShaw said:
If HT is a hoax, why are IBM and Sun using it in their server processors??
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for the same reason Intel might be dropping. In theory it sounds good but im telling you from an actuall performance use, it makes no diff. I have no clue what it does on their servers, might be useful on that point. Plus, technology comes out all the time that dosent catch on, this is no different.
 
QuickTime stream of Apple's pro event??

Anyone know if and when a video of this Wednesday's event will be posted?
 
Bregalad said:
I can't tell whether the new dual core machines are air or liquid cooled, but the new DC2.0GHz machine has a warning message in front of the fans: "If you see liquid, unplug computer and consult manual".
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If you see liquid coming out of a liquid-cooled computer, that's a bad thing.

If you see liquid coming out of an AIR-cooled computer, that's TRULY dire 🙂


jaduffy108 said:
From Tomshardware.com 10/17/05
"Intel's Next-Generation Server Promise"
Summary:
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Thanks for the info. For my needs (and Apple's, really), laptop chips are of particular interest. How are AMD's chips vs. the Pentium M?

I have NO desire to see anything with Netburst on my desk, although Apple will use it if they have to. I think the PowerPC has some life left in it though, closing the time-gap until late 06.

I also wouldn't be surprised if Apple's agreements with Intel have timetables: if Intel falls behind, Apple's free to shop around. (Didn't that situation happen with Motorola and IBM?)
 
Ship Dates

Anyone know why the ship dates are so far out for the quad? My date is 11/7 and I ordered less than 30 min after apple store came back online on Wednesday.

Any experiences or thoughts to share? Can I expect early or late delivery?
 
4God said:
Yeah, I was wondering the same thing. 😕
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I haven't found a webcast yet and I've been looking everyday...Apple isn't going to come out with one.
Anybody know of other Mac websites (non-official) that might have one?
 
anyone gonig to upgrade to 16GB of RAM??

I just ordered a Quad today and added 8GB of RAM. Is anyone gonna do the 16Gb????

What's also interest is I got $1,500.00 on my G4 on an eBay auction today. LOOOOOVELY.

The upgrade to 16GB is 11,900, DAMN! anyone got that kinda money around here so i can feel even more broke? lol.
 
sai_digitalle said:
I just ordered a Quad today and added 8GB of RAM. Is anyone gonna do the 16Gb????

What's also interest is I got $1,500.00 on my G4 on an eBay auction today. LOOOOOVELY.

The upgrade to 16GB is 11,900, DAMN! anyone got that kinda money around here so i can feel even more broke? lol.
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I can't even buy the Powermac!
Anybody buying 16GB of RAM, instead should just give that money to me 😛
 
illegalprelude said:
Let me tell you this, HT is a joke.
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Overhyped? Definitely! Not as good as real SMP? Yep! Joke? Not really. True. HT won't make your computer in to uber-machine and it wont double the performance. Difference in games is neglible (but games are not very good with multiple processors/multithreading). Where HT does benefit, is multitasking. I have seen several benchmarks where HT really helps if you do multitasking.

HT (or SMT) is not a joke. IBM's POWER-CPU's have it, future Sparc-CPU's have it. Just because Intel totally overhyped the technology does not mean that it's a joke.
 
Evangelion said:
Overhyped? Definitely! Not as good as real SMP? Yep! Joke? Not really. True. HT won't make your computer in to uber-machine and it wont double the performance. Difference in games is neglible (but games are not very good with multiple processors/multithreading). Where HT does benefit, is multitasking. I have seen several benchmarks where HT really helps if you do multitasking.

HT (or SMT) is not a joke. IBM's POWER-CPU's have it, future Sparc-CPU's have it. Just because Intel totally overhyped the technology does not mean that it's a joke.
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look @ benchmarks all you want but when it comes to everyday use, it makes no diff. I never look at benchmarks cause their a bunch of usless numbers, in the end of the day, its everyday use that matters and HT isnt doing me jack squat.
 
illegalprelude said:
look @ benchmarks all you want but when it comes to everyday use, it makes no diff. I never look at benchmarks cause their a bunch of usless numbers, in the end of the day, its everyday use that matters and HT isnt doing me jack squat.
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Here's some real-life benchmarks. 11% reduction in encode-time is nothing to sneeze at, IMO. But let's drop the benchmarks, and look at real-life usage, shall we? Here's what Anandtech says about it:

The result of using a HT enabled or dual core system is better responsiveness when multitasking
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Oh, but let's continue: Here's a quote from Sharkuextreme:

The second image is of a standard scenario with HT disabled. It has higher spikes (and of a longer duration) than with HT enabled and we can say without question that Intel's HT allowed for more stable operation when running multiple applications concurrently. Application performance was still close, but overall responsiveness was higher with HT enabled.
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Aces Hardware says this:

To resume:

* HyperThreading speeds up single threaded applications a little bit by handling the OS tasks in the background on the second logical CPU (See Comanche framerates for example: +2.6%)
* HyperThreading speeds up multiple single threaded applications quite a bit (See Comanche (+7.1%) and RAR compressing results (+ 7.5%))
* HyperThreading speeds up multithreaded applications a lot (Virtual Dub MPEG4 encoding + 20%)
* But seems to have a little trouble with a multi thread applications and some single threaded applications at the same time.
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So HyperThreading CAN, and quite often does, help. Just because you don't see any major difference on your computer ("Boo! My games are not one bit faster!"), does not mean that it's useless.
 
Evangelion said:
Here's some real-life benchmarks[/url]. 11% reduction in encode-time is nothing to sneeze at, IMO.

So HyperThreading CAN, and quite often does, help.
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So, HT can speed up things by up to 20%. But this tells us at the same time that cache misses before HT were also up to 20%. So in one-fifth of the time the CPU was not doing anything because it was not fed with any data. That must have been a hell of an efficient processor before they added HT. 😀
 
Macademia said:
All exciting stuff, but just one thing... I'm not sure about the name of the photo app... I mean... aperture? Seriously? I know it's a little adolescent, but couldn't they have thought of a less giggle-worthy name? I can see the joke posts and headlines now.. "I have a big problem with my aperture", "please help me instal plugin in my aperture" , "Steve Job's aperture feels good to computer geeks" etc etc.
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Does "iExpose" work better for you? 😀
 
sai_digitalle said:
I just ordered a Quad today and added 8GB of RAM. Is anyone gonna do the 16Gb????

What's also interest is I got $1,500.00 on my G4 on an eBay auction today. LOOOOOVELY.

The upgrade to 16GB is 11,900, DAMN! anyone got that kinda money around here so i can feel even more broke? lol.
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If anyone wants to upgrade their RAM in those quantities they would be extremely foolish to buy direct through Apple. $11,900 (or whatever the figure is) is way overpriced for what you could probably get at a place like Crucial, I'm assuming at least. 😎
 
Yikes! The 2GB RAM module is selling at a 10x price premium over 1 GB modules over at crucial.com. (5x per 1GB)

If I were looking to upgrade my PowerMac, I think I'll wait until 2 GB RAM prices drop to at least 2.5x price premium.
 
~Shard~ said:
If anyone wants to upgrade their RAM in those quantities they would be extremely foolish to buy direct through Apple. $11,900 (or whatever the figure is) is way overpriced for what you could probably get at a place like Crucial, I'm assuming at least. 😎
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If you go through Crucial's system selector thing and select Power Mac G5 Quad, the recommended 2 GB DIMMs cost $1350, which ends up being over $10800. If you look at generic 2 GB DIMMs, they're still over $1000 and the total memory upgrade would be over $8000. So while Apple is more expensive, the cost of 2 GB DIMMs does seem to just be high across the board.
 
rolandf said:
Apple should keep the Power(PC) processors also for their future machines.

As they provide big portions of pro-software made in-house, it should not be such a problem to have the
Intel and AMD as well IBM platforms served.
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Powermacs are supposed to be converted only in mid 2007.The main reason for the switch are xxxbooks where no real upgrades have been done.
 
manu chao said:
So, HT can speed up things by up to 20%. But this tells us at the same time that cache misses before HT were also up to 20%. So in one-fifth of the time the CPU was not doing anything because it was not fed with any data. That must have been a hell of an efficient processor before they added HT. 😀
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P4 is a very inefficient CPU, due to long pipelines. And HT was deisgned to address that shortcoming. And it did, to some extent, but not enough to completely compensate for the overlong pipelines.
 
I'd definitely be buying the Quad right now if I didn't have a lot of expensive DDR RAM sitting in front of me. 🙂

Seriously, though, nice to see Apple with a monster machine again. Reminds me of when the dual 2.0 came out.
 
Renegate said:
Powermacs are supposed to be converted only in mid 2007.The main reason for the switch are xxxbooks where no real upgrades have been done.
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That's been tossed around the Web a lot, but officially from Apple we do NOT know that PowerMacs have to wait until mid 2007. We don't know that they have to wait until 2007 at all. All we have (reasonably enough) is a vary VAGUE timetable that the transition will be complete some time (maybe early even) in 2007. We don't know that PowerMacs will be the last to go. Xserves would be logical latecomers, since people have big PPC clusters they may want to expand.

I'm sure even Apple themselves don't know the schedule for 100% certain, and they're wisely being vague to avoid over-promising. PowerMacs on Intel in late 2006 is very possible. (Sooner is possible--even with Netburst--but strikes me as less likely. Intel's next wave of chips are worth waiting for if the G5 has some life left in it.)


sai_digitalle said:
I'm debating on which to get, Is ECC-Ram, really necessary?
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Most people don't need EC. What will you be using it for?

Remember the slogan: "Life is Random" 🙂 Live on the edge!
 
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