I recently saw the following info posted on Unicornation.com - anyone care to comment? Please understand that I'm in a position of ignorance here, so don't shoot the messenger... the punchline seems to be that for us DAW users, it would be worthwhile to wait for the next rev of the G5's before jumping in.
Thoughts???
Thoughts???
The first rev of the G5s may be obsolete before they even hit the streets. There are some serious questions as the the DDR specs Apple has chosen are about to be replaced by a newer and faster standard (and by standard I mean industry standard).
Of course, you are welcome to spend your money on whatever you want, but from a techie perspective the G5s (which are not going to be that much faster in real world apps) miss the mark by quite a bit and we probably won't see them where they need to be until rev b or c.
Having been a former Apple developer and HW tester I speak from experience...rev A = bad news...and I _may_ have already had my hands on one for testing (nudge, nudge, wink, wink, say no more, say no more).
Apple chose the 400Mhz DDR standard which can be addressed at 6.4 GB/s, as of right now has been replaced by a faster standard which can be addressed at 12.8 GB/s. The real issue with this is that Apple is pretending to move to an industry standard, but they are one giant step behind the rest of the industry (which is so unlike Apple). The good points are that, regardless, DDR is the way to go. The RAM will be available & relatively inexpensive. I'm sure they had a reason for choosing a standard they knew was on it's way out (hell we Mac users were using SIMMs longer than any PC user before we finally moved up to DIMMs).
My biggest issue with all of this is that they really need to compete on a speed/price level with the PC world (like Dell) and chosing an older standard is not the best way to do this. Granted DDR RAM is faster than any of the previous standrads (PC100, PC 133), so there is a significant improvement over the current standard (70.6% faster addressing) but the rest of the system bogs that down to a total of about 43% faster than a similarly rated (Ghz to Ghz) G4. That is one major hit to performance, almost 30% of the gain just given up. Not to mention the difference when going to a 64-bit (2^64) system froma 32-bit (2^32) system should be exponetial. And remember Apple's first venture in DDR RAM with the duals? They actually addressed memory *slower* than the SDRAM systems (for instance the DDR 1 GHz dual was 29% slower in memory intensive processes than the SDRAM 1 GHz dual because of this).
These are all issue that Apple need to address. And, yes given the delay in shipment of the current crop the Rev. B machines will probably be a couple months off (December/January?) by my best guess. I doubt they will upgrade the DDR/Memory architecture to take advantage of the new standard but they should at least fully support the DDR standard that they chose to use in their system to get full benefit of the potential speed gain. That alone will benefit us DAW users in a big way.
Also, a point no one seems to has mentioned. Altivec has been updated, meaning all apps that took advantage of the Altivec processor need to be updated (re-coded) to take advantage of the G5s speed. And those that don't take advantage of Altivec at all will not show as much of a gain from the G5 as they could. Case and point: some non-Altivec apps actually run a percent or 2 faster on a G3 than a G4. For instance Bryce on an iBook beats out a G4 TiBook by quite a bit. But that is another issue for another discussion.
To sum it all up: for a system that should be a magnitude of 10 times faster than the previous crop is only about 43% faster on average (again GHz to GHz). Something is wrong.
As a former Apple Developer I can tell you that I would never buy a 1st generation machine. I've seen what gets swept under the rug for "the next update".
Apple has promised that these technologies are fully supported in the new G5s (DDR-400, PCI-X, 64-bit data flow, the new Altivec code, among others), when in reality they will be fully supported at a later date -- some of them dependent upon software developers who are currently struggling to release OS X versions of their software only now -- 2 years after OS X Was introduced). Read the white papers/developer papers, it's there in black & white (black & white geek-speak, but it's there).