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Their 64 bit chips run two separate 32 bit registers. Their 32 bit chips are really 8 bit chips interlaced to 32 bits. Pentium chips employ long pipelines and CISC processing. Because of the CISC processing they have to run at higher processing cycles, hence the higher GHZ. They generate a helluva lot of heat and the latest interation, Prescott, pulls 100 watts of power. It's all smoke and mirrors to say the 3.6 GZH chip is faster than a 2.7 GHZ G5. Jobs complained that IBM had only increased processing power from 2 GHZ to 2.7 in two years. However, during that same time period Intel has only increased the speed of the P4 from 3.4 to 3.6 GHZ. Late last year they issued a press release admitting they had hit the wall with the current P4 technology in terms of squeezing more speed out of that line of chips. Perhaps Apple is banking on a new line they are going to develop for them that will eliminate the limitations and bottlenecks of the current P4's, but that's down the road - perhaps two years. In the meantime, I wonder where IBM and Freescale will be with their chips?

Does anybody find it strange that Microsoft and Sony dumped Intel in their gaming machines citing similar complaints about Intel as Jobs did with IBM?

Next question. Does Apple really think they're going to shoehorn the P4 into a slim 1 inch Powerbook case when no pc maker has been able to do this? All laptops running the P4 are over 2 inches thick. Personally, I sure would have loved to have seen the 3 GHZ dual core G4 in the next generation Powerbook.
 
Are we going to get dual Pentiums? There is some software out there in the Mac world that takes advantage of having 2 procs. Will it all get recompiled so that having dual procs is no longer a benefit? :confused:
 
efoto said:
abrooks, that is a screencap from the keynote right?

Any chance anyone else is hosting that keynote movie? I cannot play it off Apple's site from work (but other sites hosted movies play fine, imagine that :p )

Aside: do you always keep your Adium chat-box centered over your dock like that abrooks, or is that simply a coincidence?

Not actually my image, its linked from Neowin, it is actually almost impossible to capture the stream because its in H.264 and nothing out there can capture it, although iGary claims he already has.
 
I don't think this is real suprising...even Apple's PowerMac page shows where the G5 is anywhere from 80-114% faster then the Pentium 4. Even without Rosetta running, a G5 will still smoke this thing.

Everyone keeps yelling that Apple will NEVER use a Pentium 4. It is my feeling as well they would not, but what happens when they want to go forward with the transition on the desktops and Intel has not delivered better?

It is very possible Intel could have the same problems with some of these future processors as IBM has had with theirs. If that happens we could see Apple rush to try and get the entire line updated so more then just the laptops and Mini are running on Intel.

When they announce the iMac on a Pentium 4, I would expect the last G5 models to sell out FAST! Not saying this is going to happen, but a week ago 95% of people here never thought Apple would be going x86 either.
 
abrooks said:
Not actually my image, its linked from Neowin, it is actually almost impossible to capture the stream because its in H.264 and nothing out there can capture it, although iGary claims he already has.

so there is no way to save the file with quicktime pro, like right click the link on apple's site and choose "save as quicktime movie" one of the pro options.
 
stockscalper said:
...It's all smoke and mirrors to say the 3.6 GZH chip is faster than a 2.7 GHZ G5. Jobs complained that IBM had only increased processing power from 2 GHZ to 2.7 in two years. However, during that same time period Intel has only increased the speed of the P4 from 3.4 to 3.6 GHZ. Late last year they issued a press release admitting they had hit the wall with the current P4 technology in terms of squeezing more speed out of that line of chips. Perhaps Apple is banking on a new line they are going to develop for them that will eliminate the limitations and bottlenecks of the current P4's, but that's down the road - perhaps two years. In the meantime, I wonder where IBM and Freescale will be with their chips?

Does anybody find it strange that Microsoft and Sony dumped Intel in their gaming machines citing similar complaints about Intel as Jobs did with IBM?

I have said everything you have in your post, and of course I agree 100% with you.

IBM hasn't made bad progress. It has kept up with everyone else, and the fact that MS is using PPC in the XBox says a lot. MS doesn't switch to a processor type they're not very familiar with unless there's a reason for it.

I really hope its true that Steve knows Intel's plans, and that there's a nice new chip in the future. I'm sure this must be the case. Otherwise Steve would have chose AMD as they're ahead of the pack right now. Steve has probably already seen it running in a PowerMac, but obviously won't talk about it.

And how convenient that all new software developed on the Mac can now run on both Intel and PPC, because if Apple ever wants to switch back to PPC, there won't be any need for another software re-compile. :)
 
The only conclusion that can be made out of these results is that the Rosetta emulation is effective enough. We already know that it is emulating a G3 (= no altivec), and that floating-point performance is not very good on x86. Applications that depend on altivec and good FP performance will be recompiled very soon.

Rosetta is needed mostly to be able to run those little applications that are discontinued and you happen to have some important documents written by them. Performance is of minor importance - these test results tell that it is enough to be useful.

Same reasoning can be applied to Classic. I really hope that there will be Classic support in Mac on Intel. No matter what the performance is, but one day I might want to open a document from 1987 - created by an application that has been discontinued long time ago.
 
bloodfist said:
so there is no way to save the file with quicktime pro, like right click the link on apple's site and choose "save as quicktime movie" one of the pro options.

Nope it just saves a file that when opened begins to stream.
 
stockscalper said:
Their 64 bit chips run two separate 32 bit registers. Their 32 bit chips are really 8 bit chips interlaced to 32 bits. Pentium chips employ long pipelines and CISC processing. Because of the CISC processing they have to run at higher processing cycles, hence the higher GHZ. They generate a helluva lot of heat and the latest interation, Prescott, pulls 100 watts of power. It's all smoke and mirrors to say the 3.6 GZH chip is faster than a 2.7 GHZ G5. Jobs complained that IBM had only increased processing power from 2 GHZ to 2.7 in two years. However, during that same time period Intel has only increased the speed of the P4 from 3.4 to 3.6 GHZ. Late last year they issued a press release admitting they had hit the wall with the current P4 technology in terms of squeezing more speed out of that line of chips. Perhaps Apple is banking on a new line they are going to develop for them that will eliminate the limitations and bottlenecks of the current P4's, but that's down the road - perhaps two years. In the meantime, I wonder where IBM and Freescale will be with their chips?

Does anybody find it strange that Microsoft and Sony dumped Intel in their gaming machines citing similar complaints about Intel as Jobs did with IBM?

Next question. Does Apple really think they're going to shoehorn the P4 into a slim 1 inch Powerbook case when no pc maker has been able to do this? All laptops running the P4 are over 2 inches thick. Personally, I sure would have loved to have seen the 3 GHZ dual core G4 in the next generation Powerbook.

What are you talking about? Their 32 bit chips have 32 bit registers. Their 64bit chips use the AMD x86-64 extensions and have 64 bit registers. Internally Pentium chips have been RISC since the Pentium Pro (with CISC to risk instruction convertors).

Whilst the developer boxes are PIV the first Intel Macs are going to be laptops and lower end boxes (the Mini). As such they are going to be using the Pentium-M which is actually quite a cool running chip. It also has a sensible pipeline (shorter than the G5 iirc). The future desktop Intel Macs are going to be using the dual core 64 bit Pentium-M derivative desktop chips that Intel will be shipping next year.

Yes the PIV sucks but even Intel realise that. What we are all going to get is going to be faster, cooler running and Pentium-M based.
 
Hi, ive registered to try and reassure (educate?) the scared mac owners. I should say i am a desktop pc user and a laptop mac user myself so i follow the news in both worlds.

Abstract Are we going to get dual Pentiums? There is some software out there in the Mac world that takes advantage of having 2 procs. Will it all get recompiled so that having dual procs is no longer a benefit?


There is no such thing as a SMP pentium 4 setup, you need to get Xeons to be able to have a dual cpu configuration, which would render the price of the dual cpu powermac high, but we re all used to that i guess. The pentium 4 is (well, can be anyway) dual CORE, which, by the way intel implemented it, acts more like SMP in disguise.

I don't think this is real suprising...even Apple's PowerMac page shows where the G5 is anywhere from 80-114% faster then the Pentium 4. Even without Rosetta running, a G5 will still smoke this thing.

Yeh im sure apple would print a page showing a g5 getting smoked by everything else. As with intel vs amd, sometimes the g5 is faster, sometimes its slower, go read anandtech's comparaison if you want a more detailed analysis.
Now, THIS IS A TEST BED' NOT A FINAL PRODUCT!, and its exactly to keep people like YOU from panicking that apple put an NDA on this thing.

It is very possible Intel could have the same problems with some of these future processors as IBM has had with theirs. If that happens we could see Apple rush to try and get the entire line updated so more then just the laptops and Mini are running on Intel.

Intel ALREADY has their pentium m running (and have been for 3 years). It CAN be run on desktop chipsets without a hitch with the use of an adapter (some will remember the slotcket from asus back in the days, same thing).
Intel ALREADY has the dual core pentium m (codename Yonah) running. Although not for sale, it exists, contrary to the magical dual core g5 or the 3ghz g5.



It would be completly retarded for apple to use a pentium 4 anyway. The current crop of pentium 4's (Prescott) sucks more juice than a g5, outputs more heat, and pretty much stinks when compared to the amd offerings. Steve Jobs clrearly said one of the reason to switch was to up the work/watt ratio and reducion power consumption. Well, thats the pentium m. At 2ghz it draws 24 Watts, compared to the 103Wats of a 3.2ghz prescott and and 180+ Watts of a dual core pentium 4. So its pretty obvious that apple wont touch the pentium 4 with a ten foot pole.

What i gather from the translated ppc code running on the x86 machine is that its not bad at all. At least much better than trying to run x86 code on the itanium. And thats on day 1 of the announce. It still has at least a year to get tweaked. Not to mention it will ONLy count for binaries that have not been recompiled.
All in all, this transition spells good news to me and i dont really get how some of you get so emotionnal over a piece of sillicon when the computer will run in the same fashion it always has, if not better.
 
Nermal said:
You have to sign an NDA in order to rent a kit, but I wonder whether you need to sign anything to use one onsite at WWDC. It's possible that no NDA is being broken here.
I believe in order to get a ticket to WWDC, you have to be an ADC member and buy the ticket through the ADC site. In order to become a member you have to agree to their terms, which I'm pretty sure included an NDA :p (nice try though)
 
Sorry but I haven't been following Pentium develeopment as much as I apparently should have. Yonah, Conroe, Pentium -M's, what's it all mean? I'm still trying to get my head around Pentium doesn't suck. Can somebody tell me which of these future chips are 64 bit, which are 64 bit dual core, which are low power/mobile and which one (ones?) will we likely see in our first Powerbooks (my next purchase)? Is there a roadmap somewhere that explains this clearly (the ones I've seen on Intel's site don't) I know we'll never see a Pentium 4 in a production Mac, but what WILL we see?
 
Ravenflight said:
Sorry but I haven't been following Pentium develeopment as much as I apparently should have. Yonah, Conroe, Pentium -M's, what's it all mean? I'm still trying to get my head around Pentium doesn't suck. Can somebody tell me which of these future chips are 64 bit, which are 64 bit dual core, which are low power/mobile and which one (ones?) will we likely see in our first Powerbooks (my next purchase)? Is there a roadmap somewhere that explains this clearly (the ones I've seen on Intel's site don't) I know we'll never see a Pentium 4 in a production Mac, but what WILL we see?

Intel Roadmap for this year (without codenames, sorry).

Edit: Better link EMT64=64Bit
 
Ravenflight said:
Sorry but I haven't been following Pentium develeopment as much as I apparently should have. Yonah, Conroe, Pentium -M's, what's it all mean? I'm still trying to get my head around Pentium doesn't suck. Can somebody tell me which of these future chips are 64 bit, which are 64 bit dual core, which are low power/mobile and which one (ones?) will we likely see in our first Powerbooks (my next purchase)? Is there a roadmap somewhere that explains this clearly (the ones I've seen on Intel's site don't) I know we'll never see a Pentium 4 in a production Mac, but what WILL we see?

The quickest to come out should be the yonah, a desktop dual core pentium M.

A bit further in the future:
For the desktop, youll have the presles and ceral mill, single and dual core netburst cpus ( à la pentium 4) using a .65micron process (current prescotts are .90 microns).
There will also be the conroe will is a pentium m-like (those laptops chips) architecture for the desktop. The merom/conroe are supposed to be more than just an evulotion to the pentium m's we see today but a revamp of the architure which should yeild to 20-30% more IPC.

Its not clear which of these will be 64 bits, and theres probably a bunch of "eventual" cpus i have not listed here. The intel roadmap is just too wide.


Seems someone beat me to it, oh well!
 
I wonder what will happen with the Portables, Mac Mini and the AIO's I hope they stay away from the Celeron D and Will the Powerbooks get the Centrino??
 
But what about the firmware???

What I really want to know about is the firmware we'll see on Intel Macs. Will it be a modified Open Firmware? Will it be the new open source Intel brainchild? Will we be able to do Target Mode? Will I be able to hold the Option key down on startup and see list of boot volumes? Will I have to endure the archaic BIOS the rest of the PC world is saddled with? No one is talking about this, and it is the one thing that concerns me. Schiller said they "will not stop anyone from putting Windows on Apple hardware." Does that mean Macs will have Windows compatible firmware, or is it a tongue-in-cheek way of saying "yeah, just try dropping Windoze on our hardware and see how well that works *wink-wink* ?"

I want the total user experience to stay the same, including the boot options I now have on my Macs. Anybody know anything?
 
ogminlo said:
What I really want to know about is the firmware we'll see on Intel Macs. Will it be a modified Open Firmware? Will it be the new open source Intel brainchild? Will we be able to do Target Mode? Will I be able to hold the Option key down on startup and see list of boot volumes? Will I have to endure the archaic BIOS the rest of the PC world is saddled with? No one is talking about this, and it is the one thing that concerns me. Schiller said they "will not stop anyone from putting Windows on Apple hardware." Does that mean Macs will have Windows compatible firmware, or is it a tongue-in-cheek way of saying "yeah, just try dropping Windoze on our hardware and see how well that works *wink-wink* ?"

I want the total user experience to stay the same, including the boot options I now have on my Macs. Anybody know anything?

No one seems to know what we are getting, but it's public knowledge that we are not getting Open Firmware.
 
robbieduncan said:
No one seems to know what we are getting, but it's public knowledge that we are not getting Open Firmware.

"Public knowledge" means you should have no problem posting a link that definitively states we will not get Open Firmware in the Intel Macs.

Post away!

:p
 
Smoke and Mirrors?

Doom III runs much faster on those supposedly "slower" P4 chips. LMAO. It's not even close. A single P 3.6 can clean the clock of a dual 2.7 GHZ G5. And yes Doom IS multi-threaded. It's physics engine is on a different thread.

In real life the G5 just feels really sluggish. You can cry about synthetic benchmarks but in reality you Macheads are in for a treat. we are talking about an easy 30% advantage in real world use with that game. When you consider that they tested a dual processor machine on a multithreaded program it's an unbelievable thrashing for the G5.

And it's not just the g5 that sucks its the Mac memory systems which have lagged behind for years now in general.

Pete
 
Abercrombieboy said:
It is very possible Intel could have the same problems with some of these future processors as IBM has had with theirs. If that happens we could see Apple rush to try and get the entire line updated so more then just the laptops and Mini are running on Intel.
If I remember the keynote correctly, Steve emphasized many times that developers needed to start writing in xCode and Universal Binaries so the developers software would run on BOTH processors. Knowing Steve, if IBM gets their S**T (er, stuff) together, PowerPC may still be used more than we think and still stands as a backup to the Intel card if Intel falls short. Knowing Steve, he has clauses in his deal with Intel that allow him to dump them if they don't meet Apples needs. Steve talked about phasing out Moto years ago, and yet they are still here. Steve also said that there are PowerPC products in the pipeline. IBM made promises to Apple and failed to execute, so he is opting for Intel and their promises. No doubt that OSX will continue to live a "now not-so-secret" double life" ... as an insurance policy.

Letting an early "benchmark" from a single processor developer box, on an existing chip from today, is hardly any kind of discouragement for me. The present box is merely designed to allow developers to start translating their software and getting it ready to run on the Intel chips. It is NOT designed to compete in ANY FORM with the present optimized dual-chip PowerPC systems that are shipping today. By the time the transition gets completed in two years+ ("almost completely by the end of 2007" per Steve), most applications (at least the important ones), will have been transitioned to Universal Binary / xCode, and most users who need the speed, and use the applications regularly, will have updated their software to current releases of the software anyway. If Mathematica 5 can be converted to a working version in a few hours, then a year or two should be sufficient for others to get their software converted, even if it requires more work than the "20 lines in a million" of the Mathematica example. We should hold off judgement until we get something more dependable/workable to "compare" to.

I'm no expert, but a developer can probably write code on an old 500 MHz, single-processor PowerPC system that will absolutely kick butt when run on a Dual 2.7 system. JMO
 
robbieduncan said:

Thanks. That's a shame, I hope whatever firmware goes into the Intel Macs gets the usual Apple treatment and will continue to support the functionality at that level that further separates Macs from the Windoze/myriad-generic-BIOS crap.
 
The joke will be that after year or more the double G5 still be faster than Intel specialy with altivec operations. (Photoshop)

The main trick with Pentium M is low power and temperature with low frequency
but when you run it on full speed then it will be nice warm for you and your battery.
 
Spock said:
I wonder what will happen with the Portables, Mac Mini and the AIO's I hope they stay away from the Celeron D and Will the Powerbooks get the Centrino??

I pray the world stays away from Celeron D, F, X, or anything in the future. Regardless of them being an 'alright' processor to some, the Celeron has such a poor stigma, I'll NEVER EVER compute on one, and if Apple puts that crap in any Mac, its certainly not a model I will be ordering.

Centrino is a technological grouping of wifi, chipset, and processor, it is not a processor of itself. The processor in use in the Centrino set is the Pentium-M, designed for mobile computing with good performance and low power consumption. That said I hope that iBooks and PowerBooks get these (not really, but since its going to happen anyway, might as well embrace it now). I could see iBooks with a 2.2Ghz P-M while PowerBooks boast a 1.8 dual-core or perhaps 2Ghz dual-core, which would be pretty sweet IMO. Not sure how the dual-core thing works out, but if each core can maintain the 2mb l2 cache that the dothan currently has, seems to me that would make quite the speedy little bugger :)
 
Is it just me, or are there others who hate the fact that we can't use the term "Wintel" in the same sarcastic manner we used to. :D
 
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