Lacero said:That hasn't stopped him before. Remember the iPod mini fiasco of 6 months for non-US residents. I remember that very bitterly!!
Yep, as do I!
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Dual Core PowerMac G5 Updates?
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Yep, as do I!
blitzkrieg79 said:
That's not true. They always used After Effects in their tests, the Nightflight test is the new one. Nightflight basically uses fractal noise for the majority of the test and that particular test is skewed toward the Mac very very heavily. They used it because it's a PC beating a Mac at a very Mac-biased test. It would be like Apple showing that they can beat PC's in Doom3 or Quake4.
That's true for A64's and Opterons but not for Pentium D's, which also beat the Mac.
How is Cinebench a PC optimized benchmark? They optimize for Mac just as well. This isn't Doom3 or some such app where PC's have an edge. Out of all the benchmarks that are cross-platform this is probably the most fair.
According to Apple that's a good thing because 64-bit slows the Mac down in most cases.
UM. Winning 2 tests by a very slim margin and getting destroyed in 9 others isn't "holding it's own". The Mac still loses 8 out of 11 to the Pentium D and 7 of 11 to the Dual Xeon. Given that the A64 X2 4800+ (2.4ghz) beats the Pentium D pretty easily it stands to reason that it would do the same to the Mac.
Of course that's all theoretical. In the real-world, Apple is getting trounced right now, particularly as you compare lower priced machines.
BGil said:
The only test I see Apple getting "trounced" there is a Cinebench benchmark, and I will say this again, OpenGL on Mac OS X is nothing to brag about, its not the G5 processors fault that Apple software engineers are lagging behind...
Remember when Quake 3 came out? It ran so bad on Macs it wasn't even funny but the guys at ID took it upon themselves and optimized the game for a G5 to a level where even high end PCs with same video cards had problems keeping up with G5s...
In real world filters Apple isn't doing so bad considering they are running on a 3 year old technology with a single core G5 processor...
I still think if Apple would choose to finally release a dual dual G5 it would probably be right up there with the best Opteron...
And I just don't understand the logic in that 64-bitness slows the Mac down, it is clearly seen in the benchmarks that Windows x64 makes a quite noticable difference for the x86 worlds performance, so I am assuming that if properly programmed 64-bit instruction sets for G5 would also show a noticable difference...
Anyway, its all about optimizations, most developers optimize for PCs first because of their market share which makes sense, Mac comes second, usually developers don't spend too much time on Mac versions of software but its hard to blame them as there just isn't as much money to be made because there just isn't a whole lot of Macs out there when compared to PCs...
Again, its all about optimizations and I will stand by my words as I have some experience in working with various computer equipment that G5 properly optimized at the same clock speed is as fast or even faster than anything AMD can throw at it...
blitzkrieg79 said:
This particular Cinebench test doesn't use OpenGL acceleration for it's rendering.
It gets beat by over 50% in the first test, 20% in the third, 10% in the fourth, by over a minute in a test that only takes 2 minutes in the 6th, slaughtered in Cinebench, and the Total Training 2 + Nightflight difference is almost 12 minutes.
Considering most of my projects have rendering times measured in workdays or weekends, I'd consider that a big difference. Furthermore, the abilty of the Opteron and Windows to section off any process to a particular processor(s) would allow me to continue working in another app (say my video editor) at full-speed without dropping frames. That's a big difference between the two systems. You can speak about how much faster the PowerMac should be theoretically but in the real-world it's not.
PC's have always beaten the G5 in Quake3. The only reason why the G5 is even competitive is because the SMP was broken in the Windows version a longtime ago. Try looking at the scores from single processor systems X86 systems and you'll notice they are just as high as the dual processor scores if not higher. The Mac version is very SMP aware and has an advantage when running dual processors. It still looses though.
Opterons are 3 year old technology as well. And even the single core version can usually beat a PM with a higher clock speed.
http://www.creativemac.com/articles/viewarticle.jsp?id=31238-1
I still think if Apple would choose to finally release a dual dual G5 it would probably be right up there with the best Opteron...
You can ask around on this forum but apparently it is something that came from Apple themseleves. IIRC it had something to do witht he fact that the PPC already has more registers... or something. I don't know but that's the reasoning Apple gave for why they haven't moved completely to 64-bit.
I think that's not true for the software packages we're talking about. For games yes the PC dominates the market but not so for creative software. Most creative professionals I know, with the except of those doing 3D, use the Mac and have traditionally always done so. It wasn't long ago that software packages like ProTools had a much greater feature set on the Mac than on the PC. So it's not really accurate to say that creative apps are optimized for PC first. These are large companies and their optimize for both platform equally.
Again, its all about optimizations and I will stand by my words as I have some experience in working with various computer equipment that G5 properly optimized at the same clock speed is as fast or even faster than anything AMD can throw at it
Worried about Rev A. of a Dual-Dual?
So the one thing I haven't seen discussed in this thread in much detail is "is it a good idea to buy Rev. A of a new Dual-Dual design -- particularly given that a good deal of Apple's engineering focus has to be on the MacTel transition?"
Any thoughts on this?
So the one thing I haven't seen discussed in this thread in much detail is "is it a good idea to buy Rev. A of a new Dual-Dual design -- particularly given that a good deal of Apple's engineering focus has to be on the MacTel transition?"
Any thoughts on this?
terpfan91 said:
Yeah, it has been discussed.
I said early on in this thread that anyone who buys REV A of the dual core machine is on crack.
BGil said:
Ehhhhhhhhhh, as a matter of a fact I work for one of those software companies that basically consumes all of its resources on Windows versions of software first as thats where the most money is to be made of.
If there is any reasonable budget left then they think about Linux or Mac OS X version of software and believe me, they don't spend as much time optimizing the software for it simply because there isn't a whole lot of money to be made, usually its just a rush job, a bad port, and as time goes by and the software sells certain minimum number of copies then they maybe will release a patch to somehow improve the performance of the software but usually nothing major...
Most creative software is optimized more for the Windows platform, period... Just the way dollar dictates the market... There have been a lot greater technologies than PC before (Amiga) but they got eaten up by the Wintel duopoly because they had the marketing power to grasp the computer market...
The point with Quake 3 I tried to make was that when it first came out it sucked big time and its PC counterpart didn't have to much performance problems simply because it was coded better... As time went by and they actually started to take their time in to it all of a sudden they could improve the frame rates in some instances by over 100%...
Anyway, we can argue about what architecture is better or whatever but what made Apple stand out was not only a different OS but also different hardware, now the only difference will be the OS and if Apple continues to sell its machines at current prices I doubt they will be in the business for long...
But I am guessing Apple might actually go back to the past and to help to distinguish itself from x86 world they will for example offer multimedia acceleration coprocessors built on the motherboard to accelerate encoding of h.264 files for example... Mac OS X alone just won't cut it especially that MS has over 90% of OS share...
Anyway, right now Apple is selling its computers on PowerPC technology and their market share is surging so maybe they really don't need Intel that much... Thats why I just don't buy that entire performance per watt speech... I know there is a whole lot more to this than portable processors...
iGary said:
Ha, well to go with that - there might not even be a REV B if they manage to get a MacTel chip in there - although I'd find it hard to believe that they wouldn't since 2007 is a long ways away.
So other than being on crack, why do you consider it a bad idea to buy one? I have a Rev A 450 MHz G4 sitting on my desk and its still humming right along nicely....
D
iGary said:
do you expect the dual core to be new designs from ground up? i thought the just switch out the processores on a slightly modified mainboard. but the chipset, case, cooling system, gpu, drives will all be the same. then the risk in buying a rev A would be below the crack level. maybe pot, but not crack.
Maybe I am clueless here, but I've expected a 970mp PM to have PCI Express, yet I don't understand the economic implications of making graphics boards for the last PPC PowerMac. With the present high end PM, you can get either a low end 9650 to drive a 30" Cinema Display, or you can get a high end card instead, as long as it is PPC compatible. Should a 970mp PCIe PowerMac have at least two graphics card options also? Maybe a PCIe version of a 9650 for the low end, if such is possible, but if it makes no economic sense to have a variety of PCIe PPC choices at this point, then I expect it would make the most sense to have only the top of the line graphics card to match the top of the line 970MP PowerMac.
So I just noticed ATI is bringing out their X1800 line next week: "The R520 will ship in at least three versions the Radeon X1800, the Radeon X1600 ad the Radeon X1300 and cards will begin shipping by the end of September, the company said."
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1558,1861634,00.asp?kc=ETRSS02129TX1K0000532
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2532
And they will be dual link compatible:
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=26303
So my prediction is we won't see a 970MP PowerMac before the introduction of the X1800, and hopefully at the same time.
I also note that ATI recently came out with a card that is both PC and Mac compatible, so I expect any Mac PCIe card would also be PC compatible.
So I just noticed ATI is bringing out their X1800 line next week: "The R520 will ship in at least three versions the Radeon X1800, the Radeon X1600 ad the Radeon X1300 and cards will begin shipping by the end of September, the company said."
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1558,1861634,00.asp?kc=ETRSS02129TX1K0000532
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2532
And they will be dual link compatible:
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=26303
So my prediction is we won't see a 970MP PowerMac before the introduction of the X1800, and hopefully at the same time.
I also note that ATI recently came out with a card that is both PC and Mac compatible, so I expect any Mac PCIe card would also be PC compatible.
DavidCar said:
I'm thinking the same as you, fingers crossed that the new G5 will have PCIe and also use the latest ATI or Nvida cards... You'd think that such a powerful new upgrade in graphics apple must adopte it if it wants to still remain at the front of the pact when it comes to overall performance... Anyway, hope its the case that the new G5 will come out as soon as those new cards are announced officially so I can order a new tower... Still on my 2 and 1/2 year old powerbook desperatly need an upgrade... Hope its not too long before we get a new range out...
rolandf said:
I would thought that since Apple likes graphics so much and so many design firms use Apple that they would have had PCI Express slots available almost 2 years ago or so when PC mfgs were getting them. It is also very limiting factor since ATI and NVidia do not produce a whole lot of AGP cards any more. All of the mid to high end cards mostly come with PCI Express only. Apple has got to include this even before going Intel. Apple better do PCI Express in all of their products when 2006 comes around.
There is now a countdown timer on the ATI website, presently showing about 11 days and 9 hours, so it will expire October 5.
If I'm right about it making more economic sense to release cards compatible with both Mac and PC, rather than having separate cards for a dying PPC PowerMac line, then some of the retail boxes presumably being released on the 5th should say "Mac and PC Edition" and some should be PCI Express. If not, then that puts a serious dent in my expectations for a 970MP PowerMac.
I just noticed in the Anandtech review of the first Mac/PC ATI card that the top of the line Mac only X800XT just dropped $100 to $399, seemingly making room for a new top of the line Mac card sometime soon.
http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=2502&p=9
Maybe, just maybe, all the puzzle pieces are about to fall into place.
If I'm right about it making more economic sense to release cards compatible with both Mac and PC, rather than having separate cards for a dying PPC PowerMac line, then some of the retail boxes presumably being released on the 5th should say "Mac and PC Edition" and some should be PCI Express. If not, then that puts a serious dent in my expectations for a 970MP PowerMac.
I just noticed in the Anandtech review of the first Mac/PC ATI card that the top of the line Mac only X800XT just dropped $100 to $399, seemingly making room for a new top of the line Mac card sometime soon.
http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=2502&p=9
Maybe, just maybe, all the puzzle pieces are about to fall into place.
More puzzle pieces.
Surfing around, I find there won't be an AGP version of the next ATI card, and that the card was once planned to be announced on Sept 20th, among other possible dates, which was the date of the Paris keynote. However, production problems caused delays. Was this why the keynote was cancelled?
http://www.techpowerup.com/index.php?5127
http://www.hkepc.com/hwdb/r520firstlook-e.htm
Surfing around, I find there won't be an AGP version of the next ATI card, and that the card was once planned to be announced on Sept 20th, among other possible dates, which was the date of the Paris keynote. However, production problems caused delays. Was this why the keynote was cancelled?
http://www.techpowerup.com/index.php?5127
http://www.hkepc.com/hwdb/r520firstlook-e.htm
They should do that but it won't differenciate them from Windows boxes because any DX9 card from ATI or Nvidia has WMVHD and MPEG-2HD decode acceleration, some now have encode accleration too. Vista comes with DXVA2 which adds H.264 encode and decode acceleration to the mix. So far ATI and Nvidia have only confirmed DirectX support for their HD video acceleration technologies.
ammon said:
Totally agree with that. I'm hoping Apple steals Vista's thunder by releasing Leopard just before Vista (i.e. MS's version of Tiger) comes out. Oh, and Apple will make Leopard run natively on PCs as well, putting even more pressure on MS and their little Vista OS.