G5 iMac?

[ibookin']

i think with a g5 the entire dome should be perforated sort of like the g5 towers. It would look like those folding vegetable boiling pots. Like this:

I used to play with one of those all the time when I was little.

Anyway, I'd love a G5 iMac to be released. Parroting what other have said, I really think it would help a lot to improve the price/performance ratio of iMacs vs. mid-range wintel or winmd machines.

But then again, do most people buying the iMac care about the performance of their machines? A 1.5GHz G4 would be plenty for the iMac customer.

Then again, 640K was enough for anybody way back when.

 

[gooddog]

After all the time we have waited patiently...

iMac G5 1.8 with 20" LCD at $2,199.00 would be highly appreciated.

************************

I expect a 23" HD display slewing atop a
"full sphere" G5 iMac with twice the internal
room ( the southern hemisphere ) in the
same footprint, blended post legs - four of them, all wireless peripherals like -
illuminated BT keyboard with built in, removable trackball that recharges with removable batt's , some options for filling the southern hemisphere ( xtra drives, TIVO-like box, game boxes, iPod dock, java percolator, pop tart toaster,etc. );

AND - oh, yes ... I am fed up with passwords --- If a PDA can have a reliable
fingerprint reader, why can't the iMAc ?

I say get with biometrics - yesterday - especially the laptops -- ALL OF THEM.

These options would truly make it ideal as a hub for iLife and still keep it under the PRO line.

The iMac need not be "inferior" to the PRO books and towers --- only DIFFERENT from them -- for a different purpose : VARIETY of ways to enjoy the machine.

This will give Apple some place to dump their soon-to-be-topped 23" HD panels.

---gooddog




**********************************

 

[Windowlicker]

Anyway, I'd love a G5 iMac to be released. Parroting what other have said, I really think it would help a lot to improve the price/performance ratio of iMacs vs. mid-range wintel or winmd machines.

But then again, do most people buying the iMac care about the performance of their machines? A 1.5GHz G4 would be plenty for the iMac customer.

Then again, 640K was enough for anybody way back when.

well, there's one flaw on the iMac compared to PCs. Usually when a daddy goes and buys a computer for the children, he's buying a computer that the kids can play games on. Now, I think a G4 1.5 iMac would have enough power to run all the games, but the display card lacks in performance. I think what they should have on iMacs is cards that have 64-128mb of memory, but wouldn't be too expensive. I don't know if there is cheap 128mb cards, but I guess there could be cards made especially to support gaming performance (non-pro cards...cheap).

prove me to be wrong.

 

[eric67]

PPC975 for the WWDC??!!

the french macrumors web site croquer.free.fr is reporting that the expected revision of the current PMG5 models originally planned for January/February is now fully cancelled, and that the revision planned for January 2005 is now transfered for the WWDC 2004...so in Juen we can expect Steve demoing PPC975-based PMG5 running up to 3.2GHz in dual processor system..availability should be aournd september....as usual with Apple

 

[aswitcher]

the french macrumors web site croquer.free.fr is reporting that the expected revision of the current PMG5 models originally planned for January/February is now fully cancelled, and that the revision planned for January 2005 is now transfered for the WWDC 2004...so in Juen we can expect Steve demoing PPC975-based PMG5 running up to 3.2GHz in dual processor system..availability should be aournd september....as usual with Apple

It would be great if it were true. I dont recall if this website has been reliable in the past though, so grains of salt stuff.

 

[JFreak]

First iMac sales suck and aren't getting any better!!!!!!

it all comes down to numbers - if the imacs had the price of emacs and the emacs had the price of the ipods, and the ipods had the price of bt mice, and the bt mice had the price of regular mice, apple would sell a lot more everything mentioned but the regular mice. apple chooses to have high price points, for some reason, and maybe they are soon forced to lower prices.

i would really like a 20" imac, but it's still too pricey...

 

[tom.96]

well, there's one flaw on the iMac compared to PCs. Usually when a daddy goes and buys a computer for the children, he's buying a computer that the kids can play games on. Now, I think a G4 1.5 iMac would have enough power to run all the games, but the display card lacks in performance. I think what they should have on iMacs is cards that have 64-128mb of memory, but wouldn't be too expensive. I don't know if there is cheap 128mb cards, but I guess there could be cards made especially to support gaming performance (non-pro cards...cheap).

prove me to be wrong.

I looked in a big computer shop the other day at graphics cards and I was surprised at how little difference in price there is between 64 and 128mb cards. In fact I saw very few 64mb cards, it seemed 128mb was the standard and there were quite a few 256mb cards there. These cards were boxed retail ones for the PC and they seemed cheap, so a 128mb card bought in bulk should not cost that much.

 

[dekator]

I think Apple knows the iMac is dead without a G5 in it. The sooner Apple goes G5 the better. I don't think they should wait for the Powerbooks to have the G5 first even though the iMac is a consumer machine, because the main distinction between the 2 is portability.

The two other questions are:

1) Are they going to make a headless iMac?

2) Are they going to allow it to be upgradeable?

These are 2 weaknesses of the current iMac's sellability.

I entirely agree. The distinction Pro vs consumer has always had something artificial. With a headless iMac would have to come an update of the PowerMac line, though. But that doesn't speak against the iMac. On the contrary, updating the PowerMac ('Pro') line to 2GHz+ is almost overdue.

 

[LimeiBook86]

eek...

I just hope they come out over the summer before my school decides to buy 20 of them for my commercial art class. Although anything would be better for out Crapway 333mhz machines, I just don't want to get outdated Macs as an "upgrade"... But, again anything is better than those machines in school...anything..

 

[singletrack]

I'm not sure it matters whether the next iMac is G4 or G5 so much as it costs less, so it's an actual CONSUMER product for EVERYONE. Where Apple is really hurting is its volume which could be increased through reaching out to everyday Joe. (sorry to you if your name is Joe) Apple is praised effervescently by design critics for their intriguing, COOL new creations (Cube, iMac, etc.), but unfortunately that's not what it takes to sell computers. I appreciate the functional design of Apple's computers as much as any, but for goodness sake, make a headless iMac and we'll be back in business. Let's Go Apple! You can do it!

They have a consumer Mac - the eMac.

The iMac went pro-sumer when they fitted the LCD screen and raised the prices.

They had a headless iMac, it was called the Cube.

 

[KingOfPain]

Let me clarify what I said before people decide to dismiss it. I am referring to two sets of test performed here. The first is a number of tests that Barefeats performed between a number of computers including a 1.5 G4 and 1.6 G5. This showed that there was a very marginal difference between the two. This could be accounted for with the G5's extra 100 mhz.
(...)
The i.5 G4's performance is almost identical to the 1.6 G5.

I wanted to ask what kind of benchmarks these were, because a lot of benchmarks won't make any use of the better memory bandwidth of the G5, but since you posted FCP benchmarks later this isn't the case here.

But one thing worth mentioning is that the G4 has a severe bottleneck in the bus, which isn't present in G5 systems. Due to that reason a lot of G4 systems come with L3 cache, but the iMac doesn't have it so far.
It is interesting though that the 1.5 GHz G4 you mean seems to be the AlumBook, which doesn't have any L3 cache either (unlike the TiBooks).

I guess I might help the iMac a bit if they added 1MB of L3 cache eventually, but I guess I'd prefer a G5 model.

The G4 only has 7 pipeline stages, whereas the G5 is something like 20+. G4 doesn't need to be fed as quickly, and doesn't suffer the same penalties for things like branch mispredictions that the G5 does.

You are basically right that with longer pipelines mispredicted branches are a bigger hazard, but I bet that the G5 has a better branch prediction than the G4, and you also seem to mix up the PPC970 with the Pentium 4, because the latter has 20 and more stages, while the PPC970 has 16 to 25 stages according to this:

- 9 fetch, decode stages
- 5 to 13 out of order execute stages
- 2-3 dispatch, completion stages

http://www.ibm.com/chips/techlib/te...2AE087256C5200611780/$file/PPC970_MPF2002.pdf

 

[thatwendigo]

I expect a 23" HD display slewing atop a "full sphere" G5 iMac with twice the internal room ( the southern hemisphere ) in the same footprint, blended post legs - four of them, all wireless peripherals like - illuminated BT keyboard with built in, removable trackball that recharges with removable batt's , some options for filling the southern hemisphere (extra drives, TIVO-like box, game boxes, iPod dock, java percolator, pop tart toaster,etc. );

AND - oh, yes ... I am fed up with passwords --- If a PDA can have a reliable
fingerprint reader, why can't the iMAc ?

I say get with biometrics - yesterday - especially the laptops -- ALL OF THEM.

Actually, aside from the 23" display, I think you might be onto something. This would be ridiculously expensive at current pricing schemes, but the idea is sound enough. Rather than the trackball, though, Apple should create a cradle-charging mouse like the Logitech MX 700, or commission a special version of the Cordless MX Duo from said company. Include a thumbpad biometric lock on the keyboard, with a built in mic so that you could use a dual voice-scanner activation. I think the dual-hemisphere is just silly, though, but I'm pretty sure you were joking about that.

I don't know if there is cheap 128mb cards, but I guess there could be cards made especially to support gaming performance (non-pro cards...cheap).

prove me to be wrong.

Done.

The mid-range graphics card of the moment is the Radeon 9600XT, but that's about to shift now that the NV6800 and ATI x800 have been released. Even the cheaper PC variants costs at least $150. for a 9800XT (the former top of the line), you pay $400 at the moment, which means that the manufacturers haven't adjusted their pricing yet, since a brand new ATI x800 costs $399 at BestBuy and CompUSA.

This is probably because the card is so new, but you never know.

"Gaming cards" and "Pro cards" are often pretty much the same, until you get into the realm of FireGLs and Wildcats (around $600 and up to $1500).

the french macrumors web site croquer.free.fr is reporting that the expected revision of the current PMG5 models originally planned for January/February is now fully cancelled, and that the revision planned for January 2005 is now transfered for the WWDC 2004...so in Juen we can expect Steve demoing PPC975-based PMG5 running up to 3.2GHz in dual processor system..availability should be aournd september....as usual with Apple

And I've been saying this for HOW long, now?

I looked in a big computer shop the other day at graphics cards and I was surprised at how little difference in price there is between 64 and 128mb cards. In fact I saw very few 64mb cards, it seemed 128mb was the standard and there were quite a few 256mb cards there. These cards were boxed retail ones for the PC and they seemed cheap, so a 128mb card bought in bulk should not cost that much.

That's because 64MB is now a bit outdated, especially if you're building your own machine. We're starting to move past 128MB as a standard, and 256MB is almost affordable at this point.

It's called technology moving on. You get used to it, eventually.

But one thing worth mentioning is that the G4 has a severe bottleneck in the bus, which isn't present in G5 systems. Due to that reason a lot of G4 systems come with L3 cache, but the iMac doesn't have it so far.

Interesting that it still does particularly favorably at some tests, isn't it? The message that this gives me is that the G4 could be much better than it is, and that the FreeScale e600 chip will be something to look towards if it comes on time and as promised. A dual-core 2.0ghz chip at the same heat as a single 970fx 2.0 is not something to be taken lightly.

You are basically right that with longer pipelines mispredicted branches are a bigger hazard, but I bet that the G5 has a better branch prediction than the G4, and you also seem to mix up the PPC970 with the Pentium 4, because the latter has 20 and more stages, while the PPC970 has 16 to 25 stages according to this:

So it's between 9 and 18 stages longer than the G4, which does make it at least sometimes 20 or more stages. That means that nmk is not complettely wrong, but that he overstated things a bit.

 

[imac_japan]

Apple needs to make an Imac like this

Check this page out

http://www.petitiononline.com/rumi04/petition.html

 

[Danrose1977]

Oh for the sake of the children!

Check this page out

http://www.petitiononline.com/rumi04/petition.html

WOULD YOU STOP POSTING THIS!!!!!

I'm sorry, but you got flamed to death on your petition thread elsewhere.... when are you going to realise that a set top box is not the way forward!

 

[jeffbistrong]

Check this page out

http://www.petitiononline.com/rumi04/petition.html

Doesn't apple like maintain a policy that is sort of not competative . . .look at the prices of their G5 Computers and, all the other computers . .you even see it with the IPOD. A 15 GB ipod is 300, a dell like 20 gb jukebox is like $250 or something like that

 

[agreenster]

Check this page out

http://www.petitiononline.com/rumi04/petition.html

HA HA! 28 total signatures! Man, with that kind of support, Apple just might let you have some Advil after giving you a swift kick in the pants.

 

[Mr. Anderson]

Move on to the topic at hand.....

 

[AsgardianGod]

I myself am all for G5 iMacs. It's time Apple moved all their devices to the G5 platform as soon as possible considering the hugely touted benifits Apple pushed the G5 proccessors to have over the G4.


lol Mr. Anderson beat me to it.... Bravo!

 

[JFreak]

Doesn't apple like maintain a policy that is sort of not competative . . .look at the prices of their G5 Computers and, all the other computers . .you even see it with the IPOD. A 15 GB ipod is 300, a dell like 20 gb jukebox is like $250 or something like that

no. apple maintains a policy of putting out top quality products, and that drives prices up. for ipods, there is no real competition - and the apple computers, well, they have to be compared to ibm rather than to dell.

NOBODY wants to buy a dell 20GB jukebox if they really compare it to an apple 15GB ipod. it doesn't matter that the dell costs 12.5 usd per gig compared to ipod costing 20 usd per gig, because after all it's ten gigs that you use and the difference is only 50 dollars. and the dell jukebox looks like **** and ipod is THE THING right now...

but there are unfortunately always those who don't compare, or make biased comparisons.

 

[jayscheuerle]

I have a "decent display," but it's CRT, so the the eMac was a reduction in space used for me.

Actually, I've never really seen it as "tons" of people, so much as a very vocal minority. Most people are more intersted in "me, me, me" cries for the latest and greatest (along with their personal "needs") for basically bargain basement prices. Could you show me someplace I could verify the existence of this massive, untapped market for G4 headless, externally expandable machines?

I agree, but that's also conditional on G4 systems. At the moment, the G5 is going to necessitate that inexpensive does mean cheap.

Interestingly, if you do a search into third-party G4 systems (they exist), you'll find that Apple is far more generous than most. I did a breakdown of the Pegasos II motherboard that used commodity parts, and it was basically a wash. Macs were far better value, even at the older pricepoint.

I think they don't offer it because there's not enough demand to sell one. The mac isn't about low-end experience.

Geez... Okay, "decent" isn't the right word. LCD, okay?

How do you differentiate between a vocal minority and a large group? I can't say I tally up the names, but over the 3 years I've been a member of this site there's been calls for a "headless iMac" ( a misnomer, because the eMac is the only low-end machine made by Apple these days) by many people. LowEndMac.com also rallies for this every so often.

Not a G5. A G4. And why would you consider that "cheap"? In this thread alone, there are examples of the G4 continuing to be a strong perfomer.

The Pegasos II thing is interesting, bit irrelevant to wanting a Mac.

What's this insistence on a low-end box being a low-end experience? It would still run the same OS as the G5s. You could still put a load of RAM in it. You'd still have firewire and usb ports for peripherals. Put the box out of site and you'd be hard pressed to differentiate between the "experiences". Price is often quoted by PC users as why they can't switch. When you only have $700 to spend and you want a new system, somebody telling you that a $1300 system is a great deal feature for feature is just missing the point.

An inexpensive, not "cheap", machine would be the best thing Apple could do to raise their marketshare. Raising their marketshare does not mean that they would make more money. Not offering a box like this may be a shareholder decision and if they were ever going to do it, they would have done it years ago. It could still break them into more houses than the iPod if they played it right, but I'm not holding my breath...

 

[jayscheuerle]

i got an idea...

the powerbook is the "pro" version of the laptops.....therefore it is the better quality....

then the imac is the "consumer" of the *desktop* line. dont cross the 2 platforms.....

There's nothing "consumer" about a machine that starts at $1300 and works up to $2200.

The eMac is Apple's only consumer offering desktop wise.

 

[JFreak]

I myself am all for G5 iMacs.

me too. put in a G5 while lowering prices at the same time, and i'm in! i really fancy that 20" version, but will not buy G4 desktop no matter what. the G4 is acceptable in laptops, however, but for desktops it really needs to be replaced with the current generation. i wouldn't mind if they needed to cut the clock frequency to - say - 1.2GHz if that's what they need to put it into the small case, but all in all they must to put in the G5 if they care about the market share at all.

 

[JFreak]

The eMac is Apple's only consumer offering desktop wise.

and even that's a model that was made for schools and kinderkartens, not consumers. it has become a consumer model purely because it's the cheapest new apple computer money can buy.

it would be nice if apple made a real consumer mac (by re-introducing the cube for under 500 usd) but it might not happen for a while. it seems that apple wishes to sell a display with every computer as the discounts are headed towards the displays rather than to the powermacs. displays must be very profitable for them i guess

 

[i_wolf]

There are a number of things i wanted to comment on.
First and foremost regarding the G5. The pipeline length cannot be used as a pure measure of the performance against the G4. There are a number of reasons for this. The G5 issues many many more instructions at any one point in time than the G4. The G5 also has far superious branch prediction. I believe ars said that it was the most advanced of any processor presently available. So branch predictions are extremely unlikely. Furthermore the G5 has an extremely advanced scheduler that allows it to issue far more instructions at any one point in time, and allows it to have far more instructions in flight at a particular point in time than the G4. I believe i read somewhere that clock for clock (both under optimal conditions) the G5 should be over 30% more efficient/faster per clock.
With regard to the macworld bench's where the put a dual G5 against a single P4 and Opteron. Unfortunately they were not exactly testing like versus like. Testing two different typeso MP3 encoder is not a good way of doing testing. All things are meant to be as even as possible. They should have taken LAME, and compiled it with the optimal compiler for each platform and then benched. They didn't they took iTunes and then took Music Match. I wouldn't mind but the finished product is absolutely terrible from Music match. It is noted for its terrible sound quality compared to LAME and other encoders.
In another test they took Premiere on the mac, this has been discontinued for a significant number of years. They compared a couple of years old Premiere on the Mac (with no optimizations what so ever) against the latest and greatest windows version of Premiere which has the latest SSE2, Hyperthreading etc.... . Also if i recall the version of premiere that they tested with was not SMP aware, and if i recall also it is a carbon app that runs in carbon (somebody correct me if im wrong here). This would indicate that the G5 sys was doing exceptionally well to even be keeping up under such unfair situations. As for the games... well how can you compare a ported game against a native game ?!?!? A Direct X game against an OpenGL game?? Crazy.
In a lot of tests that i have seen where identical apps have been used clock for clock the G5 is slightly faster than an Opteron. Certainly Barefeats showed this in their tests.
With regard to the G5 being about equal to the G4, remember that in a lot of cases you are seeing highly optimized G4 code running on the G5. As was noted when the G5 was initially launched it should run older code fast or faster than an equiv clock G4, however to really make it sing you gotta use a good compiler and software optimize. This has allready been done for the G4, so things are as good as they will get. The G5 on the other hand has seen very tangible performance increases with the release of the first proper G5 aware optimized compiler.
This compiler saw scientific benchmarks soar through the ceiling on the G5..... NASA's Jet3d anyone??? Over at arstechnica other people reported similar experiences. The fact is that presently very few apps are making the G5 sing at all but that is changing. The G5 lends itself well to old code that is not optimized but lends itself fantastic to code that is tuned for it. Apple even stated at the WWDC last year presentation that the chip is very forward looking....
So definately a G5 would be far superior in an iMac instead of a G4 at an equivalent clock speed. Its technically much more efficient per clock, and as more and more apps become 'G5 aware' and optimize for it the performance disparity will widen between it and the G4.
Regards
i_wolf

 

[munchmime]

2 small reasons

I'll take one as soon as they reach the UK (though I'd much rather pay US prices - any reason a US one wouldn't work over here?)

Your power cord perhaps, you may just need a different cord which you can get almost anywhere.

#2, you would only have to reinstall the software and set it to your country.


hope that helps