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ISSCC 2004: IBM on PowerPC 970FX
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While the dual 2.0 may be fast, you will still notice a difference with speed bumps. The g5 does look stale, it has had the same HD, same graphics, same specs for months and months. It's time for a change, I do a lot of design work as well. I have used a g5 and I know personally I can push the limits of it.
Is it fast? Hell yes, should it be faster, you bet. I want a computer that moves faster than I do. I want to run dreamweaver at full speed, I want to not even wait for photoshop actions, I want to run flash blazing fast, I want to have 15 browser windows open. I should be able to do all these things at the same time and the computer should laugh at me and tell me to bring it on.
I realize this is unrealistic, but the faster I can go on a computer the more work I get done. The more comfortable I am. Every bit of power the g5 can offer will be used in my opinion, maybe not all the time, but it will be used.
so let's see new revs!
OMG
It is so funny how people crap on the G5. Remember May of last year right before the WWDC and we were so peeved at the G4 non-sense for the past four years? The G5 comes out and now people are pissed at it or pissing on it. Apple understands its market and there are a lot of satisfied customers of the G5. They also have an update, waiting to pull the switch, when the pent up demand is slowing G5 sales. If apple kept releasing product after product bump in a 3 month timetable, then they would have financial issues (can you imagine 3-5 months excess inventory?)
Technically, the G5s have been on the market for five months (Oct 2003). So look for new G5s in March.
It is so funny how people crap on the G5. Remember May of last year right before the WWDC and we were so peeved at the G4 non-sense for the past four years? The G5 comes out and now people are pissed at it or pissing on it. Apple understands its market and there are a lot of satisfied customers of the G5. They also have an update, waiting to pull the switch, when the pent up demand is slowing G5 sales. If apple kept releasing product after product bump in a 3 month timetable, then they would have financial issues (can you imagine 3-5 months excess inventory?)
Technically, the G5s have been on the market for five months (Oct 2003). So look for new G5s in March.
Re: Power5
daveL,
I responded to your previous statement... you describe the POWER5 and why no one has mentioned it. Even though later you go on to talk of the 975/980/G6, I commented on the POWER5 which you said "I'm surprised nobody has commented on the Power5." -- This statement lead me to believe you actually thought the POWER5 would make it into an Apple product.
You worded your post wrong, hardly making me a "newbie"
-PPCTech
daveL,
I responded to your previous statement... you describe the POWER5 and why no one has mentioned it. Even though later you go on to talk of the 975/980/G6, I commented on the POWER5 which you said "I'm surprised nobody has commented on the Power5." -- This statement lead me to believe you actually thought the POWER5 would make it into an Apple product.
You worded your post wrong, hardly making me a "newbie"
-PPCTech
The Power is good, but unfortunetly only on paper. In terms of speed the Itanium 2 rules, this isnt even debatable. But it doesnt mean Intel will suddenly sell milions of Itaniums. The software isnt there and its too slow and expensive to port and the speed increase isnt justified. As for the power architecture it has lots of support and software but doesnt come close to the SUN, alot of the major tools are missing hence thier use is limited as far as workstations go. Stability and reliability is also flakey and needs a kick to bring it on par with the competition, again Iam not crititising the power architecture all iam saying theres room for improvement. As for dual cores CPUS, U SPARC 4's are being deployed as we speak, iam waiting for the new blade to be released.
As for the gaming issue, the G5 was not designed to play games period. Yes you can play games but only after waiting months for a PC to MAC port and then the speed cannot be compared to an equivalent x86 machine. The requirements for playing games have changed over the years as most of the processing (2/3rd's) is done by the graphics chip, however with anti-alliasing, filtering, pixel/virtex shaders and high polygon counts together with high BW requirements demand much more than CPU power. You need a fast graphics chip, very very fast graphics memory, a fast interface, a fast and a solid chipset. CPU speed comes last togethor with the system memory.
As for multithreading its a gimmick, it only helps if your doing multiple things at once say encodeing a DIVX movie while rendering a 3d scene at the same time. Its usless if your only focussing on one thing, nothing beats real HW, dont expect QUAD CPU performance from a multithreaded G5, it simply doesnt work like that.
In the past Apple has never updated their products more than roughly twice a year, and I don't think they are going to change that. I guess you'll have to live with it.
Apple probably thinks it is loosing less money like this on outdated hardware they can only sell at a discount, once a better modell is introduced. They also have far less modells to advertise, to maintain in their databases, to support technically, to test new software with, and so on. And once they introduce new modells they have much more new features to advertise.
With that business modell, you might have to wait three more months before a new graphic card is introduced, but in the end the difference for the customer is not that big.
Wow..
Let us look at all the flaws in this post.
1.) "The Power is good, but unfortunately only on paper"
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1103_2-5160704.html
2.)"Stability and reliability is also flakey and needs a kick to bring it on par with the competition"
Every POWER CPU has two transistors for every one, to double check the results were accurate. This is necessary for government and military agencies that require perfect results each time. If reliability was a problem with the POWER architecture, would there be 159 IBM supercomputers in the Top500?
3.)"As for dual cores CPUS, U SPARC 4's are being deployed as we speak, iam waiting for the new blade to be released"
IBM POWER4 has had dual cores, along with integrated memory controller since it's introduction at MPF in 2000. SUN is just now reaching dual core status, and Intel has an Itanium in the works that is dual core, AMD a dual Opteron as well in the K9 series of CPU's. POWER is ahead of the game and trailblazing where the rest of the industry is headed.
4.) "As for multithreading its a gimmick"
Not sure when a CPU can push two threads down the pipeline at once was a gimmick... yes some applications tend to find better use of SMT than others, but that is simply because the applications are not highly threaded, or threaded at all, so of course there will be no speed advantage there.
-PPCTech
You're forgetting about the 2D games and games that come out first for the Mac. Granted, there aren't many of either, but those types of games can run as good or better than their PC equivalents (if there is in fact a PC equivalent; some of this software is Mac-only). I am going to contribute to this base by writing a 2D game that is designed for Mac.
Unless youve had first hand experience with the power workstations all I can say is stability and reliability was flakey and no it wasnt a dodgy machine as I had 3 replacements. The issue could of been in the OS but most of thought otherwise. The quality of the machine was a joke, not what you would expect from IBM. IMO it wouldnt surprise me if they were repeating the GXP60/70 Hard Drive quality issues. They go on and on about it saying they were overused beyond thier 8 hour per day usage, and they aint got the balls to admit that what actually happened was that they had a ton of faullty components and then decided to make use of them to save money and then screw the consumer.
Hey i just have to mention for army guy, most all games are still cpu bound that is why a 9800 in a G4 doesnt do much for frame rates. the video card still has to be fed and a G4 cant feed a 9800. G4 is the bottleneck. now a P4 at 3.2 is a whole nother matter. P4 is still king and we do not yet have a chip that can match it one on one. At least the 970fx will get us very close.
Yes they are CPU bound but it depends on the resulution your running, antialiasing and the 3D engine. You cant run a $400-$600 video card in a G4 it doesnt make sense. If you have that kind of money to spend then you would be running it in a highend machine anyway comensense.
I don't agree with this, a dual G5 has plenty of processing power to feed a 9800 (but the G4 is underpowered). The main reason that games are slower on Macs than on PCs is that they are written to the DirectX API, whereas Macs must do everything in OpenGL. Graphics cards similarly are all optimized for DirectX performance first, and OpenGL a distant second. Until that changes there's not much that can be done about it. Though really Halo is the only game I've seen bog down a dual G5/Radeon 9800 rig. Most other game engines, like Quake III Team Arena, run very well on that machine. If a P4 gets 380 fps, and a dual G5 "only" gets 275 fps, is that really such a big deal? For most gamers, the performance is going to be adequate.
the performance is adequate, dont forget the DUAL will actually be slightly slower due to the overhead and games dont make use of the 2nd CPU anyway. As long as your running them at high res with anti-aliasing then the G5 is OK.
OK?????????????
Try "Amazing!" Especially after these new powermac updates at speeds topping out between 2.5 and 3GHz and with the radeon 9800 pro mac special edition's release alongside of them.
If anything, a well designed MP system will utilize a higher percentage of a single cpu on an 100% cpu/memory bound application. When you bring up your game on our PC, even though it is running a "Windows" OS, other tasks still context swtich in the background on that single CPU, reducing the percentage of total cpu that the game gets.... On an MP system, cpu affinity will allow for at higher percentage of that cpu to be used for a given application, diverting other processes to the less-loaded cpu. The app doesn't have to to be MP aware to take advantage of this.
Multithreading is certainly not a gimmick. Both UI facing applications and server-side applications will be much more efficient and responsive if they are designed to use threads.
Creation times and context switch times for threads (for most well written UNIXes), versus the same for processes is much faster and uses far less resources. Now if you're talking about older versions of Solaris, you may have a point, as they pretty much screwed up their thread implementation (too big, too slow).
For problem spaces where FORTRAN would be the language of choice (ie non-dynamic systems) you may have a point. You ARE only doing one thing at a time, and probably won't gain much from the advances in software development since the mainframe days.
I'm not so confident of this. I've heard reports on these forums that we won't get 'very close' to Pentium-like speeds until IBM releases the PowerPC 975 (or PowerPC 980, if you prefer its old name).
This is assuming you have perfect SMP implementation and are CPU bound, unfortunetly your not cpu bound when running games at high res together with anti-aliasing, the bottle neck is the graphics card and memory bandwidth. Although I should say that this problem has been solved in the NV40 which will have 45-50GB/s memory bandwidth which is perfect
+ PCI express so SMP will probably increase peformance abit but not by a significant amount until games are SMP aware.All iam saying is that nothing beats real hardware, a DUAL multi-threaded machine will note compete wilth a QUAD cpu machine. The fact is Apple will probably try to pass this on in its marketing saying you can have QUAD cpu performance using DUAL CPU's, it wouldnt surprise me.
Yes OK, not amazing, again if your playing games get a P4/FX, anyway the hardcore gamers build thier own machines anyway Apple machines are out of the question.
Pffff...¨matched performance?!¨...The G5´s have been there, done that, and yes they will soon TROUNCE Inhell´s processors and the x86 architecture overall.
I dont think so, x86 is here to stay, for gaming and professional EDA applications. I dont see Cadence porting $500k-$1m tools to the G5 let alone OSX, they dont even do it for the Power 4 series (only the basic tools and old versions). Unless youve had 1st hand experience with an Itanium 2 those words are rediculous. Its faster than the Power 4 whether people like it or not (proved by running HSpice simulations for database sizes ranging from 1GB-14GB) assuming youve set it up correctly.
So many people HOPE x86 is here to stay. The problem with x86 is that it has been extended many times, which creates a huge mess of legacy code issues. I think Intel should transition away from x86 to a new architecture, similar to the transition from Motorola's 68k architecture to IBM & Motorola's PowerPC 601 (and subsequent 603, 604, G3, etc.). This step, although it would be hard for Intel, Microsoft, and all the PC makers, would help Intel in the long run. There will be temporary benefits for IBM while Intel makes the transition, but those will be erased once the new processor line is in full production. My personal choice for a new Intel architecture would be based on the Pentium M, but without all the CISC baggage (RISC or EPIC architecture).
DOnt forget that when the Opteron is running in full 64-bit mode (64-bit OS + 64-bit Application/Driver) you dont deal with the x86 baggage. Intel should transistion but they cant due to the numerous x86 applications. The EDA tools are currently being ported to 64-bit Opteron so iam not worried about my applications. And games, well 64-bit versions will come but what about the existing 32-bit libraries of games people have? The other tools Iam concerned about are Maya, Softimage and Mental Ray which Ive no doubt believe are currently being ported. Iam assuming microsoft will port the major office tools including office, visio etc... What als0 comes with porting is that when an application is allready mature, solid and rock stable it suddenly becomes the oposite.
The pentium m is essentially a heavely modified pentium 3 with out the long pipeline of the pentium 4, but still x86.
The pentium m is essentially a heavely modified pentium 3 with out the long pipeline of the pentium 4, but still x86.