Job, Newsweek and 2003

[MacRumors]

Newsweek reports on Steve Jobs' keynote from last week, and interviews Jobs who indicates a promising year:

In an interview with NEWSWEEK after the speech, Jobs was ebullient, promising that this was only the opening salvo in a year of new-product introductions.

All rumor-eyes remain focused on IBM's Power 970 chip this year. IBM's new processor was announced in October 2002 by IBM. The new chip promises to provide 32-bit PowerPC as well as Altivec compatibility.

Second half of 2003 is when volume production is expected per IBM.

 

[jbrown]

But when---when --- I neeed....


ah,first post heaven

 

[ealar]

I'm going to laugh

When he announces the 970 was just a big hoax and they are really switching to a customized AMD chip

You have to admit, the audience would go into a stunned silence for about 10 seconds, it would be brilliance.

 

[macdop]

Amazing

I am amazed, and pleasantly surprised to see such a great article from MSNBC, traditionally I have noticed, not a direct, but a subtle undertone of the MS in MSNBC, this article though seems to applaud the shots Apple is taking at Microsoft, and I love it!!! (the shots at Merrill Lynch by MSNBC are also a great bonus!)

 

[dricci]

Ah, it's going to be a busy year for rumor sites!

I hope all future keynotes are as good as this one was. I think Apple will be going head-on with Microsoft in the Softare/Office realm, with Keynote and Safari being the first step. I also think we'll see Apple partnering with more companies (like Phillips with Rendezvous, and now TiVo).

Now, bring on the new product rumors and speculation!

 

[pkradd]

32 bit power

Doesn't the new IBM 970 provide 64 bit power as well? Isn't that the big deal about it?

 

[j763]

Re: 32 bit power

Originally posted by pkradd
Doesn't the new IBM 970 provide 64 bit power as well? Isn't that the big deal about it?

Yep, it's 64-bit. When we say it's 32-bit compatible, that means that existing Mac OS X applications will run fine on it. If it wasn't 32-bit compatible, every application on the Mac would have to be recompiled.

Thankfully, it's compatible!

 

[eric_n_dfw]

Re: 32 bit power

Originally posted by pkradd
Doesn't the new IBM 970 provide 64 bit power as well? Isn't that the big deal about it?

Yeah, but 64 bit, besides being great for marketing hype, doesn't give most desktop users much benefit.

Remember, the bus on Macs is already 64 bits wide (or is it 128), the 64 bit-ness referrs to how much data the processing units are looking at per cycle.

Servers and high-end users will get boosts, but the common desktop user just dosn't do many things that 32 bits isn't enough for. (Please, if I'm wrong, someone in the know tell me!)

Now, the things about the 970 that have me psyced are: 900Mhz FSB, real DDR support, better AltiVec and it's not made in Motorolla's chip fab' plants!!!

 

[hesdeadjim]

Re: Re: 32 bit power

Originally posted by eric_n_dfw

Yeah, but 64 bit, besides being great for marketing hype, doesn't give most desktop users much benefit.

Remember, the bus on Macs is already 64 bits wide (or is it 128), the 64 bit-ness referrs to how much data the processing units are looking at per cycle.

Servers and high-end users will get boosts, but the common desktop user just dosn't do many things that 32 bits isn't enough for. (Please, if I'm wrong, someone in the know tell me!)

Now, the things about the 970 that have me psyced are: 900Mhz FSB, real DDR support, better AltiVec and it's not made in Motorolla's chip fab' plants!!!

I was under the impression that if the software is written with 64 bits in mind, that a significant boost will occur. Of course, that means that the software has to rewritten, but imagine photoshop taking advantage of both the 64 bit and AltiVec, that should make a huge difference. Plus, all the iApps will be compiled with 64 bit chip in mind as well. Eventually, most things will be optimized. I'm just afraid that it won't be possible to run 64 bit software in a 32 bit enviroment.

 

[wrylachlan]

Re: Re: Re: 32 bit power

Originally posted by hesdeadjim


I was under the impression that if the software is written with 64 bits in mind, that a significant boost will occur. Of course, that means that the software has to rewritten, but imagine photoshop taking advantage of both the 64 bit and AltiVec, that should make a huge difference. Plus, all the iApps will be compiled with 64 bit chip in mind as well. Eventually, most things will be optimized. I'm just afraid that it won't be possible to run 64 bit software in a 32 bit enviroment.

Since the iApps are more consumer and the PowerMacrs, XServe, and eventually PowerBook are where I would assume the 970 will go, i doubt if the iLife suite will go 64 bit any time soon. Additioinally I'm sure that while they transition from 32 to 64 bits we will see mixed binaries, just like the 68K to PPC transition. And I'll be willing to bet that as an incentive to use cocoa apple will make it significantly easier to make the 32-64 transition in cocoa than in carbon.

 

[vixapphire]

VST = 32 bit = casiotone sound quality on most v-synths.

 

[phampton81]

cocoa and carbon

I was hoping someone might be able to explain what cocoa and carbon mean. I know it has something to do with a program is written (I think) but maybe someone could try to explain it all and the differences between the two to someone who is not to familiar with programming. Thanks

 

[Head Wound]

Re: cocoa and carbon

Originally posted by phampton81
I was hoping someone might be able to explain what cocoa and carbon mean. I know it has something to do with a program is written (I think) but maybe someone could try to explain it all and the differences between the two to someone who is not to familiar with programming. Thanks

Its all about APIs, which are essentially just chunks of code that is commonly used. There is a whole library of APIs included with most OSes that any app can call on. This saves tons of memory and diskspace becase each app doesn't have to have it all included individually.

Now, in OSX they have TWO libraries of those APIs, one called Carbon and one called Cocoa. In OS 9, you can also get Carbon APIs, and of course the "Classic" OS 9 APIs. The reason Carbon is available in both OSes is simply because of pissy programers who wanted to be able to transition to OSX more easily.

Carbon apps can run in either OS9(with the Carbon APIs) or OSX, while Cocoa can only run in X. There is an advantage for Cocoa apps though, and that is that they are not dependant on the limitations of OS9 as Carbon has too be. They also often give better performance and integration. For instance, if apple switched to a 64-bit IBM processors, or even to x86, Apple can simply rewrite the Cocoa APIs along with a recompiled OS and all of the sudden all the Cocoa apps you already have get to take advantage of some of the benefits of the new CPU architecture(or they get to work at all, in the case of x86), simply because they used those Cocoa APIs from the beginning. Carbon on the other hand is sort of an OS9 code adapter for OSX and apps built on it could not be so easily adapted to the new architecture, most likly requiring the apps developer to rewrite or at least recompile for the new CPU. Cocoa is just vastly more portable.


Please, anyone feel free to correct me where necessary!

 

[jlneemidge]

32-bit vs 64-bit

There's a lot of confusion about 64-bit versus 32-bit processors. What is generally meant by this is the size of a general-purpose register or a memory address. There are lots of other bit measurements -- size of data bus, size of floating-pointer registers, special-purpose registers (e.g. Altivec), etc.

For _most_ applications, you won't see any speed improvement (and possibly a slight penalty) from 64-bit mode. Why? Very few applications need to do integer math on numbers larger than 2**32 (~ 4 billion). Very few applications need memory addressing beyond 4GB. Very few systems have hardware RAM beyond 4GB. So, in essence, you're pushing around twice the data every time you work with a memory address or an integer.

However, for large-memory applications (databases are a good example), having >4GB addressibility is a _huge_ win. Why? They don't have to swap pieces of data in and out, or if they do they can let the OS handle it. Less pointer manipulation, look-up tables, etc.

Also, in the not-too-distant future we'll see home machines with >4GB RAM, at the rate we're going. A 32-bit system could make use of it through segmenting the address space, but no application could address any more than 4GB. In fact, the kernel itself couldn't address more than 4GB at a time -- it'd have to change which 4GB of physical RAM mapped into its 4GB of addressible space.

All of the above is why most 64-bit processors maintain a 32-bit mode as well. 32-bit applications run without modification (and without penalty) while 64-bit applications can enjoy the extra space. The kernel itself can run in 32-bit mode while some applications are 64-bit (AIX does this; I believe others may too). In fact, if you look at AIX (which has supported 64-bit applications since 4.3 and 64-bit kernel mode since 5.0), most apps are still 32-bit. Only the few that need the extra space are 64-bit.

The reason why the 970 should be a big step forward is only partly for 64-bit -- until >4GB desktops are common, and apps are ported to use the address space, it's not a big deal. There's room to use it for video work, but it's still not a large part of Apple's business. The real improvements are a much better core, based on Power4, and likely a lot of headroom to scale up performace (as Power4 has scaled up).