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Leopard requirements eliminate G3 machines
- Thread starter daneoni
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SpookTheHamster said:
A 3-4 year old PC would be like a 2.5 ghz Pentium 4 or an Athlon XP 2000+, both of which are still very fast today, and much faster than a 1ghz G4.
CubeHacker said:
that would be a very high end ($$) computer for those days; certainly not something most people would have had. I have a 4 year old pc (2.2GHz P4 and otherwise impressive specs for its time), and from my experiences, it can't compete against a 1.25GHz G4. Even my brothers 700MHz iMac G4 can hold it's own against my pc (though at that point, it had more to do with Mac OS vs. Windows)
Sweetfeld28 said:
What are Altivec?
Just a fancy marketing name. What's so magical about it? AMDs have '3DNOW!' wow.. 3D NOW! Intels have SSE since the Pentium, woah, Ass Ass Eee.. Powerful <3
Saying G4s are powerful because of Altivec is like saying Pentium 4s are super computer chips because they have 1066Mhz FSB!
generik said:
Not quite... the issue is not whether Altivec makes anything *powerful*, but whether core code is written using Altivec instructions on PPC without backup non-Altivec code on the PPC side. If that is the case, the code doesn't work, regardless of whether Altivec provides a substantial boost or makes the given PPC particularly powerful in comparison to anything.
Although it would seem at this point strange to write Altivec-only code. There is no line-by-line equivalent in the Intel world. So clearly non-Altivec code will still be developed. It would seem like this wouldn't be a good reason to write out the G3s....
jhu said:
so, you completely missed my point then?
I was talking about real world usage; not benchmarks that tell you nothing. Benchmarks told me a MBP is supposed to be 4x faster than my powerbook, yet I can go from using one to the other without even noticing. don't tell me that my own pc is faster than it actually is; I'm the one that owns it and have used it a great deal, believe me, it is not that fast; my 1.67 GHz powerbook completely pwns it in everything I do.
plinkoman said:
apparently you missed the point of my post. the povray benchmark scene tells me that my athlon64 2.4ghz is at least 33% faster than the pentium 4 2.8ghz at work. sure enough, any scene rendering that i throw at it confirms this 33% (+/-4%) speed increase.
try it. any cpu intensive application will be faster on the p4 2.2 ghz compared with the 1.25 ghz g4. however, if you really do have a 1.67 ghz g4 instead, then all bets might be off.
jhu said:
what ever made you think I had a 1.25??
I used that as an example, just like I used a 700MHz G4 as an example because I know people who have those; a quick look in my sig, or in countless other threads, you would see I have a 1.67GHz PowerBook. Latest revision, fully loaded.
And I work with music, not videos, not photo's etc... and I'd like to see someone show me any discernible difference in speeds between my PowerBook and these supposedly 8,000,000,000x faster intel machines on the software I use for that.
Thats what I meant. for everyday tasks, and for the software I use, even a 1.25 G4 has absolutely no trouble keeping up with either my pc, or intel macs. And for that, I consider most benchmarks to be utterly meaningless for me.
plinkoman said:what ever made you think I had a 1.25??
I used that as an example, just like I used a 700MHz G4 as an example because I know people who have those; a quick look in my sig, or in countless other threads, you would see I have a 1.67GHz PowerBook. Latest revision, fully loaded.
And I work with music, not videos, not photo's etc... and I'd like to see someone show me any discernible difference in speeds between my PowerBook and these supposedly 8,000,000,000x faster intel machines on the software I use for that.
Thats what I meant. for everyday tasks, and for the software I use, even a 1.25 G4 has absolutely no trouble keeping up with either my pc, or intel macs. And for that, I consider most benchmarks to be utterly meaningless for me.
well, here's what you first said:
so i gave you an area of computing where the p4 would perform better than the g4 at the clock rates you gave, mainly processor intensive tasks.
since you're not really doing anything requiring significant processor usage, of course you won't notice a difference. by the same token, i can tell you that my 350 mhz g3 serves static web pages just as well as my athlon 64 2.4 ghz.
jhu said:
right, an area of computing which I don't use, thus it doesn't matter to me.
you need to put what I said into context. Someone said that a 3-4 year old mac would be much better than a 3-4 year old pc. Then, the person I quoted said that 3-4 year old pc's were 2.5GHz P4's and Athlons; to which I replied that first; those were only at the high end 3-4 years ago, and second, that in my experiences, even my pc, which was high end 3-4 years ago was not any better than a mac of that time period; again, in my experiences; not for encoding or rendering videos or whatever.
that's all. I never said 1.25GHz G4's were faster than any pentium from 3-4 years ago, I just said that it was comparable in my experiences. perhaps I could have worded that a little better, but thats all I was saying. Thus my point was that I would much rather have a 3 year old mac than a 3 year old pc; and that G4's are not as pathetically slow as many people here seem to think these days.
generik said:
Lets get our history straight, that way we don't sound uneducated about this subject. The subject you are referring to in your post would be SIMD (Single Instruction Multiple Data) processing. In the real world, Intel was first in this game, however it was not with SSE (anyone remember MMX?). AIM's (Apple IBM Motorola) Altivec was introduced years before both SSE and 3DNow . And because Altivec was a moving target, It took AMD and Intel a few more years to catch and surpass AIM's technology, and it was SSE3 that truly did this. Without SSE3 Rosetta would not be possible, and it is truly a great SIMD overall.
This essay is the easiest one doccument to read that explains these technologies, and why SSE3 is a good step forward from the version of Altivec on the G5 .
< /class >
Sweetfeld28 said:
I would argue that your system would put up a good fight with many modern systems built recently. It is going to take a fast P4, normal Core Duo, normal Core 2 Duo, or advance 3DNow! athalon to match and or exceed your systems capabilities.
This is due to the high amount of average users are still content with slower P4, Cintrino, or Celeron systems for their daily tasks. Not everyone in the computer world is after "State of the art",or the fastest technology. Many are content with a system that is new, works for their needs, and is inexpensive.
In any case, I think its not necessarily a bad thing that G3's will be unsupported under Leopard. Trimming the fat is what's kept OS X the operating system it is. Apple seems to me like it's always been a company that is looking forward to the next great idea, and they have a tendency of letting go of old technologies that don't fit the bill. Look at what Apple did to the legacy ports on their machines.
MS has decided that windows should be able to be run on the older machines, mostly because they don't sell the hardware, so getting people to buy upgraded versions of software requires a lot of backwards compatibility. As a result, Windows has become bloated with code that still provides that compatibility, but isn't nearly as polished as OS X.
I believe that someone will come up with a hack allowing the system requirements to be bypassed and the user to install Leopard on a G3. We don't expect Leopard to run as well on a G3 as a G5 or Intel. But someone will do it for the sake of saying it can be done and posting a How-To on some internet message board.
However, Apple does it not to spite G3 users, but to ensure that the users get the best experience possible.
MS has decided that windows should be able to be run on the older machines, mostly because they don't sell the hardware, so getting people to buy upgraded versions of software requires a lot of backwards compatibility. As a result, Windows has become bloated with code that still provides that compatibility, but isn't nearly as polished as OS X.
I believe that someone will come up with a hack allowing the system requirements to be bypassed and the user to install Leopard on a G3. We don't expect Leopard to run as well on a G3 as a G5 or Intel. But someone will do it for the sake of saying it can be done and posting a How-To on some internet message board.
However, Apple does it not to spite G3 users, but to ensure that the users get the best experience possible.
G3-400 is now G4-500 - Tiger Y or N
I'm running a G3-400 in which I have installed and run a Sonnet G4-500 CPU, 1gb RAM OS 10.3.9 and 2 internal HDs (60gb & 80gb). I'm a graphics professional using Adobe CS2 (InDesign, Photoshop Illustrator etc.) Quark 6.5, and all the supporting extras. I maintain OS 9.2.2 on one of the hard drives because I still can't afford to get rid of my UMAX Powerlook III SCSI scanner, and since OS X doesn't support SCSI I need to boot back and forth from OS X to OS 9.
I would like a simple (if possible) answer, with my setup, is OS 10.4.x advisable or not.
Thanks
ps I have virtually the same setup at work, and my PC oriented Boss doesn't seem to interested in upgrading our Macs.
I'm running a G3-400 in which I have installed and run a Sonnet G4-500 CPU, 1gb RAM OS 10.3.9 and 2 internal HDs (60gb & 80gb). I'm a graphics professional using Adobe CS2 (InDesign, Photoshop Illustrator etc.) Quark 6.5, and all the supporting extras. I maintain OS 9.2.2 on one of the hard drives because I still can't afford to get rid of my UMAX Powerlook III SCSI scanner, and since OS X doesn't support SCSI I need to boot back and forth from OS X to OS 9.
I would like a simple (if possible) answer, with my setup, is OS 10.4.x advisable or not.
Thanks
ps I have virtually the same setup at work, and my PC oriented Boss doesn't seem to interested in upgrading our Macs.
Just out of curiosity, why do intel machines require twice as much ram as Power PC machines? Personally, I wouldn't want to run OS X on 512mb of ram anyway, but why the difference? Does this mean, intel machines don't use the ram as efficiently? If anyone has an answer to this thanks for clearing it up.