My Radical Rumors: G3s across the board!

this is totally subjective but i'm running a pentium 1.6 with XP at work and i'm not too impressed with windows explorer. i can't speak for the cpu because i don't do very cpu intensive tasks but moving between applications and using the 'start' menu is painfully slow considering what's inside the box.

give me rice_web's g3 and osX any day

joshua
 
Quartz Extreme could be seen as an attempt by Apple to lessen it's dependance on Altivec for Quartz. This could extend the life of the G3 in Apple products.

On the other hand IBM hasn't hasn't been able to make the G3 faster than Motorola has made the G4, so I don't see Apple moving the entire line back from the G4 to the G3.
 
Re: Re: i hear ya...

Originally posted by Beej
Like I keep saying... it's not the speed of the Mac that keeps me here... it's the OS. If I wanted raw power, I'd buy an AMD setup. But I hate Windows, and couldn't bare to run Linux 24/7. I love the Mac OS, and I'm willing to pay the extra $$$ to keep using it. More than happy.
Click to expand...

same here. but why is Apple still calling them "pro" machines and charging insane prices if they are having a hard time running "pro" apps and are, hardware-wise, severely outdated? as someone who needs these machines to make a living i can't help but feel, that compared with the current state of technology, there is very little that is "pro" about my PowerMac or PowerBook. i always get flamed for making statements like this, but isn't it the truth? eventually my wallet and patience will run out and i'll have to go with what's powerful and not brand loyalty for the sake of it.
 
Apple's two biggest problems with price are:

(1) They want to maintain high margins
(2) G4s are pricey

However, I do understand your frustration of being with a slow computer.
 
And some more information on the 750FX:

The L1 and L2 cache on the 750FX are each 256 bits, which also improves performance (I believe that the current G4 uses 128, and that the previous G3s used 64)

For more information on the 750FX, I'd recommend reading IBM's technical explanations of the processor.

http://www-3.ibm.com/chips/techlib/techlib.nsf/techdocs/BECF98824B9B663287256BCA00587B22/$file/750FX_Technical_Summary_DD2.X_V1.0_prel28May02.pdf

(and yes, the G3 uses a 4 stage pipeline, while the current G4s use 7)
 
This is a certainty. G3's across the line, and they will be sporting a new, nebulous, non industry standard "revolutionary" new vector processing unit...UltraVec

;)

...or Mach 3 TurboVec

:D
 
Originally posted by rice_web
Apple's two biggest problems with price are:

(1) They want to maintain high margins
(2) G4s are pricey

However, I do understand your frustration of being with a slow computer.
Click to expand...
rice-web,

I agree with number 1 (what company doesn't want high margins), but on number 2, I have to ask for clarification. If you look at Motorola's press releases, you'll see that the 7455 costs $295 in quantities and the 7445 costs $125. That seems pretty cheap to me. How much do the 750FX's cost? I've never found that info in any IBM document.
 
But in what quantities? Even Apple doesn't purchase G4s at the rate that other companies looking for embedded chips do. (in other words, Motorola has bigger customers than Apple)
 
From what I remember when buying electronic components while in EE school, generally buying in quantity would mean in quantities of 1000 or more for items such as CPU's...
 
$295 for the 7455 in QUANTITY
$125 for the 7445 in QUANTITY
Yes these chips are freaking expensive!!!! The CONSUMER can get 1 AMD AthalonXP for under $200. DAMN i actually wish apple would at least give us a choice to use IBM's new G3's in our machines especially if it would reduce the cost. With the faster bus and DDR ram it would OWN G4's. Screw Altavic make a PCI card For it :D
 
Ermmm...

BarkMonster....are you blind? Go take another look at that BareFeats page. The only thing the iBook won in was the Rock Island test, and it lost HARD in everythign else
 
Originally posted by rice_web
But in what quantities? Even Apple doesn't purchase G4s at the rate that other companies looking for embedded chips do. (in other words, Motorola has bigger customers than Apple)
Click to expand...
I doubled checked.

$295 for 1ghz G4 7455 (in quantities of 10000)
$125 for 800mhz G4 7445 (in quantities of 10000)

I agree that the G4 would be much more expensive than P4s and AMDs (only because of the economies of scale that Intel and AMD enjoy), but what about the IBM 750Fx? IBM isn't selling too many of these babies, I can't imagine that they'd be super cheap.
 
Ermmm... No I'm not, you might be though

I know the G4s beat the hell out of the iBook in all the test that are based on Altivec, GPU speed and memory bandwidth...

In the bryce test on the page it totally trashes all the other models. This isn't a test based on Altivec, dual CPU code or how fast the graphics card is. It's just a fair cross platform test.
Click to expand...

It's just surprising how well it did on the test where RAW cpu speed was the only issue, in that test a G4 is basically the same as a G3 and that's why a G3 can be faster. I know if you're using photoshop, fcp, iMovie, iTunes, Software Synths, 3D games or any of the other things where a fast GPU and Altivec matter more than clock speed the G3 is the loser, infact as an all round chip, it's fairly slow compared with the G4's potential speed. Obviously I'm not saying the the G3 is categorically faster than the G4 across the board, if I thought 1 good result in a Bryce 3D test was all the mattered, I really would be blind! (not to mention stupid).
 
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