Re: Requote
quote:
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Originally posted by deanbo
Maybe I should requote my quote (ooohhh tricky). If you spent several thousand dollars on Apple's current high end G4 (dual 1.4 ghz), only to have Apple release a 1.4 ghz PPC 970 later several months(?) later as a low end machine (even if it is a single no dual processor) what would you be saying.
Doh!! and not likely.
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Ok I got it. Yeah that's a DOH! A massive one btw. But the dual 1.42 has been out for a few months so if the 970 come out in 3 months or so, that's a normal upgrade cycle isn't it? The fact that it would be a massive upgrade doesn't really matter they are switching to a new chip provider, they are going to pace themselves with the chip production, the previous machine are pretty much irrelevant at this point.
I agree, it's happened a few times, infact every time apple have had signficantly faster G4s over the past few years, the entry level has ended up being the same clockspeed as the previous top model. They won't have the ability to artifically cripple the entry level model by eliminating L3 cache this time either, we don't need it anymore.
Powermac G4 timeline (gigabit models onwards)
400Mhz G4 as the low end and a dual 500Mhz G4 as the high end.
466Mhz G4 as the low end and 733Mhz as the high end. With the added bandwidth and other motherboard improvements, the 466Mhz G4 was actually faster than previous single 500Mhz G4s.
This is pretty much like going from dual 1.42 high end to single 1.4Ghz lowend, except the dual G4 would have obviously been faster than the single G4 for a lot of things even without the benfit of the digital audio G4s more efficient motherboard and memory system.
733Mhz as the low end (minus L3), 867Mhz mid range and Dual 800Mhz high end.
800Mhz as the low end (minus L3), Dual 1Ghz as the high end
The 'low <-> high' pattern breaks as apple realise they need breathing room for a speed bump over 2 product cycles
Dual 867Mhz as the low end (1Mb less L3 & DDR266), Dual 1.25Ghz as the high end.
This was actually the biggest speed bump they've ever done if you're running software that really screams on dual cpus
1Ghz (1Mb less L3 & DDR266), dual 1.25 as mid range (1Mb less L3), dual 1.42Ghz as the high end.
Now we get to the alleged future PPC970 lineup...
1.4Ghz PPC970 low end, dual 1.8Ghz PPC970 high end.
seems quite reasonable to me, we might know on paper that the systems are signficantly faster than the models they're replacing, for people less spec savy, they'd just see an entry level model that looks 40% faster than the previous one and some impressive bar graphs on an apple ad showing it kick a 3Ghz P4 into touch in a photoshop or maya bake off.
The fun thing is, Canterwood, even with the faster FSB over Northwood, isn't going make a 3.4Ghz P4 by Q4 of this year be super fast compared with the 3Ghz chips they have out now.
It's common knowledge that intel arn't planning anything quicker than 3.4Ghz by the end of the year, I can't see the increase of 1Mb on-die L2 and 200Mhz x 4 FSB making it anything more than a minor speed bump over the current P4 performance.
