PowerMac G5 Update?

[rareflares]

whatever, we'll find out soon enough.




i used to lurk these boards before because the speculation was actually useful and a lot of times actually predicted the actual outcome.

but these recent baseless rumors and speculation are completely meaningless. Apple has been in the dark for an unbelievably unusual amount of time, and none of us have any decent prediction about what Apple plans to do (even less so than normally).



I can GUARANTEE, however, that all our questions will be answered within the next 3 weeks.

 

[relimw]

He can't, with 100% certainty. Hovever, odds are very good that a large majority of the people who are "crying" don't need to do something with their PowerMac that cannot be handled by equipment that's actually for sale.

Then, of course, there are those that heard the almighty Steve say 3GHz by next summer, and those that only upgrade their systems when new systems are some multiple of times greater than what they current have

Admittedly, most people can still only word process at some lowly speed, and don't actually utilize their machines to the system's fullest potential (your generic home user). A dual 2GHz will play all games currently out just fine, and will continue to do so until a machine is about 4-5 years old.

 

[ImAlwaysRight]

Wait a minute - why would those be considered updates?? WE ALREADY HAVE DUAL 2.0 AND 1.8GHZ POWERMACS.

2.2
2.4
2.6

That's what makes sense.

Hahaha! Those of you thinking Apple was going to give us 3.0 G5 now, thinking Stevo would actually produce them EARLY, well, hmmm... you give me a laugh! I have said all along Apple will not meet their 3.0 promise by Sept 2004, especially since after 10 months we have not even seen an interum update. I hate to say I told you so, but I told you so!

Maybe you all are Mac newbies, but Apple typically updates in this fashion: drop the low end (which is why the price drop of 1.6 G5's to developers), the current mid becomes the new low, current high becomes new mid, and a new high-end is introduced. Some minor modifications may be take place, like RAM/hard drive changes, new technology, etc. Yes, with the introduction of the G5 this cycle was upset, but now that we are talking still G5's, well, guess what, this cycle will continue. (The transition from G3 to G4 actually so NO MHz speed bump.)

I have said all along if Apple could produce faster speeds last Jan we would have seen it. The truth is, Apple has been unable to get 2.5 until now. If you are holding your breath for 3.0 G5 by September, you do the math: considering it took 10 months to go from 2.0 - 2.5 GHz, do you really think we will have 2.5 - 3.0 GHz in 3 months time? Don't be a fool. It ain't gonna happen! Possibly as early as December, but my guess is 3.0 G5 won't happen until January. It may even come later, considering January is only 7 months away, and looking at how long it took to get 2.0 to 2.5.

Those of you waiting for a new high end should just buy the new 2.5 GHz and stop waiting, cuz if you are holding out for 3.0, you'll be waiting until sometime in 2005. I am glad to say that I have been enjoying my dual 2.0 G5 since last September. The speed has made my video rendering take less than half the time, not to mention any games I play run as smooth as glass.

 

[wileypen]

G8 announced!

I've got CNN on, muted in the background while I work (and scan these rumor sites endlessly). A fancy spinning graphic caught my attention. The huge letters "G8" filled the screen.

"Jobs has done it again, no one saw this coming, ohmygod that's why the 8,1 designation for the new machine, the G8 is here! Why is President Bush there? Oh. Economic summit."

I was the happiest man in the world for about five seconds. And now, strangely, I'm pissed at Jobs that the G8 _isn't_ here, and I plan to not buy a new machine until it comes out.

 

[job]

I've got CNN on, muted in the background while I work (and scan these rumor sites endlessly). A fancy spinning graphic caught my attention. The huge letters "G8" filled the screen.

"Jobs has done it again, no one saw this coming, ohmygod that's why the 8,1 designation for the new machine, the G8 is here! Why is President Bush there? Oh. Economic summit."

I was the happiest man in the world for about five seconds. And now, strangely, I'm pissed at Jobs that the G8 _isn't_ here, and I plan to not buy a new machine until it comes out.

Your post is the funniest thing I've read on these boards in a while.

Thanks for the laugh.

 

[nuckinfutz]

The MHz myth rears its head, on a Mac site no less. Clock for clock, the Opterons are generally a bit faster than PPC for most things and so a few percent difference in clock speed will fall slightly in favor of the Opteron on average. Blame it on the PPCs mediocre memory subsystem (or alternatively, AMDs superior one). It is worth noting that AMD is doing all this on a 130nm process; they are not relying on a 90nm process to get a speed boost, though they will be using a 90nm process shortly after IBM debugs it for them.

PPC kicks ass at DSP, but lots of big apps aren't DSP-ish. Opteron has a wicked fast memory subsystem any way you care to measure it (half the latency, almost twice the real bandwidth of PPC), which is something most apps can take advantage of since few apps fit entirely in cache.

These processors have difference focuses, and therefore different strengths. For generic high performance, the Opteron is generally better. It is how you end up with situations like I have where we use Mac workstations for visualization and DSP front-ends/terminals, but the supercomputing codes are run on Opterons -- the Opterons run rings around the G5 at the same clock for the non-DSP stuff.

Yes i'm aware hence I want to set peoples expectations that a Dual 3Ghz Powermac would not but sub $3000. The 2.4Ghz Opteron and a 2.5Ghz 970fx system would be competitive with each other with the Opt doing well in memory bound applications due to the ondie mem controller. However no Opteron could beat a 3Ghz 97x processor clock for clock. If Apple can hit it's one year promise them I expect this machine to be quite spendy. As for the 130nm versus 90nm. That's true the Opteron is beefy and it's huge by comparison. They should be able to do nice things at 90nm.

Apple has two problems right now.

1. They need to get the Power5 derivative shipping. This should have an improved Altivec engine. And if we're lucky either an ondie mem controller or SMT.

2. X86 is beating Apple because applications are optimizing there first and then Mac second. Apples apps rock for performance but that's not going to help someone who's running 3rd party apps. I hope WWDC let's apple announce GCC 3.5 and Xcode 2.0. Much improvements in software performance are needed.

The 970 is just whetting the apetitive. The mac geeks know it's the next generation that we have our highest hopes for.

 

[pjkelnhofer]

OK, with this post I'm officially ignoring any/all power mac discussion threads. This is ridiculous. What cracks me up is all the whining here seems to be people that 'were gonna buy' a G5 one day soon when an update comes. What I never see is what they're using now. I wonder how many whiners are actually PC people trolling some days. This is just silly the amount of people whining about 100 - 500 MHz difference. Congrats to buying into years of Intel marketing.

Don't forget that same 'MHz is king' company just flipped to the 'BMW' speed number of 300/500/700 and actually is slowing down clock speeds on their systems.

Don't you see the irony of posting that you are ignoring a thread?

I don't think the majority of people are frustrated with the raw speed of the G5's, but the fact that they have not been updated in a year and now we are looking at less of an upgrade than we expected.

Right now it is more a question of how fast the G5's are as opposed how much progress (if any has been made in the past year).

If as ThinkSecret suggests the best we can hope for is basically adding a Dual 2.5 GHz (probably at a higher price point than the current top of line G5), it would mean that other than squeezing out a small percentage of faster chips IBM has made no progress of the 970/970fx in the past year.

 

[sblasl]

Radeon 9800 Pro Mac Special Edition

Based on the currently published rumours, it looks like my new Radeon 9800 Pro Mac Special Edition video card still has everything beat!!!

I'm glad I bought my Rev. B Dual 2GHz G5 back in the middle of March!! I have been a very satisfied customer since making my purchase!!

 

[nuckinfutz]

Hahaha! Those of you thinking Apple was going to give us 3.0 G5 now, thinking Stevo would actually produce them EARLY, well, hmmm... you give me a laugh! I have said all along Apple will not meet their 3.0 promise by Sept 2004, especially since after 10 months we have not even seen an interum update. I hate to say I told you so, but I told you so!

LOL. you might want to wait until september before cashing in your chips. You're not out of the woods yet.

 

[anubis]

quit bitching. if apple was so terrible and the updated powermacs are so slow, then you don't have to buy one. no one is holding a gun to your head making you buy such "disappointingly slow" macs.

you crybabies have three options:

1. earn a master's degree or higher in computer engineering and design a 3ghz powermac yourself. seeing as most of you do enough whining, i'd say the median age is about 14. so i suppose this isn't happening.

2. don't buy a new powermac. it's just that simple. if apple's new powermacs just aren't fast enough for you, buy a PC that is.

3. stop whining. seeing as a lot of you who are whining probably aren't in the market for a brand new mac anyway, i don't see what you're complaining for. furthermore, i'd say that 90% of people who have the high-end g5 probably only use it for web browsing and IMing 99% of the time. to complain that apple's new high-end might only be 2.5ghz instead of 3ghz, and thus macrumors will take a billionth of a second longer to load, is ridiculous.

I think i'll just stick with my dual 876 MDD g4 anyway. it's more than enough power for everything i do, including final cut pro, maple 9, and unreal tournament. to say that most people need the power of a high-end g5 is dumb.

 

[TWinbrook46636]

The highest-end G5 configuration, at 2.5GHz, will include dual 1.25GHz frontside buses and will reportedly ship with an ATI Radeon 9600 XT graphics card (128MB); the other models will include an NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 Ultra card (64MB).

-and-

Standard hard drive sizes will be relatively unchanged; the 2.5GHz and 2GHz models will ship with a 160GB hard drive and 512MB of RAM, while the dual and single-processor 1.8GHz units will include an 80GB drive and 256MB of RAM. Most aspects of the Power Mac G5 will apparently not see significant changes, according to information obtained by Think Secret.

----

So, it took them a year for this? A freakin year? What the hell have they been doing all this time? There is more to a new model than processor speed alone but apparently they have done nothing the past twelve months except wait for IBM. And what's up with the downgrade to the video card on the top model? No wonder they are delaying the announcement. They want to enjoy to good press from the Airport Express announcement before the ball drops. Maybe they are all selling their shares today in anticipation.

 

[JoeG4]

This rumor is such outlandish crap I wouldn't even take it with a train, nevermind a mine-load of salt.

Methinks someone at TS is smoking crack. An FX5200 STILL in the lineup?! NOT EVEN CONSUMERS WANT THOSE!

 

[DGFan]

So the PC world gets Athlon FX53's/P4 3.4Ghz combined with Radeon X800Platinum or GeForce 6800 Ultra, and we get a 9600XT in the top end machine. What a joke.

What's a joke is how many people don't understand even rudimentary marketing.

Why do you think that basic configurations tend to be listed with too little RAM to do useful work?

I mean, you want these machines to come standard with a $300+ video card but only 512MB of RAM? That's only 256MB of RAM per processor. It's a joke. No one expects you to do useful high-end work on a base configuration.

So, back to the original question: why do think they have very "basic" basic configurations?

It's because lots of morons will look at only the headline price when comparing systems. If Macs start at $2000 and a similarly fast PC starts at $1400 it won't matter that the Mac comes loaded. And it would just help fuel all the negative hype that Macs are more expensive and aren't configurable.

So Apple releases systems with usable basic configurations that can be upgraded for power users. And remember, there are lots of power users that don't need anything more than a FX5200. Doing sound editing? If so, you don't need an X800 or even a 9600 and money spent on one would be wasted.

 

[Dont Hurt Me]

Maybe a lot of people dont need anything more then that $50.00 card that apple buys for $20.00 but they are still charging a arm and leg for a system thats armed with......Fx5200. go up from 640 x480 and it starts dropping frames right away. still garbage in the cadillac.

 

[relimw]

Apple has two problems right now.

1. They need to get the Power5 derivative shipping. This should have an improved Altivec engine. And if we're lucky either an ondie mem controller or SMT.

Well since the Power5 has SMT built-in, this would be the most logicial choice.

2. X86 is beating Apple because applications are optimizing there first and then Mac second. Apples apps rock for performance but that's not going to help someone who's running 3rd party apps. I hope WWDC let's apple announce GCC 3.5 and Xcode 2.0. Much improvements in software performance are needed.

Well, that's not likely to happen since gcc 3.4.0 has only been out since April It'd be nice if Apple would release some info on how project files are created (for external generation of projects), but I don't see that happening, and I doubt an XCode 2.0 would happen either. However, and upgrade to gcc3.4 would be nice.

 

[rDLr]

well, I'm just happy I checked out macrumors today and got wind of that rumor. so I was able to cancel my dual 1800 order I was scheduled to pickup that afternoon for 2500euros (2800$). Man, that would have been a bummer, wouldn't it?!

It depends how bad you need the computer right now. What if Apple announces a new lineup, but it does not ship right away. They typically have the low end ready and the high end with a delay.

 

[pjkelnhofer]

Maybe you all are Mac newbies, but Apple typically updates in this fashion: drop the low end (which is why the price drop of 1.6 G5's to developers), the current mid becomes the new low, current high becomes new mid, and a new high-end is introduced. Some minor modifications may be take place, like RAM/hard drive changes, new technology, etc. Yes, with the introduction of the G5 this cycle was upset, but now that we are talking still G5's, well, guess what, this cycle will continue. (The transition from G3 to G4 actually so NO MHz speed bump.)

That is not always exactly true, but I will agree it is the basic path they have been following (although the bumps have usually come every six to seventh months for the past few years).

However, the ThinkSecret rumor is basically adding a new computer to the top of the line while also bumping up the bottom of the line.

So the question becomes if the lineup is 2.5DP, 2DP, 1.8DP, 1.8SP what does the pricing structure become. One scenario the 1.8SP sells for less than the current 1.6SP (which would be a welcome event to many people) and we see a price structure like $1699, $1999, $2499 and $2999. That however doesn't jib with the rumor that the old 2.0's will sell for $2499 in an attempt to clear out inventory. So more likely would be something like $1899, $2199, $2799 and $3199. In which case in a year, the Dual 2.0 has only dropped $200 (less than 10%).

No matter how you slice it, very little progress has been made by IBM on the 970. I think that no matter what gets released in the next few weeks we are basically just treading water until the next generation (975?, 980?) IBM chip gets revealed.

 

[blakespot]

The 1 time in history, if these video card options prove true then it will look really lame in the days of Ati's and Nvidea's latest offerings X800's and 6800's

No, the Rage 128 was offered on the Mac first, before any PC. It was not as grounbreaking as the GeForce 3, but as a truecolor 3D card, it was a very solid contender at the time.



blakespot

 

[subterfuge]

Ok, I've basically just been browsing the boards for the last few months, as I'd love to switch over to a mac after having used linux for quite a while. I figure with OSX I get all the open source apps and stability but also photoshop, illustrator, final cut... Anyway, as I'm off to college in August, I need a new computer fairly soon, and I've been thinking about a few things. As much as I'd like to see a dual 3GHz machine announced at WWDC, it might be more advantageous to see the announcement of machines at lesser clock speeds before then. I say this mostly because I'd rather have a massive monitor than a couple hundred MHz. If the new displays, rumored to be announced at WWDC, are just redesigns with the same LCD, I'm sticking with the current generation. Considering that the current brilliant savings promotion ends on the 26th ($300 for school purchases), I could pick up a midrange G5, and a cinema display for $1199 if the new G5s are announced early. It's not 3GHz, which may dissappoint some, but it's food for thought for those in the market for a new machine.

 

[reyesmac]

I don't really believe this rumor. It's been a year, they can do better than that. Although from what I have seen, Apple rarely gives us any powermacs that are truly worth it, unless you are counting the over $3,000 model. And most of the time that one ends up being overpowered by the competition in 6 months anyway.

I think if they optimize OS X for G5's (64bit OS) they might be worth it at the sub-3gig speeds. It just sucks that its been a year and all they can come up with is 500mhz and a case that gives you more space to put absolutely nothing in.

I think the folks at Apple know this and they will have something cool up their sleeves to get us to buy them.

 

[blakespot]

The default graphics card options are quite simply pathetic, last generation cards (and in the case of the 5200, useless for anything other than basic 2D). Why should we have to pay extra for a decent graphics card on top of the extortionate price of the mac itself.

So the PC world gets Athlon FX53's/P4 3.4Ghz combined with Radeon X800Platinum or GeForce 6800 Ultra, and we get a 9600XT in the top end machine. What a joke.

Dual 2.5Ghz is OK, but I expected more for the top end machine, especially with its cost.

Apple let us down on this one. (if the rumors are true that is....!)

Looking at the specs, the 5200 FX looks akin to the GeForce 4Ti 4600 in power. I run one in my dual G4 800 (a 4Ti). It is a great card giving me glass smooth framerates in Giants, Quake III, Alice. HALO and UT2K3/4 play great as well.

That goes beyond "basic 2D," FYI.


blakespot

 

[applekid]

I'm hoping ThinkSecret is wrong as far as some of those specs go. I want PCI-Express, better graphics cards, etc. Sounds like the old mobo, with minor changes and a change in size.

Watch this rumor get pushed back day after day and finally, we get disappointed. Might as well show your cards Apple.

 

[bar italia]

furthermore, i'd say that 90% of people who have the high-end g5 probably only use it for web browsing and IMing 99% of the time.

Do you really believe that 90% of people w/high end G5s only use it for surfing and IM?

If you don't, why would you take the time to type all of this out?

 

[FoxyKaye]

So, I just read this entire thread for about 5 minutes, and here's the stuff on which we seem to agree:

* Apple will be releasing updated (rev. B) PowerMacs in the near future.
* These new PowerMacs will approach (but possibly not reach) 3Ghz in speed.
* Eventually, the G5s will work their way into the iMac lineup.
* Everyone wants a faster machine, although what everyone seems to also want is a revision B machine that works out some of the hardware glitches of the initial PowerMac G5 lineup.

Maybe it's just me, but everyone seems to be getting pretty catty with each other for no other reason than everyone wants an update from Apple. Relax folks, it will happen. Besides, how many of us on MacRumors can actually afford to keep up with Apple's product updates every year? I know for myself, a new G5 of any nature is wishful thinking.

 

[Dont Hurt Me]

Looking at the specs, the 5200 FX looks akin to the GeForce 4Ti 4600 in power. I run one in my dual G4 800 (a 4Ti). It is a great card giving me glass smooth framerates in Giants, Quake III, Alice. HALO and UT2K3/4 play great as well.

That goes beyond "basic 2D," FYI.


blakespot

anyone who thinks a fx5200 is the same as geforce4Ti has had 1 to many drinks, is higher then a kite or doesnt know what he is talking about.