PowerPC 970GX Reference?

[Kirkmedia]

WWDC or NAB

I still think that Apple will announce Dual 3 GHZ G5 towers at NAB in Las Vegas in April not WWDC. I find it curious, that nobody has mentioned NAB as a
Platform for announcing new G5's. Has nobody here ever heard of NAB?

Any thoughts?

 

[gekko513]

I still think that Apple will announce Dual 3 GHZ G5 towers at NAB in Las Vegas in April not WWDC. I find it curious, that nobody has mentioned NAB as a
Platform for announcing new G5's. Has nobody here ever heard of NAB?

Any thoughts?

What's NAB? 😀

 

[Kirkmedia]

WWDC or NAB

What's NAB? 😀

NAB stands for "National Association of Broadcasters". They have the largest
electronic media show in the world in Las Vegas every April. Over 100,000,
Entertainment professional will pass through its doors. Apple usually has
the biggest Exhibit there. FCP 5 and Quicktime 7 are supposed to make
their debuts there, too.

Find out more at, http://www.nabshow.com

 

[gekko513]

Apple's not listed on the keynote page. Don't know if that means anything, though. They are listed as exhibitors.

Apple Booth(s): SL1914,SL1902

 

[Kirkmedia]

WWDC or NAB

Apple's not listed on the keynote page. Don't know if that means anything, though. They are listed as exhibitors.

Apple Booth(s): SL1914,SL1902

Last year Apple debuted "Motion" and "Xsan" at NAB. The presence of 1000's of Producers, Video Editors, Motion Graphic Artists and other Post Production Professionals, who make up the largest demographic of G5 tower users(and purchasers), make NAB the logical choice for debuting new hardware and software.

 

[Eric_Z]

As far as freescale is concerned I have personal knowledge that the dual core G4 is available right now... The question is in what quantity.

You say what now, the 8641D is sampeling?

Can you elaborate a little?

 

[swissmann]

Well something needs to happen with the G5 I just wonder what that will be. 3 GHz is way overdue.

 

[visor]

It is not fair to single out this post, but this Doom 3/GPU stuff is getting really old.

how about 'cinema4d renders twice as fast on a P4 notebook than on a 2*2ghz G5'
i wouldnt belive it, too - but i saw it... pretty darn embaressing. thank god it wasnt my g5

 

[visor]

How many people can really say they will rely upon and constantly use the extra 0.5GHz?

usually it comes down to - the faster the high end, the lower the prices for the mid end stuff - alas more likely updates for the poor of us.

 

[748s]

I still think that Apple will announce Dual 3 GHZ G5 towers at NAB in Las Vegas in April not WWDC. I find it curious, that nobody has mentioned NAB as a
Platform for announcing new G5's. Has nobody here ever heard of NAB?

Any thoughts?

it's been mentioned before in other threads.
one of them here

 

[BornAgainMac]

how about 'cinema4d renders twice as fast on a P4 notebook than on a 2*2ghz G5'
i wouldnt belive it, too - but i saw it... pretty darn embaressing. thank god it wasnt my g5

Same settings?

 

[psycho bob]

Intel are only in the position they are because of the huge physical clockspeed of their chips. As far as technology goes the P4 sucks hence the reason that AMD can introduce a processor with a far lower GHz rating and toast it. Intel can cram as many cores as they wish into a P4 the smart money will always go with AMD. The whole multi core debate seems a little strange to me, the technology has been around for years it is only because we might now be getting them in desktops that people have jumped upon it. Lets face it IBM have a march over the competition when it comes to high end CPU design at the moment this technology lies in there high end server designs and not the ones apple uses. The Power 5 has had multi cores as has its predecessor the Power 4 on which the G5 is based (the G5 is essentially one Power 4 core). If apple need this technology that badly just put in a couple of those that should keep folks happy 😛
As apple and there fore its customers are used to multi CPU designs replacing 2 processors with one or more with numerous cores is a logical step. There are benefits of course but the OS X technology does not fully take advantage of the current setups. VMM and scheduler optimisation remains poor (see the Doom 3 Benchmark thread for more) even apparently in 10.4. So apart from the paper specs the benefits of multi core technology will probably be lost at least until software is better written to take advantage, I doubt Tiger will do this.
Like many I think Cell is the way forward. Theoretically a Power 4 or 5 PPC with Cell technology would toast any current or indeed future AMD or Intel design for a while to come (once software optimisations have occurred). If ever there has been a time for apple to adopt a technology early this is it. Even if it were a short term thing for say a generation of Powermacs and even Powerbooks it would put apple back at the front of the pack and give real bragging rights in the creative and scientific markets.

 

[daveL]

how about 'cinema4d renders twice as fast on a P4 notebook than on a 2*2ghz G5'
i wouldnt belive it, too - but i saw it... pretty darn embaressing. thank god it wasnt my g5

Bull. Prove it.

 

[broken_keyboard]

Yes! The GX is real.
I've been waiting to upgrade my PM.

 

[Beck446]

Anyone have any guesses on heat #'s? Especially in comparison to the freescale dual cores rumored to be a possibility? I know these would be guesses , but your guesses are better than mine!

 

[iris_failsafe]

I want professional cards. Apple doesn't take 3d very seriously and it makes me angry.

Enough of the GeForce and Radeons I want FireGL and QuadroFX cards now. A lot of software development for mac has been halted because of the lack of support for these cards 😡

 

[ffakr]

how about 'cinema4d renders twice as fast on a P4 notebook than on a 2*2ghz G5'
i wouldnt belive it, too - but i saw it... pretty darn embaressing. thank god it wasnt my g5

I don't doubt it.
But I don't know what cinema4d was compiled with, how much G5 optimization there has been (if any), if rending a scene is cpu bound.. or if I/O is important, if cinema4d was using both CPUs or if it's capable or particularly good at SMP...
We benched POV-Ray on a dual G5 2GHz and an Athlon 3200+ (socket 764.. 1MB L2 version) and the Athlon beat the pants off the G5 but POV was using one CPU and it was not optimized for the G5 in any way.

One of our researchers is running geo-physical science software on a G5 cluster and he's seen up to 70% speed increases by using IBM's XLC and XLF compilers over GCC 3.3. The XL compilers are optimized for the G5 and they support advanced features like auto-vectorizion and unrolling loops.. but the GCC that shipped with the G5s didn't even know what a G5 was. When you optimized for a G5, it used a hack of the Power4 and G4 profiles to generate code.

Bottom line is, a good compiler and code optimization can make a HUGE difference. Unfortuantely, a lot of Mac code is lower priority than the windows versions and so far.. the tools that are most often used by mac developers (gcc in Apple's dev tools) are pretty poor compared to other solutions (like IBM's and Intel's compilers)

 

[ddtlm]

ffakr:

PentiumM's max wattage is significantly higher than their idle wattage. If I recall correctly, it's in the upper 20s to 30 watts. P-M doesn't look that impressive powerwise when it's not clocked down to 600MHz. It's still a nice processor, but there is a perception that it uses nearly zero power and that's simply not true.

A quick visit to Intel's site can settle this matter with facts. All the fastest P-M's, those with 533mhz FSB's, 2M L2's, and clocks from 1.6ghz to 2.13ghz, have a maximum thermal power of 27W. See page 60:

http://www.intel.com/design/mobile/datashts/305262.htm

The older P-M's, with 400mhz FSB's, 2M L2's, and clocks from 1.5ghz to 2.1ghz, have a maximum thermal power of 21W. A 1.4ghz and 1.5ghz they are available with a thermal ceiling of 10W, and at 1.0ghz to 1.2ghz they are available with a thermal ceiling of 5W. See page 74:

http://www.intel.com/design/mobile/datashts/302189.htm

Those are, of course, maximum thermal output figures.

...and the Athlon beat the pants off the G5 but POV was using one CPU and it was not optimized for the G5 in any way.

I've found that if something isn't specifically optimized for G5's then comparison using it is unfair. 😉

Bottom line is, a good compiler and code optimization can make a HUGE difference.

Or not. Depends entirely on the application.

 

[guifa]

To which I reply with wry amusement:

"Your PC is a game machine ridden with virii. Enjoy."

😛

To which I reply even further, "the plural of virus is not virii."

http://www.linuxmafia.com/~rick/faq/plural-of-virus.html

 

[ddtlm]

Beck446:

Anyone have any guesses on heat #'s? Especially in comparison to the freescale dual cores rumored to be a possibility?

Not a whole heck of a lot lower than the current 970's. Its gona be the same basic core, built using the same process. However within a batch of chips there can be a large variation in thermal characteristics, so it seems to me that IBM has some hope of being able to cherry-pick prize cores that run cooler (Intel and AMD do this all the time to get laptop chips).

AMD has announced that they'll have a dual-cored 1.6ghz 90nm A64/Opteron running at 30W peak. If IBM can't match that, some people on these forums are gona look silly. 😉 Moto says their MPC7448 (90nm) will use "less than" 10W at 1.4ghz, so we can suppose that a 1.5ghz MPC8641D (also 90nm) be be a bit north of 20W.

Notably, Moto's watt-per-mhz is right on top of what Intel claims for P-M's in the 1.4ghz to 1.5ghz bracket.

 

[Mord]

err the 970fx uses 25w at 2GHz..... it just has a very small core and runs only above 1V

 

[wrldwzrd89]

<snip>
Like many I think Cell is the way forward. Theoretically a Power 4 or 5 PPC with Cell technology would toast any current or indeed future AMD or Intel design for a while to come (once software optimisations have occurred). If ever there has been a time for apple to adopt a technology early this is it. Even if it were a short term thing for say a generation of Powermacs and even Powerbooks it would put apple back at the front of the pack and give real bragging rights in the creative and scientific markets.

The Cell won't be ready for production until 2H 2006 at the earliest (more likely not until 2007). You can forget about ANYBODY using Cell technology until then.

 

[Chomolungma]

The PS3 and Toshiba TV

The Cell won't be ready for production until 2H 2006 at the earliest (more likely not until 2007). You can forget about ANYBODY using Cell technology until then.

Playstation 3 this year? Toshiba is said to use it in plasma/flatscreen TV this year, although i'm uncertain of this particular.

-Chomo

 

[blitzkrieg79]

Hello there people, I am new to this thread but I have been lurking here for a while now... Anyway, as far as the 970GX and cell goes, somehow I have a feeling that Apple has been exposed to this technology for a while now, knowing them even if they are involved in some kind of a processor development they won't reveal it to the public until they will actually release them, I remember how pleasantly surprised I was when they released the first 970s two years ago and I know a lot of people werent expecting such a jump, back then they went up by 600Mhz, I mean I know it was more then due but it was a positive surprise... Also, somewhere on the net I read that the 980 (or the G6) is supposed to have 4 integer and 4 floating point units attached to it (and that was before I knew of the cell processor) and to me the technologies seem to be awfully similar if u ask me... anyway I will eleborate on this later cuz corporate America is calling upon me... take care guys

 

[psycho bob]

The Cell won't be ready for production until 2H 2006 at the earliest (more likely not until 2007). You can forget about ANYBODY using Cell technology until then.

Where did I state anybody would be using it this year? Future models should (if apple has any sense or adventure left in them) be based around this technology. This year we will get PPC970 based 3GHz models, single core I suspect. Next year should be far more interesting.