Originally posted by ddtlm
Chryx:
IBM will have their own chipsets as they always do... I would be amazed if the nForce2 was even on their radar. People *love* to believe unsubstantiated rumors round these forums, but just cause the nForce2 exists, just cause it has two channels of DDR memory, and just cause it sounds like it could be cool... we have not been provided any reason to believe that it will ever show up in a Mac.
Absolutely, I think it's very unlikely that we'll see Nvidia chipsets in Macs at any point, I would like to see a DSP for audio purposes though, realtime 5.1 encoding would seem like a Digital Hub features if anything is
The Athlon's FSB "which is obviously the bottleneck" is not really standing in the way of progress, see http://www.tech-report.com/reviews/2002q3/athlon-333bus/index.x?pg=1
for some hard numbers. At anandtech there is an article http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.html?i=1344 which shows that lower speed Athlons (up to 1.2ghz) do not benefit much from DDR vs SDR
The higher clocked Athlons (1.8Ghz / 2200+) ARE FSB limited, to the extent that if you overclock the FSB from 133Mhz to 166Mhz you get roughly two speed grades worth of performance at the same clockspeed.
133/166Mhz FSB article on Tech Report
And for the record, I saw a VISIBLE speed improvement switching from PC133 (cas2) to DDR (also CAS2) with the same AthlonXP 1700+, it wasn't just a "ooh, it benchmarks faster now" thing, games ran visibly smoother for example (same board BTW, SiS 735 based)
having a big fast L3 cache is all well and good, but it's not much use if your dataset is larger than the cache size.
(how fast is the L3 cache on a Quicksilver anyway, and not the raw cache speed, the speed it connects to the G4?)
Also, all the coders I've spoken to on the matter say that Altivec is bandwidth limited a lot of the time, a faster FSB and a suitably meaty memory subsystem would be of huge benefit to the Mac based on what they've told me.
Chryx:
IBM will have their own chipsets as they always do... I would be amazed if the nForce2 was even on their radar. People *love* to believe unsubstantiated rumors round these forums, but just cause the nForce2 exists, just cause it has two channels of DDR memory, and just cause it sounds like it could be cool... we have not been provided any reason to believe that it will ever show up in a Mac.
Absolutely, I think it's very unlikely that we'll see Nvidia chipsets in Macs at any point, I would like to see a DSP for audio purposes though, realtime 5.1 encoding would seem like a Digital Hub features if anything is
The Athlon's FSB "which is obviously the bottleneck" is not really standing in the way of progress, see http://www.tech-report.com/reviews/2002q3/athlon-333bus/index.x?pg=1
for some hard numbers. At anandtech there is an article http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.html?i=1344 which shows that lower speed Athlons (up to 1.2ghz) do not benefit much from DDR vs SDR
The higher clocked Athlons (1.8Ghz / 2200+) ARE FSB limited, to the extent that if you overclock the FSB from 133Mhz to 166Mhz you get roughly two speed grades worth of performance at the same clockspeed.
133/166Mhz FSB article on Tech Report
And for the record, I saw a VISIBLE speed improvement switching from PC133 (cas2) to DDR (also CAS2) with the same AthlonXP 1700+, it wasn't just a "ooh, it benchmarks faster now" thing, games ran visibly smoother for example
(same board BTW, SiS 735 based)having a big fast L3 cache is all well and good, but it's not much use if your dataset is larger than the cache size.
(how fast is the L3 cache on a Quicksilver anyway, and not the raw cache speed, the speed it connects to the G4?)
Also, all the coders I've spoken to on the matter say that Altivec is bandwidth limited a lot of the time, a faster FSB and a suitably meaty memory subsystem would be of huge benefit to the Mac based on what they've told me.
