The PowerPC G4 was a lie?!

[Bob Bobeck]

Just read this, says that the G4 was just a pumped-up 603.

I'm still runnin a dual 1.42 Power Mac G4 FW 800 with Leopard 10.5.8.

Wtf??? Is Apple screwin our eyes out???

 

[adcx64]

That site is blatantly false. You can even see someone commented at the bottom making corrections. The G4 is built on a completely different architecture, the 7xxx series, not the 60x.

 

[Intell]

I love how he calls AltiVec questionable. It's as if he doesn't even know what it can really do. Even now days people are still impressed by its power.

 

[adcx64]

I love how he calls AltiVec questionable. It's as if he doesn't even know what it can really do. Even now days people are still impressed by its power.

My point exactly. The guy obviously has a limited understanding of the architecture.

 

[Whargoul]

"Below I'll give some historical background, technical information, and plain facts that support my claim that the PowerPC G4 is really a second-generation processor, and the broader notion that the PowerPC family has not evolved significantly since 1995"

So, the clean-sheet design G3 that could significantly beat a 604 of much higher MHz was not a new generation?

 

[SDub90]

I don't think it's a serious blog.... it's name is trollaxor and there's even a post all about ascii penes.

 

[raysfan81]

I love how he calls AltiVec questionable. It's as if he doesn't even know what it can really do. Even now days people are still impressed by its power.

Yeah... It really is unfortunate that many developers never took full advantage of its power.

 

[goMac]

All PowerPCs are related, so I'm sure somewhere the G4 is related to the 603. Not really that big a deal.

As a developer, I can tell you that Altivec is very hard to take advantage of. It simply doesn't work in a lot of cases. However, Intel has shipped something extremely similar to Altivec since the Pentium 2 called SSE, which really got powerful in the Pentium 4. So we didn't really lose Altivec with the Intel transition, in fact the same library is still in the system, but now it uses SSE, and SSE is also extremely fast.

So in the end, because Intel has the same technology, I don't know if Altivec ended up being that big of a pro for the PowerPC.

 

[Zotaccian]

G4 was based on G3:

http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/g3cards/xlr8g4/g4vsg3.html

The design philosophy on MPC7400 is to change from the MPC750 base only where required to gain compelling multimedia and multiprocessor performance. MPC7400's core is essentially the same as the MPC750's, except that whereas the MPC750 has a 6-entry completion queue and has slower performance on some floating-point double-precision operations, MPC7400 has an 8-entry completion queue and a full double-precision FPU. MPC7400 also adds the AltiVec instruction set, has a new memory subsystem (MSS), and can interface to an improved bus, the MPX bus. The following sections discuss the major changes in more detail.

When looking at benchmarks, it is quite obvious that G4 didnt stand a change against PC's with same or even bit lower priced PC's:

http://www.digitalvideoediting.com/2002/05_may/features/cw_aeshowdown.htm

I also find clock for clock comparisons worthless since it was Motorolas problem that it couldn't ramp up the clock speed the same way Intel and AMD could and when PC's were still cheaper or similarly price I think the only one who had problems was Apple. It was extremely wise choice to move to Intel.

PS. I own both Intel based MBP and G5 based iMac.

 

[Lil Chillbil]

NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO !!

everything I know is a lie!!!

just kidding!

 

[bax2003]

However, Intel has shipped something extremely similar to Altivec since the Pentium 2 called SSE, which really got powerful in the Pentium 4. So we didn't really lose Altivec with the Intel transition, in fact the same library is still in the system, but now it uses SSE, and SSE is also extremely fast.

First CPU with SSE instruction was Pentium III (Slot 1, Katmai), followed by Coppermine......not Pentium 2.