Meet Max, the G4 PowerPC processor 120
Arto Stimms sent us
a rather nice
compilation of facts and tidbits about the G4 processor,
aka Max. Main features:
Altivec, MERSI SMP, 2Mb L2, and a 128 bit
data path running at 100Mhz. At 1.8 Volts, a 400Mhz G4 will
only consume 8 Watts.
PowerPC series, a modern marvel. (Score:1)
I think the PowerPC is proably the best all around processor out here, it has advantage in nearly everything wxcept for market share. Sure there may be a few other processors faster or better than it but at what price? Intel Gambled too much and now they're jumping over walls, but one day, that wall will just be too tall for them to simply jump over.
K7 sounds great. but it still uses x86 instructions and such to make it work. It might be a much better processor if it werent burdened with legacy code... And the rest of the other better and faster processors are simply out of the reach of everyone except for big companies, Bill Gates (now i hafta wash my keyboard...), and every other damn rich and dumb fools...
Got PowerPC?
Go to the Source (Score:1)
Motorola Document Beware, it's a 1.2MB PDF file.
only with no extraneous spaces. No spaces at all, in fact. Augh!
Anyway:
The diagram on page 22 shows that both the system bus and backside bus are still 64-bit. The 128-bit bus is (for now) restricted to the L1 caches (page 28).
MERSI stands for Modified, Exclusive, Reserved, Shared, Invalid (page 27).
It is pin-compatible with the 750/G3 processor (page 29).
Estimated performance is 18 SpecInt95 and 16 SpecFP95 at 400MHz with 2MB of 200MHz cache and a 100MHz system bus (page 31). That's healthy, but not astounding.
It's interesting to compare the die photo (page 24) with the QED RM7000 [qedinc.com]. About 3/4 of the RM7000 die area is cache compared to 1/4 of the G4. The RM7000 delivers 14 SpecInt95 and 16 SpecFP95 at 300MHz using about 5W of power. But the RM7000 doesn't have a vector unit.
SQL Error
Hello IBM/Motorola from your customers (Score:1)
Do you have any idea how much free software is available, just waiting to run on the ppc? Imagine a tail -f that can run on multiple files, a dbx that doesn't crash if the targets stack frame is corrupted, and numerous other utilities that cause me to shudder in revulsion at the utilities packaged with AIX 4.2. Tap into this power, support affordable personal ppc's by producing or releasing affordable pc-compatible motherboards. You can maintain control of your corporate market, while gaining the foundational support of thousands of active developers, hundred of active ppc specific developers for free. There are so many x86's in the business world simply because so many purchasers and their friends own one at home. Regain the world's confidence by allowing the end user to see the power of your chips. Don't cripple yourselves by depending on microsoft with its inetentionally slowed down NT for ppc. When ppc users write the ppc OS, they write it for performance.
It is said, never trust a bald barber, since he can have no respect for your hair. IBM you should be trusting ppc users, since we are the ones with a vested interest in seeing you succeed. Even though we may not be corporations, we could be the next person to decide whether the site needs a few thousand wintel's or a few thousand ppc's.
well... (Score:1)
Need for a Low Power Speed Demon (Score:1)
I've had a 486 laptop running Linux and have loved it. It's been great even though it's extremely slow due to the fact that it has a 486 and 20mb of RAM. I use it mainly for network utilities and some limited coding projects and find it incredibly useful. Would like to get something that could replace a desktop, though.
The thing is, I don't want another x86 laptop. Some of them have decent (4 hour lifetime with a LiIon battery), but the x86 CPU is just sucking juice at an amazing rate.
What I want is a power optimized laptop. A strongARM or PowerPC laptop would be great in this area. I'm not opposed to getting a PowerBook G3 or G4, but they are rather spendy.
I wish that Mickysoft would continue to support PowerPC based NT systems and that some other vendor would realize the potential of a nicely optimized NT based G3/G4 laptop. That might make the price come down. Then I could format the hard drive and put Linux on it
A strongARM based laptop running a preinstalled LInux would also be nice. Hear me HCC and Corel?
Current Laptops are basically very portable computers that can run on batteries for a limitied amount of time. Let's hope someone builds one that lasts 10-12 hours without a huge battery!
Stop the misinformation (Score:1)
There is no way that Altivec (or 3D now! or MMX) can improve speed of general applications like Mozilla, Word Perfect, etc... The main problem of G4 will be their price (and that's why I have a super-cheap K6-300 instead of a PII-300, PII-450: I prefered to buy a [second-hand] laptop).
BE different (Score:1)
Remember one thing, MS lives by copying other technology. When Apple releases OS X with G4's with Altivec later this year it will the easiest and most powerful media system an average consumer can afford. It would be about 2 - 3 years for MS to play catch up if Intel drops x86 with a consumer ia64 (laugh) or MS gets a clue and redesigns windows (again) for media handling. Apple has to and is dropping as much legacy crud as possible to leapfrog MS and grab the lead again. IBM and Motorola are doing there part to leapfrog Intel with Altivec and multicore G4's and efficient SMP.
After win 95 MS didn't know what the next evolution is. Well the marketplace is going to find out when MS releases their first clueless and directionless OS. Happy computing
Interesting point (Score:1)
Not if it has the same crappy interface as OS N nX.
Not if it doesn't have pre-emptive multitasking.
Not if it doesn't have memory management and protection.
Not if it boots into a single-user mode.
Not if it doesn't have X builtin.
In short, if Apple really puts a Unix in MacOS, I might look at it. If they basterdize it then I'm going right back to where I claim that MacOS is worthless to me.
Funny... (Score:1)
Not to mention I don't see many multi-terrabyte disk solutions for the Mac.
Half the price? Clue in. (Score:1)
But you want to talk about bad parts? Well, I bought a AMD K5-90 on a no-name motherboard for $120 three years ago. It has a generic 256k isa video card in it, along with two $15 PCI NE2000 controllers. Oh, and a $10 sound card. 32 megs of generic RAM. The only quality parts were my two Western Digital hard drives (and I guess that's debatable). Let's see how it's doing:
3:30pm up 133 days, 5:13, 4 users, load average: 1.00, 1.00, 1.00
Yup, looks like it's doing OK. It runs everything from matlab to rc5des to amp. Had to take it down a while ago, the power went out for more than half an hour. Previous uptime was about 120 days, and that was because I had to move it. I can't remember the last time it stopped working was...
I don't think it's usually crappy parts that make things crash, I think it's crappy OS's.
And besides, don't give me crap about how Mac hardware is great. I got 8 megs of the correct type of memory to put in my Centris 650. Put in the SIMM. The computer recognised it fine... and two hours later turned off for no reason. So I took it out -- and the random-turnoffs continued. It won't even turn on at all now. I tried swapping the battery, no help. The Apple guy said he couldn't do anything besides sell me a new Mac.
No thanks.
I chouldn't agree more... (Score:2)
Macs are great people, their hardware kicks ass, its just way to expensive and after you run BE and MacOS you will see a diffrence. It like watching Windows compaired to Linux on a x86 machine. MacOS either dosen't take full advantage of the hardware or just isn't optmized as well.
If macs ever get comparable to x86 prices and I can build my own I will and I'll run BE and Linux, but right now I don't have that kind of money to waste.
Why? (Score:2)
Sure Apple's processors err IBM and Motorola's process are better then x86's but price/preformance ratio they don't even come close.
Why wait for the PIII? (Score:1)
wait for the k7 (Score:1)
when the AMD's K7 comes out with 200 MHZ bus it will kick the G4 out of the water.
Amen brother! (Score:1)
-Heck, MacOS is a piece of **** in low level
- operations. That's why they're jumping to OS X, cuz
- they can't dig themselves out of the hole they
- made.
You need to re-check your facts. Appleshare IP does file transfers over fast ethernet at twice the speed of Win NT.
Ever compile code on a Mac and a Windows Box? The only areas where windows has the mac beat are gaming (which is changing) and the ability to use more than one floppy drive (whoopie f*cking doo).
LK
Great, something else to waste money on . . . (Score:1)
You're not comparing (for lack of a better term) apples to apples.
The fastest Mac on the market goes for 2999. At 400 mhz it'll smoke any simgle PII system on the market.
Yeah, maybe you can get a PII 450 from Joe Schmuckatelli's discount computer warehouse for under 2k. Big deal, it'll still not be able to touch the G3 400. When apple was was using the PPC604, a 180 mhz 604 outperformed a 200mhz Pentium Pro by about 15%.
The number one cause of errors on the MacOS is old applications. I'm sorry if you still want to run MS Word 3.02, upgrade. A computer related purchase isn't like a house purchase. You WILL need to upgrade. A computer isn't supposed to last 50+ years.
If you think that the blue screen of death is any more helpful than the cryptic system bombs that a Mac will show you, then you must be smoking crack.
LK
there are at least two places of PPC advantage (Score:1)
alpha. but when power consumption is important,
like in an embedded system or a notebook id rather
have a PPC. as nice as the strong arm is, for some
reason there is relatiely little software for it.
i like the fact that people can come over and use the mac sitting next to my real computer, if i had
a laptop, for the same purpose, id like to be able
to also boot into the macOS. (of course i would be
using sheepshaver if i really wanted to run any mac apps) i dont know how strongARM compares to PPC. anyone with experiene on both?
wait for the k7 (Score:1)
It can be done in less than 15 cycles with 3DNow (I don't know for KNI and MMX doesn't interest me)
And I guess your 1.23 cycles/pixel doesn't include the memory writes.
It's very easy to hype with hard numbers like this
Remember, Apple hype is
Do you remember their claims about the iMac 40% faster than a P2/400 ?? I'm still laughing
That's real nice, but.... (Score:1)
Is this Be's idea of a good marketing strategy? To openly admit that they are dumping a large majority of their original userbase over technical documentation that seems as if its trivial to begin with... to conceit inferiority of their large-capital, corporate operation to a small, loosely-banded group of PPC hacks...
I cannot imagine that Apple would sue, though it also comes as little suprise that in this period they arent forthcoming aboout hardware specs... given their position as an alt-OS, and their relative fraternity amongst others (what other major propriety platform has sponsored a Linux port, even one as curious as mkLinux??)
To Jean Louis Gassee and your Beboppers: stop your whining, Linux developers have for years dealt with a lacking of hardware documentation, vendor suport, and the like, and with your experience the only thing preventing you from continuing the PPC port (hard to say port since it was the original platform) is your infamously clouded ego.
For those not in the know, JLG was the VP of Product Engineering I believe for many years at Apple Inc., having been (once again from mem) a high ranking exec of Apple France before... a nearly psychotic leather-clad Frenchman, he was known to strike terror into anyone at Apple who opposed his vision of the Macintosh, and was apparantly responsible for so many of the wrong-turms Apple made in terms of product direction, including the destruction of several infamous, Intel-oriented Mac projects. Such battles included a functional MacOS running on top of an Intel driver layer many years ago, and the many vaporware OS projects that consumed so much of Apple's resources in the past. He may have great ideas of his, but he sure has never been able to deal with those of others.
Upgrades? (Score:1)
I wouldn't mind a PCI card that gave me USB and FireWire either...
Duh yourself (Score:1)
BTW, Netscape is notoriously crash prone. You can't blame Apple for that. You can blame Apple for unprotected memory though...
Apple Haters... (Score:1)
but my last machine was handbuilt. i got a board, power supply, generic ATX case (which the mb fit, thanks), drives and memories and cards from half a dozen different places. without a bundled copy of macos. but having recently sold it off, i am now going to get a new g3 minitower.
i don't have any problems really, at the moment with apple, and i must say that it's nice to see steve kicking ass and taking names. macos x should certainly increase the mac cool factor, and i cant wait to get it.
id suggest waiting for the new os to come along, running it on the g4s and reapprasing your opinion. if you still don't go for the mac, thats cool too.
I had a problem with my Mac (Score:1)
Mouse and Keyboard (Score:1)
I totally agree about the keyboard and mouse from a usage point of view... ak. Brutal.
But they look great on a poster - the whole iMac package was designed to look great. And the users who buy them don't use them enough to care.
They don't sell iMacs on specs, any more than they sell microwaves by specs - it's a matter of how they sell them. I don't see Compaq (currently Apple's main competitor) putting this sort of thought or effort into their hardware design.
Kev.
wait for the k7 (Score:1)
The G4 enebled with AltiVec will kick butt anyway.
Running at 400 will outperform the P3/500 with 25-200% in everything where Math is used like Speech, Image/MPEG, 3D Graph and Encryption.
For example:
-128bit permutation - very important in DES and other encryption schemes.
Altivec - 20cycles
MMX - 4cycles/bit = 512cycles.
-Median Filter (3x3) Replaces center pixel in a 3x3 window by median of sorted pixels
Altivec - 1.23cycles/pixel
MMX - 415cycles/pixel
AltiVec will rule!
Read more about it:
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/9812/pcc-r
G4 vs. Alpha (Score:1)
MIS Antipathy towards Macs (Score:1)
One thing I've noticed is that most Mac users do a pretty good job of supporting their own computers, including upgrading the OS and installing hardware.
This of course drives tech support people nuts -- Imagine a graphic artist doing the hidden mysteries that only they can do! The only logical conclusion is that the funky Apple computer is shit.
Of course this is due to the fact that the MacOS was designed from the ground up to be easy to support.
Those of you who believe that Linux+KDE/Gnome, with a little more work, can be as easy to adminster as Macs are kidding yourselves. Essentially that's what they tried to do with Windows, and failed. I don't have very much faith that the very qualified Linux programmers or even MacOS-X project can put a pretty face on the UNIX mess and expect it as supportable as the MacOS.
(Of course many Linux users don't want Linux to be easy, but that's not "world domination"!)
Apple Haters... (Score:1)
To begin, Winblows users have nothing against the Mac or the MacOS. I get so tired from people callling me up and asking me about their Pc's crashing. I am still runing system 8.1 on a 68k mac. I push it to the limit, on boot up the extensions fill up half the screen, I get up to 6 or 7 netscape windows open at one time, playing a game in the background, while rendering graphics in the front... and I don't get more than one crash every 2 to 4 weeks if that! I am sorry but Windows looks horrible, it sux! It makes PII 450's preform like trash. Give me one thing that a Winblows user can do that a Mac user can't do better on a less powerfull machine. PC's should be used for Linux, or BeOS or even maybe SunOS. But come on people don't spend alll this money on a PII system and run Winblows 95/98. Have a Linux box networked with a Mac, have your Linux box do the Network jobs and programing, have your Mac do the gaming and multimedia jobs and your set for life. And when OSX comes out you can drop Linux as well if you want. So Winblows users get used to it Macs are here and they are here to stay "FO EVA"
Paul.
Apple isn't the only game in town. (Score:1)
If you want to run Win3/9X/NT/CE run Intel, or it's clones. If you don't and need to optimize power run motorola.
A good example is that little car thingy that NASA sent to Mars.
BSOB (Score:1)
Oh, to hell with it..... why can't M$ just die?
G4 vs. Alpha (Score:1)
Rich
Need for a Low Power Speed Demon (Score:1)
Great, something else to waste money on . . . (Score:1)
Stop the misinformation (Score:2)
2)It's not just about the speed!!! If it was, why not argue that someone buy and SGI MIPS box and get all the great FPU performance? Because it costs too much. Sure, at clock speed, the G3/4 kicks x86 (at least integer wise, not sure about fpu). AMD and Cyrix also beat Intel at clock speed. But Intel just ups MHz. Now, the G3/4, probably not only beat Intel chips at clock speed, but at one or two higher clock speeds as well. Here's the thing: you can still get a faster x86 system for much cheaper (note: since we're just talking about speed here, we don't care about friendliness. That's the usual explanation for Mac prices, that you pay for the easiness and friendliness of the system). In october, I put together a Dual P2-350 system, with UW SCSI card, and UW SCSI hard drive, and 64 MB RAM, Matrox G200 vidcard, SB AWE 64, PCI ethernet, and a 12x SCSI cdrom, for $1000. No monitor. But with a monitor, that would have cost the same as an iMac. And there's just no way that the 233 MHz G3 running on a 66MHz bus was gonna beat that system.
So, when the K7, G4, and P3 are all out later this year, if I (a power user), feel like upgrading for more speed, it will most likely be to another x86 chip because speed/$ is much greater.
NOTE: I'm no x86 fanatic (I'm the guy who posted about cheap alphas yesterday), and this discussion does not apply to normal computer users, because to them speed is not all that is important, and they don't understand what makes a computer fast. Fast is not what sells, marketing and gimmicks sell.
IBM is bad ass. Motorola? (Score:1)
Apple writes the only OS in widespread use, but it does not have a stranglehold on the market (ie, it doesn't punish companies for shipping CHRP systems with other OS's on it, a la MS) Apple ended it's OS license to the cloners not because they were shipping other OS's, but because it wanted to. Mot and IBM could have shipped the systems with Linux or god-knows-what-else, but they didn't because they didn't look far enough ahead.
The independant desktop PowerPC market exists, the only thing that doesn't exist (anymore) is the Mac OS-clone market.
Apple Haters... (Score:1)
I'd wager that over 90% of the computing world has strongly feelings about the MacOS (or Apple) one way or another.
Apple has gone through several phases and transitions in its history. Unfortunately, no transition is possible without "die-hards" or other people getting burned. Some people are mad that Apple dropped support for Apple ]['s a decade ago (although way that bothers them still befuddles me), while some are mad that Apple has completely moved to its PowerPC-based RISC systems.
Frankly people like this need to grow up. Face it, change happens. It hurts, but there's no way around it. The Apple ][ was a great computer... 2 decades ago!
Also, Apple went through some quality problems between 1995-97. (Any Mac administrator can give you horror stories about Systems 7.5-7.5.3, or the infamous flaming 5300's). But able has made an amazing turnaround recently in virtually all aspects of its operations. Mac OS 8.5 has none of the quality problems (slow, crashing, unexplained errors) that plagued its predecessors. Many people who cite these "problems" with the Mac OS simply haven't used any recent hardware or the current OS rev.
Also, I'd be remiss if i didn't point out that much of the infrastructure of the computing industry is built around supporting and maintaining Windows-based computers. Any competitior to Windows (ie, Linux, Mac OS, BeOS, etc...) poses a direct threat to the livelihood of most IT departments out there. That can't be discounted as a barrier to acceptance of the Mac OS. (It's after my Job!)
running reliably? You tell me! (Score:1)
ahmm.. I've bought a clone about 8 months ago. The only parts that are not so "clone" are the 233 Pentium processor, Diamond Video card and the SoundBlaster 64.
You talk about reliability? Check this out:
5:51pm up 153 days, 20:04, 3 users, load average: 0.00, 0.01, 0.00
Let me see any other non-Unix OS do similar?
About only time I reboot/shutdown my Linux boxes is when I have to either upgrade my kernel or install new memory/board on the motherboard! Oh yea.. and it was that other time when I moved out of my parents home to my own place ;-)
sidster--
Linux rox ...
Great, something else to waste money on . . . (Score:1)
And people are saying that MS has a monopoly?
This is insanity! Sure, the G4 might be a fast computer..... But who gives a sh*t if nobody can afford the damned thing? Until Apple figures out that this proprietary bullsh*t isn't going to cut it, most people will stick with Intel/AMD.
Why buy a G3 (or G4) for $3K when you can get a PII for $1.5K?
And to top it off, you get MacOS. The OS that doesn't even have the sense to tell you what the hell its errors mean. We constantly get random errors with all of our Macs -- 7.5.3 all the way up to 8.5.
"Gee, why did my Mac lock up?"
"I haven't the slightest clue."
I run DiskDoctor, rebuild the desktop, reboot... and now it works? WTF? What was wrong in the first place? Can it be prevented? Beats me, since the damned thing won't tell me what the _real_ problem is. I don't give a rat's ass how "easy" the MacOS GUI is to use... from a support perspective its a goddamned nightmare! At least windows will tell you what's wrong! (and in most cases, it can be easily fixed)
Oh, to hell with it..... why can't Apple just die?
Apple Haters... (Score:1)
Apple Haters... (Score:1)