UBB.Developers Forums General Discussion Chit Chat WWDC!

Today is the big day for us Mac geeks. 2 hours until Jobs hits the stage. Anxioulsy awaiting announcements about the IBM PPC 970 and Panther

Semi-live updates can be found at:

http://maccentral.macworld.com/news/2003/06/23/keynote/ Although it seems to be getting hammered.

Power Mac News

The G5, in partnership with IBM. 64-bit processor. Runs existing 32-bit apps no problem. Running at up to 2GHz. 1GHz front side bus (FSB). Built for full Symmetric Multiprocessing (SMP). Massively parallel architecture. "Just the beginning." 130 nanometer process with a gate length of under 50 nanometers, 58 million transistors.

System control features point to point architecture. Dedicated bandwidth to main memory for each subsystem. 8GB per second of bandwidth into the processor. 12 times the bandwidth of the G4, no slowdown for second processor. 400MHz 128bit wide DDR memory. 6.4GB/sec of memory bandwidth. 8x AGP graphics. 133MHz PCI-X slots, 2GB per second bandwidth. HyperTransport to main G5 system controller. Serial ATA to connect to drive, 1.5GB per second of bandwidth. FireWire 800 and 400, USB 2.0, AirPort Extreme, Bluetooth, optical I/O. 500GB of storage.

New Power Macs support up to 8GB of RAM. 4x SuperDrive in all models. GeForceFX 5200 Ultra and Radeon 9600 Pro graphics. All aluminum enclosure. 9 fans and computer-controlled cooling. Quieter -- 30dBa (twice as quiet as G4).

3 models: 1.6GHz, 256MB, 80GB $1999. 1.8GHz, 512MB, 160GB $2399. Dual 2GHz, 512MB, 160GB $2999. All will ship in August.

[]tackaberry said:
Power Mac News

The G5, in partnership with IBM. 64-bit processor. Runs existing 32-bit apps no problem. Running at up to 2GHz. 1GHz front side bus (FSB). Built for full Symmetric Multiprocessing (SMP). Massively parallel architecture. "Just the beginning." 130 nanometer process with a gate length of under 50 nanometers, 58 million transistors.

System control features point to point architecture. Dedicated bandwidth to main memory for each subsystem. 8GB per second of bandwidth into the processor. 12 times the bandwidth of the G4, no slowdown for second processor. 400MHz 128bit wide DDR memory. 6.4GB/sec of memory bandwidth. 8x AGP graphics. 133MHz PCI-X slots, 2GB per second bandwidth. HyperTransport to main G5 system controller. Serial ATA to connect to drive, 1.5GB per second of bandwidth. FireWire 800 and 400, USB 2.0, AirPort Extreme, Bluetooth, optical I/O. 500GB of storage.

New Power Macs support up to 8GB of RAM. 4x SuperDrive in all models. GeForceFX 5200 Ultra and Radeon 9600 Pro graphics. All aluminum enclosure. 9 fans and computer-controlled cooling. Quieter -- 30dBa (twice as quiet as G4).

3 models: 1.6GHz, 256MB, 80GB $1999. 1.8GHz, 512MB, 160GB $2399. Dual 2GHz, 512MB, 160GB $2999. All will ship in August.


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I want one, I want one lol

I'm still running on a G3 (old case, but upgraded the cpu to the faster g3 chip), I feel so behind

Ohhhh! Gimme! Me wants it!

It was a long time since I was impressed by a Power PC processor, but this one certainly is interesting. Not too high prices either, even though I won't be able to buy anyting in the nearest 3 years...

[]tackaberry said:
Dual 2GHz, 512MB, 160GB $2999. All will ship in August.
[/]
I'm drooling over this. You know, if someone wants to give me one, I won't be offended.

I hate to bust yer bubble, but apparently Apple cheated big time on their benchmarks to stack the cards in their favor. I'm sure the G5 is good, but don't take everything Steve-o tells you as absolute end-all truth...

http://www.theregister.com/content/39/31405.html

---Jamin

A similar story appeared on slashdot

http://www.haxial.com/spls-soapbox/apple-powermac-G5/

As far as I'm concerned, every manufacturer tunes the machines to outperform on the benchmarks, which themselves are relatively useless and moderately amusing

In the real world, the G5 is way faster than the G4's and that is what will matter for those who have held off on buying a new Mac, and will wind up buying the machines.

Power Mac's aren't going to attract the average joe. Although, I don't see the benefit of the APple marketing machine positioning it as the fastest thing out there...because that kind of claim is bound to have a limited shelf life regardless.

I think they are pretty cool looking, although I don't see myself buying one. If anything, I might buy a G5 PowerBook when they come out in the future, although I'm super happy with my 12" AL

OOC, any thoughts on how the new 64-bit architecture is going to affect design apps like Photoshop? I know you HAVE to get the newest version of PS if you want it to work on OSX... is it going to be like this for G5 too? I've always had secret desires to get a mac, because of the better graphics abilities and such... but now am I going to have to wait for Adobe to update PS for G5 again?

---Jamin

Hmmm....

I sense a trend here-

I bought my new dual G4 about a month and a half ago.

[]Jamin said:
OOC, any thoughts on how the new 64-bit architecture is going to affect design apps like Photoshop? I know you HAVE to get the newest version of PS if you want it to work on OSX... is it going to be like this for G5 too? I've always had secret desires to get a mac, because of the better graphics abilities and such... but now am I going to have to wait for Adobe to update PS for G5 again?

---Jamin [/]

Adobe already has a PhotoShop 7 version optimized for the G5's. Supposedly it will be a free upgrade to PS7 users and will be available when the G5's ship in August/September. During the WWDC some developer came on stage and live in front of the audience took his 32-bit app and in 15 minutes re-compiled it for 64-bit optimization. Apple claims that recompiling 32-bit apps in OS X to 64-bit shouldn't be a real big deal, but we'll see how many take the time to do it. And it will depend on how efficient the developer was with the code and how OS X-compliant they were first run through. Adobe is the only major player I've seen publicly announce immediate support for the 64-bit architecture.

So to answer your question, if you have PS7 and OS X and you bought a G5 today, you wouldn't have to spend any money on a PS7 64-bit upgrade.

Of course, all existing 32-bit apps will run just fine on the G5's, and better than they ran on the G4's.

[]Jamin said:
I hate to bust yer bubble, but apparently Apple cheated big time on their benchmarks to stack the cards in their favor. I'm sure the G5 is good, but don't take everything Steve-o tells you as absolute end-all truth...

http://www.theregister.com/content/39/31405.html

---Jamin [/]

I agree that Apple and anyone else who uses benchmarks will lean towards setting it up to favor their systems. Just looking at the specs you can't argue that it won't be vastly faster than the current G4's and is in the very close neighborhood with current high-end P4's. And I would argue your using the phrase "cheated big time" because I think that is a way overblown statement. They were more fair than many of the tests I've seen in the PC CPU and GPU world.

It drives me crazy listening to Intel and AMD people go at each other about thousands of benchmarks, each one saying something different, bouncing between the two as to which is faster. In the end, does it really make a usable difference between an AMD XP 3000 vs. a P4 3.2Ghz. For me in the Intel/AMD world, everything past 2 Ghz is just gravy.

But, for me to believe Apple has the fastest personal computer right now, I'll have to wait til they ship and some hardware review shops get them going. Benchmarks really don't mean much to me, its more about how the apps as you would buy them off the shelf will perform across different platforms.

My 15" 867Mhz PowerBook at home runs applications about as fast as my 1.8Ghz AMD WinXP at work. In fact, more than a few times I bring my PB to work to work on certain projects just because I can get the job done a little more efficiently. And so far, there is nothing I do with either computer that I feel is too slow. I might consider an upgrade to a G5 tower, mainly because its an entirely new architecture for Macs, and there will probably be some fantastic software coming out in the coming years that will fully utilize it in ways I can't imagine right now.

[]Jamin said:
OOC, any thoughts on how the new 64-bit architecture is going to affect design apps like Photoshop? I know you HAVE to get the newest version of PS if you want it to work on OSX... is it going to be like this for G5 too? I've always had secret desires to get a mac, because of the better graphics abilities and such... but now am I going to have to wait for Adobe to update PS for G5 again?

---Jamin [/]

Adobe announced that they will have Photoshop Plug-Ins, which will allow PS to run TWICE as fast on the G5's. That's pretty impressive if it is in fact true. Besides, that's not even including performance gains when the machine is upgraded to a 64-bit optimized version of OS X.

http://maccentral.macworld.com/news/2003/06/24/photoshopg5/

[]AllenAyres said:
Only ~ a year late, but it's nice to see Apple still plugging away.

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Possibly irrelevant considering this. Also, are Itaniums being distributed in desktop computers in mass production? I thought most of the Itanium's to date have been divied out to testers for testing, but not for general consumption.

Apple wasn't making the claim they are the first to have a 64-bit processor, for God's sake those have been around for a while. Their statement was that they are the first to have a 64-bit based desktop computer, as opposed to a workstation or server.

The only other 64-bit competitor I can see right now is AMD with their 64-bit Athlon coming out last I heard in September. Though they do have the Opteron out right now, but I haven't seen where its been pushed or picked up by consumers.