Is Apple at a dead end?

Can anyone say "Edsel"???

I dunno. Mac bashing is a national passtime for some. Isn't the new hardware thinga done deal? I read that they were going to intel/amd based hardware a couple of weeks ago. If so, they would no longer have to defend strange hardware specs:

( a guy once spent a half hour trying to tell me why his dual processor (2x1ghz) powermac was twice as powerful as my 1.8 celeron... I would rather set myself on fire than talk processors with a mac person...)

I can't see how switching to hardware that is more plentiful and cheaper to acquire would be bad for anyone, even if they have to take a bad quarter or two to do it. Wouldn't this also put them a tad closer to being able to sell boxed copies of OSX to the average PC user? Their new 5-Box licensing is veeeeery nice, and would be tempting for even me. I loathe the idea of buying boxed copies of XP for the 4 computers doing various duties around my house...

All this is from me, mr MacIgnorant, so overlook me if I am wrong. I just think that the trouble with Mac has been 99% hardware since their initial decline. Wouldn't they be better off as a software company, or software with a a dell-like division? For a company that is not business targeted to make both hardware and software seems a little overreaching to me. You have all the problems of a company like microsoft, with all the painful problems of companies like HP and Dell, rolled into one. Why bother? Maybe because you are in cahoots with MS, who fears that boxed copies of OSX that will run on the average PC makes the linux threat look like a game of tiddlywinks in the home PC OS market? Having to fight OSX on the consumer side and Linux on the business side would suck, bad, imho.

again, forgive the ignorance. This is just your average coffeeshop wisdom... I'll go skin now...

ugh, 1.8 intel. I have a celeron box on my desk, leering at me, making me say things...

wow what news! Amiga and now Mac! Well as long we have fast computers, PC or Mac don't really matter to me. Just too bad for them tought.

As I understand it (and Steven Den Beste's article seems to substantiate it) the Apple OS is more or less wedded to their processor structure. So becoming a software company is not an immediate option. You CAN'T just put the OS on a different processor platform.

As for migrating to AMD... if I were Microsoft I might tell AMD that if they were Apple-friendly the next generation of Windows would certainly take advantage of the architecture of the Intel chip. But perhaps not. At one time, Microsoft was the single largest owner of Apple common stock.

Apple is in trouble because they became dependent on a single source (Motorola) that they did not control.

Kind of ironic that Apple and IBM would have similar problems.

Funny bakerstreet, I see it the other way. Apple makes erally really good computers, that unfortunately run on a crapy OS. Of course, that may change now that they at last have a good OS. Or so we hear.

No, it's not all the truth. Apple makes proprietary hardware. I HATE THIS.
You don't have the CHOICE of MB's, Video Cards, etc. You gotta buy APPLE hardware. Thus, price goes thru the roof. PC's are cheaper since there are SO many makers of all types of hardware. Mac OSX is VERY VERY nice. Probably the BEST OS I've ever put my hands on, and trust me, I've run just about all of them at my job. We have about every OS made working in some format at my TV station. Win, Apple, Unix, Linux, SGI IRIX, AS/400, even OS/2. I can go on..
I'm HOPING myself, since OSX is based on Free BSD which runs on Intel, MAC OSX will make it's way to intel. They DON'T have much to do there.. Look at SGI..
SGI ran Motorola CPU's for years and now new SGI workstations are running Intel stuff.. I hate windows. Allways have.. XP is about the most stable that I've run ( 2000 was good also ) but Microsofts biz practices piss me off..
That's why I've got OD. I cannot STAND the way windows looks.. I run Win XP and Linux at home.. I would run Linux ALL the time, but there are some things I JUST need to do work related at home that are WIN only..

That may be that because apple makes all the hardware the price goes up but it also makes it much more stable. Much more hardware work good together than it does for the pc, the system never shuts down or get blue screens because of hardware trouble, maybe more because of too little ram. The trouble is that you can not play pc games on apple computers and not so many programs work either. Most of them are also more expencive to buy than for the pc.

I understand that you can't just plug the new Mac os into a new hardware/processor setup. But it is kind of like a guy that has a 300 pound gorilla living in his closet. Every day, the gorilla comes out and socks him in the teeth. Since it is cheaper to buy false teeth than get rid of the gorilla, he just keeps buying false teeth.

In this case apple keeps slapping nice cases and flashy OS on a hardware setup that is substandard, and tries to muddy the water by adding processesors and propaganda, which doubles the cost for processors, and doesn't come close to doubling performance. I say save the money for false teeth, and spend the extra money on getting rid of the gorilla.

If they are prevented from making a PC compatable OS because microsoft is scared of them, then they need to go to the government about it, like everyone else. Had they been more of a voice in previous attempts to control microsoft, then something more might have been accomplished. I would be willing to be bet they have years worth of memos and emails filled with bullying, extortion and threats from MS. I would predict that when they do gain a new hardware design, it will be incomapatble with the traditional, Windows/*nix setup, and i bet MS "helps absorb the costs" just so they won't have a boxed copy of OS 10.2 adding a second front to their little war...

Porting to another CPU architecture isn't trivial. It took them years go migrate from 68k to powerPC and both of those were made by Motorola and both were big endian.

Well, i guess if you 'like' getting socked in the teeth by gorillas it wouldn't be worth the effort...

They are dead if they don't, IMHO. I don't think they will keep current hardware smokescreen going through the advent of 4 and 5 Intel/AMDgig processors. Design-software developers are gonna catch up to the hardware sooner or later. Then Apple will be left with grandmas and teens who like their 'look', which will pretty much make them a classy e-machine with its own OS...

well, i don't want to get into a debate about the facts involved because i'm not an electrical engineer. i do know something engineers have told me before though. it's too easy to just hold up megahz for both x86 and power pc chips. it's like comparing rpms in cars.. car a maxes out at 5000 rpms, car b maxes out at 6000 rpms - therefore b must be faster.. well, not necessarily. for example, what if a has 5 gears, and b has only 4? to find out which is really faster, you need to measure mph instead. that's the problem.. mhz is not a universal measurement of how fast a machine is. if all else is equal, sure it is.. but if it's not, no. if i recall correctly, intel xenon chips with the same clock speed are 'faster' than their non-xenon counterparts.

it's just so easy to latch onto a simple quantifiable number. i don't know.. i just think it's a shame that all this high powered marketing can't seem to dispel a simple mis-conception.

all i know for sure is that in my consistent personal experience, and that of a wide number of people i've talked to, when loading and running the same apps on an x86 and a power pc, the apps run faster and perform better on the power pc, even when the
'clock speed' is much lower.. about 60 to 70% of the intel.

that said though, i think the whole idea of mhz and comparing across the board is so ingrained in people, nothing will ever knock it out. indeed, they will probably have to switch to an inferior chip just to satisfy consumer perceptions. hehe.. i can hear it now.. 'you can't argue with numbers man..' heh..

This is not the first time I have heard that Motorola isn't developing anything for Apple. There have been rumblings that Apple is taking a serious look at going to the 64bit chip from AMD. There have been mixed reviews about how the chip will preform. Some are saying that the chip will really suffer in 32bit mode and others (including someone that managed to 'borrow' a refrence chip from a motherboard maker for a weekend) say that even in 32bit mode it will be faster by around 30% over the fastest P4. The number of chipset and motherboard makers burning the midnight oil to be ready for it leads me to believe it will be a great chip. If the chip is really that spectacular then this could be a good time for Apple to make the jump.

I am not sure how hard it would be to port the OS. Other software makers have been porting between Apple and the PC for years, including Linux, another OS. While I think it would be harder then flipping a switch in a compilier, the kernel is based on FreeBSD which started on the PC.

Since when has M$ been a great friend of AMD? They are porting the OS to support the Hammer, but M$ has always been willing to share. They just want to have, by far, the largest chunk.

The OS will not be available for all PC owners. I think if Apple did it they would make sure that you had an approved Apple branded(waaay overpriced) motherboard. Making the OS available to everyone would be too smart for Apple to do.

Running dual processors does not give you double the cpu capability. Most benchmarks I have seen say that running duals gives you about 130-150% percent what one processor does. Apple is not even using the most advanced architecture to do it. The OS and software also need to be optimized for it. Even if they are optimized for it many applications recieve little to no benifit from using duals. Having said that, I find it hard to believe that dual 1gig powerPC's can hold a candle to a 2+gig cpu from AMD or Intel. AMD agrees that Mhz is a dated way of comparing cpu's. They have started using their own ratings. A standard setup with a 2gig Athlon vs a 2gig P4 shows the Athlon faster in many applications. I do think it is possible that software runs faster on a powerPC at the same clock speed. The Apple OS's over the years have not had to support a fantastic array of hardware. MS is also known for writing bloat ware that would make their OS slower. I heard a story once from a developer at MS. He said that at one point orders came down from the mountain that from then on they were to use a format for developing the OS that would make all programs look similar and easier to use but make the OS slower and larger.

I find this whole bit quite amusing. The G4 AS IS can run two instructions per clock cycle - yet you don't hear apple or motorolla branding 1ghz G4's as 2ghz. The G4's pipeline is only 7... compared to a whopping 20 for the P4. Placing it in simple terms, this allows the instruction to pass through the G4's pipeline over twice as fast as one would on a P4. Put one plus two together, and it is easy to see why a dual 1.25ghz G4 system can encode to DVD roughly TWICE as fast as a 2.53ghz P4.

It is even more so that noone seems to take mention or notice of how motorolla announced sometime ago now it's new fab process which yields in excess of 2ghz for G4's; nor of IBM's new PPC processors screaming into clockspeeds UNHEARD OF for any arch type. Then there's the fabled G5, a full 64-bit cpu which can also run 32-bit code native which I won't even get into.

As far as altivec... well all I'll say is yeah it's crazy for a RISC processor but so what
Apple is famous for their crazy ideas - it's called innovation here people
Being able to handle a 128-bit data path FAR outways any 'quad-pumped' P4 bus lol. You know (don't you?) that the P4 bus is only a 4-way 8-bit path (32-bit total architecture)!

All I read are these ridiculous comments on 'more choice' for h/w, more benefit to users. Blech. The new apple h/w HAS DDR-ram. It even has TWO onboard ata controllers. You can run raid (not ata-133 big whoop anyhow), but the big deal is putting your optical/magnetic drives onto the second ata-66 controller so as to free your main ata-100 controller from the load (as well as to give maximum thoroughput while having two optical and/or magnetic drives on the second controller). Alas there are many extravangant upgrade and/or h/w options for those inclined to search and/or I dunno... LOOK! lol (Links provided upon request for those blind ones.)

You also get FULL-LENGTH 64-BIT PCI slots on new apple h/w. That's something far from standard on x86 Then there's the low-latency- extremely low. You get ~1 millisecond for audio at 96khz @ 24-bit. 32-bit floating point is already builtin and waiting to be taken advantage of, and there are loads of PRO-QUALITY audio cards for mac. Don't even make me laugh (woop too late) - creative blows. Their recent cards might do 96khz @ 24-bit INTERNAL PRECISION, but you sure as hell can't record a wave or riff or anything else with their cards in that pro-format. Your dvd player under your tv can do better than your creative card if all you look at is internal precision - just use your eyes, please.

For years now, people have been taking video cards branded for x86, flashing their bios' to mac ones and using them in their macs (something you also seem to be oblivious to). Saying x86 competition has driven video co's to new levels is a moot point, seeing how if there were only apples the same would be true.

Don't forget that Apple is a HARDWARE company. They can guarantee their software will run on the computers they sell, BECAUSE they design the hardware, make it and sell it- something often forgotten in the minds of x86 users. This is where they make their money. If they have to charge more for a superior product then so be it, because that is exactly what you get- a superior product. Things just work.

If you were to compare Apple computer H/W evolution to M.S. $oftware evolution, it is clear who upgrades in more ways, more meaningful and more often. Sure it's not as often as you'd like, because in the end they have to make money; yet it should be quite clear that apple is the leader to all those but the close-minded, ear-shut and eyes-closed bigots.

Where can Apple go from here? Up, up and away... superman-like even.

peace

AMD state that clock speed is a dated way of measuring performance. Afterall a 2.2Ghz AMD is faster than a 2.4Ghz Intel. So what if basic Apple G4 is a dual 867Mhz. OK, the Apple costs more, so what.

Are any of you going to complain that a Merc costs more than a Ford, of course not. Everyone seems so caught up in what Microsoft has to say. Do you get a DVD-r drive with your standard PC, of course not.

I know alot of Graphic Designers who won't even touch OSX yet, they prefer to use what they know, why should they change.


I say, Apple carry on doing what your doing. Carry on developing intuiative OS's and well designed computers. For example the new iMac, beautiful piece of kit. You won't see any PC manufacturer build a machine like that will you.

I would rather pay more for a machine that will still do the job in 5 years time.

Hmm, brief summary:
Apple - innovative computing, not afraid to rock the boat,
Intel - not worth the money,
AMD - good job kicking Intels arse but still relys on IBM compatible architecture of early 80's ,
Microsoft - waste of time installing.

There is no shortage of benchmarks that show that the G4 is no longer competitive with the latest chips from AMD or Intel.

Clock speed isn't anything but a 1 ghz CPU G4 is not going to be able to keep up with a 2.5 ghz Pentium CPU.

Having been a Mac user in the past, and now a PC user, I've been on both sides of this issue.

Until there is a benchmarking software that will run on both the Mac/PC platforms, it really is an apples/oranges argument.

In my experience, there's no OS like the MacOS. OSX just widens the gap, IMO. WinXP is the best OS Microsoft has released, but it's not nearly as intuitive, powerful, or stable as OSX. With the recent announcment of OSX coming for the Intel side, I'm almost giddy.

I've owned 2 Macs in my past, and loved both of them. The first, I outgrew, but I got 5 years of use out of it. The second, I fried by attempting to install RAM (darned static electricity - I actually heard it "pop.") It was my own fault, and I have no doubts that I would have gotten much more use out of the machine.

However, upgrading a Mac involves replacing the entire machine, as you can't swap motherboards/cpu's at will. But, you just don't see hardware/OS issues on the Mac. It doesn't happen. By cutting the hardware choices, Apple has come up with machines that just plain work, and KEEP ON working. My PowerMac once ran for 4 1/2 months, between reboots/power down. I only shut it down because of a bad lightning storm in the area. I think the longest my current machine (AMD CPU) has run uninterupted is 10-12 days.

I look at Mac's like specialized cars - they have their purpose, and that doesn't always mean general use. Just as 90% of the population wouldn't use a military issue hummer for drag racing, most consumers won't use a Mac... (That's not to say that you can't use a Mac for general use, but if you value playing the latest/greatest games, or having a ton of choices to perform software tasks, then maybe the Mac isn't for you. However, if you need a stable piece of hardware, and an intuitive and powerful OS, and are willing to make some concessions when it comes to software, then the Mac is a good choice.

Just my 2 cents...

R

>I find this whole bit quite amusing. The G4 AS IS can run two instructions
>per clock cycle - yet you don't hear apple or motorolla branding 1ghz G4's
>as 2ghz. The G4's pipeline is only 7... compared to a whopping 20 for the
>P4. Placing it in simple terms, this allows the instruction to pass through
>the G4's pipeline over twice as fast as one would on a P4. Put one plus two
>together, and it is easy to see why a dual 1.25ghz G4 system can encode to
>DVD roughly TWICE as fast as a 2.53ghz P4.

Apparently you don't know how a pipeline works. As long as you don't get a branch mispredict, the length of the pipeline doesn't affect the rate at which instructions get executed. When you say the G4 "can" execute 2 instructions per cycle, it's important to note that most of the time, running the code that's on a Mac, in the Mac hardware environment, it actually doesn't do so. That's because some instruction sequences can't be parallelized that way, and a lot of the time even a single G4 is starved for data from the SDRAM. (You can't execute what you haven't fetched.)

It's also the case that both the Athlon and the P4 "can" execute two instructions at once. (In fact, they can execute up to four, but it almost never happens.)

The G4 pipeline is seven stages. On the P4 it's 20. What that means is that the P4 has taken the same job and divided it into a lot smaller steps, each of which is easier to execute. In other words, each step can be executed faster, which means that the unit can run at a much higher clock rate. The PIII also had a much shorter pipeline. The problem with short pipelines is that they have a lot lower top-end clock rate, and the G4 is near its ceiling now. The P4, on the other hand, is just getting started. (Intel just released a 2.8 GHz unit, and will almost certainly break 3 GHz before the end of the year, with even more to come after that. They didn't increase the length of the pipeline because they were stupid, they did so because they were smart. That's what you have to do in order to keep the power of the CPU rising.

>It is even more so that noone seems to take mention or notice of how
>motorolla announced sometime ago now it's new fab process which yields in
>excess of 2ghz for G4's; nor of IBM's new PPC processors screaming into
>clockspeeds UNHEARD OF for any arch type. Then there's the fabled G5, a full,
>64-bit cpu which can also run 32-bit code native which I won't even get
>into.

Well, most of us figured it was another of Motorola's many vapor announcements. At a certain industry convention every fall, it had become something of a tradition each year that Motorola announced that its PPCs would soon achieve clock rate parity with Intel. Of course, they never came close. Just as Intel broke 1 GHz with the PIII's, Moto announced that 1 GHz PPCs were coming. But the actual 1 GHz PPC didn't show up until a few months ago, something like 2 and a half years later.

The reality is that Motorola's marketing folks can't face the prospect of walking into that convention and saying, "We're behind and we fully expect to stay behind for the forseeable future" because then the stockholders would get mad. Much better just to lie about how cool it was all going to be, when the PPC hit 1 GHz (which they announced in 1999) and when it hits 2 GHz (which the G4 won't ever do because a 7-stage pipeline processor can't go that fast no matter what IC technology it's built out of).

>As far as altivec... well all I'll say is yeah it's crazy for a RISC
>processor but so what
>Apple is famous for their crazy ideas - it's called innovation here people
>Being able to handle a 128-bit data path FAR outways any 'quad-pumped' P4
>bus lol. You know (don't you?) that the P4 bus is only a 4-way 8-bit path
>(32-bit total architecture)!

Apple may well be famous for their crazy ideas, but Motorola designed Altivec, not Apple. And like any SIMD system, it is really good at some things and totally useless for others. It's not a universal panacea, and in any case the P4's SSE2 is essentially as good now if not better, when measured against real time. Altivec can do more per cycle, but it doesn't do 2.5 times as much per cycle, and the fastest P4 now gets in 2.8 cycles for every one of the fastest G4.

>All I read are these ridiculous comments on 'more choice' for h/w, more
>benefit to users. Blech. The new apple h/w HAS DDR-ram. It even has TWO
>onboard ata controllers. You can run raid (not ata-133 big whoop anyhow),
>but the big deal is putting your optical/magnetic drives onto the second
>ata-66 controller so as to free your main ata-100 controller from the load
>(as well as to give maximum thoroughput while having two optical and/or
>magnetic drives on the second controller). Alas there are many extravangant
>upgrade and/or h/w options for those inclined to search and/or I dunno...
>LOOK! lol (Links provided upon request for those blind ones.)

It has DDR-SDRAM and it's throwing away about 40% of its capability, except when it's doing DMA to the hard disks. The RAM in question is 333 MHz DDR-SDRAM, but it's being used to feed a 167 MHz bus. The only reason they went with it is that there is no 167 MHz SDRAM. So they're using DDR-SDRAM as if it were simple single-data-rate SDRAM.

Two ATA controllers has been standard on top end PC mobos for several months now, with one of them being RAID and both being enabled for ATA-133. And the reason ATA-133 is valuable is that any IDE disk larger than (I think it was) 130G can only be used with an ATA-133 controller. (They did more in that change than just speed it up.)

>You also get FULL-LENGTH 64-BIT PCI slots on new apple h/w. That's something
>far from standard on x86 Then there's the low-latency- extremely low. You
>get ~1 millisecond for audio at 96khz @ 24-bit. 32-bit floating point is
>already builtin and waiting to be taken advantage of, and there are loads of
>PRO-QUALITY audio cards for mac. Don't even make me laugh (woop too late) -
>creative blows. Their recent cards might do 96khz @ 24-bit INTERNAL
>PRECISION, but you sure as hell can't record a wave or riff or anything else
>with their cards in that pro-format. Your dvd player under your tv can do
>better than your creative card if all you look at is internal precision -
>just use your eyes, please.

Actually, full length PCI slots are rapidly becoming quite common. (The new PC I just bought has three of them, AND three additional slots besides.) 32-bit floating point is damned near useless because it accumulates errors too fast. I'll be damned if I know where this comment about latency comes from; what's that got to do with the motherboard?

>For years now, people have been taking video cards branded for x86, flashing
>their bios' to mac ones and using them in their macs (something you also
>seem to be oblivious to). Saying x86 competition has driven video co's to
>new levels is a moot point, seeing how if there were only apples the same
>would be true.

For a long time, the fastest NVidia cards were hardware incompatible with the Mac, for reasons that has never been clear to me. It wasn't until to GeForce 2 MX that NVidia brought out a chip which actually could be used with the Mac. And the reason that Mac fans were buying PC video cards is that the ones Apple was shipping were, by and large, sucky.

>Don't forget that Apple is a HARDWARE company. They can guarantee their
>software will run on the computers they sell, BECAUSE they design the
>hardware, make it and sell it- something often forgotten in the minds of x86
>users. This is where they make their money. If they have to charge more for
>a superior product then so be it, because that is exactly what you get- a
>superior product. Things just work.

Until they crash, as OSX has been doing a disturbingly high number of times from the reports I'm seeing.

And there isn't any guarantee that the software will run; no company which develops any kind of significant software would be stupid enough to write such a thing. (Software ships with a disclaimer, not a guarantee.)


>If you were to compare Apple computer H/W evolution to M.S. $oftware
>evolution, it is clear who upgrades in more ways, more meaningful and more
>often. Sure it's not as often as you'd like, because in the end they have to
>make money; yet it should be quite clear that apple is the leader to all
>those but the close-minded, ear-shut and eyes-closed bigots.

Comparing Apple's hardware to Microsoft's software is the classic Apple-to-Orange comparison. How about comparing Apple's hardware to Intel's hardware?

>Where can Apple go from here? Up, up and away... superman-like even.

There are two big questions regarding where Apple can go, once one comes down from the drugs one has taken to go up, up and away.

1. When will IBM be ready with desktop Power4's in quantity?
2. How much will they charge Apple for them?

Neither question has an obvious answer. Given that I think that the machines just released are pretty much the end for speed increases from Moto (with maybe, just maybe, one more minor bump) then Apple is stuck with what it's got until it can start to ship Power4 units, even as Intel and AMD continue to move the bar up. Intel just released a 2.8 GHz P4, and it's not even remotely close to done with the speed increases which are coming out of that design. I wouldn't be surprised if they can eventually push it to 5 GHz or even beyond, especially once they move to the 90 nanometer process they're working on now.

It wouldn't surprise me at all if it's a year from now before the Power4's are ready in quantity, but no one outside Apple and IBM really knows for sure.

The per-unit price for the chips is an even more interesting question. Right now the 2.4 GHz Xeon runs $700 retail, and on that part much of the engineering was subsidized by the regular P4 which is selling in much higher quantity. (They're both versions of the basic Northwood core.) The reason that Moto has been taking it in the teeth financially is that they haven't been able to charge Apple a chip price high enough to make back their engineering expense on the volume Apple buys, which means that though Motorola makes more than manufacturing cost on each chip, it loses money overall on Apple's business. (A **LOT** of money.)

IBM won't make that mistake. Aside from Apple, the only other customer for the new Power4's will be IBM's own workstation group, which will be doing quite a lot less volume than Apple will, and selling machines at quite a lot higher price. So I would not in the slightest be surprised if, when the time comes, Apple ends up paying IBM about $1000 per chip for these. And if that's the case, then Apple won't be able to afford to put them into anything except extremely expensive high-level units.

If the next speed bump from Apple is a year off, and if when the machines come out the cheapest one is $5,000, what will that do to Apple's overall business?

Will it be up, up and away, or down, down into the ground?

By the way, here's an interesting fact. When any pipelined processor mispredicts a branch, it has to flush its pipeline and refill it. Most processors now are very good at branch prediction, and both the Athlon and P4 predict correctly more than 90% of the time (though I don't know the exact figure, and note that it varies depending on the program).

The G4 has to, also. When the G4 mispredicts, it has to reload all 7 pipeline stages, taking 7 clock cycles to do so. Assuming a 1 GHz clock rate, that means it takes 7 nanoseconds.

The P4 has to reload 17 stages. (For reasons too complicated to go into here, it doesn't have to reload all 20.) For a 2.8 GHz P4, that takes 6 nanoseconds. Which means that the disparity in clock rates has now reached the point where the G4's shorter pipeline isn't even an advantage any longer.

There **is** a "Megahertz myth", but it's Apple that's pushing it. The myth is that no matter how great the disparity in clock rates, the Mac is always faster, and somehow the Mac keeps increasing in speed without increasing its clock rate so as to stay faster than the P4 or Athlon as they do continue to speed up.

All objective third-party testing which has been done comparing variously configured PCs against the fastest Macs show that the Mac is now quite a lot slower at nearly everything. Of course, with the radically different architectures of the PPC and the x86, performance will be uneven, and there are an extremely small number of cases where the G4 actually still performs disproportionately rapidly. Apple has been searching as hard as it can to find such cases, demonstrate them in public, and pretend that they're somehow typical. The reality is that those kinds of cases almost never come up in normal use, and that for actual non-trivial use these days PCs are both quite a lot faster AND cost less, too.

In one benchmark run by someone other than Apple, doing non-trivial work in video production, a single-CPU P4 running 2.53 GHz was nearly twice as fast at many kinds of operations as a dual 1-GHz G4, and it also cost several hundred dollars less.

You can find it here:

http://www.digitalvideoediting.com/2002/07_jul/features/cw_macvspc2.htm

They actually did a three-way comparison, also including a dual Athlon. In some tests the P4 was faster. In some tests the Athlon was faster. The Mac was always slower and nearly always a hell of a lot slower.

But that's because these were real use examples, not carefully cooked exercises in propaganda from Apple intended to try to support their megahertz myth.

I started computing when a home computer was programmed in machine code and had 256 bytes (yes bytes) of RAM. We progressed to assembler programs that saved us having to know the hex code for each instruction a processor was capable of and commercial computer systems with 16K of RAM and on into today's world of human intelligible language compilers. I spent nearly 10 years programming for a system which finally reached the luxurious level of 4Mb of RAM. We couldn't use that much for programs (the application didn't need it) so I wrote a disk cache to make use of 2Mb of it. This system only supported 60 concurrent users.

The quality of the compiler has a huge influence on the efficiency of the code executed. A piece of 'generalised' code to multiply two numbers is likely to run to many orders of magnitude more instructions than would be required if the programmer had used assembler with a comprehensive understanding of what sized numbers the code might be asked to execute.

What I am rambling on about is that computers can be made to execute the tasks we want done much faster by revisiting the compilers used to convert the programmers high level language into what the CPU actually performs. Could this be the way for Apple to be going?

Actually,
u guys shld check out mac.com and find out why a g4 mac processor is equaivalent or even better than p4s... something abt velocity engine and the bus. Anyway the apple's Airport feature is realli cool too.. AND imac is the onli model i have seen that has an adjustable LCD screen...

I've looked at "mac.com" and what I've seen is lies, evasion, and deliberate distortion by a company attempting to deceive in order to cover up the fact that their machines are distinctly behind the curve, overpriced and horribly underpowered, because their main supplier of processors isn't staying competitive. I see a company attempting to convince the gullible that up is down, sideways is straight ahead, and the G4 is always faster than the P4 no matter what their relative clock rates.

And I'm sad to see that some people fall for it.

The "Velocity engine", also known as "Altivec", is the PPC's implemention of SIMD. In the P4 it's known as SSE2, and they're basically equivalent now in effective capability. Altivec can perform more per clock cycle, but SSE2 gets in a lot more cycles, and they do the same amout of work in real time for all practical purposes. But irrespective of that, SIMD systems are by their nature very specialized and can only be used to solve certain specific kinds of problems. For most things SIMD (Single Instruction, Multiple Data) is totally useless and can't be applied.

The G4's bus, meanwhile, is actually the reason why the latest Macs are completely crippled. The newest Mac is an attempt to build a city and supply it completely over a dirt road filled with potholes. Apple is about a year overdue for a total redesign of that bus, but it can't be done without a total redesign of the CPU, and Motorola doesn't seem interested in doing that.

One thing in particular that's interesting: benchmarks have shown that the new dual-processor Macs slow down considerably when running two unrelated programs simultaneously which are both CPU bound. That's not what is supposed to happen in a dual system, since each program should be running on a separate CPU, and on a decently designed system both programs will run about the same speed as they would alone. But on the Macs, what this does is to overstress that marvelous bus to which you refer, leaving both processors starved for ability to access the RAM. As a result, both CPUs end up wasting a lot of cycles in wait-states because they need to retrieve memory and the bus is busy serving the other CPU. http://www.barefeats.com/pmddr2.html

More disturbing is that Rob has found that the new dual-G4 DDR 1GHz Mac is actually slower at most things than the older dual-G4 SDRAM 1GHz Mac. The new machine has DDR-SDRAM and a 167 MHz bus, while the old machine has SDRAM at a 133 MHz bus. But the old machine has twice the L3 cache, and that seems to be the difference.

The new machines use DDR-SDRAM, but they're feeding data onto a bus which is not double datarate. The reason Apple went with DDR was that it can be purchased to run at 167 MHz, while SDRAM can't be. But they're using the DDR as if it was SDRAM; they're not using the "double data rate" because the G4's bus can't handle it.

Any attempt to claim that the G4's bus is any kind of advantage is a total crock. It's the single weakest part of the entire modern Mac system, and it is what is holding the performance of all modern Macs backward. It is a terrible bottleneck, but Apple can't fix it without Motorola's help, and Motorola no longer cares.

As to the "adjustable LCD screen", check this out: http://www.gateway.com/home/prod/hm_profile4x_ProdDetail.shtml

That iMac may well look pretty cool, but the actual electronics in it is damned shitty, even by Apple's standards, and as a computer (rather than an objet d'art) it's a waste of time (http://www.etestinglabs.com/main/reports/gateway.pdf). Meanwhile, the single pylon support for the screen looks really cool from a distance, but it was an extremely poor design choice in practice. What people have been finding is that on the majority of the LCD iMacs, the screen flops to the left or right and can't be adjusted to stay straight. That was bad with the 15" version, but it's worse with the 17" because the screen is bigger and the lateral forces are greater. Gateway's design, with two supports, won't have that weakness. It's true that it also won't be quite as "adjustable", but sometimes that's a good thing given the iMac's tendency to spontaneously adjust itself by flopping its screen over to the side.

IanAdd, I'm afraid that compiler technology today is actually extremely good. Most modern compilers actually produce code which is tighter than humans could, because the compiler can use approaches humans would try to avoid. (If a human used them the chance of inducing bugs would be too high, but the compiler can keep things straight and avoid the pitfalls.) Unfortunately, the problem of code efficiency is multidimensional, and it turns out that there are legitimate reasons why you don't want to try to force your programmers to keep their code unreasonably efficient if you can avoid it.

In summary: efficient code takes too long to write and has too many bugs. Inefficient code can be delivered sooner, costs less to develop, and will be more reliable. And given the increases in processor speed available to everyone (except Mac users), it's a reasonable tradeoff: I'd rather have an inefficient piece of code available to buy today than a promise of efficient code to be delivered in five years, maybe. I can compensate for inefficiency with faster processors, but no one can run code which hasn't yet been delivered.

I wrote a long series of articles which discussed some of those issues, here: http://denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2002/07/OpenSourcepart1.shtml http://denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2002/07/OpenSourcepart2.shtml http://denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2002/07/OpenSourcepart3.shtml http://denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2002/07/OpenSourcepart4.shtml http://denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2002/07/OpenSourcepart5.shtml

MAN, am I sick of the RISC vs. CISC, G4 vs. P4 vs. Athlon debates. And the argument that Macs run better because Apple controls both the hardware and the OS, leading to better total integration between the two is hogwash.

I remember just a few short years ago and the ultra-hyped release of OS-8. Initial public releases of OS-8 installed on Performa 6500 series using the 603e CPU had a nasty tendency to trash the hard drives' boot sectors, making them unbootable and in fact, rendering all the data on them unrecoverable for all practical intents and purposes.

That Apple released for public sale an OS that acted like a boot-sector virus on hardware that they themselves made is a gaffosaurus if ever there was one. Didn't Apple even try the OS on all the machines on which they expected it to be run? Why not? They made every single one of them. They must have had examples of them on hand.

On the other hand, Microsoft has been pillaried for far less egregious errors even though they don't control or make ANY of the literally millions of possible hardware configurations on which their OS is to be installed.

How about the original iMac keyboards and mice? Both were ergonomic atrocities. But they sure photographed well.

I love the new OS-X. But I hate Apple for their proprietary hardware. A few years ago, Power Computing was building faster and cheaper Macs than Apple. Apple's solution was to jerk the license to their OS, buy out the company and dismantle it. God forbid there be any competition. So MacOS lovers are forced again to buy Apple hardware at a higher price than they should have to pay were it a free market.

I also hate Apple because for some reason, they think MacOS users want the computing equivalent of designer jewelry when in fact, most of us just want the computing equivalent of computers! Just because we appreciate the virtues of MacOS doesn't mean we want computers that compromise affordability, serviceability, expandability, cooling efficiency, legacy compatibility and ergonomics for the sake of making them look like high-tech tissue dispensers, table lamps, and toilet seats.

And just because we bought an overpriced new Mac doesn't mean there is lots of money in the wallet left to buy all new peripherals, just because Apple decides it no longer likes SCSI ports and 8-pin serial ports and AppleTalk networking. The great god Jobs not only takes these ports away, in most of Apple's newest and biggest-selling offerings, there are not even open slots to retrofit support for these older standards. So now all our external hard drives, scanners, zip drives, network cards, serial and localtalk printers no longer work. Yes, it's true that almost all PC's use USB for peripherals now, too. But most new PC's still also have DB9 serial ports and parallel ports, for those printers and modems we still want to use that need them.

Adapters? Get real. USB-to-SCSI? (YUK!) Serial-to-USB? localtalk/ethernet bridges? By the time you buy all this kludgeware, you may as well have bought new peripherals. And if you do buy all these adapters and manage to install and configure them, your system will become a nightmare of a patchwork camel - not exactly the image that Apple promotes, is it?

Apple seems hell-bent on building for us the perfect, beautiful computers they think we ought to have, rather than the low-cost, adaptable, upgradeable, USEFUL computers we WANT.

Why should MacOS users be trapped into either putting up with Apple's bullshit or holding our noses and switching to Wintel/Lintel? The reason is simple. Proprietary hardware. As much as I like Apple's operating system, I refuse to be trapped by their hardware platform. So I use Windows XP, DAMN IT!! Because it works and I can get my work done and my computer doesn't cost me an arm and a leg and I can upgrade it cheaply and to my satisfaction from a myriad of free-market options.