Today Apple announced quad G5's. Basically 2 dual core 2.5 GHz CPU's. They will be available in next month. They ship with PCI Express and other improvements. And it can now support 4 30in displays.
PowerBooks: The 15-inch display now supports 1440 x 960 resolution; the 17-inch supports 1680 x 1050. Both will be 46% brighter than previous models, and both will have 22% better battery life. And SuperDrive (DVD burners, that is) will be standard (but you can downgrade to combo I believe). Apple Cinema HD support is now built-in as well. Expect the 12-inch to retial now for $1,500, the 15-inch for $2,000, and the 17-inch for $2,500. All are available now.
Also, prices on Cinema Displays were dropped. 23 in is $1299. 30 in will drop too (not sure to what).
Aperture is a new pro photo app. This is a tool obviously aimed at professionals; it’s got a virtual loupe for magnification, a virtual light table, and a free form space for mock-ups. Aperture will be out next month, retail price of $499.
Obviously Apple hasn't dropped development of the PowerPC. But no GHz increase? So they make up for it by increasing the number of processors. The PowerBook updates are cool, but I only use 12 inch models (I drop the larger laptops too often... ).
But nothing announced would cause me to want to go out and replace my current hardware. But I will be glad when the time comes to update my work G5! Posts: 1209 | Registered: Dec 2003
| IP: Logged |
posted
If I had the money, I'd be excited by these announcements. Since I'm poor though, I'll sit here content with my iMac G4.
Posts: 1960 | Registered: May 2005
| IP: Logged |
posted
I'm very content with my G4 iMac, although the new iMacs look very nice. I probably won't buy anything new until the Intels come out hopefully next year.
Posts: 1256 | Registered: May 2005
| IP: Logged |
posted
Yeah, Intels should be next year sometime. I unfortunately won't have the money to upgrade till probably 2007 sometime. They should be further along in Intels by then.
Posts: 1960 | Registered: May 2005
| IP: Logged |
quote:As you can see the 2.3 GHz Dual Core machine is marginally faster than a water-cooled 2.5GHz Dual G5 with a souped-up graphics card. The largest difference is in memory performance, not in the actual processors according to our tests with Xbench. We want to point out that this testing method isn't completely failsafe but should mostly be seen as a hint of the new machine's performance.
Conclusion The Power Macintosh G5 is better than ever and this is likely the last major update that we will see before the transition to Intel- processors. Apple has polished the details and the new processors gives some extra power. Because the exterior is largely exchanged this feels more like a "speedbump" even if the processor-switch is more significant than that.
Performance-wise, one Dual Core processor doesn't make for a large difference compared to two old G5 processors. We predict that the new Quad 2.5GHz Powermac will make for a performance increase of 70% or more.
Yeah, they are switching to Intel. Someday. Not too soon I don't think. I hear there is still a lot of work to do. While the OS itself will run, there are a lot of Apple apps built on top of the OS. There was a secret group in Apple (that even the OS group didn't know about) that made sure that the OS ran on x86, but I guess they couldn't make sure every app would run. So now they are probably working on updating all of their apps so they will run natively on x86.
FWIW, I don't think the switch will be that big of a deal for PowerPC users. It isn't like the hardware will go unsupported.
Yeah. I'm poor too. The announcement that the 30 in is now $2500, and the new PowerMac can support 4 of them? All thogether that would be something like $13,000. Wow. Posts: 1209 | Registered: Dec 2003
| IP: Logged |
posted
The switch is to start in summer 2006 and be complete by the end of 2007.
quote:FWIW, I don't think the switch will be that big of a deal for PowerPC users. It isn't like the hardware will go unsupported.
That remains to be seen. I'm certainly not expecting to be able to put a top-of-the-line video card in my dual G5 in 2007, which means that there won't be much point in developers releasing -- for instance -- new games as "universal binaries."
Also, I suspect that the resale value of PowerPC hardware will crater, which is new -- Apple hardware normally holds its value surprisingly well.
I'm not certain that the switch will be a success. I'd like it to be one, but we'll see.
Posts: 10886 | Registered: Feb 2000
| IP: Logged |
posted
Actually I wouldn't be surprised if the older machines held up better in price for a while, or at least the more recent and higher end models, as they'll be able to run old software significantly better than the Intel macs. Rosetta is good, but there's no altivec support and emulation is just never anywhere near as fast as a native system.
Posts: 187 | Registered: Jan 2005
| IP: Logged |
posted
The game market should prove interesting now. Apple switches to intel, Microsoft switches to PowerPC for the XBox. Sony PS3 on the Cell processor.
Soon it'll be easier to port a PC game to the Mac than it will to the XBox.
Posts: 2245 | Registered: Nov 1998
| IP: Logged |
posted
Speaking as an IT guy, we're holding off buying any new Macs until the switch, since the announced change to new hardware has killed our typical life cycle process.
Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
| IP: Logged |
posted
That seems weird to me, Tom, though it depends somewhat on what roles you have your macs in. Here at IU they're often used as kiosk computers and scattered throughout certain computer labs (though they preferred the G4 imacs for the kiosk purpose). For those uses, there's no reason not to purchase -- becoming outdated applies anyways, there're no internal upgrades involved other than RAM, et cetera.
If you're talking graphics workstations or the like, then yeah, I can see hesitating.
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
| IP: Logged |
posted
Luxology (programmers who wrote Lightwave who left NewTek and made their own 3d app called modo) did a test render on the quad G5.
quote:We had the opportunity to try one of the new quad G5s with modo 201 and I must say I was impressed with its speed. As an example, it rendered the global illumination test image shown above in 17 seconds flat. The scene includes 244,000 polygons with 8 sample antialiasing and 200 indirect rays. Brad's dual 2.5 G5 takes 38 seconds to render the same scene, so it looks like the new machines can render over twice as fast.
quote: Here at IU they're often used as kiosk computers and scattered throughout certain computer labs (though they preferred the G4 imacs for the kiosk purpose).
The ONLY things we use Macs for: 1) graphic design (two of six machines) 2) arts education (including video editing)
We also provide six Macs in a single public lab, just in case some students would rather use a Mac instead of a PC. Our logs, however, suggest that these Macs are almost never used, so we'll probably wind up reducing their number anyway.
Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
| IP: Logged |
posted
Interesting; here, they're quite popular, particularly with the CS geeks (the CS building has a whole mac computer lab as well as three PC ones, about half as many macs as PCs).
I think its partly that you're a smaller school, making the dynamics very different. Also, our bookstore (and University Information Technology Services) take as their position that the more students with macs, the easier it is on them, so there's a distinct, if small, push in that direction.
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
| IP: Logged |
posted
We've also got an interesting mix of students; only about 30% of our student body is resident, and fully 35% of our students are employed full-time and over the age of 22. These are, in other words, more likely than normal to be adults who've been in the corporate world for a while and have decided they need another degree -- and since it's very rare to run across a Mac in a corporation, our students are less comfortable with Macs than the teenagers and twenty-something graphic arts students at whom Apple has historically aimed its marketing. Something like 3% of our student body owns a Mac of any kind, which is a rather low figure for any college (but, again, not particularly low for the outside world.)
Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
| IP: Logged |
posted
At the U of U it is hard to know what is going on. The campus is very decentralized. Fine Arts is 99% Mac. Chemistry, Biology, Humanities, and Math all have many Macs, but I don't know the percentages (I'm guessing they have more PC's than Mac, but I don't know). The hospital is starting to do Macs. CS has few Macs afaik. Naturally, I don't think there are any Macs in Business. The few "centralized" IT departments have very few Macs if any. I'm at the library and Macs are strong here, probably 40%. Lately, we see more and more Mac laptops in the hands of students.
Posts: 1209 | Registered: Dec 2003
| IP: Logged |
posted
I don't know what this really means, but it sounds cool.
quote:With the new G5s Apple has moved to DDR2-533, offering a total of 8.5GB/s of memory bandwidth. Unlike Intel's DDR2 platforms however, the G5s can actually use the added memory bandwidth. The G5 interfaces to the North Bridge via a bi-directional 64-bit FSB running at 1/2 the CPU clock speed. That means for a single 2.5GHz dual-core G5, there is about 10GB/s of bandwidth from the CPU to the North Bridge. For a dual dual-core 2.5GHz G5, that's 20GB/s of bandwidth as each CPU gets its own dedicated FSB. So in this case, there may actually be a tangible performance improvement from going to DDR2-533.
posted
It means that the processors can take advantage of the increase in memory bandwidth. My G5 tower is memory-bandwidth constrained by comparison, since the FSB is significantly higher-bandwidth than the memory (more than double, IIRC). The new G5 towers improve this somewhat.
Posts: 10886 | Registered: Feb 2000
| IP: Logged |
Printer-friendly view of this topic
![[Frown]](frown.gif)
).![[Smile]](smile.gif)
![[Eek!]](eek.gif)
