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Macho Mac: G5 Unveiledby Fred Balin, fbalin@macresolutions.com
Created: July 6, 2003
Sing It!
Body ... da da da, da da da
Body ... da da da, da da daWith a combination of reverential awe and in-your-face bravado, Steve Jobs introduced Apple's new PowerMac G5 tower systems two weeks ago at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference at Moscone Center and staked bragging rights to the world's fastest personal computer.
Now we understand.
Despite it's unmatched position as the technology company of simplicity and elegance, of design and sophistication, of usability and functionality, of hip and cool, Cupertino has a complex.
Hey! Hey! Hey, hey, hey!
For years no-nothing technology analysts and PC bigots have kicked sand at the Mac. "A toy." "It runs too slow." "Not suitable for the enterprise."
Rubbish of course, and yet it has had a corrosive impact. Externally, on confused customers and internally, on the Apple core.
No matter each extraordinary Apple design feat, the issue in certain circles always returned to raw processing speed.
In recent years, Apple countered with the G4's Velocity Engine, a special high-speed processing unit on the chip, and again with dual processor G4 PowerMacs. They also educated the public that blindly using processor cycles as speed equivalents was like comparing Apples to, well, oranges; it was a Megahertz Myth. But not everybody listened or understood.
And it hurt.
Despite the endorsements of the creative and the learned, the soulful and the expressive, the visionary and the thoughtful, we now know deep down inside what the whiz kids at Cupertino really thought.
Macho, macho Mac,
I've got to be, a macho Mac....
Macho, macho Mac,
I've got to be a macho ...
Da da da da, da da da da da. Da da da da, da da da da daAnd now they may have it, and, boy, are they feisty.
All that pent up energy...
...so bad that despite Apple's fanaticism about controlling new product information, someone within the company accidentally posted the G5 product news on the Apple Retail Store website days before the unveiling. There it resided for a few hours before, presumably, the Apple SWAT Team restored order and carted the culprit off to pump iron at an undisclosed landfill.
But Steve Jobs was in a forgiving and joking mode at Moscone referring to the miscue as an act of mere "premature specification."
The official G5 announcement from the CEO followed, "We are delivering today, the world's fastest personal computer."
After that, the specifications and speed tests conveyed the kind of information only a deeply committed cross-platform geek could love and meaningfully decipher.
• 64 bit processing
• 2 GHz frontside bus
• 12 unit core
• 215 simultaneous in-flight instructions
• Pairs of symmetric-integer, double-precision floating-point and load/store units.Wow, I think...
What's it all about, Stevie?
Even he didn't know completely, stalling after "it has massive branch prediction logic." Then, a half-beat later: "I don't know what it does... it predicts branches....it's a good thing."
The audience laughed. But seriously folks, how does the lay crowd know just how good all these features are and what they amount to?
The Apple-hired testing outfit, Veritest, documented that a prototype top-of-the line G5s closely matches or surpasses the best Dell systems in integer calculations and kicks butt in floating point. Hot dog.
Apple's internal tests of key hi-performance applications, show more dramatic whippings with Photoshop, pro audio applications, scientific analysis tools, and gaming. Sounds good...
But the new machines don't ship until August so we won't hear from end users like you for many weeks.
In the meantime, this article is my attempt to more clearly and simply explain what the new G5 seems to be all about via the best sources I have on hand.
Thanks for coming along for the ride, and let me know if you have input to add.
The Making of the G5
In case you missed it, Apple's flower power days together with its 6-colored logo are long over. And despite its iconoclastic rhetoric, Cupertino has now been hanging out at the gym big time with IBM for 10 years.
The fruits of this collaboration, which also included Motorola, has been the Power PC Alliance and four major generations of chips that drive Apple's PowerMacs. At the Developer's Conference, we learned of Generation 5, the G5 processor, Apple's trademark for IBM's PowerPC 970 microprocessor.
The G5 chip is based on one that IBM uses to run its highest performing supercomputers.
Describing the chip's fabrication and physical specifications moved Steve Jobs to tones of reverential awe.
Why? Because IBM's $3 billion dollar fabrication plant in Fishkill, New York makes a G5 microprocessor:
• with 58 million transistors. ("I don't know how they count them.")
• with transistors 130 nanometers wide, connected by 400 meters of copper wire less than 1/800th the diameter of a human hair.
• on a chip 118 square millimeters that is pressed in groups onto 12-inch wafers.
• all untouched by human hands in a robot controlled factory."It's amaaazing," Steve said, before pausing and repeating. "It's amaaazing." And indeed it is.
The new G5 microprocessor runs at speeds of up to 2 GigaHertz (GHz), which is almost a one-third increase over the fastest G4 chip running at 1.42 GHz. IBM expects to release chips running at 3 GHz within a year.
In addition to the speed boost, the processor is touted as the world's first 64 bit desktop processor. Both G4s and the fastest PCs use 32-bit processors. The major short-term benefit of the 64-bit innovation is application performance boosts through minor revisions ("recompiling"). The new processor also enables the use of up to 8 GB of memory which only a small but significant group of users will require.
In the long term, 64 bit processing may set the stage for a new level of applications.
The 64-bit architecture also supports 32-bit applications with no degradation in performance. In other words, all your current PowerMac G4 programs running under Jaguar (Mac OS X v 10.2) are supposed to work just fine in a G5.
In addition to the faster and wider processor, information can be fed into the G5 chip at a much faster rate via a system bus that runs at half the processor speed, e.g., 1 GHz on the 2 GHz processor. This is 6 to 7 times faster than on the G4.
However Apple used other tricks in G4 systems to compensate, including a large and fast (Level 3) memory cache to store data close to the processor, and a shorter and more efficient pipeline to feed data instructions into the processor. This was the crux of Apple's MegaHertz Myth campaign. With the G5, Apple moves to more of a PC style processor with a longer pipeline, no Level 3 cache, and a much faster bus. In terms of microprocessors, the Apples and oranges are now more alike.
Also, on a dual processor G5, there is a separate hi-speed bus for each processor. The dual G4s shared the same bus.
In addition, the G5 microprocessor maintains the G4's Velocity Engine, a speed feature PCs do not have.
So, in summary, the G5 is a faster and wide processor. It works with a greatly accelerated system bus rather than a Level 3 memory cache. It employs a longer instruction pipeline composed of less complex instructions, and it maintains the special advantages of the Velocity Engine.
Directing the G5 is a new system controller that Apple developed and is fabricated in the same IBM plant as the G5 microprocessor. It is designed to allow direct communication between subsystem components avoiding bottlenecks.
Other components of the G5 logic board, support new, updated, and familiar technologies on the Mac.
The G5 employs a new hard drive interface, Serial ATA, which utilizes hard drives of the same name. Serial ATA provides faster data transfer than Parallel ATA found on G4s. The G5 can house a second Serial ATA drive. Each Serial ATA drive can hold up to 250 GB for a grand total of up 500 GB of internal storage. Each drive sends data over a separate bus, alleviating a potential bottleneck with pairs of Parallel ATA drives, which shared the same data path.
The Advanced Graphics Processing (AGP) Slot which holds your video card has been increased in speed from 4x to 8x and supports faster and more sophisticated cards.
Expansion slots (for SCSI, video and other cards) can take advantage of a faster PCI-X architecture. Many, but not all, older PCI cards will work in these slots. (The older, PCI expansion technology is still found on the low-end of the three G5 models.)
Each of the three new G5s has a 4x SuperDrive, same as on the latest SuperDrive-equipped G4s.
Audiophiles and sound editors will be pleased to note the inclusion of in and out Sony/Philips Digital Interfaces (S/PDIF) which allows noise-free optical digital audio connections to decks, receivers, and 5.1 surround sound systems.
The new Macs, also ship with latest version of USB, 2.0. These ports are backward compatible to the older, slower version 1.1. Version 2 exponentially increases bandwidth potential. Of course, your device has to support USB 2 and be capable of utilizing the faster bandwidth to make a difference.
Until now, Apple has avoided upgrading USB in preference toward FireWire for hi-speed connections. While USB 2.0 rivals the original Firewire 400 speeds found on all Macs of the past few years, the new Firewire 800 doubles Firewire's effective bandwidth.
In any case, the new G5s sport three of the newer, USB 2 ports and two USB 1.1 ports. They also contain two FireWire 400 ports and one of the faster FireWire 800 ports, also found on Mac OS X only booting PowerMacs G4s.
The PowerMac G5 can hold up to a whopping 8 GB of RAM in the top two machines and up to 4 GB of RAM in the entry model. RAM modules must be installed in pairs.
There's a new case design for the G5. It's made of aluminum. While most of the ports are on the back, three are three conveniently placed on the front, including headphones, USB 2 and Firewire 400.
To add or replace components, you remove the entire side of the G5 enclosure and a plastic air deflector within. Then you have easy access to the innards.
To deal with heat from the super-charged G5s, a new cooling system was designed that includes the vented case design, air deflector, and nine, yes nine fans. Yet, Apple's claim is that this machine is twice as quiet as the latest G4. Given the flack Apple experienced with one recent G4 model, derisively termed "the leafblower," it is likely that they has studied the noise issue carefully.
The G5 comes in three basic flavors: 1.6 GHz single processor, 1.8 GHz single processor, and Apple's proclaimed PC heavyweight champion, 2 GHz dual processor. Current base pricing, is $2,000, $2,400, and $3,000 respectively.
Steve Jobs highlighted the aggressive pricing and followed up with comparable rhetoric. After noting that the fastest Dell is priced at over $4,000, he proclaimed: "From now on, if anyone tells you that Apple's hi-end machines are more expensive that PCs, you can tell them where to look."
So should you buy a new super-fast G5?
If you like to be the first in the neighborhood with new technologies, or if you are primarily a PC junkie and have been thinking about the Mac and OS X, go for it. Your time is now.
I am a more cautious soul, and prefer choices and to hear from real-world end users. Sometimes the former is not possible as when Apple kills old models and has managed inventory well.
In this case, Apple has hedged its bets, or maintained "alternate" price points, depending on your point of view. Under the G5 announcement radar (and discussed in our last newsletter), Apple introduced two new general classes of PowerMac G4 (1.25 single and 1.25 dual GHz machines), which are significantly less expensive than G5s or the G4s of a few weeks ago and that boot into both OS 9 as well as OS X. (The G5s are Mac OS X only machines.)
So unless you are working in very hi-end digital video, audio production, scientific analysis, game development, or image rendering, or crave to be on the bleeding edge, I would advise waiting. If you need a new tower Mac, get one of the G4s. They are tried and true and will serve you well. (Contact us for a needs analysis regarding your specific implementation).
But Apple's future clearly rides with IBM and the G5 processor and architecture. Does it represent the long-awaited dream of Steve Jobs, for parity in performance and price with hi-end PC desktops? If this system performs in the real world as well as it preens on the Apple stage, it could mark the beginning of a new era of Macintosh acceptance within the mainstream PC world.
In any event, it's going to be fun.
MacResolutions
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info@macresolutions.com
©2003,
Fred Balin, MacResolutions
All rights reserved.
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