A lot of interesting hardware-related news lately. First of all, Matrox makes a dynamic come back with its Parhelia512 graphics card and a lot of sites (1, 2, 3, 4) carry the white papers and spec sheets. In the console world, SONY has slashed the prices of PSone ($49) and PS2 ($199), following price cuts by Microsoft on XBOX. However, PS2 remains the No1 console in sales, by far. In the meantime, Intel introduced faster Celerons, based on the Pentium4 core. In fact, these new Celerons are nothing but the older Pentium4 that were selling last year. The newer Pentium 4s have reached a speed of 2.53 Ghz. On the other side of the river, Apple announces a new rack-mount server:“This is the fastest architecture we’ve ever built,” said Jobs. The server will have a dual 1GHz G4 processor, 256K L2, 4MB DDR L3 caches. System controller with custom ASIC done by Apple. Built-in: Gigabit Ethernet and FireWire. That controller has up to 2GB DDR SDRAM (“This is the first time that we know of that that DDR SDRAM has been used in a 1U server” – however, dual Athlon U1 DDR servers are shipping since last year, a search on Google reveals). For storage 60GB and 120GB ATA/100 drives will be offered. “We’re going with ATA because they’re just as fast as SCSI and they offer real benefits in term of largest capacities”, Jobs said, however the speed issue is pretty debatable. Many would favor SCSI when compared to IDEs.
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Eugenia Loli
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#1 256k L2?? BWAHAHAHAH puhlease, thats not enough even for a low end workstation
#2 Will be buing a PS2 next paycheck. I’ve been waiting for this for what seems like for ever
#3 Now that matrox is releasing the vid card I can upgrade my 2xPPRO to a 2xAMD. Been waiting for this one for ever too….
God I LOVE competition!
They just posted the pix on their website… they can even make a rackmount look worthy of drooling! Gotta give it to them for sheer class, but the price is alittle hefty, that said our lead software engineer is wanting to place front end graphics servers for our Sun Boxes to lighten the load for them to do their real work (data crunching). Apple’s name came up this week in a meeting, I almost had to pinch myself to see if I was awake. The cool part of the subject was ‘money is no object’… which sounds cool to me if they want to slam G4s into the consoles 🙂
They just posted the pix on their website… they can even make a rackmount look worthy of drooling! Gotta give it to
them for sheer class…
Who cares – it’s a rack-mount server, not a girlfriend.
As long as Apple keep taking overprices for their hardware professionals will stay away – even though MacOS has got alot better with X.
Don’t assume the prices are excessive! Read this summary:
http://maccentral.macworld.com/news/0205/14.server.php
Looks like they are pretty cost effective.
>>Who cares – it’s a rack-mount server, not a girlfriend.<<
Oh did somebody piss in your wheaties today Anonymous Coward?
🙁
Amen to that, brother. Apple has it’s priorities backwards
It seems to be “Wow”Factor, Idiot proofing, “Wow” Factor, technology.
Unless they change, apple will be continue to be the choice for gay web designers, not IT professionals.
Here is a comparison between a relatively decked out Apple blade and the top end 1U rack mount option from Dell, similarly configured:
Apple Xserve($6999.00)
2x PowerPC G4 @ 1 GHz
2GB PC2100 DDR RAM
2x 60GB Ultra ATA/100 HD @ 7200 RPM
1 Copper Gigabit ethernet card
1 Fibre Gigabit ethernet card
1 MacOS X Server–unlimited users
1 Premium service contract
Dell PowerEdge 1650 ($6699.00)
2x Intel Pentium III @ 1.4 GHz
2GB PC133 RAM
1x 18GB 10K RPM Ultra 160 SCSI Hard Drive
1 Copper Gigabit ethernet card
1 Fibre Gigabit ethernet card
1 Microsoft Windows2000 Server w/5 client license
1 Premium Contract
If you wanted the 25 license Windows2000 Advanced server, the price would be another $2500
Overall very comparable. Two important notes, which makes the comparison difficult with no benchmarks. The memory on the Apple machine is much faster than the memory on the Dell model. The hard disks on the Dell will probably blow the doors off of the Apple. Especially since the drives in the Apple are only 7200RPM drives. Overall though, the price on the higher end is pretty reasonable.
>>Unless they change, apple will be continue to be the choice for gay web designers, not IT professionals.
I guess the straight web designers will be too busy driving their tricked out muscle cars to care which computer they are using. Good thing for Apple that the gay IT people will be buying pretty computers as well, to make up for the drop in use by the straight designers. Enough playing on stereotypes for one day…
I have to admit I was one of the people clamoring for a rack mount Mac for OSX. I said I would buy one when they came out. But this is rediculous. I should have made myself more clear. What *WE* (all of us who generally think Apples suck) wanted was something more. What *WE* meant to say was that we wanted a 5 GHz G5 with Pentium 7 compatibility 2x of course. 4 TB of RAM, unlimited SCSI RAID storage, 10 PCI slots 2 AGP slots and a slick case (but not so slick our friends think were art fags). All for the very reasonable price of $19.95 (nineteen dollars and ninety five cents). Oh, and a year of AOL for free! Until *WE* get that we wont be considering Apple’s….we’ll be sticking with our dads PC
You forgot about having SuperGiga-ethernet, and a high temperature superconductor NUMA interconnect for high bandwidth internode communication. But I think $599 would be reasonable once they added that 😉
Hank that can’t possibly be… PCs are always cheaper than Macs, you must have made a typo, right?!
!@#$%^&*?
I think that the MS licensing costs are gonna bite the OEMs in the butt on this one 🙂
Servers are very lucrative when your licensing is betterthatn your competitions 🙂
ruprecht: That 256KB L2 cache is *not* a problem. Were it the last line of cache before the memory, it might be more of an issue, but these suckers have 2MB of DDR L3 per processor.
Nobody complains about L1 cache sizes these days either. L3 cache is essentially where it’s at now.
This is a great server for small business, workgroup, design professionals (straight, bi, gay, and even a-sexual) and even some university options.
I wouldn’t put a huge database on it or anything, nor would I use it if I were say “Bell South” or anything, but for 75% of the market out there it seems to be perfect (and easy to manage). The only real problem is the IDE drives, and I’m not going to get into a religious war of IDE vs. SCSI.
With the G5 on the horizon, things are looking good for NeXT, er, Apple.
I agree……
I mean we finaly see that MS licensing casues a machine to be significantly more expensive than an Apple.
I think the Apple rack mounts are going to be big hits at the mid-level.
with Linux taking the high end servers and some mid and low end, I think that the Apple servers will hit MS right where it hurts…..easy administration.
with Linux handling the databases, and Apple handling the doh doh administration capabilities, MS will be losing server space faster than you can say Loser.
You are most definately correct. No PC manufacturer has anything that holds up to the big iron machines for large scale databases and stuff like that. The hardware for those machines cost a lot of money for a reason. It would be suicide for Apple to try and go up against that right now. I think this is an excellent first step, and if the hardware is an indication of the future desktop hardware, then we are in for a treat this summer.
Bring them on. Can’t wait to see the comparison’s of this thing against a comparable Intel config, both loaded up as Linux servers. That should make for an interesting comparison.
Oh why the heck not. While at it, do a comarison of AppleBSD w/ Apache against IIS5 on the WinTel rig.
I love these games. …Thems good games
Don’t forget that Oracle 9i is coming to OS X. Clustered with these systems will provide and powerful database solution at a decent cost.
” While at it, do a comarison of AppleBSD w/ Apache against IIS5 on the WinTel rig.”
Why not Apple Apache vs Intel Apache? Only an idiot would run IIS.Or someone who doesn’t care about security…
I don’t know who would win, but I’m sure the Mac will show respectably.
Personally, i am hoping that apple can succeed in these new workstation/server markets. Hopefully success there would give them a nice new high margin segment that would enable them to reduce the price of their G4 or G5 mini-tower desktop machines. $1599 to start is just too much.
Anyone else remember another computer with 2 rows of LED CPU indicators, dual PowerPC chips, a few PCI slots, and running a relatively rare operating system? 8)
hehe… I watched the videos at news.com about last week’s Jaguar and today’s rack presentations with Jobs as the host. Jobs was wearing today the exact same clothes as in last week’s presentation. I hope he does not wear them for a week.
Maybe I’m confusing him with someone else, but wasn’t it Jobs who used to wear the same type of clothes, day in & day out? He thought it saved him lots of time not having to decide what to wear each morning …
1. Wow factor matters, it really does. If it didn’t, every rack mounted server ever would be a beige box with bland lights. This simply isn’t true.
2. Idiot proofing is a good thing, dangit. A GOOD THING. If you consider that this box will be making inroads into many Windows and UNIX worlds, an idiot-proofed introduction to MacOS X will satisfy many, and make the transition silky smooth.
3. Technology is not ENTIRELY Apple’s fault. They depend on Motorola’s semiconductor unit, which has been having serious issues for a while, AND mainly targets embedded processors, which don’t NEED to run at 3.2 GHz because you’ll have to deal with 400 watt power supplies (numbers completely made up). They would turn to IBM, BUT IBM is still not sure whether they want to adopt the AltiVec PowerPC extensions or not. Otherwise, we’d have hit 1 GHz months ago (IBM said they could do it with G3s). Admittedly, they WERE late with DDR RAM, and the 2x/4x pumped FSBs (the way to get EFFECTIVE 400/533 MHz FSB speeds, while keeping the actual clock at 100/133). Oh, and the hard drives should be SCSI. Because that’s the RIGHT THING TO DO FOR SERVERS.
4. Stereotypes BAD!!! Go to your room!! Discuss with your manly Heman sysadmins their mighty and manly repetitive stress injuries!! <joke> Honey, besides, there CAN’T be THAT many gay web designers, because gay people have WAY more design and fashion sense to allow some of the crap on the web we are still stuck with! </joke>
–JM.
I suddently have the need for a rack mounted server?
What *WE* meant to say was that we wanted a 5 GHz G5 with Pentium 7 compatibility 2x of course. 4 TB of RAM, unlimited SCSI RAID storage, 10 PCI slots 2 AGP slots and a slick case (but not so slick our friends think were art fags). All for the very reasonable price of $19.95 (nineteen dollars and ninety five cents). Oh, and a year of AOL for free! Until *WE* get that we wont be considering Apple’s….we’ll be sticking with our dads PC
Why don’t you ask for a spaceshuttle trip to the space station while you at it.
I hope you were joking.
BTW, who would want AOL… even if it is free?! I would not use AOL unless they paied me $100+ a month.
hehe… I watched the videos at news.com about last week’s Jaguar and today’s rack presentations with Jobs as the host. Jobs was wearing today the exact same clothes as in last week’s presentation. I hope he does not wear them for a week.
LOL!!! No, he stopped doing that a few years ago…
Intel sliced the price of its 1.2GHz Celeron the most, lowering it $10 — from the ZDnet article
WOW! A whole 10 dollars?! Man, I just want to run out and buy one!
not.
What i’d like for them to do is lower the proce on the P3s, so I can put another one in my dual P3 motherboard. THat would be awesome (especially when I run BeOS)
Yum, I want.
Who cares – it’s a rack-mount server, not a girlfriend.
I like sexy g/f’s & sexy computers… Why not have everything?
choice for gay web designers, not IT professionals
Ahh, you can’t be gay and professional?
I think that the MS licensing costs are gonna bite the OEMs in the butt on this one 🙂
I hope so. But you just know it’s not going to happen.
Even if MS starts to price itself out the market, buy new macs, or install x86-unix-alike and apache on current pcs?
Unless they change, apple will be continue to be the choice for gay web designers, not IT professionals.
Ah, the sweet sounds of ignorant bigotry…and I hadn’t gotten a dose all week…
I don’t get point…. I couldn’t escape reading that Apple is the world’s largerst UNIX distributor…
So, if you compare a Dell to the XServer, cut out the cost for Windows and add some 80 USD for a Linux copy, or BSD, if that is your thing…
Then it’s far more “UNIX” comparable and you don’t have the user license issue… x86 is *not* Microsoft, after all..
>>Then it’s far more “UNIX” comparable and you don’t have the user license issue… x86 is *not* Microsoft, after all..<<
Oh but it is… you are just in denial!