“IBM will begin delivering volume quantities of its new 90-nanometer (nm) based PowerPC 970 G5 to Apple Computer next month, sources confirmed last evening” claims AppleInsider. Elsewhere, Apple plans to beef up the Software Update mechanism built into Mac OS X, sources said to ThinkSecret.
AppleInsider: 90nm PowerPC G5 next month
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Can someone please translate 90-nanometers to plain english?
Sure thing! 90 nanmeters = 0.000023 inches
I’ve been looking at the Dual 1.8Ghz and was thinking of getting one for christmas. I can wait an extra week or two to make sure this isn’t just a rummor; I’ll most likely still get the Dual 1.8, but the price should go down once Apple anounces a Dual 2.5GHz box.
that the chip is really really really small and the transistors are really really realy close together allowing for less power for more speed.
I think 3GHz duelies will be out in a few months.
It means possibly faster, cheaper processors for Apple. It’s also probably a key for them to get to 3ghz and beyond.
better correct my mistake before I get flamed for my math and spelling:
90 nm = 0.000004 inches
Does anybody know if there are any rumors of a cache increase for the G5? The performance of a G5 is fantastic…but increasing the cache would probably make it even better. After all, Intel has a 2mb L3 cache in addition to the 512k L2 cache. I checked out the Apple site for specs on the G5 and found that there is only a L2 cache at 512k (same as Intel). There was no L3 cache info so I can only conclude that there isn’t any L3 cache. If somebody has info to prove me wrong, please let me know. If anybody has any info on rumored cache increases, let me know about that too. Thanks!
January is a pretty bad time to have a tradeshow, I guess. Oh well, I’ve never been but this year I will be working it. =)
How can anyone afford a mac ?? I would love to own one, but here a g5 dual 2ghz cost more than the avarage worker earns every month….
The current G5 is based on 130nm transisters. A transister is made up of three parts: PNP or NPN (P=Positive material, N=Negative material); the measurement is the length from the one end of the transister to the other.
As the size goes down, the power required to run the transister goes down. Thus you can run a smaller transister on less power or more run it faster at the same power.
Wow, what a great time to be a Mac user! The hits just keep coming and coming. Apple is really on a roll! So many cool things that have come down the pipe already and so many more cool things in the pipeline ahead.
As Eric Cartman would say: Schweeeet.
How can anyone afford a mac ??
By saving up money until they have enough to buy one.
How can anyone afford a mac ?? I would love to own one, but here a g5 dual 2ghz cost more than the avarage worker earns every month….
That is odd. I thought they were quite reasonable priced and are expected to go down in price. Further it has been shown time again that the average TCO of a Mac vs. a PC tends to be lower, thus Macs are overall cheaper. Yes, you might paya little more initially, but it will last a hell of a lot longer than most PCs.
Well duuuuuuuuuuh…..
The thing is a top model x86 only cost ½ a top model mac…cant be that much better….
How can anyone afford a mac ?? I would love to own one, but here a g5 dual 2ghz cost more than the avarage worker earns every month….
I forgot to mention that Apple does offer pretty nice financing packages if you can’t just whip out a credit card or check card and pay for it on the spot.
…the lower heat dissipation resulting from this process will be incentive for Apple to begin creating G5 PowerBooks. (of course, the heat dissipation of a 1.2GHz G5 is only 18W, and we still haven’t seen 1.2GHz G5 PowerBooks, *sigh*)
any ideas what this would translate into GHz? What will happen to the G4 powermacs (mini-towers)? Could this not also mean powerbook with G5s?
Macs differ from PCs with their CPUs and motherboards. Everything else is as generic as PC stuff (memory, hdd, video, network/modem/USB controllers on mobo, etc). How can it last longer? Or maybe their OS eats less CPU cycles then Win2K or Linux with XFCE or Fluxbox? I would really like to know what components of Macs last longer then PCs.
“…the lower heat dissipation resulting from this process will be incentive for Apple to begin creating G5 PowerBooks. (of course, the heat dissipation of a 1.2GHz G5 is only 18W, and we still haven’t seen 1.2GHz G5 PowerBooks, *sigh*)”
This has been talked about frequently with Steve Jobs commenting that works is under way though there isn’t a clear timeline for a release. They might actually release a dual CPU G4 powerbook while they resolve some of the heat issues though.
One of the approaches I have read about being taken is R&D to create a cooling system which utilizes ethanol vapor passing through small channels/grooves along the top of the CPU to cool it since ethanol has a higher heat absorbtion rate than air.
Not to worry…I am sure they are coming.
The thing is a top model x86 only cost ½ a top model mac…cant be that much better…
look up sony’s prices……
top of the x86 cost almost 2000 dollars more then the top G 5,,,,,,,,,isn’t the xeon powered box based on an x86 processor?
can’t tell me apple is so expensive when i can afford one,,,,,and i go to school full time with no help from parents……:P
To add to your comment. basically Silicon and Germanium the primary elements used in semi-conductor technology have a valency of 4 (4 electons in the outer energy level). I would draw a diagram if I could of how they align so you would understand what follows better, but basically P-type material is made by ‘doping’ the silicon with an element which has only has three electrons. In the structure formed by the silicon there is now a hole in which an electron can fill. N-Type is just the opposite, the silicon is doped with an atom that has 5 electrons in the outer energy level. When it is in the structure is has a spare electron.
basically an NPN transistor has these three regions seperated by a gates preventing the spare electrons from filling the wholes. Depending on how the a small voltage is applied the material one of two things will happen. Either there will be an extremely high resistance (the transistor is off or is a 0), or the material will allow the electrons from the N type material rapidly flow across the gate and fill the wholes in the P-type material. In this state the transistor is on or a 1.
So the smaller the transistors you make the less voltage needs to be applied to make things work
Please correct any information which is not entirely accurate as I learnt this in high school about 10 years ago.
I would wait until the start taking orders on them.
The thing is a top model x86 only cost ½ a top model mac…cant be that much better… […] top of the x86 cost almost 2000 dollars more then the top G 5,,,,,,,,,isn’t the xeon powered box based on an x86 processor?
The only thing on the x86 side comparable to a dual G5 system is an Opteron system, and I have not seen any tier 1 vendors selling Opterons at this point in time. All Athlon 64 processors have a single HyperTransport controller and are thus incapable of SMP. The Xeon uses a shared 533MHz bus, meaning at saturation each processor effectively receives 266MHz of the bus, and the P4 architecture’s performance is significantly impacted by bus bandwidth availability. Meanwhile, on a dual 2GHz G5 each processor has an independent 1GHz bus.
That’s closer to 60nm, but not quite there yet. Hurry!
In my land, heat we know.
http://arstechnica.com/cpu/02q2/ppc970/ppc970-1.html
PPC970 1.8Ghz = 42 watts
P4 2.8Ghz = 68 watts
Use simple math,
PPC970 2.8Ghz = 65 watts
Use new 90nm process, P4 heat go up to 103 watts
Many think everyone using new small wires have same problem.
So fast G5 major heat, it will make.
And slow G5 major speed, it not make. Clock for clock, G5 compared to G4, less it does.
Apple universe, physics, still applies.
Well, a large L3 cache would either be useless (G4-like cache) or very expensive (P4 Extreme Edition AKA P4 Xeon-like). The G5 already has a huge memory bandwidth (this one should have about 9.6GB/sec of usable memory bandwidth!) so the impact of L3 is much less.
How can anyone afford a mac ?? I would love to own one, but here a g5 dual 2ghz cost more than the avarage worker earns every month….
The average worker doesn’t need a g5 dual 2ghz. The average worker would get by just grand with an eMac, which costs something like 1/3 the amount of the g5. Even a nicely-loaded iMac costs about half as much as a g5 dual 2ghz.
“Macs differ from PCs with their CPUs and motherboards. Everything else is as generic as PC stuff (memory, hdd, video, network/modem/USB controllers on mobo, etc). How can it last longer? Or maybe their OS eats less CPU cycles then Win2K or Linux with XFCE or Fluxbox? I would really like to know what components of Macs last longer then PCs.”
Let me rephrase and expand only slightly. It isn’t so much that a Mac will outlast a PC in terms of the computer remaining in an operational state. What it is referring to is how most people actually use their computers…it is a behavioral observation, not a physical one.
PC users are typically Windows users (though there are many PC users who are not – perhaps you are one of these?). Reality is, is that most PC users don’t use things like fluxbox. They are Windows users who are put through frequent upgrade cycles.
Many invest in CPUs, memory, HDs, video cards etc on a regular basis to keep the performance up. Further as applications and OSes are released, hardware incompatibilites often arise. Apple is close to immune to this.
Why? They develop the hardware and the OS to work together. That doesn’t really happen on PCs. Apple has much tighter control over the hardware and OS design integration process. Thus a mac can remain usable longer than what most PC users will maintain a PC for.
For instance the Dell that I got 2 years ago started to feel sluggish after about 1.5 years. Now it feels like it is crawling on a lot of things. The Macs that I have worked with, though they are older have maintained a better overall performance.
The cycle of upgrading on PCs tends to be more frequent for the majority of PC users than what the typical Mac user will encounter. Thus Macs have a lower TCO.
you are missing that Intel ramps up te speed and power of their chips with every revision. a P4s heat does not correlate to a G5s heat. they are diffrent CPUs with diffrent ways that tehy are developed and diffrent ways they are ramped.
Bah. The Xeon is severely hampered by limited bus bandwidth, especially since they don’t even have the 800MHz FSB. On the other hand, its not as bad as it looks — the G5’s have to share a single memory bus anyway, so the improvement from having independent FSBs isn’t that huge. The Opteron, however, gets a memory bus per processor, so performance is a whole lot better. If the Opteron can keep up with IBM’s clock speeds (that’s a new one!) than it’ll be the one to beat.
What are you talking about? Heat is heat, and 68W is *always* greater than 103W.
having 2 indipendant Buses to memory, are you saying that the Memory manager for each Proc can access the same bank of memory? or do you need 2 banks that are indipendant of each other but the data is mirrored on each?
in any case, I am sure that the next IBM chip, the 980 will be much cooler and have indipendant buses to the memory, it is just to good of a feature to not have.
I am not native english speaking, but I try to describe what 90nm means.
I hope you are familliar with the european mesurement! And because nm is the short sign for “Nanometer” I will try to explain with my european knowledge:
European mesurement:
1 Meter (m) has 1000 Millimeter (mm)
1 Millimeter (mm) has 1000 Mikrometer (µm)
1 Micrometer (µm) has 1000 Nanometer (nm)
American mesurement (I rounded the inch numbers):
1 Meter (m) is about 39.3700787401575 Inch
1 Millimeter (mm) is about 0.0393700787401575 Inch
1 Micrometer (µm) is about 0.0000393700787401575 Inch
1 Nanometer (nm) is about 0.0000000393700787401575 Inch
90 nm is about 0.00000354330708661417 Inch
If my memory serves me right (it has been years since I had chemistry in school):
An atom has an radius of 0.5 to 1.5 Angström.
1 Angström = 0.1 Nanometer
So this means, that 1 Nanometer is about 5 to 10 atoms wide (depending on what atoms you take).
So this means, that 90 nm is about 450 to 900 atoms wide (again: it depends what kind of atoms).
cheers
SteveB
how is 68 watts greater than 103 watts?
either there was a typo, or one of us mis read what mr. gobblty gook for a name was saying.
o Supports two 1.6GHz PowerPC 970 processors
o Up to 84 2-way blades may be installed in an industry-standard 42U rack
o Up to 4GB of DDR ECC memory
http://www-1.ibm.com/servers/eserver/bladecenter/js20/more_info.htm…
http://everymac.com/systems/apple/powermac_g5/index.html
Do you have any idea how much does it costs? I am just curious.. I personal rather to wait for PowerPC 980 and PCI Express.
The new 90 nanometers is 30% smaller than 130 nanometers. A 90 nm chip is (slightly) faster than a 130 nm chip running atthe same frequency becasue the information doed not have to travel as far. It also reduces power consumption (from 92 to 62 watts) causing the processor to run cooler, and by extention opuns up the ability to run the chip at a higher clock speed.
Quote:
Many invest in CPUs, memory, HDs, video cards etc on a regular basis to keep the performance up. Further as applications and OSes are released, hardware incompatibilites often arise. Apple is close to immune to this.
I’d say far from it. Remember the switch from Moto 68K to PowerPC? More recently, OS9 in a coffin and OSX everywhere. Classis mode seems a little iffy still. Lets see how long before Apple makes OSX 64 bit only and then everyone will have to get a G5 system just to use OSX 10.x
Quote:
Why? They develop the hardware and the OS to work together. That doesn’t really happen on PCs. Apple has much tighter control over the hardware and OS design integration process. Thus a mac can remain usable longer than what most PC users will maintain a PC for.
There’s a stereotype the rest of the computing industry sometimes injustly label Mac users as: brainwashed fanatics. They’ll listen to everything Steve Jobs tells them and be so forgiving of Apple no matter how many times Apple screws with their userbase. To relate to your point about software integration: it’s fine to see that tight level of integration as a good thing. But I for one don’t like it when a company has that much control over a platform. Microsoft could very well take over the x86 platform or even create a new platform of their own. Heck, they even have mockups of a concept PC called the “Athens”. But if MS really did that everyone would scream bloody hell MONOPOLY. Apple gets away with it because the industry perceives them as “the little guy.” A lot of Apple’s business decisions have been revolved around the fact that they are a niche player. They know that and play that card very well.
> Do you have any idea how much does it costs? I am just curious.. I personal rather to wait for PowerPC 980 and PCI Express.
I called the 800 numbers and spoke to a rep. – of course dependent upon configuration, it will be about $3500.00 and availabe at the end of this month.
Sadly, power consumption grows with the square of the clock: the voltage needs to be higher, meaning that the power consumption for each operation is higher, and you do more operations per second.
If a 1.8GHZ G5 uses 42W, a 2.8GHz is likely to use 101W.
Plus, intel at least is seeing that 90nm doesn’t really result in lower power consumption than 130nm, because leaks start to outweigh the gain of smaller gates. 90nm allows for smaller CPUs, which is cheaper to manufacture but harder to cool.
Let’s try that again. 68W is less than 100W. The fact that there are architectural differences between the G5 and P4 doesn’t change the fact that the P4 runs hotter.
yes, that is why in order to increase clock speed, you need to reduce the size of the tranzistors.
Microsoft is a monopoly because 95% of the computer using world uses their software, it has nothing to do with what Platform their software runs on. MS could certainly make their own computers, but they would have to be very carful to NOT cut prices on the computers to the point that they put OEMs out of business, and they could not offer their software for free if the hardware is purchased.
Apple is not a monopoly, they make a product, that is it. their product runs an operating system that they make and it runs software that they make. we are talking about the COMPUTER USING WORLD. you cannot decided a monopoly based on a platform something runs on, it must be the percentage of the general product market, apple competes with Dell, Gateway, HP, IBM, and soon, Sun. MS offers the software for most of these OEMs, and most people use MS software. MS has a software monopoly in the industry.
well I must have mis read what that guy was saying, I thought he was saying that BECAUSE the P4 at 90 nm will run or is running at 100 Watts that there is no way the 970 at 90 nm can run at 62 nm.
that is whay I read from what he said and that is why I responded the way I did.
Please stop the Mac vs. PC junk. This is a very interesting story. It has nothing to do with Microsoft, PC’s, Intel or TCO. The story is that Apple is going to have new models coming out and we’ll see what there is to see then. It is exciting though, from any viewpoint.
Recently The Register reported that Intel will be rolling out thier 90nm chips next Feb at the earliest. This will be the first time in a long while that a RISC chip was produced on a newer process revision before Intel. Hoo-Rah IBM!
On the other hand, its not as bad as it looks — the G5’s have to share a single memory bus anyway, so the improvement from having independent FSBs isn’t that huge. The Opteron, however, gets a memory bus per processor, so performance is a whole lot better. If the Opteron can keep up with IBM’s clock speeds (that’s a new one!) than it’ll be the one to beat.
Yes, that’s about what I said in my post. However keep in mind that the G5 sports a dual channel DDR400 memory controller, so the two processors share two memory busses, not one. The Opteron gets an additonal performance boost from dual channel memory controllers on each processor, so a dual channel Opteron system’s total memory bandwidth is about 10.4GB/s, versus 6.3GB/s for the G5, or 5.2GB/s per processor for the Opteron and 3.1GB/s for the G5. Meanwhile, the Xeon comparitively provides a mere 1GB/s per processor for SMP configurations.
The real argument I was trying to make was that the dual 2GHz G5 is arguably the most powerful desktop/workstation system available today from a tier 1 vendor, due to the rather poor memory bandwidth of a comparable dual Xeon system. As far as I know no tier 1 vendor is offering Opteron workstations yet.
Sadly, power consumption grows with the square of the clock: the voltage needs to be higher, meaning that the power consumption for each operation is higher, and you do more operations per second.
If a 1.8GHZ G5 uses 42W, a 2.8GHz is likely to use 101W.
If the process is the same yes, but if the gates shrink you need less electrons to reach the threshold voltage (which itself may be lower) so this doesn’t hold across generations.
Plus, intel at least is seeing that 90nm doesn’t really result in lower power consumption than 130nm, because leaks start to outweigh the gain of smaller gates. 90nm allows for smaller CPUs, which is cheaper to manufacture but harder to cool.
Intel’s silicon process is different to IBMs.
IIRC IBM is using SOI (Silicon on Insulator), this is a more expensive process but less prone to leakage. Hence the 970 going to 90um will give a higher GHz without additional heat wereas Intel seems to be experiencing quite the opposite.
“Sadly, power consumption grows with the square of the clock: the voltage needs to be higher, meaning that the power consumption for each operation is higher, and you do more operations per second. ”
Wait. Power consumption grows linearly with clockrate, and quadratically with the voltage.
“If a 1.8GHZ G5 uses 42W, a 2.8GHz is likely to use 101W. ”
No, 65W if the voltage is kept the same. It is likely they will drop the voltage by .1 or so as well.
I think IBM also has a patent on SOI.
Bascule, how do you define tier 1 vendors?
I just priced out my Christmas gift and was ready to sign on the dotted line for a dual 1.8 system. Maybe I will wait for a bit and see if prices come down.
this is cool and encouraging but i have to ask is IBM getting the kinds of volumes that they want from apple? Maybe it does not matter because their fab is getting a lot of customers. I am just concerned that ibm might one day pull a motorola and decide they don’t really want to make apple’s chips.
then again motorola is a disaster elsewhere as well.
The thing is a top model x86 only cost ½ a top model mac…cant be that much better….
If you build it with cheap off the shelf parts, sure.
But go price an Alienware PC with (more or less) equivalent equipment to what a dual G5 has (dual XEON, DVD-rw, bluetooth, SATA hdd, 512-1gig RAM, big high quality LCD screen, etc) and the PC’s will be only slightly higher if you’re lucky, and several hundred if not.
And I’m a PC user. I’m just tired of that myth that any white box PC made with the cheapest hardware is equal in quality to a Mac.
For instance the Dell that I got 2 years ago started to feel sluggish after about 1.5 years. Now it feels like it is crawling on a lot of things.
That’s not the hardware’s fault, I think.
You should either wipe everything and reinstall, or run anti-spyware/adware scanners.
Performances shouldn’t degrade over time, in theory, but since windows (I assume you are no using something else) is a crap magnet, it piles up with time.
they add ECC Registered RAM support in the next revision.
isn’t part of the reason that intel’s new p4 the prescott is going to be 100+W even at 90nm beacuse it also runs at 4Ghz+ , but the opteron and the G5 can do more per clock, so i guess intel is the one looking dumb from trying to run up the clock speed and not what the actual processor does. i would love to get an opteron or a G5 but alas i’m not from a rich country so i’ll guess i’ll wait till the G7 is selling
The PPC 970 aka G5 uses an SOI copper process, while Prescott does not. SOI alleviates much of the current leakage that the Prescott P4 is experiencing, therefore an equivalently clocked G5 takes a lot less power at 90nm.
“his is cool and encouraging but i have to ask is IBM getting the kinds of volumes that they want from apple? Maybe it does not matter because their fab is getting a lot of customers. I am just concerned that ibm might one day pull a motorola and decide they don’t really want to make apple’s chips.
then again motorola is a disaster elsewhere as well.”
I wouldn’t worry too much about IBM “pulling a Motorola.” IBM has been producing chips for Apple for quite some time…not just the G5. For instance, many of the iBook G3 processors came out of IBM.
Motorola is a disaster. That company is a complete mess. Apple was tired of Motorola before Motorola was tired of Apple. Why? Motorola is just a disaster internally.
IBM is far from being the mess that Motorola is. As long as producing the G5 remains profitable, IBM will do so.
“That’s not the hardware’s fault, I think.
You should either wipe everything and reinstall, or run anti-spyware/adware scanners.
Performances shouldn’t degrade over time, in theory, but since windows (I assume you are no using something else) is a crap magnet, it piles up with time.”
Actually I have wiped my box several times and I do run anti-virus/anti-spyware. Further, IE is not used on my system, so that plugs up plenty of security holes.
I actually suspect a lot of problems have to do with the crappy Windows “hotfix”/”release and fix it later” cycle. Further, this is not that much of a user issue when you consider how PC hardware requirements for software seem to out pace that of a Mac.
Take for instance games. Game software on PCs seems crazy in its demands. Particular on WinXP. There have been planty of times that I have seen memory requirements on software for XP that were double that if it were run in Win98.
And yes, absolutely that has to do with it being Windows. No question there. It is not the fault of the PC. But you have to consider that most people are going to want to use applications that are used in either Windows or MacOS X. The majority of people out there could give a crap about the KDE environment.
This means that you have to, when looking at the average TCO, look at Mac OS X vs. Windows PCs. It is this issue, combined with the rate of requirement increases on the Windows side that make PCs TCO higher than a Mac.
that is not an issue becasue IBM is making the SAME chip for their systems. the thing with Moto is that they had to make a special chip just for apple that was not used in any moto products.
well the day that Linux makes a large crater in MSs market share, we can make comments like the one you just did, but a computer should not have to be wiped clean every so often to run well. My mac has been runing Jaguar for over a year and a half, and I did an upgrade from 10.1 so OS X has been running on here for well over 2 years with no wipe/reinstall. it runs the same as it did the day I instaled OS X.1 (well it actualy runs faster since Jaguar was bettr optimised). My XP machne however has slowed down considerably and all I have on it is Office and VS 6.0, no games no shareware, nothing.
Bascule, how do you define tier 1 vendors?
Tier 1 vendors are designated by market analysts, and include most vendors with widespread name recognition (i.e. companies which would be known even by a layperson) These would include companies like Dell, HP, IBM, Apple, etc.
I beleive sun is offerering or will be offering shortly Opeteron workstation and servers.
I beleive sun is offerering or will be offering shortly Opeteron workstation and servers.
I beleive sun is offerering or will be offering shortly Opeteron workstation and servers.
As soon as Sun releases some Opteron products, then yes, the situation will change. However this time it’s unclear what Sun’s Opteron product line will even be. So far it sounds like it will be primarily blade servers in a similar fashion to their line of Xeon systems.
>>Sure thing! 90 nanmeters = 0.000023 inches
Actually, its about 0.00000354330709 inches, you are off by an order of magnitude and some.
Google calculator is your friend.
Friend at Adobe say next one G5 super better.
Say no buy now.
well the day that Linux makes a large crater in MSs market share, we can make comments like the one you just did, but a computer should not have to be wiped clean every so often to run well. My mac has been runing Jaguar for over a year and a half, and I did an upgrade from 10.1 so OS X has been running on here for well over 2 years with no wipe/reinstall. it runs the same as it did the day I instaled OS X.1 (well it actualy runs faster since Jaguar was bettr optimised). My XP machne however has slowed down considerably and all I have on it is Office and VS 6.0, no games no shareware, nothing.
Yep.
Windows – format it and hope you have everything saved as “maintenance.”
OS X – It just works.
The P4 needs those large caches (think P4 EE) because it has a long pipeline. That’s why the P4 celerons with very little cache really really suck majorly.
I don’t think the G5 would have such a big benefit from a larger cache.
Anonymous: Wow, what a great time to be a Mac user! The hits just keep coming and coming. Apple is really on a roll! So many cool things that have come down the pipe already and so many more cool things in the pipeline ahead.
Wow, then you are probably better off with the x86 side of things. You’ll get hit more often. Of course, getting hit all the time may not be nice for some people…
On a more serious note, I think Apple is a company on a rebound. Yes, I have extreme doubts about Apple ever clawing out of the 5% market share barrier, and if they do, I doubt they would go far, but they have reversed their downward trend and remodeled themselves as something fashionable and chic. Certainly, I prefer to be seen around town with a PowerBook than a HP Omnibook, but style isn’t my (and many other’s) only/most important citeria.
Certain PC makers, especially Sony, had manage to imitate Apple’s kind of Aura. I also wouldn’t mind being seen around town with a Vaoi.
Jason: That is odd. I thought they were quite reasonable priced and are expected to go down in price. Further it has been shown time again that the average TCO of a Mac vs. a PC tends to be lower, thus Macs are overall cheaper. Yes, you might paya little more initially, but it will last a hell of a lot longer than most PCs.
Please, my dear friend, explain how TCO for the Mac is lower than for a PC. My PC has been running for four years, being opened up only for a optional upgrade (increasing RAM, adding hard disk, and at one time, changing the processor that was given to us as a gift). Again, how is the TCO of Apple products much higher?
One of the three friends I know personally and in real life that own the Mac has more problems with it than I do with my PC. Sure, if you buy a cheap PC from a store tucked away in a small rental space in your local mall with a name you can’t remember when you can’t tell the difference between “memory” and “hard disk” is the cause of the high TCO numbers, but if you know what you’re buying, or you’re buying from a branded acclaim OEM like Sony, AlienWare or Dell, the TCO isn’t higher than the Mac.
At least on the PC, I have some choices. Photoshop too expensive, Elements too limited? Try Jasc Paint Shop Pro, available only on the PC, and save about $500. Use a very basic set of features, can’t afford MS Office? And AppleWorks plus Keynote don’t do it for you? Try StarOffice and save a $300, or better still a stable version of OpenOffice.org and save all your money.
Okay, okay, that doesn’t count as TCO.
But in the end, we all can argue who has a higher TCO back and forth without any conclusions. Why? Because we effing don’t know. We are comparing two platforms, not two products. If you say a $1000 that has a very fast processor but has everything else crappy from a Korean nameless store in New Zealand, with a iMac G4, certainly the iMac would win hands down.
Apple has it bad products too (i.e. the Cube, only good in looks and nothing else).
Bascule: AlienWare doesn’t count at Tier 1? They sure price like Tier 1. What’s your defination of Tier 1? (BTW, AlienWare has dual Opteron systems)
Mikhail Capone: But go price an Alienware PC with (more or less) equivalent equipment to what a dual G5 has (dual XEON, DVD-rw, bluetooth, SATA hdd, 512-1gig RAM, big high quality LCD screen, etc) and the PC’s will be only slightly higher if you’re lucky, and several hundred if not.
Heh, funny. I didn’t know that the PowerMac comes with an LCD screen (and since when do we need to buy from the manufacturer when there is so many other choices out there that may suit you better?)
But I’m taking up the challege.
PowerMac at $2,999.00
Dual 2GHz PowerPC G5
512MB DDR400 128-bit SDRAM
160GB Serial ATA
SuperDrive 8x(read DVD)/4x(burn DVD)/32x/16x/8x
Three PCI-X Slots
ATI Radeon 9600 Pro 64MB DDR
Mac OS X Panther 10.3
AlienWare MJ-12 4200 Extreme at $2,970.00
Dual AMD Athlon MP Processor 2600+
1GB DDR PC-2100 SDRAM Registered ECC
2x 80gb Seagate Barracuda 7200 with 3ware Escalade 7000-2 IDE RAID Controller
Pioneer DVR-106 4x DVD±R/W Drive
NVIDIA Quadro® FX 1000 128MB
Windows XP Pro (Oh, select the one-year AlienCare, Apple also gives one year with the 2,999 price)
What do I get? For $30 less, I get twice the RAM – registered ECC DDR SDRAM at that, 160gb worth of storage via RAID, a DVD writer that can write for both + and -, and a much better graphics card geared for the likes of Maya and AutoCAD (opps, I forgot, Mac doesn’t have AutoCAD). Tell me again how the AlienWare price will be slightly higher or way more higher than a Mac.
Of course, if you are going to add LCD screens into the mix, Mac would win the race. Although slightly more expensive than NEC screens. But then again, why must I buy the monitor from AlienWare or Apple? It is an optional component, I can buy whatever brand I like, whatever model I like, whatever that suits me and my budget. Heck, I could buy a Apple monitor, an adapter, and viola, use it on the AlienWare.
And even if the AlienWare is slightly more expensive, I rather stick with AlienWare. Why? if I move to the Mac, I need to buy new licenses for the software I own (i.e. Office v. X, Photoshop Elements, etc.). Of course, if I was buying a laptop, the situation would be reversed… but then again, we aren’t talking about laptops.
rajan, why do you have to bring this crap here? If someone is dropping 3K on a system $250-500 extra MAKES NO DIFFERENCE.
Your Alienware system should really be an Opteron or an Athlon64 system if you want to do a fair comparison. Alienware is also a small operation and nowhere near what is called a Tier 1 vendor like Apple, HP, IBM, Dell, Sun, SGI, or Gateway.
The Apple displays actually have an ADC connector for their LCDs versus the standard DVI. I won’t explain the difference because you should know if you are going to enter this territory.
The REAL story here is how Apple/IBM are ramping up the processor speed at a much faster rate than before. A revision the 970s coming soon and the 980s supposedly before the year is out.
http://www.appleinsider.com/news.php?id=247
I hope to see Apple implement ECC RAM in their XServe product.
Yeah, that really proves my argument wrong. I must not relegate myself as a loser.
Listen asshole. I didn’t choose to make this personal. You did.
As far as your point is concerned, it was not commented on because I felt that it would simply be a waste of my time. It was apparent from your comments that you hadn’t really read everything that I had to say. Additionally you can’t seem to keep it straight as to whether Apple or PCs have a higher or lower TCO. Further, the PC vs. Mac debate is pointless, I don’t see why it needs to be continued.
It seems to me that you are the loser since you insist on seeing things so black and white.
Example 1:
Please, my dear friend, explain how TCO for the Mac is lower than for a PC. My PC has been running for four years, being opened up only for a optional upgrade (increasing RAM, adding hard disk, and at one time, changing the processor that was given to us as a gift). Again, how is the TCO of Apple products much higher?
You ask how the TCO is lower on a Mac (which I have answered in places and has been documented many times before). This is then followed by the quesition how is the TCO higher. So which are you asking, higher or lower?
Example 2:
“but if you know what you’re buying, or you’re buying from a branded acclaim OEM like Sony, AlienWare or Dell, the TCO isn’t higher than the Mac. “
This provides two issues. First I have stated that I have a Dell. http://osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=5321&offset=15&rows=30#174393
Additionally you comment that the PC TCO isn’t higher than a Mac. So again which is it, higher or lower?
Another issue
“At least on the PC, I have some choices. Photoshop too expensive, Elements too limited? Try Jasc Paint Shop Pro, available only on the PC, and save about $500. Use a very basic set of features, can’t afford MS Office? And AppleWorks plus Keynote don’t do it for you? Try StarOffice and save a $300, or better still a stable version of OpenOffice.org and save all your money.”
I am familiar with Paint Shop Pro. That is what I use for my work. OpenOffice runs on macs. Paint Shop can be run through emulation and I have had online discussions with the folks at JASC. There is a possiblity that PSP will hit OS X. If not, who cares. There are comparable graphics apps (Corel for instance).
Further, if you actually read and thought about my comments you would realize that I was citing more of an issue regarding Windows slowing a machine down over time, thus the need for the now well known install orgies that exist on the Windows platform. That tends to raise the TCO of a Windows box (in a corporate you have to pay someone to fix crap on Windows). This phenomena is less likely to occur on Mac OS X than Windows. It is not 100%, but it is more likely.
If you are talking about the home environment, It becomes a little more fuzzy. Some people like to constantly upgrade their system. I for one enjoy building computers. I have a number of x86 machines that I have built. But there is a portion of the population that feels the need to get the latest and greatest piece of hardware and upgrade a system. This can raise the TCO on the PC side in a home environment. That is not to say that you can’t upgrade things on a Mac, you can. The typical Mac user behavior doesn’t include this, thus the TCO is lower.
TCO is often behavioral in nature. I am not suggesting absolutes. I am not saying that you need to upgrade shit because you have a PC. I have a PC that I haven’t upgraded in sometime. Again, it is a behavioral issue, that is exacerbated by the Windows software/hardware requirements being raised regularly.
Since the new 90nm chips are expected to produce less heat, I wonder if this will result in new cooling zones or a case design revision. I would certainly expect the fans to run at a lower speed, thus making an already quiet computer even more quite.
I’ve wondered if this is possible as well. The G5 case is better than the MDD despite the MDD being more expandable.
What I would really like to see is a G5 case in the size of G4 case. It would be perfect for Apple’s single processor G5s.
I do not think this is likely however. Apple likes to reuse as many parts as possible across their line. I am sure that it has to do with keeping things simple and inexpensive to manufacture.
A 90nm chip may move the G5s into an XServe or we may see a quad processor XStation since Apple still refers to the G5 as a personal computer. Having a workstation branded product jammed with 4 G5s would be huge for credibility in the workstation class market. This is all just speculation but interesting options that Apple may explore.
” Having a workstation branded product jammed with 4 G5s would be huge for credibility in the workstation class market”
I thought of that one myself. That would result in a lot of drooling though. It would also probably still be a bit on the hot side with that many CPUs. They might have to wait till they hit 65 nm to keep it cool and quiet. I am sure they could manage cool at 90nm with a quad setup, but the fan rotation speed would probably be raised a little, thus a little louder. Then again, G5s are quiet enough that a little more noise really isn’t going to piss off most people.
Bascule: AlienWare doesn’t count at Tier 1? They sure price like Tier 1. What’s your defination of Tier 1? (BTW, AlienWare has dual Opteron systems)
Please read through the comments a bit more… this question was already asked an answered. Tier 1 vendors are designated so by market analysts. Alienware is most certainly *not* a Tier 1 vendor.
Did anyone notice that the author of that post is from Denmark (.dk)? A stock Dual PowerMac G5 2Ghz + 17″ display will set you back US$2800 from the U.S. Apple Store (plus some taxes, if they apply). The same configuration will set you back almost US$5200 from the Denmark Apple Store.
Here in Australia, again the same configuration… US$4846, give or take a few dollars. The problem comes in that I can configure a quite powerful PC – more than enough for my needs – for US$1000 less than that. It’s a very tempting offer, not helped by the fact that many Apple promotions (offers, competitions, etc.) and services (Sherlock channels, iPhoto photo albums, iTMS, etc.) aren’t available here.
(To be fully honest, there are rumors of the iTMS in Australia next year, and I’ll welcome it if it comes, but as it will be bucking a very long and well-established trend, I’ll believe it when I actually see it.)
Now, that said, I don’t plan on moving off the Macintosh platform, if for no other reason than it is the one platform where I trust things to work as advertised. From painful experience, the same cannot be said for the Windows platform, or for the myriad of Linux distribution platforms that are out there. But if I needed the best (which I don’t just yet), I’d be doing some serious saving to pick up that box.
But coming back to the topic at hand, these are good developments. Apple has been making a lot of good developments lately for the Macintosh platform, and I wish for the trend to continue.
Please read through the comments a bit more… this question was already asked an answered. Tier 1 vendors are designated so by market analysts. Alienware is most certainly *not* a Tier 1 vendor.
Well, “Tier One” changes from geographical places. In Malaysia for example, hardly anyone knows of Apple. Yet companies like Acer and Legend are popular and are superbrands here. But how many in the US knows of those two companies?
And IDC doesn’t rate “Tier-One” based on name recognizablity, rather market share %. And Apple, according to IDC, doesn’t cut it for tier-one. Gartner’s defination is way more complicated, one i still don’t understand (search their sites). But again, I never saw Apple mentioned as Tier-One before by one of these surveyers. Besides, can Lotus be considered as Tier-one in the car business? Nope? True, because they are a niche player. Apple is a niche player, though matter how much you (and Apple) may want to deny it.
P.S. I’m heavily considering getting a Mac laptop. But it depends on where I’m going to further my studies. If it is near my home, I don’t need a new computer. But if it is further away, i would need it, thus I would prefer a laptop, and Mac laptops IMHO is very good. Another brand high up in my list is Sony. IBM is too expensive.