WWDC 2003: G5, Panther, iChat AV,...

[[[EUR]] HoloGram]

the Graficscard arent that bad - ok the GF  FX is lowend - but IF u wand something with Power and low price get the 9600Pro.
I have it in my PC and it works great! Noone really needs the 9800Pro! Its owsome but also expensive, so pay the 80$ extra for the ATI 9600PRO and have fun with all new and coming games!

This time Apple did a complete good job. Good Graficscards, and other good hardware. Only one thing isnt good in my eye! To less RAM in the small machine and the middle Machine - they could have put in more by standart for the same price!

But in my case i can compansate it in taking the DVD/CD-RW intead of the DVD-R . B/c i dont need this thing! and Buy a cheap RAM in the next Hardwarestore. Same works with the middle machine! And this is the one u would get ! I dont need the hight end thingy but the middle is real nice!

[beefy ? login screwed?]

Is the G5 cooled by water?

[Cow]

no it has 5 independent cooling areas and 9 fans yet it is half the noise of the G4

[Cow]

looks like PC people dug deep and pointed out the obvious that the SPEC tests were tweeked, read -->
http://www.haxial.com/spls-soapbox/apple-powermac-G5/

[Supernatural Pie]

He's a pc weenie.

 

[BeefyFigure]

I believe water cooling fans to be better because they save space in comparison to the other 9 cooling fans in the G5 tower.  I've seen PC minitowers with 2 of these water cooling units and it still held place for 4 of the standard coolers.  That's saving up twice as much space.  This is especially interesting to people who wish to upgrade and lack space to do so.  Moreover, with a cooler, you can keep your CPU surprisingly close to the ambient temperature or even below it if you use a heat-pump active cooling system.  Thus you can use a much larger and more efficient cooler than you otherwise could.

[*NADS Capt. Anarchy]

Well, Apple sure knows how to design a computer, but they sure as hell don't know what to do with a mouse. STILL a one button deal. Seriously.. how long does it take to design a two button wheel mouse? C'mon Apple, let's have a real mouse.

[Ace]

Shit, I expect this stuff from PC users but not from Mac people. BUY A TWO BUTTON MOUSE. That's what I did. That said, I used the one button for years with basically no problems.

The reason Apple will never get rid of the one button mouse is that they design their stuff to be usable for the most novice user and on up. Apple's one button mouse is to mice as OS X is to Unix. Unix is something that can be extremely powerful and useful to those who know it, but it can be confusing for new users. So what Apple did was make OS X hide the *nix underbelly by default but still allow power users to access it. With mice, there is the same situation of being a powerful tool for those who are used to it, but potentially confusing for those just starting off. People new to computers can have difficulty with the whole left-click/right-click setup, so Apple only puts one button on their mouse, thus eliminating the confusion. Apple still caters to the power users by including contextual menus and the like (which can be accessed by one button users with the help of the keyboard) for two button mice. Additionally, any USB mouse you plug in is going to work unless it doesn't conform to the USB specifications.

[*NADS Capt. Anarchy]

I have bought a two button mouse.. but seriously.. NO other computer company I know sells a computer with a one button mouse. My point merely is, Apple could easily design a sweet looking two button wheel mouse and include it with all its computers. They just haven't.

Two buttons being confusing to use? Puh-lease. My own grandma knows which of the two buttons to press. I mean, c'mon. How hard is it to figure out which button to click? If you can't figure that one out, you DESERVE a one button mouse. If Apple is truly catering to that kind of idiots, I'm not sure if I want to be seen using their computers.

[Cow]

um dude, they are releasing a 2 button mouse with scroll wheel its comming out in a few weeks prolly

[*NADS Capt. Anarchy]

I'll believe it when I see it. And then I'll thank the good lord for it.

[Mr. Lothario]

     He's a Mac user who is justifiably incensed that Apple is STILL resorting to these cheap tricks instead of just dropping it and pointing up the many advantages of the Mac (it's just that speed is not one of them). When Steve said "We'd like to announce the Fastest Personal Computer In The World," my marketing BS alarm went off. I thought back to the last time Apple had made a claim like that. They lied. They're lying this time, too. It doesn't mean that I don't want a G5, but it does mean that Apple is playing the game wrong. The only people they're fooling with the faked benchmarks are Apple users and really uncritical PC users. If they were pouring their massive ad budget into playing up the Mac as just a really great machine, they'd be winning PC people over, which is known as "increasing market share".

[Cobra]

http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/06/242154256&mode=thread&tid=126&tid=181
 
 from slashdot. Apple explains:
 
 "Greg Joswiak, vice president of hardware product marketing at Apple, in a phone interview today, defended Apple's performance claims for its upcoming Power Mac G5, after they came under fire in the wake of yesterday's announcement.  Read on for the details.              
 
  Joswiak went over the points in turn, but first said that they set out from the beginning to do a fair and even comparison, which is why they used an independent lab and provided full disclosure of the methods used in the tests, which would be "a silly way to do things" if Apple were intending to be deceptive.  
 
 He said Veritest used gcc for both platforms, instead of Intel's compiler, simply because the benchmarks measure two things at the same time: compiler, and hardware.  To test the hardware alone, you must normalize the compiler out of the equation -- using the same version and similar settings -- and, if anything, Joswiak said, gcc has been available on the Intel platform for a lot longer and is more optimized for Intel than for PowerPC.  
 
 He conceded readily that the Dell numbers would be higher with the Intel compiler, but that the Apple numbers could be higher with a different compiler too.  
 
 Joswiak added that in the Intel modifications for the tests, they chose the option that provided higher scores for the Intel machine, not lower.  The scores were higher under Linux than under Windows, and in the rate test, the scores were higher with hyperthreading disabled than enabled.  He also said they would be happy to do the tests on Windows and with hyperthreading enabled, if people wanted it, as it would only make the G5 look better.  
 
 In the G5 modifications, they were made because shipping systems will have those options available.  For example, memory read bypass was turned on, for even though it is not on by default in the tested prototypes, it will be on by default for the shipping systems.  Software-based prefetching was turned off and a high-performance malloc was used because those options will be available on the shipping systems (Joswiak did not know whether this malloc, which is faster but less memory efficient, will be the default in the shipping systems).  
 
 As to not using SSE2, Joswiak said they enabled the correct flags for it, as documented on the gcc web site, so that SSE2 was enabled (the Veritest report lists the options used for each test, which appears to include the appropriate flags).  "

[Mr. Lothario]

     Keep in mind that the benchmarks were heavily tweaked to be favorable to the G5 and crippling to the Dell. The G5s are much faster than anything Apple's put out before, but they're still not "PC crushers".

     Concerning the limited number of bays, I agree it's disappointing, but FireWire will save the day (and allow hot-swappability, too).

     Just a note to anyone buying a G5 in the near future: DO NOT GET NVIDIA CARDS. At present, Nvidia is gobbling the cock and coming back for seconds. ATI is the lord and master of the GPU market for the near future. The GeForce 5800FX is the "blow dryer" model that takes up two slots in your computer, and is the top of the line. Yet, it is slower than the Radeon 9700 Pro. The GeForce 5600 and 5200 are both very much slower than the 5800. The Radeon 9800 Pro is, according to Computer Games' benchmarks, anywhere from 5-25% faster than the 9700 Pro, depending on task. I don't know any stats on the 9600, unfortunately. In short, if you get a G5, shell out the extra money for the Radeon 9800. It's currently the absolute top of the line GPU in the market, and it'll run anything well for a good long time.

[Mr. Lothario]

     Interesting. I'd be pleased if Apple posted a full set of benchmark results, with various options enabled and disabled. That would be most enlightening.

[Cobra]

Yeah, I agree, Loth.

[Cow]

I think its unfair that the Author of the article says the tests apple did were tweeked yet he assumes the PC tests were not, everyone tweeks benchmarks now a days but Cobra that is good stuff.

[*DAMN Mauti]

Not entirely true anymore Loth. The NVidia 5800 was bs but they have released now a 59000 FX Ultra and if you search for it at http://www.tomshardware.com you will notice that this card is now the king among the graphic cards.

Of course Apple stats are manipulated nevertheless realapp performance is fantastic and that what's count.

Nobody really knows how powerful the new G5 is yet. Once they are released we will see.  I see it more than a great Apple marketing - so much free advertising on all PC sites(even if negative at the moment)!

I love this article from my favourite Techsite: arstechnica.com

You can bet your money that once many G5s are available there will be thousands of benchmarks. All in all I see it very cool how all PC sites immediatly jump on the wagon to bash Apple hehe. It would be too fun if Apple would release totaly tweaked benchmarks for Apple and beat the so high praised Intel tweaked benchmarks... ah the face of the bashing PC websites would be prizeless. Even if Apple doesn't beat them I need a great photoshop performance(my iMac 400 is still very fast for pics up to 1600*1200) and video cutting performance where a damn 30second long aged movie filter with 72subsettings doesn't need over 2 hours to render...!

Read the arstechnica article it is really very well written.

Bye,

Mauti

[BeefyFigure]

Additionally two button mice also come in handy for the gamers among us.

[*DAMN Mauti]

I wrote an email to Haxial in response to the very critical article at http://www.haxial.com/spls-soapbox/apple-powermac-G5/ :

"Hi,

I appreciate that you take a look closer at the Apple specs and that you try to find out the truth!

However I read that you doubt Apple's statement that the Dell machine was faster without Hyperthreading disabled. You can even find this at Dell's website! So at this point Apple speaks the truth!

"With Hyper-Threading enabled, system performance decreased 6 to 9 percent on the CPU2000 speed tests and decreased 27 to 37 percent on the CPU2000 throughput tests. The results indicate that compute-intensive workloads similar to those used in the CPU2000 benchmark will not greatly benefit from the Hyper-Threading capability; these workloads do not spend significant execution time waiting for data from either memory or I/O transactions. In addition, the CPU2000 workload is primarily single-threaded, leaving little opportunity for TLP, which Hyper-Threading relies on to increase performance."

More can be found here: http://www.dell.com/us/en/esg/topics/power_ps3q02-khalid.htm

All in all we will see how fast the G5 perform once they are shipped. On a side note, I surfed around the web and found some early IBM announced estimated 970 specs with SPEC 2000 numbers over 1000!  I personally think that the truth, as usual, is somewhere in the middle and to use the same compiler isn't wrong as it is. Well you can screw that but why the hell should Apple then turn off HT for Dell's spec tests!? Some controversial questions.

...."

Ok back to learning...

Mauti