Macs Have Officially Joined the Dark Side

Topic: Macs Have Officially Joined the Dark Side (Read 2473 times) previous topic - next topic

Re: Macs Have Officially Joined the Dark Side

Reply #15 – June 06, 2005, 05:55:30 PM

Quote from: EricCoolCats

Oh yes, that's why I said Intel will either have to provide or create a 64-bit chip for Apple. They can certainly provide the Itanium right now, and Apple could very well be the company save it from its current downward spiral. However, if the sinking ship (Itanic--LOL!) is already going down, then why would Apple want to rescue it? It wouldn't make sense. Honestly I don't think Intel and Apple have made a final decision on the chip yet, and probably won't for at least a few months.

I tend to agree with the one article that predicts that Apple will probably get the Yonah core from Intel. Yonah is a Pentium M (the CPU behind the Centrino brand) dual-core.. mobile design.. and I think it's also x86-64. A lot can be done with a reasonably powerful dual-core laptop chip. You're probably going to see more applications where people buy chips like the Pentium M to put them in small desktop setups, like the SFF PCs or Aopen's knockoff of the Mac Mini.

What CPU is in the Mac Mini? Is it an adapted desktop chip? If not, aren't all the Mac laptop chips still G4s or something?

Re: Macs Have Officially Joined the Dark Side

Reply #16 – June 06, 2005, 06:16:02 PM

The basics in the Mac mini are from a laptop: CPU, slot-loading optical drive, hard drive and memory module. All iBooks, Powerbooks, eMacs and the Mac mini have the Freescale G4 chip. Only the iMac and G5 towers have the G5 processor. And that's part of Apple's current problem.

The Intel move was driven by a lot of things, but make no mistake: this was a not-so-thinly-disguised shot across the bow of chip makers on Apple's part. IBM promised Apple that by June 2004 they'd have a 3Ghz PowerPC chip. In April 2005, Apple unveiled their dual 2.7Ghz G5 tower. Being over a year late with production and promises of a faster chip, Apple simply went shopping elsewhere.

Plus, there is no way to currently produce a G5 processor that will fit in a laptop. The top of the line 17" Powerbook is barely an inch thick. To fit a G5 in would double the thickness, require alternate cooling, and produce enough heat to fry an egg on the top cover. Apple customers would not buy a notebook that's 2" thick after being marketed 1" thick laptops for 4 years. As well they shouldn't. This is a company renowned for their industrial design and intelligent engineering. To shoehorn a G5 in a laptop would be counter to their own philosophy.

The mobile Intel chip idea makes more sense, so long as the heat generation and cooling issues are not beyond what Apple already has with the G4. How hot do Yonahs run, any idea?

Re: Macs Have Officially Joined the Dark Side

Reply #17 – June 06, 2005, 06:30:37 PM

The Yonah codename is for an upcoming chip due anywhere between now and early '06. Being dual-core it'll probably be pretty hot for a laptop chip, but all Intel and AMD CPUs now come with dynamic speed alteration (I think it's SpeedStep for Intel and PowerNow for AMD) for heat and power conservation issues. Even my XP 2000+ laptop throttles down to under 1 GHz at times, when it's really hot and it's not using much CPU power.

At least you'll be getting the newest stuff, and not using recycled older chips like the G4.

BTW.. ALL chip manufacturers are having difficulties the higher into GHz they go. Just about every current AMD CPU is actually 2.2-2.4 GHz, they just do other things to it like give it more on-die L2 cache or improve the on-die memory controller. I think Intel hit a brick wall around 3.8 GHz, (keep in mind, the P4 is designed solely to be scaled up in raw clock speed) and have had to scramble to make the Pentium M a more viable desktop CPU. (painted themselves into a corner with power use and heat, to where even die shrinks were starting to hurt.. less physical area to dissipate heat) I am entirely NOT surprised that IBM also cannot deliver in the MHz department.

Expect to see all chip development go into multi-core for the time being. The dual-core (on one physical CPU) chips just came out recently.. quad-core is likely due out Q1 '06.. there's also talk of 3-core (as a fallback if quad-cores can't be put out quick enough) and up to 6-core CPUs in the not-too-distant future. Of course, if you get a 2-socket motherboard, you're talking 4-core to 12-core here in the next two years. Most software still can't take full advantage of the extra core, but it does help in cases where a large app is running on one core and everything else on the system is running on the 2nd. Software will eventually be coded to take better advantage of multi-core machines, as well as the switch to 64-bit.. so it'll be a little while yet before you'll see the true power of the stuff coming out right now.

BTW, if the reasons why chip X can clock past a given MHz and chip Y cannot pass it interest you, then you might wanna check out sites like this:

http://chip-architect.com/
http://www.aceshardware.com/

There are tons of hardware sites out there for PC stuff, but these two seem to be the most interested in the actual guts of the CPUs.

Re: Macs Have Officially Joined the Dark Side

Reply #18 – June 06, 2005, 06:39:39 PM

Quote

double the thickness, require alternate cooling, and produce enough heat to fry an egg on the top cover

Dude, you just described my Dell :D

I like having a laptop and all, but this P4 2.4 GHZ (the desktop P4, not a Centrino) Dell runs HOT HOT HOT, is over 1.75" thick, and weighs about 10 pounds. It's a brute, to be sure. And it seems like it doesn't operate nearly as fast as a P4 2.4 should - my father's 2.6 walks all over it, with the same 400mhz FSB and less RAM. My 3 GHZ/800MHz/FSB/serial ATA/1GB RAM desktop simply embarrasses it, as it should, but my father's 200mhz advantage should not give him the performance edge that he has over this laptop. He has a real video card rather than my shiznitty Intel 845 video, but neither of us are gamers so that wouldn't explain it - I don't know why this machine seems to be so slow. Of course, when I first got it it seemed to be fast as hell, so maybe it's just me, but...

I ripped three unencrypted 6GB data DVD's to the HDD and it took over an hour on the laptop. I did the same thing on my desktop and it took 20 minutes. Can't blame that on the serial ATA, since an optical drive would never even approach the bandwidth limit of even standard ATA. It just took that long for the thing to crunch the data. I like this laptop, but I don't think my next one will be a Dell - who knows, maybe by the time it's up for replacement (likely two years) I'll replace it with an Intel machine running Mac OS :D

On the desktop/laptop chip thing - I noticed that Dell has recently stopped selling desktop chips in their laptops. All of them are now either Centrino or Celery based - no P4 at all. Even the mighty Inspiron XPS, their flagship laptop that had the editors of Maximum PC drooling with its 800mhz FSB, 3.4GHz P4 proc, has been replaced with a "Gen 2" version with the Centrino.

*EDIT* Agreed on the "hit the wall" thing, Bird351 - there's actually a pretty good article on it in Maximum PC, even explaining why AMD's approach is better than Intel's. Apparently the Intel answer is to literally put two CPU's on one chip and have them communicate between each other through the chipset (so data has to leave the chip, go out to the mobo through the chipset, and then back to the CPU) while AMD's two cores communicate directly with each other. The buttstuffogy they gave was this:

Imagine a dual-core proc as a duplex. Intel's duplex has the doors on the far ends. For data to go from one side to the other it must leave one door, go down the driveway, travel along the street (chipset), go back in the other driveway and in that door. Obviously this is not the best scenario, as it is inefficient, especially if there is a lot of traffic on the street. AMD's approach is to have the two doors next to each other so data can simply step across the doorstep and into the other core (or through the on-die memory controller as the case may be). More efficient than Intel's approach because data never leaves the "yard", but still not ideal because the communication is still happening outside the duplex. The ideal situation would be to have a door in the wall dividing the two halves of the duplex so the cores may communicate directly with each other without ever leaving the duplex.

I had previously thought that we were nearing the end of the excitement in the PC world because there hasn't been any real innovation since the AMD64 and increases in clock speeds were providing diminishing returns, but it looks as though things are only just starting to get interesting...

Re: Macs Have Officially Joined the Dark Side

Reply #19 – June 06, 2005, 06:44:29 PM

Watch your system info in Windows to see what speed your laptop is actually running. You could have dust buildup in the cooling system that could be throttling the CPU down. It's possible there are also settings you can alter to change how it throttles down. There also may be issues with some of the earlier SpeedStep implementations.. if you haven't already, maybe you should check up on it. I forget who had the problem, but I vaguely recall some early dynamically-throttled chips having problems sticking at the lower speeds once they heated up. Might need a BIOS fix or something like that. And yes, desktop chips can have SpeedStep/PowerNow!, because I think my laptop CPU is an adapted desktop XP2000+.

Re: Macs Have Officially Joined the Dark Side

Reply #20 – June 06, 2005, 10:44:46 PM

Carm, it's not just you. The DVD burner in my Powerbook isn't a slouch, but it can't even begin to touch the speed of the one I have in my spare Mac (a 1x Pioneer DVR-103). I think in my situation, at least, it has something to do with the hard drive speed and the bus speed of the Powerbook, not the processor speed (1.25 Ghz). So last year I bought an external Firewire bus-powered DVD burner that works faster than the built-in burner--go figure! It's like, laptops can basically do what you ask them to do...just don't be in a hurry and don't expect them to be cool to the touch.

Re: Macs Have Officially Joined the Dark Side

Reply #21 – June 06, 2005, 11:02:37 PM

Bird351: This one doesn't have speedstep.

Re: Macs Have Officially Joined the Dark Side

Reply #22 – June 06, 2005, 11:24:39 PM

Hmmm.. you sure it doesn't? I mean like undospoogeented feature, etc. My laptop does not advertise or even list (to my knowledge) the PowerNow function, but it has it and I've watched it in operation. From the ~1.6 GHz or whatever a 2000+ is, down to around 900 MHz when it really heated up.

Re: Macs Have Officially Joined the Dark Side

Reply #23 – June 07, 2005, 12:08:14 AM

Yep, I'm sure. No matter what programs I've run, whether battery power or plugged in, hot or cold, it always reports 2399 MHz. I even ran Intel's CPUID and as you can see:

Re: Macs Have Officially Joined the Dark Side

Reply #24 – June 07, 2005, 12:13:16 AM

OK, that's one thing out of the way. Now how often do you defrag? :p

Re: Macs Have Officially Joined the Dark Side

Reply #25 – June 07, 2005, 08:41:26 AM

Weekly. I'm very fussy about keeping my computers updated, spyware free and running as efficiently as possible (including clearing cache, emptying recycle bin and defragging). I won't allow anything to run in the system tray except what's required (wireless network icon, volume, Norton Antivirus and MS AntiSpyware).

Re: Macs Have Officially Joined the Dark Side

Reply #26 – June 07, 2005, 08:58:44 AM

there hasent really been much change in processor speed since the p4. The amd might run circles around it, at least the 64 bit will. The amd 64 bits are only around 2000 mhz. They win with their variable fsb speeds of up to 2000mhz. Basically the amd is just better designed with a faster bus speed. The processor speed dosent seem to matter as much as the work load anymore. I know that my AMD 233 will clock at 435 mhz where my p2 celeron at 300 will clock at around 296 mhz.

Re: Macs Have Officially Joined the Dark Side

Reply #27 – June 07, 2005, 09:07:42 AM

do you ever run msconfig? If not I can give you instructions. Basically go to start and then run. Type in msconfig. Click okay. This will bring up the system configuration utility. Go to the startup tab. It will be the last one on the right. On the emachine computers you can clear all of them out without any ill effects. I think that this goes with windows xp in general. Basically everything in that list is either spyware or something that you installed on your computer. Chances are you have in the neighborhood of 25 to 30 things in this list. Any thing over 30 is slightly high. 40 and up is alot. Each one of these things uses anywhere from 8000k of ram to 32 megs of ram. So that is somethign that you might want to look into if your puter is slow. This will work on any windows XP machine as far as I know. Donot try this on a windows 2000 or older comptuer. IT will stop your computer from functioning

Re: Macs Have Officially Joined the Dark Side

Reply #28 – June 09, 2005, 11:44:07 AM

Ok, it's been a few days now, and some info is leaking out:

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The first Apple systems in 2006 will use Intel's Pentium M processor, according to sources familiar with the companies' plans. The Pentium M uses the same x86 architecture as the Pentium 4 but consumes far less power. Its design philosophy is expected to be the model for Intel's future processors.
Apple officials did not return repeated calls for comment, and an Intel spokesman declined to comment on Apple's product decisions.

An interesting move but expected. They may use the Pentium M in the desktop models as well, but most people are thinking the Apple laptops will be the first to get upgraded, since they're so far behind speed-wise compared to a PC.

Quote

Interesting notes on Apple's Intel development system (available to developers only):

They are using a Pentium 4 660. This is a 3.6 GHz chip. It supports 64 bit extensions, but Apple does not support that *yet*. The 660 is a single core processor. However, the engineers said that this chip would not be used in a shipping product and that we need to look at Intel's roadmap for that time to see what Apple will ship.
It uses DDR-2 RAM at 533 MHz. SATA-2. It is using Intel GMA 900 integrated graphics and it supports Quartz Extreme. The Intel 900 doesn't compare favorably to any shipping card from ATi or nVidia. The Apple engineers says they dev kit will work with regular PC graphics cards, but that you need a driver. Apple does not write ANY graphics drivers. They just submit bug reports to ATi/nVidia. So, when we asked where to get drivers for better cards the engineers said "The ATI guys are here." He's right, they've been in the compatibility lab several times.
It has FireWire 400, but not 800. USB 2 as well. USB 2 booting is supported, FireWire booting is not. NetBoot works.
The machines do not have Open Firmware. They use a Phoenix BIOS. That;s right, a Mac with a BIOS. They won't tell us how to get in the BIOS. I'm sure we can figure it out when out dev kits arrive.
They run Windows fine. All the chipset is standard Intel stuff, so you can download drivers and run XP on the box.

Keep in mind that this is just the development box...specs are definitely going to change for production. But it shows how relatively simple the changeover was to get OS X running on stock Intel hardware and a general PC motherboard and components. As I said in the past, Macs were getting very close to being a PC anyway, using some standard equipment. Even parts of OS X are nearly identical to its XP counterpart. So all this does is switch things over even more, to the point where just about the only things different between them will be the processor and the OS.

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Think Secret has some unofficial Xbench results from a 3.6GHz Pentium running Apple's Rosetta system at WWDC 2005 (NOTE: Rosetta is the underlying component of the next OS X that allows translation between PPC and the Intel chip):

Overall, the Intel Mac are scoring between 65 and 70 with Xbench, a far cry from the 200+ scores higher-end G5 systems reach. The CPU test is landing in the high teens compared with scores of 100 to 200 for G5 systems, but that appears to be primarily due to lackluster FPU scores. ... The Intel Mac performed substantially less well than the dual-2.5GHz G5 at Thread test, scoring an 82 compared to 225. In the Computation Thread test the Intel Mac scored a respectable 110 compared to 155 in the G5, but the G5 blew the doors of the Intel Mac in the Lock Contention test, scoring a 420 to the Intel Mac's 66.
The Memory Test tells a similar story: overall the Intel Mac scored a 214 to the G5's 378, but the Intel Mac actually exceeded the G5's Stream Memory Test: 351 to 319. The G5 trounces the Intel Mac at the system memory test, however, scoring a 464 while the Intel Mac musters a 154.
The Intel Mac scored a 125 on the Interface Test, compared to a 380 for the G5. The Intel Mac scored well in both the Quartz graphics and OpenGL graphics tests--almost matching or exceeding dual-2.5GHz G5 score--although it's unknown which video card is powering the system. There has been some speculation that Apple's embracement of Intel processors will also allow the company to take advantage of off-the-shelf PC video cards.

Obviously the translation from PowerPC to Intel chips is going to make some things slower. The Pentium chips used on this demo box do not take full advantage of OS X's special graphics features (Quartz, OpenGL) so naturally the scores are lower than the native G5 box. But for a first-time shot at it, and for demo purposes anyway, it's not nearly as bad as some would think.

I think the main sticking point for developers right now is the apparent loss of Apple's Open Firmware. It's sort of the PC equivalent to BIOS but much more powerful and flexible. Really, it's what makes a Mac a Mac since it's so unique. But there are speculations that an equivalent will be adapted or created for the new Mactel box. We are also going to lose the ability to boot into the old Mac OS (8/9) because the emulator we currently use won't work with a non-PPC chip. It's going to affect roughly 10% of current Mac users due to them using older software that was never ported to OS X, or is a dead product. But you'll have that.

Another very interesting comment came directly from Apple's VP of Development. He said that OS X will ONLY work on a Mac/Intel machine. However, he was very coy about anything concerning running XP on the Mac. It just may be possible that we will be able to directly launch Windows programs without the need of a translator/emulator. We may even be able to dual-boot the machines in either XP (eventually Longhorn) or OS X. The way I see it, if that happens then M$ won't care one bit...that's another copy of XP they get to sell. However, Apple would have everything to lose if OS X was ported to PC's. They want to sell new machines, period, and if the Mac faithful want to stay up to date then they'll surely have to within the next few years.

It's getting more interesting by the day. :)

Re: Macs Have Officially Joined the Dark Side

Reply #29 – June 09, 2005, 12:25:54 PM

If I can remember right, Apple Cpu's process everything in 32 bit chunks even though they are "64bit". But they do two at a time? Doesn't there big speed boost come from processing on every second clock cycle unlike a PC at every fourth clock cycle? I'm not a Apple muncher so I don't know.

So has anyone read this yeat?

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"After Jobs' presentation, Apple Senior Vice President Phil Schiller addressed the issue of running Windows on Macs, saying there are no plans to sell or support Windows on an Intel-based Mac. "That doesn't preclude someone from running it on a Mac. They probably will," he said. "We won't do anything to preclude that."

"However, Schiller said the company does not plan to let people run Mac OS X on other computer makers' hardware. "We will not allow running Mac OS X on anything other than an Apple Mac," he said."