Jobs unveils new Power Macs (IBM's new PowerPC 970 64 bit chip and come in three flavors)

CNET ^ | June 23, 2003, 12:49 PM PT | Ina Fried Staff Writer, CNET News.com

[libravoter]

There was a mini-series a few years ago (with Noah Wylie as either Steve Jobs or Bill Gates.)

At the close of the movie, Steve Jobs says to Bill, "I know we're going to beat you because we have the better product."

"Steve, you still don't get it." Bill Gates replies. "It doesn't matter."

[Bush2000]

And then Stevie-boy left Apple to swirl around the bowl...

[PatrioticAmerican]

JObs says its the fastest personal computer, if you don;t include this that and the other.

A 3.06Gz Intel P4 with an 800Mhz bus SMOKES anything out there right now. Toss in 4GB memory, an nVidia 5900fx graphics chip, and apple is dead last.

[PatrioticAmerican]

"Well for starters...it's a much easier system to master. Witness that Windows 98 is actually Mac 84."

Yeah, but we are at Windows XP Professional, so try to evaluate apples to PCs based on current technology to current technology.

[PatrioticAmerican]

"OSX is built on a more modern foundation."

Really? It's not built on UNIX, a 30 year old OS??

[Psycho_Bunny]

My feller has a Dell running Windows XP.

He crashes his machine and gets the "blue screen of death" at least twice a week

Assuming this is true, there's a piece of hardware in the computer that is physically defective.

Or he has a virus.

 

[Billy_bob_bob]

Have you read the info at http://www.apple.com/powermac/performance/ concerning the performance of the new G5? I disagree with your assertation that the intel P4 is faster than the new G5.

Today is a red-letter day for Apple. From here on out the future of Apple will be based on IBM processors. No more being held back by Motorola. The Power4 architecture that the 970 is based on is first rate, and IBM is going to push this technology forward with a passion.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

The Power4 architecture that the 970 is based on is first rate, and IBM is going to push this technology forward with a passion.

And that is why I am watching !

[2111USMC]

Perhaps I don't have a full understanding of Mac's capabilities.

For individual PC's we run:

Windows 2000 Professional, MS Office (Word, Excel, Access, Outlook, PowerPoint, MS Binder, etc.)

For Corporate and International communication and information sharing, we rely heavily on Lotus Notes (replicator, e-mail, internal mail, d-base access, etc.)

Our international company employs more than 60,000 people. Of those, I would estimate that nearly 50% have responsibilities/need for utilizing computers on a daily basis.

Question (and I am not trying to be a "smart a$$): Are you insinuating that people in such a large network, spread out all over the world, should be able to individually choose which operating system/software platform they can use?

Are all MS products compatible to the Mac OS?

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

A changeover would be a massive exercise alright!

[PatrioticAmerican]

Um, that's a software test, not a machine test, not to mention not even running the same code base. A 2Gz chip usually doesn't beat a 3ghz chip when running the same memory.

We've constantly heard from the Mac crowd about how fast their systems were, but they never proved out. Why? Because they like to run optimized software on the Mac and make general comparisons to the PC.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Some background:

PowerPC 970 — First in a new family of high-performance 64-bit PowerPC microprocessors

[Billy_bob_bob]

Good questions. Are all MS products compatable to OS X? No. However, there is a version of MS Office that has been written for OS X, and it has gotten good reviews. Lotus Notes is not ported to OS X AFAIK, but since Lotus is owned by IBM I would imagine there is a good chance that IBM will want to deliver a port at some future date.

Apple computers excel at graphics intensive tasks, video production and editing, animation, 3-D modeling etc. Apple computers have not done well in the office software arena. That may change as time goes by. The new 970 machines compare favorably with products offered to the Unix workstation market, and at a lower price point. Since OS X is very compatable with Unix it will be easy for software vendors to port their advanced engineering and CAD/CAM programs to OS X.

Once companies start hearing from their engineering staffs that Apple computers are what they want to buy then these same companies might start looking at Apple computers for other tasks as well. So I think the future looks quite bright for Apple.

[PatrioticAmerican]

SPEC scores seems to better here

[libravoter]

Better to be a smart a$$ than a dumb a$$.

My Mac runs MS Office with all the programs mentioned. (though I don't use MS Binder, so I don't know if there's a Mac version. My office uses an Oracle system for the Lotus Notes features you mentioned, but I will check in the morning to see what the Mac options are there, because you got me on that one.

To answer your question about large networks using different systems, my employer is the best example of how it works. I work for MIT (part of why I need the freeper outlet!!!) and the institute's different sections end up having pretty different computing needs, so there is a lot of computer diversity. There are a lot of departments, especially the uber-nerd departments that use Mac's because they need a Unix-based system.

My department (200 people) is about 90% Mac-based. I love read the IT messages about virus/security warnings that go around - invariably they end with "as always, this virus/security flaw affects Windows machines only."

[PatrioticAmerican]

I noticed that Mac hasn't yet submitted their SPEC results to SPEC. I wonder why?

Official SPEC Results

[Billy_bob_bob]

I don't understand your point. Nobody runs a bare machine to see how fast they can make register lights blink (yes, I'm that old). They run programs to do thing. When you run Photoshop 7 on a G5 it outperforms Photoshop 7 on a dual 3Ghz Xeon. When you run long word lengths in a BLAST DNA sequence matching search you get results up to 5x faster than a dual 3Ghz Xeon, by almost 2x.

Yes, specific versions of different specific tests will produce different results, some more favorable to one architecture or another. The bottom line is when the pedal hits the metal and the rubber hits the road on a big hairy processor intensive task the new 970 based flat out beats the Pentium and Xeon.

For a long time now the PC crowd has beaten the Apple camp up over processor speeds and machine performance. Now it looks like Apple is not only back in the race, but they have pulled out into the lead. Exciting times we live in.

[Billy_bob_bob]

Messed up in editing. Photoshop is up to 2x faster, BLAST up to 5x faster with long word lengths. According to Apple, as posted on their web site today.

[B Knotts]

From what I can tell, the Opteron absolutely smokes the G5.

	Opteron 244 (1.8 GHz) (Einux A8000)	G5
specfp_rate_base2000	23.3	15.7
specint_rate_base2000	25.0	17.2
specfp_base2000	1160	840
specint_base2000	960	800

[montag813]

Jobs showed both benchmarks and Photoshop tests showing the new dual 2GHz PowerMac outperforming a dual 3GHz Xeon machine.

Hahaha! Take a good look at the site's spec comparison. The Xeon's beat the G5 using one interpretation, the G5 with the other. Hardly reliable. Also, Apple always uses Photoshop because the PowerPC chip has accelerated plug-in for that app...hardly fair. And the Mac uses Serial ATA at 7200 RPM...not even close the the performance of Ultra320 Drives running at 10k or 15,000 RPM, like my dual-Xeon Workstation does. My unit would shred the G5 in everything from AVID to 3D Studio Max. What a joke.