[wtmcgee]

do you think we'll see a powermac speed bump in Jan.? I'm trying to decide between a powerbook and a powermac (that's another argument, and is not important in this context), and was wondering if there was any rumbling about an increase of processor, etc in January or soon thereafter.

I'm thinking my budget allows a Dual 1.8 right now, but I was hoping we'd see the dual 2.0 as the low end after xmas. In Jan, it will have been what, 6 months since the last upgrade?

Any thoughts on what is most likely a topic that has been beaten into the ground?

[flukewurm]

im kinda wondering the same. i dont really have the $ for a powermac right now anyways. my bank acct just took a decent hit from tuition.. but come jan. hopefully the 2.5 refurbs will be down to 2k? then again. so many people having problems with 2.5s in the first place

[wtmcgee]

I can't afford, nor do i really NEED the top of the line. I'm just curious as if I should go ahead and get the 1.8 now, or hang out till Jan. if there is a likelyhood of updates. My 800mhz iBook is just not cutting it anymore for the work I'm doing, and the things I'm doing @ school.

[Detrius]

Something will be announced in January. There's an Expo in January. They virtual always announce new machines at these things. If it won't hurt you to wait, then wait.

[Lateralus]

I don't see waiting another three months for a what is likely to be a 200MHz speed bump to the low end (as you're hoping for) as something that would be worth it.

Also take into account that even if new models are announced in January, it will likely be weeks before you can get your hands on one.

[wtmcgee]

Originally posted by PowerMacMan:
I don't see waiting another three months for a what is likely to be a 200MHz speed bump to the low end (as you're hoping for) as something that would be worth it.

Also take into account that even if new models are announced in January, it will likely be weeks before you can get your hands on one.

very good points. I may go ahead and get the 1.8 now.

[Luca Rescigno]

I bet they'll have PCI Express slots all around for the two higher end models and stay with standard PCI + one AGP 8x slot for the low end. And it'll probably go 2.0-2.5-3.0 GHz, assuming they make it to 3.0 GHz.

I doubt there will be any kind of major improvement for the low end machine. Apple has made it clear that despite the high price, they're intent on crippling it anyway. Don't get me wrong, the low end PowerMac is still awesome, but I think it's silly to charge $2000 for a computer with 256 MB of RAM, a GeForce 5200, an 80 GB hard drive, and not even have the pro-level features of PCI-X slots and extra RAM slots.

[UnixMac]

Their just now shipping 2.5's and are having a tough time (at IBM) making them fast enough at a quality that will sustain the 2.5 speed... I doubt we'll see anything faster than 2.5 for a while. I bough this machine believe that it's gonna be the top end for at least 1 year.

I am sure however, that the Powerbook will be renewed in Jan. It's the only product left, with the new iMac finally here. So if you want a G5 powerbook, then wait, Otherwise buy a PowerMac now and be done with it.

[Big Mac]

Originally posted by Luca Rescigno:
I bet they'll have PCI Express slots all around for the two higher end models and stay with standard PCI + one AGP 8x slot for the low end. And it'll probably go 2.0-2.5-3.0 GHz, assuming they make it to 3.0 GHz.

I doubt there will be any kind of major improvement for the low end machine. Apple has made it clear that despite the high price, they're intent on crippling it anyway. Don't get me wrong, the low end PowerMac is still awesome, but I think it's silly to charge $2000 for a computer with 256 MB of RAM, a GeForce 5200, an 80 GB hard drive, and not even have the pro-level features of PCI-X slots and extra RAM slots.

I hope you're wrong Luca - for my own selfish reasons. In any case, I doubt there will be a G5 upgrade in January. People have expected bumps at MWSF the last couple of years and have been disappointed. Apple does not usually release Power Macs at Macworld. One good reason not to have a conference-centric release schedule is that formerly people have delayd purchases for months in anticipation of Macworld. Finally, I agree with UnixMac concerning the fact that the 2.5 has been a hurdle; I don't expect to see significant gains in clock speed any time soon.

[Pierre B.]

Originally posted by Big Mac:
People have expected bumps at MWSF the last couple of years and have been disappointed. Apple does not usually release Power Macs at Macworld. One good reason not to have a conference-centric release schedule is that formerly people have delayd purchases for months in anticipation of Macworld. Finally, I agree with UnixMac concerning the fact that the 2.5 has been a hurdle; I don't expect to see significant gains in clock speed any time soon.

My feeling too is that there will be no speed bump for the Power Macs before next summer, for the only reason that going up in clock speed is becoming lately harder and harder to achieve (for everyone, not just IBM), and the benefits are diminishing due to extreme heat generated.

[Luca Rescigno]

Actually, I think the problem is that Apple doesn't want to do an update without a significant increase in clock speed. It would be VERY NICE for them to introduce a new line with the same processors, but with some new tech like better video cards (AHEM!!!!), PCI Express, 16x DVD burners with dual-layer capability, more base RAM (256 MB in a $2000 computer is kinda bad), and I guess more hard drive options. Right now a lot of these things you can get by just adding more and more money, but if you're already spending so much for a PowerMac, you shouldn't have to spend even more to make it good. Things like making the hard drives sizes 160 GB for the low end and 250 GB for the high end, and then having a 400 GB option as well as the option for a Raptor 10,000 RPM drive would be very good. Just about every other computer in the G5's price range has this stuff available.

If you'll notice, though, AMD's fastest processor is still a 64-bit, 2.4 GHz chip. It's been like that for months and Apple's in fine shape with the processors. If they could just give us an improvement in everything ELSE, which seems to be the major area where the G5s are hurtin', I think it would really improve their value.

So yeah...

X600XT 128 MB low end, X700 or GeForce 6600 high end, GeForce 6800 Ultra optional
Pioneer DVR-108 16x DVD+/-RW drive w/ 4x DVD+R dual layer
512 MB of RAM across the board (that is, if they still want to be stingy and not put 1 GB in the high end machine)
160 GB hard drive in the lower end one, 250 GB in the two high end ones, with an option for a single 400 GB, dual 400 GBs, or a WD Raptor 74 GB paired with one of those three or a second Raptor.

They could keep the clock speed the same and it would still be a very good update, to keep things competitive. I may seem pessimistic lately, but I just think Apple's not doing all they can/should be to stay with the competition. That's ironic because they're no longer worried about having fast enough CPUs - two years ago Apple had to do whatever they could to improve their computers in other ways, because the G4 was advancing so slowly. Now I think they're getting lazy about it because the G5 stacks up so well against mainstream x86 processors, particularly the Athlon 64, which spans almost the exact same range of speeds.

[striker100]

I believe Powermac speed bumps will be coming no sooner than 9 months between revisions and shipping 1-2 months after announced.

[P]

I think we'll be seeing a "mini-bump", like when the old midrange went dual in the middle of the older Powermac's lifecycle. Say the low end gets a price cut to compete with the new iMacs and the midrange gets bumped to 2.2 GHz to let off some of the pressure from the 2.5s. Could come at any time, likely not an Expo.

PCI Express takes some time, that's a whole new chipset. I doubt we'll be seeing that in a while yet.

[UnixMac]

Originally posted by P:
I think we'll be seeing a "mini-bump", like when the old midrange went dual in the middle of the older Powermac's lifecycle. Say the low end gets a price cut to compete with the new iMacs and the midrange gets bumped to 2.2 GHz to let off some of the pressure from the 2.5s. Could come at any time, likely not an Expo.

PCI Express takes some time, that's a whole new chipset. I doubt we'll be seeing that in a while yet.

That was partly due to the constant complaints and clamoring from us about the PC's being so much faster, that Apple was under the gun to speed up their machines as fast as possible. Now though even the Dual 1.8 smokes most PCs with the proper software, so Apple would be wise to wait for a major increase in speed.

I would bet these new Dual Core CPU's may be the next Power Mac major boost, especially if they Dual them up for a total of 4 cores... Damn that's gonna be something!

[wtmcgee]

Is PCI-X even a big deal? I'm mainly going to be working with graphics (photoshop, flash, etc), so I don't really see myself adding too many expansion cards in the very near future. I mean, it'd be great to have all of the very latest and greatest, and a faster FSB, etc... but i think the 1.8 should be fine.

The way I see it, i'd rather get the low end model, bump up the video card to the 128 model and buy a gig of RAM. I'd still pay less than the dual 2ghz, and it should be able to easily outperform it, even with the slight crippling.

[UnixMac]

Originally posted by wtmcgee:
Is PCI-X even a big deal? I'm mainly going to be working with graphics (photoshop, flash, etc), so I don't really see myself adding too many expansion cards in the very near future. I mean, it'd be great to have all of the very latest and greatest, and a faster FSB, etc... but i think the 1.8 should be fine.

The way I see it, i'd rather get the low end model, bump up the video card to the 128 model and buy a gig of RAM. I'd still pay less than the dual 2ghz, and it should be able to easily outperform it, even with the slight crippling.

PCI-X isn't doing anything for me... I have am AGP 8X graphic card and that's fast enough for this CPU for now. Down the road if/when they come out with PCI-X cards that I need, I'll be glad I have one, but I doubt I'll need any of them.

I would go with the 1.8, and load in as much RAM as you can afford (Crucial is best price/performance). I am planing on taking mine all the way to 16GB down the road (when the 2GB cards come out, and as their prices drop, etc...)

RAM is going to speed up your machine as much as anything else.

[MindFad]

Originally posted by UnixMac:
I would bet these new Dual Core CPU's may be the next Power Mac major boost, especially if they Dual them up for a total of 4 cores... Damn that's gonna be something!

Sign me up for one of those! Either way, if Apple doesn't hit 3GHz by the next update, I imagine there will be a whole lot of whining about the matter. I'll probably bitch and complain, too, because I want me a dual 3GHz.

[UnixMac]

Originally posted by MindFad:
Sign me up for one of those! Either way, if Apple doesn't hit 3GHz by the next update, I imagine there will be a whole lot of whining about the matter. I'll probably bitch and complain, too, because I want me a dual 3GHz.

I did too, but the writing is on the wall for more Ghz.. for a while speed is going to come from architecture changes and less from clock cycles.

[wtmcgee]

again - thanks for the advice guys... i'm gonna order the dual 1.8 this week.

[Luca Rescigno]

You guys have PCI-X and PCI Express (PCIe) mixed up. Right now the top two G5s have an AGP slot and three PCI-X slots. The low end has standard PCI. PCI-X is not common in consumer-oriented machines, and most PCI-X cards are very high bandwidth things like gigabit ethernet.

PCIe is totally different. It's the newest standard for the slot for the graphics card, and it's unseating AGP. The thing is, while you really don't NEED it, at least not yet, it's still nice to have things up to date. You can argue that the lack of this or that in an iMac or iBook is because the typical iBook or iMac user doesn't need whatever, but you can't say that with the PowerMacs because they are very expensive pro-level computers. You know what else the PowerMacs don't need? SATA. Even the fastest hard drives can only transfer at half the speed of SATA, so they could have just put an ATA/133 or even an ATA/100 bus in the G5s instead of SATA, and it would still provide more than enough bandwidth. But the idea is that they're providing the latest technology for a high price.

It could take a bit longer to put PCIe in the G5s, because it would indeed require a new chipset. Athlon 64 motherboards with PCIe are very rare and expensive right now, but they should be coming out in the next few months. Apple's had a few months to work on it, and they have many more before the current PowerMacs really need one. I think it would be a good idea to throw in a bunch of new features even if they can't bump the processor.

[UnixMac]

Originally posted by Luca Rescigno:
You guys have PCI-X and PCI Express (PCIe) mixed up. Right now the top two G5s have an AGP slot and three PCI-X slots. The low end has standard PCI. PCI-X is not common in consumer-oriented machines, and most PCI-X cards are very high bandwidth things like gigabit ethernet.

PCIe is totally different. It's the newest standard for the slot for the graphics card, and it's unseating AGP. The thing is, while you really don't NEED it, at least not yet, it's still nice to have things up to date. You can argue that the lack of this or that in an iMac or iBook is because the typical iBook or iMac user doesn't need whatever, but you can't say that with the PowerMacs because they are very expensive pro-level computers. You know what else the PowerMacs don't need? SATA. Even the fastest hard drives can only transfer at half the speed of SATA, so they could have just put an ATA/133 or even an ATA/100 bus in the G5s instead of SATA, and it would still provide more than enough bandwidth. But the idea is that they're providing the latest technology for a high price.

It could take a bit longer to put PCIe in the G5s, because it would indeed require a new chipset. Athlon 64 motherboards with PCIe are very rare and expensive right now, but they should be coming out in the next few months. Apple's had a few months to work on it, and they have many more before the current PowerMacs really need one. I think it would be a good idea to throw in a bunch of new features even if they can't bump the processor.

I'm well aware of the difference between the two, sorry if it didn't come thru in my post, but I still don't think that I'll need it anytime soon, as AGP 8X is still not being taxed even by the new Nvidia 6800 and X800. As a matter of fact I saw a test of a AGP vs PCI Express X800 on a PC bench site, and there was no difference (measurable), if I recall.

As for SATA, I wonder, don't you think that in the case (like mine) where I have a 70+ mbs drive along with a 50-65mbs drive running in a "parallel" arrangement, with data coming in from both that the 150speed of the SATA is useful? That would pretty much max out a ATA/133 bus.

Anyway, I see your point about the "furture" being PCI Express, but AGP isn't going away over night, just like it didn't come in overnight.

[Mafia]

Originally posted by wtmcgee:
again - thanks for the advice guys... i'm gonna order the dual 1.8 this week.

i got the dual 1.8 and its great. I'm not a prefessional persay. but i definetly do pro level work on this machine and it does the job. like others stated the chances of a speed bump in january is low. I would see more of a powerbook speed bump, the new ipod, and maybe the release of tiger in January.


mafia

[P]

There are two advantages of PCIe and SATA that noone has mentioned yet:

* Latency
* multiple units
* cost

Latency is the time between the request for the first byte goes out and the first byte arrives. Both PCIe and SATA cut this time a little, though not by any significant number (at least not for SATA).

SATA should enable a lot of drives on one SATA chain, not just two per chain like UATA. This also with simpler, smaller wires (indeed, I suspect that this is part of the reason Apple put them in the Powermac - easier to cool). PCIe will also enable more than one graphics board in an easier way than exists today. A graphics board uses PCIe x16, meaning that it uses 16 PCIe channels. There is nothing that restricts you from putting two PCIe x16 slots on one board (there are such boards today), but (as has been noted) one x16 and x8 would do fine. Imagine that when you, in a few years, want a nVidia 8800 to replace that aging 6800, you can put the 6800 in a x8 slot and keep using it for your secondary display. While you can have extra boards for extra displays today, you can't have two AGP slots so you can't use your old AGP board as the secondary board. You'll have to buy a new PCI board.

Finally, PCIe will be cheaper than the current PCI+AGP design when the manufacturing process has matured a bit, and a single SATA chip can also be made cheaper when you don't have to carry the baggage of old ATA versions back to -85 or so - on multiple channels, to boot.

[Big Mac]

Originally posted by P:
There are two advantages of PCIe and SATA that noone has mentioned yet:

* Latency
* multiple units
* cost

Latency is the time between the request for the first byte goes out and the first byte arrives. Both PCIe and SATA cut this time a little, though not by any significant number (at least not for SATA).

SATA should enable a lot of drives on one SATA chain, not just two per chain like UATA. This also with simpler, smaller wires (indeed, I suspect that this is part of the reason Apple put them in the Powermac - easier to cool). PCIe will also enable more than one graphics board in an easier way than exists today. A graphics board uses PCIe x16, meaning that it uses 16 PCIe channels. There is nothing that restricts you from putting two PCIe x16 slots on one board (there are such boards today), but (as has been noted) one x16 and x8 would do fine. Imagine that when you, in a few years, want a nVidia 8800 to replace that aging 6800, you can put the 6800 in a x8 slot and keep using it for your secondary display. While you can have extra boards for extra displays today, you can't have two AGP slots so you can't use your old AGP board as the secondary board. You'll have to buy a new PCI board.

Finally, PCIe will be cheaper than the current PCI+AGP design when the manufacturing process has matured a bit, and a single SATA chip can also be made cheaper when you don't have to carry the baggage of old ATA versions back to -85 or so - on multiple channels, to boot.

Good points. The chief drawback to PCIe is no backward compatibility, since it's a serial bus technology whereas PCI-X (and PCI) is parallel. If you take a look at the initial reviews for PCIe cards, you'll see that there is not much of a speed boost over AGP at this point. That will obviously change, of course. I'm just selfishly hoping that we won't see PCIe for at least two revisions. Even if Apple gets PCIe into the next revision, I won't regret purchasing my G5. It would just be nice if Apple could indulge me this one time and do what I say.

[Skip Breakfast]

I don't see speed holding back PowerMacs as much as the internal storage is. Despite what many think, the case design is just too huge for what it accomodates. Go with the smaller processors and sinks, add two hard drive bays, and lose the "fashion-over-function" optical bay door.

[Big Mac]

Originally posted by Skip Breakfast:
I don't see speed holding back PowerMacs as much as the internal storage is. Despite what many think, the case design is just too huge for what it accomodates. Go with the smaller processors and sinks, add two hard drive bays, and lose the "fashion-over-function" optical bay door.

If Apple had smaller processors to put in, smaller processors would be used. The problem is, processors may not get much smaller, due to the energy leakage experienced with the new .90 nm fabrication process. The conventional die shrink we're used to seeing may be a thing of the past, which means that the chip makers will need to take their designs in a different direction in order to give us improved energy efficiency and speed.

In any case, while the number of bays in the current G5 case is less than optimal and less than most expect, it's more important that the components be cooled and the machine not to sound like a vacuum in order for it to be cooled. Would we have liked an additional optical bay? Of course? Another drive bay or two? Certainly. But the design tradeoff was fewer bays for superior cooling. Now you could make the argument that since third parties have figured out how to put more drives into the same case, Apple should have been able to come up with the same solution. That may indeed be true. At least we have the third party options if we need it.

[FreshH2O]

More important than small incremental speed bumps in laptops or towers would be to use the fearnings from iTunes and iPod to lower computer/monitor prices. That would drive demand from the Windows iPod users to Apple which would again drive more diverse products that do not require multiple add ons, starting with RAM.