[echosphere]

MacBidouille has posted Rumors on the web that WWDC will showcase the PowerPC 970 (G5?) with 64-bit Panther demos...
http://www.insanely-great.com/news.php?id=1800
Just curious to see everyones take on this.

Some things to ponder:
1) Yes, 64-bit processing, from what I've read, sounds like a good thing. Maybe someone who knows can explain it better. Though Intel's CEO says we don't need it anytime soon for consumer desktops, huh? I if it Intel SAYS so, it must be true???

2) 10.3 Beta with 64-bit code? The question is, could I use it on my iMac G4 800mhz?

3) "64-bit versions of Photoshop and the like."
I really couldn't imagine another major upgrade for systems and apps this soon. I just bought native OSX upgrades, OfficeX ($149), Photoshop ($129), VPC 6 ($99). How long would YOU want to wait for Quark XPress 7?

4) If it does come, should it be called the G5? There is no lincensing trademark that says that G designation belongs only to Motorola's new (vaporware) chip. It's just marketing, isn't it?

The grand question:
Yes, 10.3 Panther 64-bit with PPC 970 G5's would be great. BUT, it has to still run 32-bit apps natively. Example, just like Photoshop can utilize Altivec and DPs, programs should be able program in extra to access 64-bit instructions, but also have the freedom not too.

Sorry, newbie with lots of questions, feel free to let me know (like I could stop you..) if you think these points are relative or not. These are RUMORS after all, or are they?

[Severed Hand of Skywalker]

Good way for Apple to get people to stop buying the current towers.

[Gul Banana]

Well, this seems like as good a time as any to apply for that WWDC scholarship.

About your points:
1) Yes it's a good thing, no it won't make an enormous difference to most people's word processing and web browsing. It's more useful for high-end things, such as video editing and web serving. What it actuallly means is that the computer can push around integer data in chunks twice as big.

2) No idea. I'm hoping "yes"; Apple definitely has the technology available to do that.

3) Aforesaid 64-bit upgrades hopefully won't be necessary, just useful. Given especially that you have a computer which is NOT a PPC 970, there'd be little point in getting them.

4) We need a cool new name, though!

And the final thing...
According to everything we've heard about the PPC 970, it _will_ be able to run 32 bit applications completely natively.

[Terri]

Finally a Mac that I can also grill my breakfast on…

[CharlesS]

Originally posted by echosphere:
The grand question:
Yes, 10.3 Panther 64-bit with PPC 970 G5's would be great. BUT, it has to still run 32-bit apps natively. Example, just like Photoshop can utilize Altivec and DPs, programs should be able program in extra to access 64-bit instructions, but also have the freedom not too.

Although the OS needs to be updated to 64 bit, any of the other apps can run fine in 32 bit. This has been discussed to death all over the Mac world...

[Axo1ot1]

There is always someone to complain. If it isn't that the computer is too slow it's that it's too noisy or too hot.

[ambush]

OK guys - now you need to tell me - is the ppc 970 really fast? Or what? Is it basically just "a new G4"? I'd expect it to be FAST - like faster than than a P4, than a Centrino or whatever.....

[MacGorilla]

Originally posted by ambush:
OK guys - now you need to tell me - is the ppc 970 really fast? Or what? Is it basically just "a new G4"? I'd expect it to be FAST - like faster than than a P4, than a Centrino or whatever.....

Comparing the PPC chip to an Intel chip is hard, comparing a 64 bit PPC chip to a 32 bit Intel chip is silly.

[ambush]

Originally posted by MacGorilla:
Comparing the PPC chip to an Intel chip is hard, comparing a 64 bit PPC chip to a 32 bit Intel chip is silly.

The problem is that people said that like 6 years ago. "Comparing RISC to CISC is just silly".. well.. turns out a P$ is a lot faster/cheaper than a G4 right now. So, I hope you understand... I feel kinda spketical about it...

[NeXTLoop]

If you look at the documentation, it looks like the 970 has the potential to smoke Intel butt. Especially since it will debut at a higher clock speed than originally anticipated.

[foobars]

Originally posted by ambush:
The problem is that people said that like 6 years ago. "Comparing RISC to CISC is just silly".. well.. turns out a P$ is a lot faster/cheaper than a G4 right now. So, I hope you understand... I feel kinda spketical about it...

The current processor situation is because of Motorola's shortcomings-- not the PowerPC's.

[echosphere]

Thanks Banana for the explanation.

I know these are rumors, but realistically, where else would Apple show off the 970 if not at WWDC? MWNY? Probably not, due to all the issues, plus it's relly not the place. If Apple wants to get developers on board they need to start talking to them now.

And, if Apple doesn't go with something like the 970, then where? Any ideas of where Moto is going these days? What is the roadmap with their processors for the Mac?

One interesting things these days, is that the Pentium-M gives Apple some breathing room, as officially now, mhz doesn't really mean that much, thank god.

[ASIMO]

And there'll be a live quicktime stream of monkeys flying out of my butt at WWDC '03.

[Nonsuch]

Seems quite likely to me. The 970, if not already in production, will be soon, and developers need to know what the new architecture will mean to them. This is nothing like an "announcement," though. And don't expect a lot of intelligence to trickle out of this--these folks tend to take their NDAs pretty seriously.

[edddeduck]

I would goto arstechnica and read up on the 970. It's a great design and should do very well in macs.

1. It has 2 Altivec Units on board so thats twice as many of those for a start.
2. It has a 900Mhz DDR bus (with eight prefetch streams). Roughly 10 times more bandwidth than a G4e. Good for multimedia.
3. It is going to run at 2.5Ghz
4. It can exectute a maximum of 8 instructions per cycle vs 5 on a G4/P4.
5. It has 12 execution engines vs 9 for the G4e and 5 for the P4.
6. "This design is aimed at four-way (systems)," said Sampson. "It can certainly support eight-way. It's intended for SMP." - Pete Sampson, IBM senior PowerPC architect. The G4e was not designed for SMP although it does do it unlike the 970.

So overall it is looking like a mean machine. Also as IBM usually deliver on their promises.

Cheers Edwin

[Gul Banana]

Originally posted by echosphere:
And, if Apple doesn't go with something like the 970, then where? Any ideas of where Moto is going these days? What is the roadmap with their processors for the Mac?

Q4 2003
Make the G4 a bit faster maybe.

Q1 2004
We should probably bump up the bus a bit. How do you guys feel about 200 MHz? Or something, I dunno, maybe that's too high.

Q3 2004
Oh, we, uh, forgot about the G5, didn't we? How about we add another Altivec unit to the G4 and call it the G5?

2005+
I guess we could make our chips run a bit cooler. Yeah, that'll make the embedded customers happy.

[Gul Banana]

Originally posted by edddeduck:
I would goto arstechnica and read up on the 970. It's a great design and should do very well in macs.

1. It has 2 Altivec Units on board so thats twice as many of those for a start.
2. It has a 900Mhz DDR bus (with eight prefetch streams). Roughly 10 times more bandwidth than a G4e. Good for multimedia.
3. It is going to run at 2.5Ghz
4. It can exectute a maximum of 8 instructions per cycle vs 5 on a G4/P4.
5. It has 12 execution engines vs 9 for the G4e and 5 for the P4.
6. "This design is aimed at four-way (systems)," said Sampson. "It can certainly support eight-way. It's intended for SMP." - Pete Sampson, IBM senior PowerPC architect. The G4e was not designed for SMP although it does do it unlike the 970.

So overall it is looking like a mean machine. Also as IBM usually deliver on their promises.

Cheers Edwin

3 is misleading - at launch, the 970 may only go up to 1.8 GHz. Nobody is really sure yet.

[echosphere]

You have a big butt Asimo. Primates coming from your posterior is nasty.

We've heard rumors of G5s for the last 2 or 3 years. When? Apple is dead in the water right now. Year of the laptop? Yeah, well is sure as hell aint going to be the hear of the desktop if Apple doesn't show us some serious hardware soon....

[edddeduck]

Originally posted by Gul Banana:
3 is misleading - at launch, the 970 may only go up to 1.8 GHz. Nobody is really sure yet.

OK Possibly a bit missleading but as a G4e cannot run at 2.5Ghz at all, ever its worth mentioning.

Cheers Edwin

[::maroma::]

1984
2004

I'm betting Apple has some goodies in store for the 20 year mark.

[Homer1946]

The 970 is cleary, by all spects, a much better chip than the G4. We all know a true G4 didn't materialize and the current G4 is just an updated 604/G3 with altivec and an extra state to enable multiprocessing (courtesy of the 604).

We also know from multiple published reports that the 970 runs 32 bit G4/G3 code without requiring emulation and it is Altivec compatible.

It is also clear that enabling the 970 for X requires limited modifications.

The result is that a 64 bit version of X is likely to be demoed when the 970 is close enough to production yields to demonstrate.

The is not magic, but technology that has been discussed extensively.

Since the 970 is currently yielding sample volumes and will be at production volumes within the next 6 to 12 months (we hope), a 64 bit compatible version X running on prototype hardware seems at least a realistic possibility at the next WWDC.

-R

[mitchell_pgh]

2004 is really going to be the year of the Apple.

Things I can't wait to tell my PC friends?
You mean, you ONLY have a 32 bit system?

On a serious note:
From everything that I have read, the 970 is going to be a solid platform for the next few years. It's basically a stripped down Power4 chip with a bunch of modifications. IBM is also working hard on the Power5 chip to keep users away from Intel's Itanium chip. This is a win/win situation for IBM and Apple. Apple finally gets a serious competitor to the P4 and IBM has someone that is essentially investing in their technological development. Who knows, perhaps the xServe will use the Power5 chip some day for Apples high end server.

That would be interesting...

[Catfish_Man]

Originally posted by edddeduck:
I would goto arstechnica and read up on the 970. It's a great design and should do very well in macs.

1. It has 2 Altivec Units on board so thats twice as many of those for a start.
2. It has a 900Mhz DDR bus (with eight prefetch streams). Roughly 10 times more bandwidth than a G4e. Good for multimedia.
3. It is going to run at 2.5Ghz
4. It can exectute a maximum of 8 instructions per cycle vs 5 on a G4/P4.
5. It has 12 execution engines vs 9 for the G4e and 5 for the P4.
6. "This design is aimed at four-way (systems)," said Sampson. "It can certainly support eight-way. It's intended for SMP." - Pete Sampson, IBM senior PowerPC architect. The G4e was not designed for SMP although it does do it unlike the 970.

So overall it is looking like a mean machine. Also as IBM usually deliver on their promises.

Cheers Edwin

A lot of that is wrong. The G4 has 4 Altivec units, so does the 970 (The 970s vector dispatch is actually like older G4s, so it's slightly worse). It can fetch 8 instructions but only dispatch 5. The G4 and P4 can dispatch 4 and 3 respectively. I'm not sure what you mean by twelve execution engines (I get 10, 4 integer, 2 floating point, 4 vector. The G4 has 4 vector, 1 floating point, and 4 integer). The G4 was designed for SMP, it just wasn't designed for GOOD SMP. Basically, the 970's going to kick ass, but not by quite as much as you seem to think (although a few things you left out will help, like out of order execution and big caches).

[[APi]TheMan]

Originally posted by echosphere:
You have a big butt Asimo. Primates coming from your posterior is nasty.

We've heard rumors of G5s for the last 2 or 3 years. When? Apple is dead in the water right now. Year of the laptop? Yeah, well is sure as hell aint going to be the hear of the desktop if Apple doesn't show us some serious hardware soon....

Asimo may have a big butt, and PPC 970s may kick butt, but I am pretty stoked on the current line of PowerMacs.

Dual 1.42 ghz? Woohoo! I have never even owned a G4, the things I could do with a a machine of that status. I make due MORE than enough on this Pismo 400. It's still a nice, impressive machine to me.

[KidRed]

Originally posted by ambush:
OK guys - now you need to tell me - is the ppc 970 really fast? Or what? Is it basically just "a new G4"? I'd expect it to be FAST - like faster than than a P4, than a Centrino or whatever.....

the current 2.8GHz P4 gets roughly the same SPEC scores as the estimates of the 1.8GHz 970

it will average about 1.5-2x faster than a G4+ at the same clock frequency.

[Superchicken]

As I understand OS X allows you to have two applications in one. You could see adobe release photoshop 7.5 which would essentially be PS 7 with a few new things and a 64 bit version of it's app compiled bundled with a 32 bit one and deppending on how many bits your processor is you'll use the one that's right for your system.
The PPC 970 can also run in a 32 bit mode.
What else... they say it runs twice as fast as a similarly clocked G4. hence at 1.8Ghz, it's faster than a 3Ghz G4, hence it's significantly faster than a 3Ghz P4
Panther may be 64 bit native, who knows, either way they probably will only release the 32 bit version until the 970 comes out and you probably won't see any indications of this durring the WWDC, and most likely you won't hear a wisper out of apple about it so that they don't kill the current desktop sales.

[gorgonzola]

The 900 MHz bus will also probably help a lot. Note that the newer pipelines on the 970 will put an end to the current problem of not being able to fully utilize the speed boost given by DDR RAM.

Although it's unclear what speed it will debut at, the 970 has a number of improvements over the G4 (not just the clockspeed). In addition, the clock speed of the chip will probably rise much more quickly than we've seen with the G4.

The real questions are when Apple is going to announce whether it's using it and when the actual machines start shipping. Because a number of things are changed, it's not going to be easy to really tell how much faster the 970 is without doing a regular old benchmark on a production machine.

As for OS X, I'd expect that they could get it running on a 970 pretty quickly.

[beb]

I want the mac that got so fast and hot that it caused the China sysndrome.

[Superchicken]

Uhhh those complaining about heat, if I clocked my G3 up to 500 Mhz it would be hot, if I have a 1.8Ghz PPC 970 in comparision to this over clocked 333Mhz G3 if it'ss over lcocked to 500 then the PPC 970 would probably be cooler.
Heck it might even be cooler than a G3, either way the PPC 970 isnot a hot terribly hot chip.

[BuonRotto]

One of the above posts mentioned 2 floating point units. I assume that this does not mean thechip has double-precision accuracy (important for CADD, 3D, and I assume advanced video and stuff), yes? This is one area that our IT guys hold over the Mac -- it can't dependably handle precision units. This subject, by the way, is something I have a very limited understanding of.

[piracy]

Originally posted by Terri:
Finally a Mac that I can also grill my breakfast on…

The 970, in many instances, has lower power requirements - and therefore less heat dissipation - than the 74xx (G4) family. And less than Xeons and Pentium 4s.

[piracy]

Originally posted by BuonRotto:
One of the above posts mentioned 2 floating point units. I assume that this does not mean thechip has double-precision accuracy

The 970 handles double-precision math.

[Diggory Laycock]

If you want to know what 64 bit proccessing is about see here:

http://arstechnica.com/cpu/03q1/x86-64/x86-64-1.html

very good article - as ever.

Most important point - for Mac users "64 bit-ness" does not bring increased speed (on its own) - unless you need very large numbers - e.g. Mathematica, strong crypto, engineering visualisation etc.

Of course this chip will be fast - but for other reasons.

[smeger]

Originally posted by BuonRotto:
One of the above posts mentioned 2 floating point units. I assume that this does not mean thechip has double-precision accuracy (important for CADD, 3D, and I assume advanced video and stuff), yes? This is one area that our IT guys hold over the Mac -- it can't dependably handle precision units. This subject, by the way, is something I have a very limited understanding of.

The problem that you're referring to is that the G4 needs a software "shim" to do double-precision arithmetic using Altivec. It's completely dependable, but you lose some of the speed boost that Altivec provides.

I haven't heard whether the 970 fixes this problem, but I'd seriously hope so - it's a big issue in the scientific computing community that Apple has been trying to cultivate. Maybe I should take a look at the 705 emails from Apple's SciTech list that I haven't yet read.

[piracy]

Originally posted by smeger:
The problem that you're referring to is that the G4 needs a software "shim" to do double-precision arithmetic using Altivec. It's completely dependable, but you lose some of the speed boost that Altivec provides.

I haven't heard whether the 970 fixes this problem, but I'd seriously hope so - it's a big issue in the scientific computing community that Apple has been trying to cultivate. Maybe I should take a look at the 705 emails from Apple's SciTech list that I haven't yet read.

The 970 does indeed natively handle double precision math.

[cacarr1]

I have to admit that I'm a bit ignorant when it gets this technical...but after reading all of your posts, I'm getting a chubby!
It sounds like I'll wait to buy a new machine until I hear more...

[Angus_D]

Originally posted by foobars:
The current processor situation is because of Motorola's shortcomings-- not the PowerPC's.

And also due to the fact that CISC technology has moved on a lot in unexpected ways (due to the fact it has had about 3948723984 times more R&D $$ thrown at it, of course).

[absmiths]

I would still rather have a machine (especially an OS X machine) running 4 800MHz processors than a single CPU machine running at 4GHz.

People have way to little respect for SMP.

[clarkgoble]

I would still rather have a machine (especially an OS X machine) running 4 800MHz processors than a single CPU machine running at 4GHz.

Well the problem with 4 800 MHz machines is the bandwidth they can communicate with things. That's why a 4-way G4 never was going to happen. You "starve" the CPU.

[echosphere]

What about XServe?

Will Apple deploy the PPC970 and a 64-bit OSX Server before the consomer configurations? Apple released DDR and also integrated FireWire800 (ok, around the same time, but so much better) before they introduced them in PowerMacs.

With WWDC, would they only be showing an XServe hardware/software setup?

I know that this makes this a rumor of a rumor. But, it could be worse, we could be talking about this shite.

[Moose]

Originally posted by Angus_D:
And also due to the fact that CISC technology has moved on a lot in unexpected ways (due to the fact it has had about 3948723984 times more R&D $$ thrown at it, of course).

Because IBM doesn't throw assloads of money into PowerPC development.

Oh, wait. It does.

[Detrius]

Originally posted by BuonRotto:
One of the above posts mentioned 2 floating point units. I assume that this does not mean thechip has double-precision accuracy (important for CADD, 3D, and I assume advanced video and stuff), yes? This is one area that our IT guys hold over the Mac -- it can't dependably handle precision units. This subject, by the way, is something I have a very limited understanding of.

Altivec natively does single precision floating point calculations. The floating point unit, however, is perfectly capable of doing double precision arithmetic.

The 64-bit-ness means that we would have double precision integers. The P4 can't do that.

[miro7]

One of the above posts mentioned 2 floating point units. I assume that this does not mean thechip has double-precision accuracy (important for CADD, 3D, and I assume advanced video and stuff), yes? This is one area that our IT guys hold over the Mac -- it can't dependably handle precision units. This subject, by the way, is something I have a very limited understanding of.

Just to clarify/add--the G4 will do double precision floats as well. Altivec only handles single precision in all current incarnations.

As of the 750FX, the G3 now handles double precision floats.

The 970 handles doubles as well as having two floating point units (where the G3 and G4 only have one). The obvious implications is an increase in speed of the operation.