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  Blog \Blôg\, n. [Jrg, fr. Jrg. "Web-log".
     See {Blogger, BlogSpot, LiveJournal}.]
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Wednesday, July 24, 2002
17:43 - This ain't too good.
http://www.digitalvideoediting.com/2002/07_jul/features/cw_macvspc23.htm

(top) link
I think it's come time for Apple to realize that the tech industry has pretty much caught on to where the CPU wars have really ended up these days.

While the "megahertz myth" has not been a big marketing point in this whole past year, it's true in a lot of ways. Now, I'm not going to claim that a 1GHZ G4 is faster at all things than a 2.2GHz P4. I think we've seen from enough real-world benchmarks, like this one (which, from the perspective of a reviewer who had given a "glowing" appraisal of the Power Mac G4, showed that machine failing pretty heinously against top-end P4 and Athlon machines in Photoshop tests), that the everyday consumer just isn't going to buy it. But the principles behind what they say when explaining what the megahertz myth is are sound-- pipeline depth is a serious problem, with branch mispredictions utterly destroying the performance of anything with a huge long pipe, when those mispredictions become common. Just look at these numbers for RC5 keypair crunching, which show a dual 1GHz G4 beating an 8-way DEC Alpha, a dual Thunderbird, and two other chipsets before even reaching the P4 and its catastrophically (in this case) long pipeline. Similarly, the SPEC2000 benchmarks produced by c't magazine some time ago (which showed the P4 trouncing the G4 by some whopping margin) were widely discredited by virtue of the SPEC2000 tests being based on very uniform, consistent operations that introduce no branch misprediction bubbles-- in other words, a test that long-pipeline CPUs like the P4 can run extremely efficiently.

But... that still doesn't help us much in the real world. Altivec instructions are in fact awesomely cool, and most of the CPU world acknowledges them as one of the best things in CPU design today-- something that Intel and Athlon processors simply can't match. It's a very elegant solution, like so many things Apple-- elegant, idealistic, and impractical when placed up against brute-force. After all, while the G4's vector-math performance can be shown to be double or triple that of an equivalently-clocked Pentium (given proper Altivec optimization), the G4's integer math unit is nothing special-- and its performance is about clock-for-clock with those of Intel and AMD, which means it goes about half as fast when you compare today's processors. Everyday computing involves a whole lot of integer math, and vector operations only show up in intense audio/video processing-- and at that, it's far from guaranteed that Altivec optimizations will be present. So it's a pretty unattractive proposition, even if the chip design itself is in fact pretty sweet.

So the word for a couple of weeks now has been that Apple plans to release a new series of Pro towers in mid-August, like on the 13th. We've seen spy photos of a new case design, which were promptly Cease & Desisted by Apple's legal sharks (and we can presume that that means something pretty serious, considering how lenient they're being on Jaguar leaks:

Though there have been few official Jaguar builds given to the majority of developers, Apple has not been particularly stringent with its handling of the seeding program for v10.2. With the 10.1 "Puma" update last year, the company took extraordinary efforts to track down leaks, and was embarassed at the reports from CNET News.com and other sites that mentioned how many pre-release builds were out in the open. For Jaguar, Apple is taking more easygoing approach, benefiting all developers.

Indeed. The 17" iMacs on display in the Apple Stores are running a pre-release seed build of Jaguar-- which when you think about it is a pretty damned unusual thing for Apple to do. Show off a piece of software in a hands-on, public place before it's even done? Why, I never!

So we can pretty safely assume, I think, that new towers are coming in August-- and judging by the interior photos we saw before the leaked threads got Slashdotted and C&D'd, something big has been redesigned. The riser cards look huge, for instance. The CPU ZIF unit is at a 45-degree angle. The Motorola logo appears to be visible on it, but it's hard to tell anything for sure.

Whatever is going into these boxes, it had better be big. Apple knows it can't squeeze the G4 in its current state into any further speed competitions. They need to release something that leapfrogs the field, not something that involves more compromises and more shepherding of public opinion. Stretching the truth won't fly. The G4 has some nice things going for it, but... as a top-end contender against the best DV-editing rigs from Dell and friends, it's at the end of its track.

The good news, though, is that it's looking to me as though Apple does have a plan. They haven't said a word about pro performance in months. They haven't been crowing about the megahertz myth; they haven't been scoffing at potential competition from Intel. They've just been focusing on the consumer end and the software front, and biding their time. They've done this before. The pendulum always swings. (This has benefits and drawbacks-- among the latter, the tendency for people to ignore whatever they are unveiling at a given time and bark about the conspicuous absence of what they're not showing off.) And this time, the pro towers are where everybody's attention-- including Apple's-- is going to be focused.

And not a moment too soon.

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© Brian Tiemann