Peeve Farm

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Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

  Blog \Blôg\, n. [Jrg, fr. Jrg. "Web-log".
     See {Blogger, BlogSpot, LiveJournal}.]
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     links, commentary, and pointless drivel.

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Tuesday, August 13, 2002

11:31 - I didn't want a headache this early.
http://www.apple.com/powermac/

(top)

Well, it seems we can now pretty much count on certain rumor sites to get the facts about upcoming announcements spot-on, even though such rumors might not be as fun to read as the big freaky blue-sky whisperings about Next Big Things or about incinerating the competition or whatever.

New Power Macs today, and the specs are just like what the rumor sites said. Though I have to say those specs are... well, mixed.

They're pumping the "Technology from the Xserve" thing quite a bit, and it's true that they're inheriting a number of advantages from the Xserve's design. Everything's dual now, for instance-- dual optical drives, dual hard-drive ATA channels (supporting up to four drives), dual video out (all digital). But the numbers... well, I'm confused. It's all dual, but it's not very symmetrical. And the specs lack some luster in a few bewildering areas.

Good things:

DDR SDRAM (whoopee)
Dual digital video out
Dual optical drives
Dual ATA channels for hard drives (supporting four drives total)
Dual CPUs across the board
ATI RADEON 9000 (with GeForce4 Ti option)
AGP4x

Bad things:

167 MHz system bus (what is up with that? Dell's top-end systems are up to 533.
The ATA drive channels are slow and asymmetrical: ATA-100 and ATA-66. Why not ATA-133? It's not like it hasn't been around for years.
Video out is asymmetrical (ADC and DVI)-- though that may be a good thing
The price.

I mean, what the hell? $3300 for the top-end system? Apple's supposed to be getting its prices down, not inching them back up to where they were in the Apple IIvx days (remember $8000 Macs? Remember?). I just went to Dell's site and priced out a similar system (well, except for that 533MHz system bus); it came out to about $2300, if you subtract the monitor and add the iApp wanna-be programs and a DVD burner. The Dell configuration is still ungainly and sloppy, but it does come to $1000 less than the Mac. And I don't know if the Mac can claim a $1000 premium for what advantages it has.

Sure, we've got DDR now. But what good is that going to do against a system bus over three times as fast? And I don't think you can buy ATA-66 drives anymore. (Though the Dell interestingly doesn't offer ATA-133 drives-- weird.)

It should be telling that Apple is no longer using Photoshop as its acid test for comparative speed analysis against Wintel PCs; it's now using MPEG-2 encoding for DVD burning. And it does show that the new G4 bests the current top-end Dell (the Dimension 8200 with a 2.53-GHz P4) by some 43%. But then again, MPEG-2 encoding is surely a heavily Altivec-optimized vector-op procedure, and it's going to show more of an advantage over the clocked-twice-as-fast Intel chip than other operations will. And besides, the Mac is dual-CPU. I daresay the numbers wouldn't look so rosy with a one-on-one comparison.

Whatever the prospects or artistic merits of this new case, the G4 in its current form isn't going to see the inside of it for terribly long, I daresay.

My reaction to the new case was that it looks like a grinning Cyclops; but jest aside, it's clear that this case is designed to ventilate better and dissipate more heat than the previous generation-- which didn't exactly have heating issues. So I think it's pretty safe to say that this will be the case design for the new CPU as well, whenever that gets here-- because presumably it's going to run hotter than the G4. (Pretty much everything does except the Crusoe.) And the case now has an all-metal latching/locking mechanism. Still no USB/FireWire on the front panel (why the hell not?), and only four PCI slots. But I do have to wonder again why anybody would need more than four-- considering that the video is AGP (in its own slot) and the sound, Gigabit Ethernet, FireWire, and modem are all on-board.

I dunno. I like a lot of what this system has to offer, but some of the compromises and omissions bewilder me. This is a major rework of the G4 tower configuration, with a new motherboard, system controller, bridgeless direct PCI controller, and so on. I hope there's another rev of this design soon with minor improvements that correct some of the weird imbalances like drive speed, and we gotta get that system bus cranked up as well. I won't be buying a new machine for a while yet; I can wait.

I do wish they could have gotten that price down a little bit, though.