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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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Wednesday, March 12, 2003
02:18 - Inching forward
http://www.apple.com/powermac/

(top) link

Well, we're up to 1.42 GHz now.

It's not too bad a package, for what it's worth; the innards have been re-architected based on the Xserve plumbing, hopefully with the result that data throughput is no longer as bottlenecked at the system controller as it was. (There's still the CPU bandwidth bottleneck, which won't be solved until the 970 is here, so things could still be plenty better.) But the PCI bus, the ATA/100 controller, FireWire 400/800, and gigabit Ethernet are all directly addressed by the system controller without any bridging, so that might be quite nice.

There's still the cost issue-- $1500 for the base 1GHz single through $2700 for the dual 1.42 GHz (or more with the RAM and Bluetooth and such tricked out more fully), prices that require some creative thinking and/or drugs in order to place them in the same ballpark as comparable Pentium-class machines. (It's worth noting, though, that these are the lowest price points that PowerMacs have ever had.) But there are still the usual tradeoffs and justifications (system integration, ColorSync, short pipelines, FireWire 800, at least comparable performance); that much hasn't changed. Apple's got benchmarks posted which claim superiority in Photoshop 7 tests over the 3GHz P4-based Dell, which we've all learned to treat with some skepticism-- but which at least show that Apple is confident enough in its machines' competence to make such claims in the full knowledge that independent testing labs will run their own numbers.

And in any case, the machines aren't devoid of new goodies. There's FireWire 800, again; there's integrated Bluetooth; there's 802.11g; there's the 4X SuperDrive. The site shills for M-Audio's up-to-7.1 professional sound cards, which ought to legitimize Macs further on the modern audio front (up till a short time ago, Mac owners were out of luck if they wanted 5.1-capable audio). And, of course, those displays have all come down a whole bunch in price; co-workers are telling me that all the other LCD monitor makers are having to scramble all of a sudden to lower their prices in order to match the offerings of what they continue to perceive as the leader in display technology and quality.

So they're scraping that butter over too much bread. They're at least metering things so as to reach that 970 milestone just in the nick of time, so it would seem.


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© Brian Tiemann