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July 05 2003: Its Baaackkkk !! Well the Tech Community definitely had one Hell of a
shake last month with the Paper Launch of the G5, which is the long
overdue replacement to Apples struggling G4. As expected , Apple announced its new baby with the
usual hype , hysteria and arrogance that we all love to hate, Intel
released the Latest and Last of the PIV's with the 3.2 Ghz unit, while
our friends over at AMD had a turn at hibernation this month. O.K, Buckle Up....
Intel have also been caught with their pants down when
it was discovered that the mysterious P.A.T Intel have of course gone on the War Path, claiming that enabling the feature in the i865 is basically nothing more than "overclocking " , and therefore it is not condoned or officially supported , any consequent damage or warranty claims are the responsability of the end user, and/or the Motherboard manufacturers. Doh, .. And.... ??? Now as much as Intel have tried to convince the tech
community at large that the accelerated i865 solutions are to be avoided,
much to Intels horror the warnings are going unheeded for the most part,
and the Motherboards are proving to be Rock Solid, Lightning Fast, and
are easily achieving similar/better performance to the i875 boards.
The performance difference between the 3rd Party offerings and Intels
own Motherboards are staggering. Then again, for tweakablility and outright
performance, the Intel boards have always been a little on the "
conservative" side. Cheapzilla had a bit of snooze this month. Amidst reports
of the uptake of Lateron ( Opteron) systems being far lower than expected
, and the release of the Evenlateron (Athlon 64 ) now being slated for
August instead of September, AMD are still finding it hard to get a
winning feeling in anything they seem to do lately. Even the mantle
of the " First 64 Bit Desktop System " has now been wrestled
from them by their brothers in arms over at Apple when Sir Jobs paper
launched the G5 last month. Mind you in reality, it will interesting
to see who actually gets the product to market first. I wouldn't be
surprised if Chipzilla pulls a rabbit out and releases the Prescott
earlier to pip both of the the Paper Launch
Apple finally rejoined the playing field on June 23rd 2003 by Paper Launching the long, long, long, overdue replacement to the G4, with the ...G5 !! Actual quantity of the units are not expected until August-September at the earliest. The G5 or the " Hype5 " as I
affectionately like to call it is actually the IBM 970 that I have mentioned
on numerous occasions. So lets get the lowdown on what is actually The G5 is a hybrid 32bit/64bit System that
comes in 3 Flavours, the 1.6, 1.8 and Dual 2.0 Ghz models and features
512 L2 Cache, Dual Channel DDR, 800Mhz - 1 Ghz FSB, Serial ATA, USB
2.0, and Firewire 800. There is a fantastic article on not only the IBM 970 , but also how it relates to the G4 and the competing PIV-V architecture here Part 1, Part 2 . No Emotions, Hysterics or Politics involved. After being quite familiar with what is on offer, I found the alledged performance of the G5 to be a little on the suspect side of the fence, to say the least.
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Now before I start, let me say that I think that the G5 is an awesome piece of work on Apples engineering part, but their insistence on letting the idiot marketing department insult the intelligence of the the Tech community has done little more than tarnish the release in a lot of end users eyes, both diehard Mac and PC zealots alike. I have to say that I was disappointed , but not overly surprised that Apple insisted on continuing with its Blind Monkey approach to posting obviously biased benchmarking results. Now its common knowledge that everyone tends to fludge the specs a little to their advantage, but Apples claims were nothing short of ridiculous. By using conventional and established industry benchmarking tests instead of their usual proprietary Apple ( Byte) benchmarks, Apple thought that their claims would hold more water. Instead it was far easier to blow holes thru the fertilizer than usual. Their Claimed SPECint and SPECfp results were easily compared to the archive of benchmark results posted by other respective manufacturers, and it didn't take long for the shite to literally hit the fan when it was obvious that Apples claims of being the "Worlds Fastest Processor " were .. hmmmmm.. overstated ! :-) For a Detailed analysis , See here There was also the infamous Photoshop
Benchmark that The One that I found most amusing was
the Audio Application benchmark that showed not only the G5 , but
also iLogic up against the leading PC based Application i.e Cubase
SX running on its Wintel brothers. Apple claimed "more audio
tracks with real-time effects and more software instruments than any
previous desktop system in history" and showed a benchmark with
the poor old 3.0Ghz PIV being beat around the head substantially to
the tune of about 3.3 X more PlugIns . Now considering the test is more akin
to Apples and Oranges due to them not even using the same application
or plugins across the 2 platforms, there is an even more glaring anomaly.Since
when is a Dual 3.0Ghz Xeon 2.3 X more powerful than a single PIV system
? O.K, if we use the Dual Xeon mark as
the correct bench, and raise the Single PIV to 10 % below the Xeon,
that would give us by Apples figures 70 + PlugIns, which would in
effect put the Single System above the Single Processor G5's... Oooucchhhhh
!! " Never let the truth get in the way of a good story " :-) I could keep going but what's the point,
its obvious that the battle lines have been drawn, and people will
find their own truth on either side of the fence. To the One Eyed Blind fraternity, well all I can say is try not to hurt yourselves, and remember that what ever advantage that Apple may arguably have gained could be very, very short lived.. Fun and Games ahead , I'm sure !! Switch... ;-)
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