Print

Mail

wiki links

Apple confronts its lack of speed

Apple head Steve Jobs has never cut a humble swath. This was never better demonstrated than at his presentation of new Power Macs in San Francisco, when Jobs reached for the grandiloquent.

"The 64-bit revolution has begun and the personal computer will never be the same again," he said. "Today we have introduced the fastest PC in the world."

Even if critics take issue with the details of the speed tests that Apple has since made available, the message is nevertheless still clear: Apple's work with new system architecture surrounding the PowerPC G5 chip from IBM represents an enormous step forward. The new chips will allow Macs to keep up with high-end PCs running on processors from Intel or AMD.

Designers and other creative types, Apple's main customer base, have increasingly had to face up to the fact that current Windows PCs are significantly faster than their Macintosh computers.

"The main argument not to buy a Power Mac was the relatively slow speed," says Charlie Wolf, an analyst from Needham & Co. "That reason is now gone."

The speed growth will really come into effect at the end of the year when Apple brings the "Panther" version of its Mac OS X operating system onto the market.

Striking even at first glance is the 600 megahertz (MHz) jump in processing speed from the previous fastest Power Mac with G4 chip to the 2 gigahertz offered by the quickest G5 computers.

This value is still significantly below the 3 gigahertz offered by the quickest Pentium chips from Intel. Yet even in the "Wintel" world, it has become common wisdom that processing speed is not the only factor when it comes to calculating "power."

The quickest Power Macs will soon hold two PowerPC chips that will each have an independent front-side bus to communicate with the rest of the computer. This means that Apple's top model offers up to 16 gigabytes of bandwidth.

Other expediters include the high storage bandwidth of 400 MHz (128 bit DDR-SDRAM) with a flow rate of up to 6.4 gigabits per second, as well as a fast 133-MHz PCI-X port to the Apple desktop.

The top model in the G5 line is being offered on Apple's site for US$2,999.

A G5 Power Mac with a 1.8 GHz chip and 900 MHz frontside bus costs US$2,399, a 1.6 GHz version with 800 MHz frontside bus is available for US$1,999. All models come with a SuperDrive that can read and write DVDs.

The new "Panther" operating system is not just intended for professionals and owners of the 64-bit Power Mac G5s.

Apple has worked more than 100 new features into the new OS, including a completely new desktop management system.

"The `finder' function has been a bit too centered on the computer in the past. Now the user is clearly in the middle," says Apple marketing head Phil Schiller.

Particularly attention-getting at the Apple developer conference in San Francisco was the windows manager Expos, which allows the user to open all windows at once and then bring the desired window forward.

An integral part of "Panther" is a new chat program that allows two Macs to easily set up a video conference over the Internet.
This story has been viewed 20014 times.