Cool Mac Gear

My first reaction upon popping up the product photography for the new G5 Power Macs on Apple’s press info site was: “Whoa! It looks like a portable space heater.” Indeed, like a space heater from the ‘50s or ‘60s. The effect is amplified by the large expanse of mesh grill presumably there for the functional purpose of more efficient cooling with the G5’s new, computerized, nine-fan thermal system.

I was amused to note that my Applelinks colleague John Farr independently drew the same first impression, only he thought it looked like a “nuclear” portable heater.

Gone are the organic curves and the “Buick-style” portholes of the G4 Power Mac’s plastic case, replaced by an almost austere, slab-sided look, which reminds me conceptually of my son’s late - ‘50s vintage vacuum tube stereo amplifier. This appearance is partly attributable to the fact that the new G5 towers are made from anodized stamped aluminum rather than molded plastic, extending the metal case motif Apple pioneered with the Titanium PowerBook G4 back in 2001.

I haven’t really decided whether I like the effect better or not. I’m beginning to get used to the idea, and being a child of the 50s, I have a certain nostalgia for metal stuff. When I was a kid, most of my toys and other treasures, and indeed the general household artifacts of the era were made of “real” materials like metal and wood and glass, and plastic stuff was regarded as cheap second-rate, which it actually was back in those days. Plastics of that vintage had many shortcomings. On the other hand, plastics technology has come a long way in the past 40 years, and from a functional perspective, strong, light plastics like polycarbonates have a lot going for them as computer case materials. On the other hand, aluminum is much easier to recycle than plastic, and the recycled productive is just as good as “virgin” stuff, so aluminum computer cases can be regarded as an environmentally sound step in the right direction.

Physically, the new aluminum tower case/chassis is is three inches taller and about three pounds lighter (39.2 vs. 42) than the PowerMac G4. Gone is the works in a drawbridge feature of the 1999 - 2003 G3 and G4 towers, replaced by a more conventional removable access panel allowing tool-less installation of memory, hard drives, optical drives or an AirPort Extreme card. On the inner face of the lockable door are pictures showing how to add RAM. The aluminum case still has front and rear handles plus there are front-mounted FireWire, USB2, and headphone ports for convenient access.

Enough about looks and layout. What about the G5s as computers? Well, the landscape shifted to dramatically on Monday. The release of these machines is nothing short of revolutionary. Mac fans will no longer have to excuse and rationalize, or concede any ground, to PC partisans. There is of course the predictable controversy that sprang up over whether the G5 machines really are the “fastest personal computers in the world,” as Apple claims, but what really matters is that regardless of whether the G5 or the new 3.4 MHz Pentium or the Xeon is top dog in raw CPU horsepower, this new Mac is wicked fast by any standard, and it’s just getting started. Barring a fiasco like the Motorola G4 clock speed stall, there should be plenty of potential for this IBM/Apple baby to grow up apace with developments in a in the Intel/AMD orbit.

Those who have affirmed that they would like to use OS X, but just couldn’t tolerate the Mac’s lack of speed, no longer have that issue standing in the way.

I’m not going to discuss here the particulars of the benchmark comparisons. You can check out Apple’s claims and benchmarks at this Website. I would say that like the Rolls Royce people understatedly answer when queried about the horsepower of their automobile engines, the answer is “adequate.”

As The Register’s Tony Smith commented this week on the Apple performance claims controversy:

“In any case, superior performance is generally a time-limited feature. If Apple has it now, it will probably lose it again when Intel’s Prescott or AMD’s Athlon 64 ship. What Apple can say - and its customers can take heart from - is that, thanks to IBM, it has caught up. What really matters is maintaining that broad parity.”

With two double-precision floating-point units, advanced branch prediction logic and support for symmetric multiprocessing, the PowerPC G5 processor builds on previous PowerPC designs, combining an Altivec “Velocity Engine” with a superscalar, super-pipelined execution core that can execute more than 200 simultaneous in-flight instructions.

In the PC universe, going from 32-bit to 64-bit computing requires migrating to a 64-bit operating system (and purchasing the 64-bit applications that will work on it) or running a 32-bit operating system in emulation mode. As with Apple’s smooth metamorphosis from 68k to PowerPC in the mid-’90s, the PowerPC G5, however, offers a similarly seamless transition to 64-bit performance. Current 32-bit code — such as Mac OS X, the Mac OS 9 Classic environment and existing applications — runs natively at processor speed. All your existing software should work fine, thanks to the PowerPC architecture being designed from scratch to run both 32-bit and 64-bit application code. This facility enables the PowerPC G5 processor to run Mac OS X natively for an immediate performance boost. In addition, as applications are optimized and as Mac OS X is further enhanced for the PowerPC G5 processor, performance gains will be even more dramatic.

Based on IBM’s POWER architecture for mainframes, the new PowerPC G5 processor has been optimized for personal computers, runs at clock speeds up to 2 GHz and can virtually address 18 exabytes (18 billion billion bytes) of memory. This high-bandwidth execution core has over 12 discrete functional units that process parallel computation for 215 in-flight instructions, full symmetric multi-processing, two floating point units, a processor interface at 1 GHz, a 128-bit DDR SDRAM with throughput up to 6.4 GBps memory interface running at 400 MHz, a HyperTransport interface running at 800 MHz, 16 GBps of bandwidth, the industry’s fastest PCI interface available on a desktop (133 MHz PCI-X); and AGP 8X Pro graphics capable of supporting the power and thermal demands of high-end professional graphics cards.

There are dual 1.5 Gbps serial ATA interfaces and two 100 MHz, 64-bit PCI-X slots (except for the low-end G5 1.6GHz model, which comes with standard 64-bit 33MHz PCI slots). On the downside, there is ATA66/100/133 interface, so you won;t be able to transplant existing drives to the G5 or use cheap ATA disks. The Power Mac G5 comes standard with either the NVIDIA GeForceFX 5200 or the ATI Radeon 9600 Pro graphics card. As a build-to-order option for 3D design, visualization and gaming the ATI Radeon 9800 Pro s graphics card featuring per pixel and vertex shaders is available providing an fill rate of 3 billion textured pixels/second.

As for connectivity I/O, there are Gigabit Ethernet, FireWire 800, two FireWire 400 ports, three USB 2.0 ports, dual display support, optical digital audio input and output, analog audio input and output and a headphone jack. The system also supports 54 Mbps AirPort Extreme wireless networking and is Bluetooth ready for wireless connections to a host of Bluetooth-enabled peripherals.

To cool all this power, there are four independently controlled thermal zones compartmentalizing the primary heat-producing components — processor, PCI, storage and power supply for advanced airflow management, with fans in each zone (a total of nine, seven of whic spin at very low speeds for minimum acoustic output) that are individually controlled based on a combination of thermal and power monitoring, resulting in the Power Mac G5 running a claimed two times quieter than the previous Power Mac G4. Each of the dual-processor machines’ two chips is cooled independently, and the system can increase or decrease the temperature of a single zone without affecting the others. Since the G5 processor consumes 42W at 1.8GHz (compared with the G4 7455 chip’s 15W at 1GHz for example), these’ elaborate cooling systems are about more than quietness, and the G5 towers’ resemblance to portable space heaters I remarked on above may turn out to be more than a whimsical observation.

Gone missing is the previous G4 machine’s facility for adding a second optical drive, and while the most recent G4 Power Macs could accommodate up to four internal hard drives, the G5 towers can only handle two. I suppose that with the monster capacity hard drives now available, the necessity for multi drive arrays is diminished, but it was still nice to have the flexibility., and Apple specifies a maximum of 500GB of storage (ie: two-250GB drives) with these machines -- a seemingly low limit with 500 GB drives expected on the market soon. And while on the topic of hard drives, the G5 models have no ATA66/100/133 interface, so you won’t be able to transplant hard drives from your older Macs to the G5 or install cheap ATA disks.

In summary, according to Apple, compared to the G4, the G5 internals differ in the following ways:

Core:
• Massive out-of-order execution engine, able to keep >200 instructions in flight vs. 16 for the G4.
• Two double-precision floating point units vs. one for the G4.
• Two load/store units vs. one for the G4.
• Support for 64-bit integer arithmetic vs. 32-bit for the G4.
• Implements FP square root as HW instruction vs. software function for the G4.
• Instructions are tracked in “groups” from dispatch to completion.
• Complex instructions are “cracked” or implemented as microcode.
• New forms of mtcrf and mfcr -- old instructions are implemented as microcode.
• Velocity Engine single-element loads are implemented as “lvx”, previous processors zeroed undefined fields.
• Velocity Engine inter-element shifts require the shift count to be replicated in every element of the VR, whereas previous processors used the rightmost element’s shift count for every shift.
• A much longer execution pipeline (up to 23 stages vs. 7 stages for the G4).
• Two integer units vs. four (3 simple + 1 complex) for the G4. The G5’s two integer units are more capable than the G4’s simple integer units (they can both handle multiply, and one can do divide), while only the G4’s complex unit can do either multiply or divide.
• Branch mispredicts are more costly because of the deeper pipelines.
• Misaligned load/stores to uncached memory always take alignment exceptions.

Caches:
• Larger L2 cache (512 KB vs. 256 KB), but no L3 cache.
• 128 Byte cache lines vs. 32 Bytes for the G4.
• L1 data cache is 32 KB, write-through, 2-way associative vs. 32 KB, write-back, 8-way associative for the G4
• No L1 allocation on store misses.
• L1 instruction cache is 64 KB direct-mapped vs. 32 KB 8-way associative for the G4.
• Memory subsystem:
• Vastly increased system memory bandwidth.
• Improved hardware prefetch mechanism that is self-starting for established sequential access patterns.
• Larger addressable memory space (up to 16 GB with U3 memory controller vs. 2 GB for the G4 with U2 memory controller).
• Increased memory latency -- 135ns best case vs. 95ns best case for the G4.

If you’re really tech oriented, you can find a lot more comparison info at:
http://developer.apple.com/technotes/tn/tn2087.html

At least for the foreseeable future, the emergence of the G5 means that the professional desktop models are going to be segregated from the rest of the Macintosh families by a wider performance gap than at any time in previous Apple history. It can be presumed that there will be G5 iMacs, and even eMacs eventually, but Apple and IBM have their work cut out for them if they plan to engineer a G5 PowerBook, given the new chip’s massive power demands and heat generation capacity nearly three times that of the current G4s, which are more than hot enough in laptop applications. Don’t be holding your breath waiting for a G5 ‘Book.

However, for desktop users who need uber-power in a Mac, they now can have it. This is good news. Enjoy.

The G5 model lineup shapes up as follows:

Base
1.6 GHz 64-bit PowerPC G5;
800 MHz front-side bus;
256MB 333 MHz Dual Channel (128-bit) DDR;
4 DIMMs, 4GB maximum memory;
80GB Serial ATA hard drive;
AGP 8X Pro graphics slot;
NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 Ultra-64MB DDR;
3 PCI slots (64-bit, 33 MHz); and
4x SuperDrive.
$1,999

Middle
1.8 GHz 64-bit PowerPC G5;
900 MHz front-side bus;
512MB 400 MHz Dual Channel (128-bit) DDR;
8 DIMMs, 8GB maximum memory;
160GB Serial ATA hard drive;
AGP 8X Pro graphics slot;
NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 Ultra-64MB DDR;
3 PCI-X slots (one 64-bit, 133 MHz, two 64-bit 100 MHz); and
4x SuperDrive.
$2,399

High End
Dual 2.0 GHz 64-bit PowerPC G5;
Dual Independent 1 GHz front-side buses;
512MB 400 MHz Dual Channel (128-bit) DDR;
8 DIMMs, 8GB maximum memory;
160GB Serial ATA hard drive;
AGP 8X Pro graphics slot;
RADEON 9600 Pro-64MB DDR;
3 PCI-X slots (one 64-bit 133 MHz, two 64-bit 100 MHz); and
4x SuperDrive.
$2,999

System software Mac OS X v10.2.7 “Jaguar”

Bundled Software: iLife (including iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie and iDVD), QuickBooks for Mac New User Edition, FAXstf, Art Directors Toolkit, Microsoft Office v.X Test Drive, FileMaker Pro Trial, OmniGraffle, OmniOutliner, GraphicConverter, QuickTime, iChat, Safari, Sherlock, Address Book, iCal, iSync, DVD Player, Mail, EarthLink, Acrobat Reader, Classic environment and Apple Developer Tools

Hardware peripherals: Apple Pro Keyboard, Apple Pro Mouse, USB keyboard extension cable, DVI to VGA adapter, modem cable, AirPort antenna

Build-to-Order Options

Memory (PC2700 or PC3200 DDR SDRAM; installed in pairs): 256MB, 512MB, 1GB, 2GB, 4GB, 8GB (4)
Hard drives (5) 80GB Serial ATA, 160GB Serial ATA, 250GB Serial ATA
Optical drives SuperDrive (DVD-R/CD-RW), Combo drive (DVD-ROM/CD-RW)
Graphics NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 Ultra with 64MB of DDR SDRAM, ATI Radeon 9600 Pro with 64MB of DDR SDRAM, ATI Radeon 9800 Pro with 128MB of DDR SDRAM
Audio Apple iPod, Logitech Z-680 5.1 speakers, Toslink optical digital cables
External storage Xserve RAID with Apple Fibre Channel PCI Card
Wireless AirPort Extreme Card M8881LL/A
AirPort Extreme Base Station M8930LL/A
AirPort Extreme Base Station (with modem and antenna port) M8799LL/A
Internal Bluetooth module with antenna

For more information, visit:
http://www.apple.com/powermac/

Appendix

Power Mac G5 Technical Specifications

Processing
• 1.6GHz, 1.8GHz, or dual 2GHz PowerPC G5 microprocessors
• PowerPC processor architecture with 64-bit data paths and registers
• Native support for 32-bit application code
• 512K on-chip L2 cache running at processor speed
• Parallel data structure supporting up to 215 simultaneous in-flight instructions
• Simultaneous issue of up to 10 out-of-order operations
• Dual-pipeline Velocity Engine for 128-bit single-instruction, multiple-data (SIMD) processing
• Two independent double-precision floating-point units
• Advanced three-stage branch-prediction logic
• 800MHz, 900MHz, or 1GHz 64-bit DDR frontside bus supporting up to 8-GBps data throughput; one on each processor on dual processor systems
• Point-to-point system controller

Memory
• 128-bit data paths for up to 6.4-GBps memory throughput

1.6GHz model
• 256MB of PC2700 (333MHz) DDR SDRAM
• Four DIMM slots supporting up to 4GB of main memory

1.8GHz systems and 2Ghz systems
• 512MB of PC3200 (400MHz) DDR SDRAM
• Eight DIMM slots supporting up to 8GB of main memory

• Support for the following DIMMs (in pairs):

• 128MB DIMMs (64-bit-wide, 128- or 256-Mbit)
• 256MB DIMMs (64-bit-wide, 128- or 256-Mbit)
• 512MB DIMMs (64-bit-wide, 256-Mbit)
• 1GB DIMMs (64-bit-wide, 256-Mbit)

Graphics and displays

• AGP 8X Pro graphics slot supporting up to 2-GBps data throughput, with one of the following graphics cards installed:

• NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 Ultra with 64MB of DDR SDRAM
• ATI Radeon 9600 Pro with 64MB of DDR SDRAM
• ATI Radeon 9800 Pro with 128MB of DDR SDRAM (build-to-order option)

• Support for digital resolutions up to 1920 by 1200 pixels
• Support for analog resolutions up to 1600 by 1200 pixels
• ADC and DVI connectors; DVI to VGA adapter included
• Dual display support for extended desktop and video mirroring modes
• Support for up to two Apple flat panel displays(8)

Storage

• Two Serial ATA controllers supporting up to 150-MBps data throughput per hard drive
• Two 3.5-inch hard drive expansion bays with drive guides for a second drive

• One 80GB or 160GB 7200-rpm Serial ATA drive installed in standard configurations(5)
• Support for up to two internal Serial ATA drives; 500GB maximum system capacity(5)
• 8MB memory buffers on all hard drives

• Optical drive bay with SuperDrive (DVD-R/CD-RW) installed; writes DVD-R discs at up to 4x speed, reads DVDs at up to 8x speed, writes CD-R discs at up to16x speed, writes CD-RW discs at up to 10x speed, reads CDs at up to 32x speed

PCI expansion

• One of the following configurations:

• Three open full-length 64-bit, 33MHz PCI slots, or
• One open full-length 64-bit, 133MHz PCI-X slot and two open full-length 64-bit 100MHz PCI-X slots

Communications

• 10/100/1000BASE-T Ethernet connector (RJ-45)
• Built-in 56K V.92 modem (RJ-11) (13)
• Expansion slot for optional 54-Mbps AirPort Extreme Card (based on IEEE 802.11g specification; 802.11b Wi-Fi certified) (6)
• External AirPort Extreme antenna
• Optional Bluetooth 1.1 module and antenna

Peripherals and audio

• One FireWire 800 port and two FireWire 400 ports (one on front panel, 15W total power)
• Three USB 2.0 ports (on one front panel), two USB 1.1 ports on keyboard
• Front headphone minijack and speaker
• Optical digital audio in and out Toslink connectors
• Stereo audio in and out minijacks

Electrical and environmental requirements

• Meets ENERGY STAR requirements
• Line voltage: 100-125V AC or 200-240V AC
• Frequency: 50Hz to 60Hz, single phase
• Maximum current: 6.5A (low-voltage range) or 7.5A (high-voltage range)
• Operating temperature: 50• to 95• F (10• to 35• C)
• Storage temperature: -40• to 116• F (-40• to 47• C)
• Relative humidity: 5% to 95% noncondensing
• Maximum altitude: 10,000 feet

Size and weight

• Height: 20.1 inches (51.1 cm)
• Width: 8.1 inches (20.6 cm)
• Depth: 18.7 inches (47.5 cm)
• Weight: 39.2 pounds (17.8 kg) (14)

Charles W. Moore

Cool Mac Gear