Re: Computer

In article <VO4IB2vEKf8FFw9P@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Robert Sneddon
<fred@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

In message <090320071424300182%nospam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, nospam
<nospam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes

you were comparing intel to the powerbook g4, not the g5. the g4 was
not power-hungry.

But it couldn't compete in processing power with the existing and
future Intel designs.

actually it could. there were dualcore g4s and low power g5s ready to
be used in powerbooks but apple had already decided to switch.

There are low-power versions of the 80286 still
being designed into kit today, for embedded systems meant to run DOS on
battery supplies (one machine I built around such a device a couple of
years ago ran GWBASIC, God help me, but it did the job it was designed
to do). Such devices might run WfWG but they'd limp running W95 and as
for XP or Vista, forget it. In the same way G3s are also used in
embedded apps, but a 300MHZ G3 with no GPU acceleration and only 128Mb
of RAM is not a happy bunny running the current OS/X with all the bells
and whistles turned on.

and this has what to do with anything?

and in fact, there was a low power version of the g5
chip suitable for laptops,

Was there?

yes, there was.

The G5 design had a major I/O redesign compared to the G4 to
fix a lot of old problems (memory bus frex) that had made the design
"stale" but even then it wasn't that good compared to the existing x86
market-leading designs. The dual-G5 box had, as I recall, 2Mb of
external cache for each CPU with a bus speed of 500MHz, a rate Intel's
RAMBUS was then achieving for main memory accesses. AMD's DDRAM
interface was up to 400MHz by that time with a roadmap for 500MHz and
above.

again, wrong.

front side bus speed was half the cpu clock speed, with the most recent
2.5 gz g5 having a bus speed of 1.25gz. there was also 1meg of on-chip
cache on each g5 (2g total in a dual) running at full clock speed.

but apple had already decided to transition
to intel.

The switch was gonna hurt Apple,

the switch has anything but hurt apple. sales are way up.

but unlike the PC world they'd been
through this kind of switch for the Macintosh line before, moving from
68k to PowerPC. They learned from that experience and had nearly all the
conversion and support tools ready to rock on day one.

actually, none of the 68k-ppc tools made any difference. os x was
already platform agnostic and ran on intel before it ran on powerpc
back when it was openstep. both intel and powerpc builds had been
maintained all along. the compatibility layer to handle powerpc
applications, known as rosetta, was licensed from another company.

Even there were
glitches such as the delay in getting an x86-native-mode Quark running
on the new hardware.

quark was one of the first companies to release an osx/intel native
version.

A lot of prepress Mac guys left the building on
that one, heading for PC or Solaris solutions and they probably won't be
coming back to Planet Apple.

solaris? riiight.

time, applications and OS/X were getting more CPU-intensive, demanding
more and more resources, in part to make the GUI prettier (Aqua, for
example -- the first versions were not hardware-accelerated, and when HW
acceleration did come in it cost battery life in laptops to add GPU
hardware that prevented the infamous spinning beachball from appearing).

nonsense. gpu support did not adversely affect battery life in
powerbooks.

Adding any sort of extra circuitry to a laptop eats some power, and
fast GPU cores with millions of transistors are especially power-hungry.

of course, but that assumes nothing else changes on the board. other
parts of the laptop became less power hungry, notably the cpu itself.
as far as the end user was concerned, there was no noticable difference
in battery life.
.

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