Re: Computer

In message <090320071657522275%nospam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, nospam
<nospam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes
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.

Dual-core designs use a lot more power than single-core. I'm not sure
the dual-core G4 (which I never saw mention of) would have been a
successful laptop build-in. It might have worked as a mobile desktop,
but Apple have boxed themselves in to a large extent with their claims
of long battery life for their laptops. The Intel dual-core designs have
the advantage of Intel's work on reducing power consumption overall,
making them feasible for laptops. The best-life laptops (12 hours plus)
use single-core Centrino and its successors though.

The G4 core was also end-of-life, already replaced by the superior G5;
dualling the G4 might have got Apple over that particular power hump but
there were intrinsic I/O problems which would have caused more problems
down the road.

There are low-power versions of the 80286 still
being designed into kit today,

and this has what to do with anything?

Old-design slow chips that use very little power can't run modern apps
and OS. Low-power-consumption slow G3s can't run OS/X effectively. A
low-power consumption G5 wouldn't necessarily have been able to run OS/X
effectively, at least without the spinning beachball.

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.

The G4 still had I/O speed problems, and a dual-core G4 would still
have that limitation unless it was a much more radical redesign than I
think it was. The G5's extra power consumption was due in part to its
need for faster I/O to match Intel and AMD.

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.

As is everybody's sales. Apple took a big knock when they reversed
years of propaganda about how good the G5 was (Look! Altivec!) and how
bad the x86 architecture was (the Megahertz Myth), and switched to
Intel. They've got through it, and people's memories are fading, but for
a year they had two completely different CPUs in their product line.
Selling G5-based desktops was pretty much impossible for that year as
everyone knew they were obsolete, based on a CPU that couldn't compare
to the new Intel chips, and they were waiting for the promised Core Duo
desktops with real multicore performance. They bought Apple laptops
instead and found they ran faster than the more expensive G5 desktops.


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.

OS/X is not Openstep. It has a BSD kernel which Openstep was based on,
fifteen years ago but BSD now is a lot different to 1980's BSD. As far
as the GUI is concerned, that's not much different from classic OS/9,
for very good marketing reasons.

both intel and powerpc builds had been
maintained all along.

They didn't have a guaranteed platform design for the x86 laboratory
builds of OS/X until the decision to switch was finally made. What
surprised a lot of folk was that when it was announced, Apple went for
the PC200x reference design rather than rolling their own motherboards
from scratch. It would have made their paranoia about OS/X binaries
running on commodity hardware moot (except under emulation viz PearPC)
but it would have cost them in terms of not being able to buy
off-the-shelf CPU support devices. They went for the PC option instead
(which allowed them to offer dual-boot into Windows with no faffing
around).

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.

Sorry, memory fade. Which prepress package was very late in coming out
x86 native then?


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.

Lots of desktop apps are supported on Solaris, especially in the
printing business. In the early days of computerisation of the printing
biz standalone desktops were not powerful enough to run enterprise
operations. Sun was one of the companies that stepped in to fill the
gap, and they've stayed. They've got a proven decades-long reputation
that prevents a lot of shops moving to Apple or PC solutions for the
entire production chain. The designers and layout people might use Apple
or PC nowadays but there's an awful lot more to printing than that.

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.

In the case of OS/X on the G4 the CPU was already maxing out running
the graphics as well as OS services and apps. The GPU was designed in to
take some of that load off so it was only maxed out supporting OS and
apps = fewer beachballs.

as far as the end user was concerned, there was no noticable difference
in battery life.

There were ongoing power-consumption improvements in other areas of
laptop design (screens and hard drives for instance) plus smarter power
management control of the CPU, all leading to extended battery life. The
GPU ate into that benefit (as did higher-power CPUs, wi-fi, Bluetooth
etc).
--
To reply, my gmail address is nojay1 Robert Sneddon
.

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