Author: William Bryant
Date: 19:04:46 10/18/99
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On October 18, 1999 at 21:38:14, Ray MacFadyen wrote: >In an australian magazine there is a story about the new Powermac G4,it says it >is a 128 bit machine that can calculate one billion floating calculations per >second and is reported to outperform the pentium 3 600 by roughly three times. >Does anyone know anything about this machine,would it be three times as fast for >chess programs. >My next question is slightly off topic,I hope no one is offended,in australia >3 months ago 64 megs of sdram was $80,it has now risen to $250,an increase of >over 3x,is this happening in the rest of the world and if so what is the reason >for it. >Hope someone can answer these questions. >Ray MacFadyen A couple of comments. the 128 bits is an internal bus width that communicates with the L2 catch for feeding the vector processing unit (altivec). It will initial use a 64 bit bus to be pin compatible with current G3 machines to all a simple processor upgrade. (Not my area of speciality and I may be off on some of the details.). I think Altivec has lots of potential to add vector process to the eval and do really great things ala Cray Blitz, but again, I may be reading more into this than is true. The 3x function in on specific photoshop tests (because this is a popular application that is cpu intensive, and is near identical on both platforms.) This applies to floating point calculations. The G4 has improved integer speed but not the the extent of the 'hype' which is for floating point power. I can tell you that Will Singleton and I are both looking at the machines, but I doubt I'll be getting an new computer soon. Personally, I would wait for the second generation machines to use the full potential of the G4. Most of my information is from an article by Thom Thompson in MacTech, Vol 15, No 7. If you get one, let me know what you think. William wbryant@ix.netcom.com
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