At
the Seybold publisher's conference on Tuesday August 31st,
1999, Steve Jobs announced the availability of G4 Power
Macs at the Apple Store. The unexpected announcement (and
excellent pricing) was met with enthusiasm. Jobs and Phil
Schiller wowed the audience with impressive head-to-head
demos pitting the new G4 not only against a 600MHz Pentium
III but also Apple's own Blue and White G3! The G4, of course,
won hands down. Now that they are available, we have changed
the focus of this page. All pre-release news, speculation
etc. has been separated from the post release information
that is now available. New topic areas should make it easy
to find the information you are after. Happy reading!
Motorola
in Talks to Improve G4 Production - It's not Motorola's
G4 development team that has been lagging behind the
industry in innovation and design enhancements, it's
the company's manufacturing process, sources say
Update
on Q3 and Altivec - id Software's Graeme Devine
made a post to the Quake3World forums regarding some
enhancements he was making to the Mac version of Quake
3: Arena. Specifically, he was working on Altivec
instructions which should give G4 owners a significant
boost
Carmack
confirms Slashdot comments, talks Altivec - PPC
CPUs are as good as, or slightly better than, x86
on a clock for clock basis, but they can't overcome
the large MHz gap that exists," said Carmack. "Altivec
has some wins, but it won't make any significant difference
unless the performance is extremely focused in a small
area, and the balance of computation and bandwidth
is just right."
The
Motorola [7450] G4+ Processor Core -- Does It Make
The Cut? - Motorola released the significantly
improved "G4+" processor, which promises to dramatically
(and positively) affect Apple's status in the market.
G4+ basically takes G4 and improves it all-around
in a bunch of nice ways
Nightfall
developer responds to AltiVec questions - If you
want to see what an AltiVec game can look like, go
look at the Playstation2 games. G4 Macs are closer
to its performance than PentiumIII PC's. We are talking
games where the characters have memories, the physics
is amazing (throw a stone in a pond and see the real
ripples lap against the shore - not fake texture effects
Where
are the AltiVec games? - AltiVec just doesn't
have that large of a role in today's 3D games where
3D hardware is used (which is true of every G4 Mac).
3D cards do a much better and faster job of rendering
than an AltiVec software renderer could do. The main
thing AltiVec can do is speed up the transformation
math
G4
Games - I just bought a brand new G4. Are there
any games optimized for the G4 processor?
Pentium
IV versus G4 - Risc processors (Reduced Instruction
Set Computing) like Motorola`s G4 can execute more
instructions than their Cisc-pendants (Complex ISC)
at the same clocking. That means in practice that
a Cisc chip, how it is normally used in a X86-compatible
by AMD and Intel, must divide a complex statement
(for instance an instruction) into several statements
Gauging
the gigaflops gap - what is a gigaflop and should
we give a flip? Perhaps we should figure out what
a "flop" is -- let alone gigaflops -- before deciding
whether it matters.
New
G4 chip hits 1 GHz; Apple plans uncertain - With
the upcoming "Apollo" processor, Motorola's G4 processor
family will be able to join the 1-GHz club, David
Bearden, senior member of the technical staff at Motorola's
Somerset Design Center, told an audience at the Microprocessor
Forum taking place this week in San Jose, Calif
Manufacturers
Motorola
- Information and specs on the G4 processor.
Motorola
- Altivec aka "Velovity Engine" information
PowerPC
G4 Plus taped out - sources have added their
voice to earlier hints that Motorola has completed
the PowerPC G4 Plus, a process known in the trade
as 'taping out'
PowerPC
G4 Plus in Macs by "mid-summer" 2001 - sources
confirm that Motorola has begun to release fully-working
samples of its next generation PowerPC G4 Plus and
that Apple will have product at speeds of around
750MHz that could hit the market by "mid-summer"
2001 or earlier
Motorola
upgrades PowerPC G4 - Motorola yesterday unveiled
its latest PowerPC G4 processor, the 7410, but the
new processor is unlikely to please Mac users looking
for a chip capable of catching up with Intel's ever-growing
megahertz lead
Where
the hell is... the PowerPC 'G4 Plus' - getting
the PowerPC 7400 above 500MHz has proved difficult,
to the extent that Apple has been forced to ship
dual-processor machines to help convince buyers
that its Power Mac isn't lagging way behind Wintel.
AltiVec
and multiprocessing in CAD/3D - The PowerPC
G4 processor with the AltiVec instruction set is
a superior chip architecturally for science and
3D visualization than anything coming out of Intel.
Over the next two years, with perhaps particular
emphasis on 2001, we'll see a number of amazing
feats in 3D visualization running on Power Macs
with the G4 processor. To borrow words from Billy
boy himself, "the best is yet to come."
MacWorld
- "Fantastic Four: With the Power Mac G4, Apple
Brings Super Power to your Desktop"
MacWorld
- "Sidebar: Introducing the G4 Processor"
Low
End Mac - "Power Macintosh G4/450, 500;
code name: Sawtooth"
Low
End Mac - "Power Macintosh G4/400; code
name: Yikes!"
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Computer. Apple, the Apple logo, Macintosh, iPod, iBook, iMac, eMac, and
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company
and product names may be trademarks or registered trademarks and are hereby
acknowledged.
At
the Seybold publisher's conference on Tuesday August 31st,
1999, Steve Jobs announced the availability of G4 Power
Macs at the Apple Store. The unexpected announcement (and
excellent pricing) was met with enthusiasm. Jobs and Phil
Schiller wowed the audience with impressive head-to-head
demos pitting the new G4 not only against a 600MHz Pentium
III but also Apple's own Blue and White G3! The G4, of course,
won hands down. Now that they are available, we have changed
the focus of this page. All pre-release news, speculation
etc. has been separated from the post release information
that is now available. New topic areas should make it easy
to find the information you are after. Happy reading!
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