Apple releases new Dual G5 2.5 GHz Power Mac

[Eug]

Originally posted by: raybay
Apple Macintosh is reportedly having a lot of trouble getting these new units out and available. Continuing problems with IBM's manufacturing continue to delay any real availability. IBM makes the CPU, and they are having some unusually long lasting production difficulties.

Huh? These were announced *today* and aren't supposed to ship until July. How could they be having trouble getting these units out?

In fact, the main reason Apple probably chose to wait so long to announce these machines is because of those problems previously. (IBM announced the 2.5 GHz chip back in Feb.) However, I view the fact that Apple is now willing to announce these machines as a positive one that IBM has gotten to the point where the updated G5s can ship in volume. And the 970-based machines have been shipping on time ever since October.

The ones that haven't been shipping on time (since they were announced months ago) were the 970FX-based Xserves, but they started shipping in volume recently, too.

BTW, I expect the iMac to get a G5 announcement in 3 weeks. Those iMacs would use the 970FX as well.

 

[justin1466]

Uggh, another crApple article, im out

 

[Eug]

Originally posted by: justin1466
Uggh, another crApple article, im out

Thanks for stopping by! :beer:

 

[Mo0o]

Originally posted by: justin1466
Uggh, another crApple article, im out

why did your stupid ass come in in the first place. its not like the title was misleading

 

[Sunner]

Originally posted by: justin1466
Uggh, another crApple article, im out

Excellent!
Now just stay out, and we'll all be happy campers.

 

[Tab]

In addition to the low-speed fans, the dual 2.5GHz Power Mac G5 features a new
liquid cooling system?the next generation in cooling technology. This system
provides a continuous flow of thermally conductive fluid that transfers heat from the
processors as they work harder. The heated fluid then flows through a radiant grille,
where air passing over cooling fins returns the fluid to its original temperature. The
liquid cooling system is also controlled by Mac OS X, which dynamically adjusts the
flow of the fluid and the speed of the fans based on the amount of heat being
generated. The closed-loop liquid cooling system is completely maintenance free.
In addition, because the liquid cooling system is more efficient than a standard heat
sink, the Power Mac G5 continues to run quietly, even as system performance reaches
new heights.

Is a radiator going to make that much of a difference....

 

[Marble]

Maybe if the OS was better I would buy one.

 

[addragyn]

Well I heard the (troll.speed=exteme) function will be in 10.4.

 

[Eug]

Could Cooligy's liquid system be the basis of this Power Mac's liquid cooling? Apple was known to be collaborating with Cooligy in recent times.

It uses liquid cooling and a pump, but the pump is an electrokinetic pump - no moving parts.

http://www.cooligy.com/micro_channel_cooling.html

 

[Cygni]

IBM has been having a ton of problems with the 90nm proccess, and im actually kinda suprised that they got the 2.5 out when they did, with the yields rumored at being increadibly low. I think the fact that the low end system is a dual 1.8 instead of a single 2-2.5 shows that they may still be having a ton of problems trying to ramp it up. IBM wanted to be at 3Ghz by right now, and they only made half of their goal.

The G5 Arch is really powerful, and the computer itself is amazing. As an owner of a Mac OS X 10.3 based Powerbook, I can say that the only thing that is holding Apple back from (re)taking the entire workstation market is the OS. IBM built a killer system, now Apple needs to make a killer OS (or give in to the linux/win world).

 

[drag]

Originally posted by: Cygni
IBM has been having a ton of problems with the 90nm proccess, and im actually kinda suprised that they got the 2.5 out when they did, with the yields rumored at being increadibly low. I think the fact that the low end system is a dual 1.8 instead of a single 2-2.5 shows that they may still be having a ton of problems trying to ramp it up. IBM wanted to be at 3Ghz by right now, and they only made half of their goal.

IBM publicly announced it was having issues with the 90nm proccess, hence causing the postponement of the faster versions of G5-based Apple server. Plus they started making them anyways, it was just behind the deadline.

So it's not quite "rumors".

I would expect that the issues have been ironned out, after all that stuff about the 90nm low yealds is kinda old news by now.

The G5 Arch is really powerful, and the computer itself is amazing. As an owner of a Mac OS X 10.3 based Powerbook, I can say that the only thing that is holding Apple back from (re)taking the entire workstation market is the OS. IBM built a killer system, now Apple needs to make a killer OS (or give in to the linux/win world).

OS X isn't good enough for you? Or are you saying they should switch to Linux?

Because WinXP is inferior to both of them.

 

[mooojojojo]

Drag - just because you don't like XP doesn't mean it is inferior to Linux.

Linux may be a good choice for developers, and with an office package perhaps can be suited for general tasks such as word processing and spreadsheets. But Linux lacks major productivity packages: Adobe, Macromedia and Corel software - none of these is available for Linux and that means that people from the graphics, publishing, video, audio and art industries in general will never use it.

And Cygni - if you indeed meant Linux... well that's as groundless as it gets. I mean isn't OSX based on FreeBSD? Or do you not like having a visually coherent environment and prefer an interface which is obviously an afterthought? Okay - I'm basing this on experiences with KDE, but I have yet to see even a screenshot of a good looking Linux environment, let alone one which feels nice when working in it.

 

[tart666]

aaahh, that's what those giant heatsink covers were all about...

 

[Megatomic]

Originally posted by: Marble
Maybe if the OS was better I would buy one.

OSX is unix (a form of BSD), stable, feature rich, and quite beautiful aesthetically. I'd love to have a dual G5, I just can't afford one.

 

[Eug]

*** CONFIRMED *** - Liquid cooling, not a heatpipe.

Apple liquifies G5

The Cupertino, Calif.,-based computer maker introduced the three new Power Macs Wednesday. The fastest features two 2.5 GHz processors and a 1.25 GHz per processor front side bus, and it is partially cooled by a combination of water and propylene glycol, a clear liquid used in automobile antifreeze.

Internal fans and an open grill enclosure help cool the other two models - a dual 1.8 GHz Power Mac and a 2.0 GHz version.

"It's a completely maintenance free system," Tom Boger, Apple senior director of desktop product marketing, told internetnews.com. "The processor was built using the 90-nanometer process. When you do that, you challenge the power density. You could see the same problem happening with Intel's 90-nanometer chips."

The cooling technique is nothing new. For years, computer enthusiasts and gamers have used various refrigeration techniques, including the use of ethylene glycol or propylene glycol to reduce surface temperature on hot-running chips. Running at top speed, some Mac users report their G5 machines run at temps of 85 Celsius or 185 Fahrenheit. Apple said it designed its G5 systems so that the fluid encircles the two G5 processors and transfers heat from the chips as they work harder. The computers are outfitted with 21 different temperature sensor points to help monitor the system.

 

[dannybin1742]

side note, i did some snooping on the mac addict forums, even though i'm not one, and soone posted a related news articles that verified that the fluid cooling system is indeed a water-glycol mixtures, with pump and everything.

personally i think what happened is that ibm is still not hitting their yields and the clock apple needs, so to keep up with the apple crowd demand, they imporvises and build in a water cooling solution, amd and intel computermanufacturers have not stooped this low yet, they still have faith that the companies will get theri act together and figure out the heat issue- i mean AMD from thier latest batch of Afx53 can hit 2.6g on air, and that using .13micron, not .09micron.

i'd also like ot add that in the article posted here they say that when doing extrely stressing tasks, the computers have been known to hit 85C

i'm not sure the credibility fo the site though, i've never read anything else off it

 

[Eug]

Originally posted by: dannybin1742
personally i think what happened is that ibm is still not hitting their yields and the clock apple needs, so to keep up with the apple crowd demand, they imporvises and build in a water cooling solution, amd and intel computermanufacturers have not stooped this low yet, they still have faith that the companies will get theri act together and figure out the heat issue- i mean AMD from thier latest batch of Afx53 can hit 2.6g on air, and that using .13micron, not .09micron.

IBM rates the 2.5 GHz 970FX at 50 Watts typical.
IBM rates the 1.8 GHz 970 at 51 Watts typical.

IBM does not publish max power numbers, but Motorola has measured the G5 2.0 GHz 970 at 91 Watts running Dhrystone, and 90 Watts running SPECint. (Motorola did this to for benchmarketing purposes. "Yeah, the G5 is fast, but it's TOO HAWT dontchaknow... for embedded usage.") IOW, the real-life max power of a G5 2.0 (and I'm not even talking about the 1.8) is less than 100 Watts, and I would thus expect a 2.5 GHz 970FX (which has a typical power compared to the 1.8) to have a max power in this range too.

Thus, the liquid cooling, although likely a benefit in terms of noise, is probably not necessary in terms of heat. However, I suspect the liquid cooling was built also with faster G5 chips (3 GHz) in mind, but those chips never materialized. But if 3 GHz chips do appear in 6 months with max wattages of 120 W, Apple will be ready.

 

[dannybin1742]

typical and actual are two differnt things

 

[Corporate Thug]

: Drool;

 

[NightCrawler]

Looks nice but $3000 is outrageous, can build a great PC for:

Case and PSU: .....................$60
Motherboard: .......................$56 ( Epox KT600 )
Athlon XP 2200 Mobile: ..........$77 ( overclocking of course )
Corsair 512MB PC3200 ..........$85
Hitachi 160GB 7200 RPM ........$104 ( Near Raptor performance without the price and loads of space plus RAID if you buy two )
128 meg Video Card ..............$100? ( Ati or nvidia so many to choose from )
8x DVD+R and Dual Layer ......$93
OS: Linux or Windows .............$$$
======================================================

BANG FOR YOUR BUCK

 

[drag]

Originally posted by: tart666
aaahh, that's what those giant heatsink covers were all about...

the heatsink covers were almost as big as the old ones. It's just that the old ones were in 2 parts.

The big single heatsink cover ment that they are moving to a all dual cpu setup.

Which is wonderfull.

The Power970 was designed specificly to be a SMP chip.

IBM's idea was that you can make 2 slower CPU's perform better then a single super-fast super-hot cpu. And make them last longer and probably just as cheap, too.

Plus as anybody who heavily multitasks on a SMP workstation can attest too, SMP machines have many performance benifits vs a single CPU machine that don't show easily in benchmarks.

It's all about REAL multitasking.

As you know a single cpu machine can only do 1 thing at a time. It just does it realy realy fast, so that it looks like your doing many things at once. With a dual cpu machine you can actually do 2 things at once.

With benchmarks like FPS in games can only use one CPU at a time, due to the single threaded nature of most programs. (multithreaded programs are very hard to make work correctly and the benifits are often small)

So you may only see a 20% improvement in performance.

Or like Photoshop filters may only get done 10-30% faster in a SMP machine vs a single CPU machine.

However if your running a FPS gaming benchmark PLUS a photoshop filter benchmark at the same time you may see over a 200% improvement vs a single CPU doing both at the same time. (due to things like not being able to take advantage of on-cpu cache, hardware interrupts, and stuff like that.)

The downside is that for 2 CPU's + the cost of a SMP-capable motherboard+ the increased cost from power requirements, you can get 1 cpu that will run that game much faster then a SMP machine for the same price.

So if you only do 1 thing at once, like play a game fullscreen, you want a Single fast CPU for most bang for your buck.

 

[tart666]

is 970FX rated at 50W with PowerTune on or off?

the use of powerTune would send "typical" numbers way down, while allowing the "peak" number to remain sky-high, no?

 

[Eug]

Originally posted by: NightCrawler
Looks nice but $3000 is outrageous, can build a great PC for:

Case and PSU: .....................$60
Motherboard: .......................$56 ( Epox KT600 )
Athlon XP 2200 Mobile: ..........$77 ( overclocking of course )
Corsair 512MB PC3200 ..........$85
Hitachi 160GB 7200 RPM ........$104 ( Near Raptor performance without the price and loads of space plus RAID if you buy two )
128 meg Video Card ..............$100? ( Ati or nvidia so many to choose from )
8x DVD+R and Dual Layer ......$93
OS: Linux or Windows .............$$$
======================================================

BANG FOR YOUR BUCK

That's all fine and dandy, but the dual G5s should be compared to dual 3.2 GHz Xeons or dual 2.2 GHz Opterons. Plus there are things like optical outputs, Firewire 800, free software, etc.

Originally posted by: dannybin1742
typical and actual are two differnt things

Yes, that's why I posted actual numbers too... for a chip that IBM rates as hotter than the 2.5 GHz 970FX.

Originally posted by: tart666
is 970FX rated at 50W with PowerTune on or off?

the use of powerTune would send "typical" numbers way down, while allowing the "peak" number to remain sky-high, no?

Well, not quite. I did post typical and peak numbers, but to give you an idea also, IBM also rates the 2.0 GHz 970FX with PowerTune on at 24.5 Watts, while Apple posts a theoretical max of 55 Watts. So roughly double and then some.

So even if this power scaling applied to the G5 970FX 2.5 it would mean a theoretical max of ~110 Watts, which is similar to Prescott's TDP. ie. Hot, but still air-coolable (as Dell and everyone else demonstrates). But I think the real-life max would likely be under 100 Watts for the 2.5.

 

[Megatomic]

My current system far exceeds those ^^^ basic specs and yet I'd still buy that dual G5 if I had the money to do so.

 

[tart666]

allrightie then. Finally all three major CPU vendors have arrived at the same brick wall: HEAT (edit, or at least all three have same power dissipation levels AND same technology). Now we can see who has better architechture... (and it looks like x86 is really showing its age)