Guest Randy S. Posted January 11, 2006 Report Share Posted January 11, 2006 Check out this vid: Darth Jobs Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bobdea Posted January 11, 2006 Report Share Posted January 11, 2006 the video damn though I am all about the intel macs for a few reasons, I would love to have one but as of right now one is not in the budget Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jack M Posted January 11, 2006 Report Share Posted January 11, 2006 They're putting Intel chips in Apples now? Sweet, maybe Intel will claw its way back up to 31.20... where I bought it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bobdea Posted January 11, 2006 Report Share Posted January 11, 2006 from what I can tell is that intel is going do well in the next year unless AMD comes up with something fast, as of right now for the low power dual core chips intel seems to be the way to go. dual core notebooks are gonna be hot and there are going to be some pretty sweet dual core desktops in the $700 to $1000 from a few vendors Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jack M Posted January 11, 2006 Report Share Posted January 11, 2006 what kind of chips has Apple been using all along? AMD? and what does "dual core" mean? what is it, and what does it do? does it have double forward loaded camber? ;) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kjl Posted January 11, 2006 Report Share Posted January 11, 2006 Motorola I think. A dual core processor is a CPU with essentially two CPUs inside of it. I don't know too much about it, but I believe that it basically has the potential to do ~2 times as much work, without the manufacturer having to actually design a single CPU that works twice as fast. A downside is that I don't think very many applications actually take advantage of the multitasking/multithreading necessary to actually get twice as much work done. So you probably can't get twice as much performance out of a single application, but you can probably bring up twice as many applications up at the same time (e.g. let Photoshop apply a massive image blur while you do something else in another application). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jayj Posted January 11, 2006 Report Share Posted January 11, 2006 I thought I remembered them using IBM chips for a while. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Randy S. Posted January 11, 2006 Report Share Posted January 11, 2006 Apple has been using IBM chips for some time now. Ken's description of Dual Core is as close to accurate as anything else. The real speculation is whether the new Macs will be able to run native Windows or not. Also will you be able to dual-boot the machine (run two OSs simultaneously)? We'll see. I'm sure Apple won't want this to happen, but perhaps we'll see a hack that makes it work. So far my PowerBook G4 is still working great. No reason to change yet. Its a bit dented/bent from being on the back of my motorcycle last time I crashed it, but it works great. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bobdea Posted January 11, 2006 Report Share Posted January 11, 2006 windows on a mac" From what I can tell about these new machines they have the standard intel motherboards in them but with a security chip so you can run OS X, I could be wrong but there has been talk of Intel developing the guts of macs and intel claims that they are not making custom chipsets for apple. you never know, apple and intel are both known for saying one thing and doing another. The Pentium 4 based macs that were seeded to developers last year were also standard PCs in a Apple case. as for dual core CPUs or multiple CPUs it being faster they are but as soon as you put in a second processor there is a performance hit due to figuring out what processors are going to handle what. I have used a few dual processor macs and the difference is dramatic from the single cpu macs at the same speed even if the application is not multithreaded since the OS is, same should apply for windows but I really don't know since I have not used a windows box with a dual core does windows support dual processors(not dual core) as in separate CPUs but in the same box? I was wondering since I have never see such a beast though I have seen linux desktops with a pair. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
trailertrash Posted January 11, 2006 Report Share Posted January 11, 2006 on xp you can have dual cpu's, if you have a p4 with HT you will see two processors in the task manager. its odd, macs are getting more like pc's every year. they used to have scsi drives as standard and now with, i assume, non risc intel chips all your left with is the mac os as the real difference. i wonder if mac will just do away with their hardware and just sell the os to run on intel machines. jack, way back apple used motorolla chips i think. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bobdea Posted January 11, 2006 Report Share Posted January 11, 2006 motorola AKA freescale Power PC CPUs and in the high end machines the IBM 64 bit PPCs way way back in in the 80s and early 90s apple was using motorola 68000 series I doubt apple will leave the hardware industry anytime soon, thats where they make most of their money, however I guess that apple certified clones might not be totally out of the picture but Jobs has never liked the idea, first thing he did when he returned to apple was kill the clones Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mike T Posted January 11, 2006 Report Share Posted January 11, 2006 on xp you can have dual cpu's NT has supported multiple CPU's since version 4.0. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
trailertrash Posted January 11, 2006 Report Share Posted January 11, 2006 mike, i didnt mean to imply that only xp supported it. i was just trying to describe how the current windows version handles it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jack M Posted January 11, 2006 Report Share Posted January 11, 2006 I should have guessed dual core meant two processors. I would think parallel processing would be a boon to windows users - so much crap seems to be running in the background at any given time, would be nice to have another processor dedicated to what I'm actually trying to get done! Isn't OS X really just lightly-massaged Linux with an Apple GUI? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
trailertrash Posted January 11, 2006 Report Share Posted January 11, 2006 jack, its the bsd distro i think. when it first came out i thought it was kinda funny that you could get a command prompt on a mac. oh and yes, you can set affinity (on xp (not sure about older versions, mike?)) for which process on which processor. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bobdea Posted January 11, 2006 Report Share Posted January 11, 2006 core BSD but quite modified, apple uses a lot proprietary software in OS X but they do distribute the source for the base of the OS which boils down rather decent bare bones unix distro some info can be found here http://developer.apple.com/darwin/ the nice thing about OS X is that hardware support is there and if you want you can fire a X windows session to run your favorite open source programs and stuff Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Derf Posted January 11, 2006 Report Share Posted January 11, 2006 Apple will never sell Mac OS X x86 seperately because one of the reasons Macs run so well is that they all use known hardware, no obscure hardware with wierd drivers go in a mac, so there is no driver or hardware related stability issues. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chubz Posted January 15, 2006 Report Share Posted January 15, 2006 You guys are talking on a level I have begun to partially understand. Not having a computer related background it is coming to me little by little. I have another post on what new technology is going to increase my gaming performance. As the new PC games become more and more information loaded, i.e. Battlefield Vietnam to Battlefield 2 (which rocks when it flows smoothly), my system will need an upgrade soon. I have checked out the dual core, but the price tag is a bit steep Intel ($960 or so) and the new AMD ($1061), eventually I will need to change out. If any of you are gamers and have an opinion about either of these, please post. Thanks Greg Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bobdea Posted January 17, 2006 Report Share Posted January 17, 2006 would make a dramatic difference with games compared to a blasing fast single cpu unless things have changed very recently most games are such resource hogs and for the most part single threaded that you might be better off with a single cpu I don't know though, that is just a guess, check out a gaming site, see if they have benchmarked some of these systems. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tufty Posted January 18, 2006 Report Share Posted January 18, 2006 would make a dramatic difference with games compared to a blasing fast single cpu unless things have changed very recently most games are such resource hogs and for the most part single threaded that you might be better off with a single cpu I don't know though, that is just a guess, check out a gaming site, see if they have benchmarked some of these systems. Depends. Look at the specs for the XBox 360 (3 x PowerPC processors), upcoming PS3 (Multiple Cell procesors) etc, some PC games might be essentially single-threaded, but not many these days. Hell, most of them are driving the GPU pretty hard, which could be seen as multiprocessing. Remember 'Tempest', the 1981 Atari vector arcade game? It had 3 processors, as did almost all of the vector games out of Atari in the day. :) Games programmers will take everything they can, and then some more. It won't be long before there are (PC) games that require multiple processors (or at least dual cores). All of which is mildly offtopic, though. Apple's OSX is a Mach kernel with a BSD wrapper layer around it, nothing to do with Linux. It's basically a system that's been in development since 1991 or so (NeXTStep). It's great for working, not terribly wonderful for gaming, partially because the graphics cards on macs have been until recently well below 'gaming spec' unless you bought a top-of-the-range mac, and of course because most of the games are developed for Windows. Booting windows on the new Apple hardware is going to be tricksy, there's no BIOS, it uses something different. Nothing to stop you running windows in a virtual machine, though, I would guess. Although quite why one would want to is another question entirely. As is usual, people are saying "they are too expensive", but the price carries its benefits - they are generally in the same price bracket as an equivalently specced machine from a quality PC supplier. My Mac Mini, bought as a stopgap machine when my powerbook's hard drive smoked earlier this year, has been on, almost permanently, since delivery. We had a power outage a couple of weeks back that my UPS couldn't handle, so I had to power off, it took me a couple of minutes to remember where the power switch on the mini is; I've only used that switch 3 times. Uptime is only limited, for me, by the interval between security updates, and I drive the machine pretty hard. Simon Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bobdea Posted January 18, 2006 Report Share Posted January 18, 2006 hehe bobdea% uptime 11:28 up 10 days, 15:32, 2 users the only resets this mini gets are for updates and if a Xwindows session gets funky, I am running KDE most of the time and its bug ridden only took 70 or so hours to compile I guess the new Macs use a new firmware that in some cases may have a compatibility layer for bios dependant OSes but vista supports EFI so if that *should* install without a hitch somewhere I read that there is a version of GRUB that deals with EFI so I am sure someone will get XP to work with that I guess this type of firmware has been in the itanium line for awhile here is a little snippet from another site The mystery deepens. Despite protestations on Apple's part that the company's new Intel-based iMac and MacBookPro wouldn't be able to boot Windows XP, reports are starting to trickle in that the Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) boot manager can launch XP after all. No less an authority on EFI than Intel has commented (through its Australian office) that motherboards using the Intel 945 chipset (which is assumed -- though not confirmed -- to be the set used in the new Macs) support EFI and can boot XP. Intel's EFI documentation also says that a "Compatibility Support Module" will allow EFI to boot OSes that aren't directly supported by the boot manager. Given that Apple has said it won't directly stop Windows from running on Intel Macs, it seems at least feasible that a Compatibility Support Module is available. Of course, all this rampant speculation can be solved pretty quickly soon enough once the Intel Macs start shipping and users simply stick their XP install discs into the CD slot. That's when the real fun begins. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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