[HN Gopher] The Sad Saga of the 500 MHz Power Mac G4
___________________________________________________________________
The Sad Saga of the 500 MHz Power Mac G4
Author : ingve
Score : 89 points
Date : 2022-11-09 15:01 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (512pixels.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (512pixels.net)
| wazoox wrote:
| Back in 2000 in my job I had a 400 Mhz G4, and a dual PIII 500Mhz
| server (running RedHat 5.2) to work with. Once set up to dual-
| boot Yellowdog Linux, the G4 literally ran circles around the
| dual PIII machine particularly for anything network-related (the
| onboard 1 GigE certainly helped).
| ben7799 wrote:
| All I remember of this early period was just how much OS9 would
| crash when using "Professional" applications, making any
| performance increase in the Mac almost pointless.
|
| I took a "fun" elective course in electronic media my senior year
| of school. It was Photoshop, video editing on VHS + digital video
| editing, and electronic music production. All my CS work was on
| IBM RS6000s or SGI Indy & O2s at that point. I had a homebuilt
| Pentium desktop machine dual booting Linux & Windows NT that I
| used for my work and a 486 laptop running Linux that was getting
| long in the tooth by 1999. I was very much used to computers not
| crashing by that point, NT was pretty good, Linux and the
| Sun/IBM/SGI workstations would stay up for a year no problem as
| security updates requiring reboots weren't coming very quickly
| yet.
|
| I vividly remember greatly preferring doing all the video editing
| on the analog VHS editing stations because OS9 was so
| unbelievably unstable. Maybe the ultra expensive Avid
| workstations were less unstable, but I was in a 100 level course
| and not allowed to use them. We were saving our work after every
| operation the Macs were crashing so much.
|
| Of course pretty soon after this OSX started making things right
| in the world. It's easy to take Mac OS for granted these days!
|
| Heck even an iPhone with iMovie today would run rings around the
| Avid workstations from 1999!
| Cerium wrote:
| Back then people would joke that Macintosh was an acronym: Most
| Applications Crash, If Not The Operating System Hangs
| Retric wrote:
| I spent a few years programming for OS8/9 and it was possible
| to keep things rock solid, but also really easy to fuck things
| up.
|
| Cooperative multi threading meant that anything going wrong
| could cause everything to hang. The memory model was only
| slightly more forgiving etc.
|
| Which meant some software was fine to run for weeks and other
| stuff was lucky to make it through an afternoon.
| agsnu wrote:
| BowelsOfTheMemoryMgr
| combyn8tor wrote:
| It was normal to use Photoshop and have the entire system crash
| several times a day. The G4's along with the iMac had terrible
| overheating issues which also caused constant crashes in warmer
| climates. Running these machines in a room without aircon in
| the Australian summer was a no go.
| runlevel1 wrote:
| Classic Mac OS was cursed by its memory management. Decisions
| that made sense pre-multitasking would later haunt them up
| through Mac OS 9.[^1]
|
| [1]:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classic_Mac_OS_memory_manageme...
| anthk wrote:
| SO was W9X and even W98SE. Install a driver? BSOD. Set up
| something? BSOD. You sneeze at IE5? BSOD. And so on.
| rodgerd wrote:
| > All I remember of this early period was just how much OS9
| would crash
|
| This just takes me back to working for an Apple reseller and
| the stream of internal hype around Copland (what was supposed
| to be OS8) in the mid-90s. It was going to be a microkernel!
| Memory protection! Pre-emptive multi-tasking! System 7 apps
| would run in their own microkernel personalities to avoid
| crashing anything else! You might even be able to run Windows
| in a separate personality!
|
| Instead it ended with the actual OS8 release which added some
| theming and 3D effects to System 7.
| bombcar wrote:
| We spent hours carefully curating sets of extensions for
| particular tasks. It helped.
| LAC-Tech wrote:
| 500mhz was really slow in '99 wasn't it?
|
| I had my first computer either then or in 2000: 10GB hard drive,
| 64mb of ram, and 600mhz. It was the cheapest one they had.
|
| EDIT: Maybe my memory is hazy and it was more like 300mhz.
| goosedragons wrote:
| It wasn't that slow a clock speed at the time of announcement,
| a smidge behind Intel and AMD at the time. They both had 600+
| MHz chips then. But things really heated up and by March 2000
| you could get a 1Ghz processor and of course P4 was all about
| clock speeds so things changed rapidly. PPC took a few more
| years to get to 1GHz.
| Zak wrote:
| Clock speeds are not directly comparable as measures of CPU
| performance between different architectures. Intel in
| particular focused on increasing clock speed with little regard
| to performance during that time period.
|
| The G4 had a powerful (for the time) vector processor, which is
| relevant to media production. It was not slow when used for
| that purpose with software that took advantage of the vector
| unit. Apple's marketing cherry-picked benchmarks to claim that
| the G4 was much faster than Intel chips with higher clock
| speeds, but the reality was somewhere in the middle.
| bobsmith432 wrote:
| Exactly like the M1 now
| Maursault wrote:
| PPCs ran hot and sucked power. Apple's machines at release
| are ordinarily the most performant machines available for
| consumers, but that lead never lasts long. The G4 at each
| new release was indeed more performant than the current
| Intel machines, but only for a few months. Remember, the G4
| was considered a "supercomputer," and the US government
| banned its export, which hurt Apple, though they tried to
| make hay with it by marketing this, by the end of 1999,
| they were desperately trying to get that ban lifted.
|
| There still seems to be some confusion about Apple Silicon
| and the M1. When M1 was released, _it wasn 't the fastest
| processor._ You could actually build a faster Intel machine
| in 2020, but it would cost a lot more money and use a lot
| more power. What was and is special about the M1 is how
| little power it uses for its performance, which is decent
| but, like all new Apple products, an incremental increase
| in performance, and how cheap the low end offering still
| is. And I'm pretty sure that today you still can't beat the
| 2020 M1 Mac mini performance and features on Intel for 700
| bucks. What is amazing about the M1 is that it is a lateral
| move, a platform shift, without sacrificing performance,
| and it is incrementally faster than the 2018 Intel Mac mini
| at less than half the price.
| nobleach wrote:
| But as often is the case with Apple releases, you DO
| indeed have to sacrifice things. Apple will often use
| marketing to tell people they don't need features that
| are standard on other platforms (copy/paste, MMS on the
| iPhone, more than 8 Gigs of memory on the first M1). So
| it's hard to call it a lateral move without sacrifice.
| Granted, Apple always comes around.
| Maursault wrote:
| The lateral move was with Macs, not iPhones, which were
| always ARM. And the 2020 M1 Mac mini had two memory
| configurations, 8GB _or_ 16GB. Obviously the product
| would not appeal to users that require 64GB of memory,
| yet most M1 users report the limited RAM doesn 't affect
| performance. The only sacrifice with switching from Intel
| that I can think of is no longer being able to run x86
| VMs at full speed. It's not like there are sweeping
| sacrifices everywhere, but instead a nitpick or two.
| santoshalper wrote:
| It's good to see some things never change.
|
| The generous interpretation is that Apple knows that their
| users tend to skew towards "creative" professions like
| digital audio, video, graphic design etc. and so they pick
| the benchmarks that those people care about.
|
| You can write the ungenerous interpretation yourself.
| wmf wrote:
| _Intel in particular focused on increasing clock speed with
| little regard to performance during that time period._
|
| That wasn't really true in 1999 when Intel was still using
| the good P6 microarchitecture in the Pentium ///. NetBurst
| stupidity didn't start until later.
| anthk wrote:
| The G4 was much better at 500MHZ than the PIII.
| mschaef wrote:
| How well did that hold up as the CPU clock rates went up
| and the bus speed really didn't? I'd always assumed it
| was an issue, but never did have metrics to bear that
| out.
| [deleted]
| justinator wrote:
| It felt much slower than the Dells I would use in the college's
| computer lab. These things were not performant out of the gate,
| given OS 9 totally well: sucked, and OS X itself released a
| year+ later was not heavily optimized and nothing else ran
| natively, so you were running everything under the OS 9 env
| anyways.
|
| I think people forget the incremental improvements in
| optimization of the whole stack that was done and punted off as
| features. There's an old video of Steve Jobs showing off
| resizing a window in OS X by the dragging the corner and
| marveling that it would do that so fluidly and not tear all
| over the place like the previous version.
| anthk wrote:
| By 2000-2001 OSX was much better than W98 and even WXP for
| media production.
| justinator wrote:
| You may be misremembering the timeline of OS X releases as
| OS X 10.0 only came out in March of 2001. It took a while
| for Cocoa apps to mature.
| anthk wrote:
| Ah, yes, sorry. 2001-2002 then. XP in 2002 was taking W98
| over, and yet OSX felt superior. Ditto with Linux and
| KDE3 and a _good_ video and sound card and the -rt
| kernel. 2.4 or 2.6 preferabily, with Cinepaint and
| Cinelerra.
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| > The Power Mac G4, which features the PowerPC G4 processor with
| its remarkable Velocity Engine, runs professional applications
| like Adobe Photoshop over 50 percent faster than 800 MHz Pentium
| III-based PCs.
|
| Is that any faster than modern versions of Photoshop today?
| pram wrote:
| Adobe has made more things multi-threaded over the years so
| probably not. ARM has SVE too which I assume is similar to the
| 'velocity engine'
| addaon wrote:
| Velocity Engine was a marketing name for Altivec (which was
| also a marketing name, just IBM's instead of Apple's).
| Altivec was roughly comparable to Arm's NEON (32 128-bit
| registers, packed 32-bit float operations making the largest
| part of the ISA extension), but with a few key differences.
| Altivec had a much richer set of basic integer operations
| than neon (VPERM, you were my best friend), but NEON
| supported packed 64-bit double-precision floats. In general
| as a developer Altivec was much more fun to work with, and
| I'd expect that for Photoshop it was probably the more
| powerful vector ISA as well.
|
| SVE is a successor to NEON that, besides supporting flexible
| vector sizes, reflects another couple decades of learnings
| about vector ISA design and a few orders of magnitude more
| available transistors.
| the-rc wrote:
| Altivec was Motorola's trademark. IBM worked on it, too,
| and called it VMX, but didn't make chips using it until the
| 970/G5.
|
| Often lost in the noise is that Apple was the most visible,
| but not the only customer of Motorola's chips (witness all
| the variants that never made it into a Mac). Of course,
| Jobs liked to act as if others didn't exist and Motorola
| was Apple's own CPU department. I wish someone with
| knowledge would describe how or why IBM decided it was a
| good idea to sell silicon to him. It did prepare them a bit
| for the Cell partnership with Sony and Toshiba, but there's
| probably more to the story than that.
| anthk wrote:
| Altivec did magic with MPlayer. 720p video on a G4? Totally
| doable.
| addaon wrote:
| Altivec was just fun to work in. Much like writing PPC
| assembly in general, it felt like a civilized toolbox
| with a good set of hand tools -- you have your socket
| wrench of each size (byte, short, int), and you always
| know what to reach for -- but then it came with just a
| couple power tools -- vperm and vsel were basically your
| electric drill and impact wrench, and every once in a
| while you'd realize that instead of doing a perfectly
| good job banging out the result with your hand tools you
| could just finish the damn thing right now with the power
| tools. And when you could, you ended up code that was
| shorter, simpler, faster, and easier to write. So
| rewarding.
| anthk wrote:
| GameCube and Wii developers knew lots of tricks for that,
| sure.
| addaon wrote:
| The GameCube/Wii vector ISA instruction was not Altivec,
| and not very similar. It used 64-bit vectors (packed as
| two 32 bit floats usually), so half the size of Altivec,
| NEON, and most of its contemporaries. These packed vector
| instructions shared the register file with the floating
| point unit (that is, an FP register could contain either
| a 64-bit float acted on by a normal floating point
| instruction or two 32-bit floats acted on by a vector
| instruction), rather than having a dedicated separate
| register file like Altivec. And most of the fun
| instructions had no equivalent.
| purpleflame1257 wrote:
| That Photoshop was probably CS2 IIRC. I'm fairly sure that
| software bloat has eaten all the speed gains from faster
| processors. I have an old 1.33 GHz Powerbook which runs 2004
| Word as fast as my M1 macbook runs Office today. If I put in an
| SSD it might even be faster.
| leeter wrote:
| > If I put in an SSD it might even be faster.
|
| I think most of the retro youtubers I've seen have done this
| mod along with PRam battery replacements that don't leak.
| They seem to use the m.2 SATA mode drives to 44pin like thus
| (not recommending, just showing an example)
| https://www.amazon.com/44pin-Converter-Adapter-Computer-
| Acce...
| anthk wrote:
| OpenBSD for macppc would run perfectly fine and fast enough
| on that.
|
| Not for JS heavy sites, but Seamonkey with UBlock Origin
| Legacy would do a great job.
|
| For youtube, Mplayer and yt-dlp would do the job. SMPlayer
| + "open url" dialog for graphical folks.
| xxpor wrote:
| Do you think the g4 would have enough juice to do
| software decoding of h264 in real time? (slash is ffmpeg
| optimized enough for a relatively obscure platform like
| macppc? e.g. does it actually use altivec?)
| anthk wrote:
| IDK on FFMPEG, but for sure MPlayer had altivec support
| from the G4 days.
|
| Also, pair a good video card with XV/XVMC support.
|
| Also, for last drip of perfomance:
| mplayer -lavdopts skiploopfilter=all file.mkv
|
| or mplayer -lavdopts
| skiploopfilter=nonrefs file.mkv
| axiolite wrote:
| MPlayer primarily uses libavcodec (the -lavd in your
| command line refers to it) for decoding, which is part of
| ffmpeg: https://ffmpeg.org/libavcodec.html
|
| There was a lot of overlap in MPlayer and ffmpeg in the
| early days. Things like both projects sharing the same
| infrastructure, MPlayer developers automatically getting
| commit access to ffmpeg, ffmpeg sources having references
| to MPlayer, several top developers active in both, etc.
|
| It's to the point that I think of ffmpeg as a spin-off of
| MPlayer, but perhaps that's not fair. Maybe it's more
| accurate to say that several prominent MPlayer developers
| (and infrastructure folks) did double-duty for years,
| then many drifted over to working on ffmpeg exclusively.
| I know that's true for several lead folks. I'd have to go
| through the ancient mailing list archives to sharpen my
| recollection of events. Perhaps somebody else who was
| also around at the time recalls a clearer perspective.
| anthk wrote:
| IDK but before the ffmpeg(1) tool everyone used mencoder
| (and transcode(1) ) to transcode media.
|
| DVD ripping used transcode and/or mencoder.
| nwallin wrote:
| mplayer uses ffmpeg to decode h264.
| nwallin wrote:
| ffmpeg has dedicated code for decoding h264 on ppc, as
| well as all the support code for rescaling and yuv->rgb
| conversion etc. It's probably not going to be able to
| decode super ultra duper high bitrate h264, but I would
| expect it to be able to decode 24fps 720p at standard
| bitrates without breaking a sweat, and it probably ought
| to be able to handle 30fps 1080p.
|
| https://github.com/FFmpeg/FFmpeg/tree/master/libavcodec/p
| pc https://github.com/FFmpeg/FFmpeg/tree/master/libswscal
| e/ppc
| mk_stjames wrote:
| In 2001 I was using a G4 with Mac OS 9.2 for Photoshop while
| working at a studio; that was Photoshop version 7, which is
| pre-CS (which started with 8.0). My memory of the workflow at
| that time was that most system operations were snappy as
| hell. Sure, there was a bit of load time for very large files
| and some of the operations had a bit of lag but there really
| became a point around that time that the speed of work that
| you could do for most operations essentially matched the
| speed of the machine. Before that era, I remember going to
| use the cloning tool on a large, high-DPI image and getting a
| lag as you dragged the brush over a spot... waiting for it to
| catch up. The G4, especially when we upgraded one with more
| ram and OSX (which also was a huge change that happened to
| coincide with the G4) is when I remember machines getting to
| the point where I wasn't waiting on lag all the time when
| working.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| I used both a 1Ghz iMac G4 and 2Ghz iMac G5 (ALS model) in
| the 2000s for a lot of Photoshop work and remember them
| performing similarly. Both were excellent machines for that
| particular use case and zipped through anything I threw at
| them in PS, especially the G5 which I put 2GB of RAM in.
|
| The PS versions I used were chiefly 7.0 and CS1, with some
| CS2 mixed in towards the end of the G5's lifespan. I miss
| those versions so much because they sat at nearly a perfect
| nexus of features, responsiveness, and resource
| consumption. Such a stark contrast to PS CC.
| flomo wrote:
| Only certain operations were sped up by the vector extensions.
| People on PC forums would post their "jobsmarks" showing they
| beat Apple, the G4 was sorta a disaster. The replies are
| ranting about general software bloat, but I'd bet the image
| processing parts of photoshop are still highly optimized.
| q-big wrote:
| > Is that any faster than modern versions of Photoshop today?
|
| I seriously doubt that. Consider that Velocity Engine is
| another marketing term for AltiVec, PowerPC's SIMD instruction
| set. The Pentium III only supported SSE, which was a lot more
| basic in term of capabilities.
|
| But SSE was extended a lot by Intel with the succeeding
| processors (SSE2, SSE3, SSSE3, SSE4 (SSE4.1, SSE 4.2)), and
| supplemented two times by a more capable SIMD instruction set
| (AVX, AVX-512). By the way: SSE was intended to replace the
| older MMX SIMD instruction set (and to replace the x87 FPU by a
| modern floating point instruction set). So, if we consider
| AVX-512 to be the "sensible" instruction set for SIMD on x86,
| Intel needed four attempts to get it right. ;-)
|
| So, I really doubt that Velocity Engine/AltiVec can compete
| with the modern x86 SIMD units. But it is very easy to admit
| that AltiVec's SIMD instruction set design is much more elegant
| and orthogonal than modern x86 SIMD (say, AVX or AVX-512).
| perardi wrote:
| _Is that any faster than modern versions of Photoshop today?_
|
| I think you all may be missing the invisible sarcasm tag here.
| I am reading this more as a jab at Photoshop for not "feeling"
| faster on a contemporary multicore GPU-enhanced machine.
|
| Which, honestly, in my distant memory, Photoshop doesn't _feel_
| faster today. Oh, I know it objectively is much faster -- you
| can rip through 40+ megapixel images with GPU-powered filters
| like it's nothing. But whatever hideous custom interface kit
| Adobe uses make it feel perceptually pokey.
|
| Like, I just opened the Libraries panel for the first time on
| this new computer, and there was a noticeable wait as it
| rendered the "rich toolip" thing they have. The default New
| Document interface has lurching slowness as well. The interface
| just always feels a teeeeny bit behind your actions.
| yongmuller wrote:
| I had a 400MHz model that I hand overclocked to 800MHz by re-
| soldering the multiplier on the processor. That thing ran
| perfectly for over 10 years as my main PCI Pro Tools system.
| 2001-2010. RIP you beautiful grey beast.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| That was the era where I remember every radio and audio
| production studio would start moving systems over to Windows--
| except for it seemed there was always one Mac left running
| ProTools, since it could sit quietly in the studio and the
| licensing was pretty crazy expensive. Plus the audio processing
| chain the Mac was a lot better (better latency and easier
| introspection) than anything on Windows at the time.
| Maursault wrote:
| > That was the era where I remember _every_ radio and audio
| production studio would start moving systems over to Windows
|
| This is a myth. I seriously doubt any nationally marketed
| record was ever tracked and mixed using Pro Tools on Windows,
| at least, I am unaware of any. When big artists showed
| interest in Microsoft products, it was not for Windows with
| Pro Tools, it was for Internet technologies.
|
| Throughout the 90's up to 2000 (500Mhz G4 "era") nearly all
| pro audio was still Mac, but Windows was an alternative in
| audio by 2001 and it got talked about. Certainly some had
| built Windows rigs, but they were independent and home-based
| operations. Few, if any, professional studio enterprises used
| Windows for tracking and mixing. By 2004, Windows and PCs
| still did offer a slightly cheaper alternative (Digi
| equipment cost what it cost on either platform), but only new
| operations and some higher education communication programs
| had invested in audio on Windows platforms. No one was
| replacing and tossing Mac DAWs, ever, because Pro Tools and
| other audio hw was expensive and still sounded good, no
| matter how old it was it sounded the same as it did when new.
|
| By 2004, Windows still barely had its foot in the door in pro
| audio, and most pro audio operations were still Mac
| central.[1] By 2011, any competition Windows ever gave Mac in
| the studio was over, but for some reason the myth that
| Windows took over audio production from Mac at some point
| still existed.[2] But it was always false.
|
| Certainly, there were Windows PC fanatics that have ever
| insisted Mac was overpriced and better rigs could be built on
| PC, and some of them were engineers and opened their own
| studios, but in general these were much smaller operations
| compared to full size, full service recording studios. You'd
| have some little studio that had a tracking room and a
| control room built into their basement or their garage or
| shed. Any large studio with a full-sized control room and
| multiple tracking rooms, a couple smaller control rooms
| ("Studio B, Studio C") and, you know, a lobby, an artists'
| lounge, a business office, storage rooms, what you'd consider
| a "real" professional studio, was always Mac, even if they
| were still running OS9 and older Digi equipment as late as
| 2009 and beyond, these systems stayed in place because they
| kept working and new ADCs and Pro Tools software licensing
| was and still is expensive.
|
| It is 2022, and I guarantee you there are full sized pro
| studios still using OS9 on G4 with Pro Tools and Digi racks
| that will only upgrade to 10yo hw when those things stop
| working or they can't find replacement ATA hard drives,
| because Mac Pros are crazy expensive and it is hard for them
| to get their head around USB3 and Thunderbolt2 and not
| needing PCI anymore, but mostly reluctance comes from having
| to reinvest maybe tens of thousands of dollars into Intel-
| based plugins they already have on PPC and new multi-channel
| digital rack ADC systems. If it was only the Pro Tools
| licensing, they might have stayed current, but even with
| bundled plugins and lower cost hardware, it's hard to abandon
| things that are already paid for 20ya and still working,
| unless, of course, you're Skywalker Sound.
|
| [1] https://duc.avid.com/showthread.php?t=99826
|
| [2] https://gearspace.com/board/music-computers/609183-most-
| prof...
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| They said _except_ for protools. The whole point of the
| comment was to say "except for a mac running protools".
| Maursault wrote:
| Pro Tools was cross-platform since 1997 with the release
| of the PCI version of Avid's AudioMedia III card and Digi
| 888 interface. By then most other extant DAW software,
| such as CuBase, had dropped Windows support, while MOTU
| Digital Performer was Mac-only until about 2015, though I
| can think of one Windows option that appeared around
| 1997, Sonic Foundry's Acid, which was Windows-only and
| reasonably popular.
|
| Regardless, the point here is that there was a choice of
| OS platform with Pro Tools since 1997, and yet the vast
| majority of established studios used Macs. The brief
| window that Windows had to infiltrate that space was
| between 1997 and Mac OS 8 when Apple's flagship OS was
| already desperate for modernization, and 2005 and Mac OS
| X 10.4, when the OS was finally both stable and performed
| decently.
|
| I suspect there were newer small (home) studios at the
| time that were fully PC, but these engineers would never
| consider running Macintosh. That's who used Windows...
| die hard PC users that subsequently got into audio
| engineering. But any established studios, even if they
| had no actual computers tracking and mixing audio until
| 2001 almost always went with the Pro Tools interface
| options running the software on Mac OS 9. Precious few
| studio installations that already had Mac switched to PC.
| New studios either invested in PC hardware initially as
| their first DAWs, or they didn't, but I expect most of
| these failed as a business for no other reason than most
| new businesses fail, it had nothing to do with their
| computer platform.
|
| So Windows started to appear in pro audio between
| 1997-2005, but the PC platform just didn't have enough
| time to ever remotely become dominant. Maybe there were a
| lot of Windows DAWs out there, they just weren't
| surrounded by a purpose-built studio generating any
| revenue to speak of, and among actual ground-up purpose-
| built studios, Windows installations were a very rare
| exception. That said, engineers are gear junkes, and even
| in Mac studios there were bound to be an old PC and a
| handful of cheap PC laptops for stereo on-location
| tracking because they became cheaper and more reliable
| than a portable digital recorder.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| The Windows machines weren't used at all for DAWs, but
| for everything else. At least in live/broadcast. The
| automated playback system, the producer comms system, the
| general on air PC, etc. is more what I'm talking about.
|
| My point is that the Mac would still be there, doing the
| main audio production work, but all the auxiliary
| machines started getting replaced with Windows PCs
| (usually racked up in a separate room since they had
| bigger noisier disks and fans).
| klodolph wrote:
| When people post pictures of their studios, I still see
| plenty of G3/G4/G5 towers in the pictures. Maybe it's not
| at the center of the studio, but you definitely see them.
| hot_gril wrote:
| There's something fun yet practical about holding onto a solid
| old computer (or car) that's been upgraded well beyond the
| original specs. Until this year, my main work machine was a
| 2009 Mac Pro with dual Xeon x5670s (12 cores total), 24GB RAM,
| RX580, flashed to 5,1 firmware and OpenCore'd to run the latest
| macOS. Yes there are beefier versions, but this was good
| enough.
|
| Got an M1 Mac mini and miss a few things. The Mac Pro
| connectivity is still important. USB-C accessories are never as
| reliable. Also hate having to use DisplayLink for >2 monitors.
| Kon-Peki wrote:
| I ordered the 400MHz PCI version (Yikes!) with student pricing on
| the first day. The first computer I owned myself.
|
| I remember getting it with no delay, as well as a t-shirt and two
| large posters.
|
| I upgraded the memory as soon as I could afford it. I remember
| using the OS9 RAM disk feature for many programming assignments
| and getting amazing performance with a nearly silent machine, as
| it spun down the HD and turned off most fans. It was a great
| computer, and upgraded to OS X perfectly.
| AceJohnny2 wrote:
| > _" The move is in response to Motorola's delays in reaching
| volume production of its 500 MHz G4 processor chip, which is now
| scheduled for availability early next year."_
|
| > _" A full six months after its original introduction, Apple was
| finally shipping a 500 MHz Power Mac G4. [...] a lesson in
| controlling your own technology stack that Apple wouldn't
| forget."_
|
| I guess this was the start of the PowerPC production (and later,
| performance) woes that would eventually lead to Apple
| transitioning to Intel, announced at WWDC 2005.
| classichasclass wrote:
| Still got a 450MHz Sawtooth G4 as a server (with a FireWire
| RAID). It also broadcasts radio audio from a RADIOshark or a USB
| flash drive of music, and controls the air conditioner.
| erickhill wrote:
| "G4 lineup clown"
|
| I assume this was a PDF copy/paste snafu where it should have
| said "down" not "clown". But it definitely made me do a double-
| take. (or triple)
| toufka wrote:
| The quotes seem to be OCR'd with 500 being 5oo, and punctuation
| in weird spots too.
| runlevel1 wrote:
| I occasionally make that typo along with a few others
| involving visually similar graphemes.
| Cockbrand wrote:
| I ordered a G4 450MHz pretty much the day they were announced.
| After some back and forth with the dealer, I was sent two
| machines - one with 450MHz as originally announced, and one with
| the same specs, but only 400MHz as initially shipped. Somehow, my
| dealer was able to get a few of the initially very rare machines
| with the original specs, and I was lucky enough to get one. I
| don't really recall why I had been sent two machines, but I know
| that I was instructed that this would happen, and I had to look
| at the specs printed on the box and send back the slower one.
| justinator wrote:
| I had one of these machines - I wanna say the 450 Mhz one, I
| bought in early 2000, c/o the Apple Loan for Students program.
| The total was $4,000 for everything including a whopping 17" CRT
| monitor! Had I paid it on their schedule, the rig would have cost
| me $8,000. Way too much computer for a kid that worked part time
| as a Perl dev at a web design company making $10/hour while also
| going to school for art. Now of course my iPhone SE 2020 is far
| more powerful in every single way.
|
| I do remember being rather annoyed with the speed reduction/price
| raising. Being a total Apple fanboy, I was deeply entrenched in
| their fight against uh: the Man, or Intel, or whatever the
| marketing told me to be mad at.
| rsynnott wrote:
| > you won't be able to play with cool new capabilities like using
| an AirPort card, internal FireWire devices, two separate USB
| ports
|
| _Internal FireWire devices_? Did anyone ever actually produce one
| of these?
| addaon wrote:
| I recall them coming up in the context of capture cards
| occasionally. Wasn't on the video production side of the world
| so not sure how common they were.
| esprehn wrote:
| It doesn't seem like it:
|
| https://lowendmac.com/tech/internalfw.shtml
|
| I think you could put a storage drive inside the case maybe, or
| a rail mount bay. I never heard of anyone using that port.
| snapetom wrote:
| I remember this fiasco. And then shortly after that, rumors
| started popping up that Apple was working on porting OSX to x86.
| Maursault wrote:
| > I remember this fiasco. And then shortly after that, rumors
| started popping up that Apple was working on porting OSX to
| x86.
|
| Article concerns the last half of 1999. It turns out Mac OS X
| development on PPC was shadowed on Intel (after all, since 1995
| NeXTSTEP ran on Intel), but the rumor didn't appear _until
| nearly 3 years later_ in Spring 2002, and it didn 't really
| have any traction and quickly subsided long before Jobs'
| announcement confirming the rumor _another_ 3 years after that
| in Summer 2005.[1] No one still expected it by then, but at the
| same time, no one was all that surprised. Business as usual
| that Apple kept a secret for 3 years, but it 's pretty crazy
| how they somehow suppressed a true rumor for 3 years after it
| was published.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacOS#PowerPC-
| Intel_transition
| diskzero wrote:
| We actually had an Intel build of most of OSX from the
| beginning. Various parts would go stale and then a motivated
| engineer would dive in and get it running again on some
| specific set of audio and video hardware. At some point the
| existence of the "Marklar" project leaked out, but several of
| us at Apple had various builds running on commodity PC
| hardware.
| batman-farts wrote:
| I always figured this had to be the case. OPENSTEP 4.2 ran
| just fine on x86, why give that up?
| shrubble wrote:
| Any truth to the 'NRW' based on the Motorola 88k CPU, rumors?
| mschaef wrote:
| Apple really did have to push the (Motorola) G4 way more than
| they'd have liked. A 1999 G4 was a 400MHz G4 on a 100MHz FSB.
| By the 2003, when they were done with Motorola and and onto the
| IBM G5, they were running a pair of 1.25GHz G4's on a 167MHz
| FSB...
|
| I'm sure it was possible to get a lot of speed out of workloads
| that ran out of the on-chip cache, but I'm equally sure that it
| was easy to wind up constrained by memory bus bandwidth. I
| tried to convince myself to buy one and switch to OS X, but
| couldn't get past the architectural limitations. (Which were
| worse because I'd also have wanted to run Windows under
| emulation.)
| Finnucane wrote:
| I had a b&w G3 and i remember actually being a little miffed that
| Apple introduced the G4 version only a few months later. At some
| point I upgraded the CPU to a G4 anyway (when you could still do
| that sort of thing on a Mac), so I guess it didn't make a lot of
| difference.
| jedberg wrote:
| My first Mac was a used 400MHz G4 that I picked up in 2002. At
| the time it was a spare machine next to my Intel PC running
| Linux. I put (brand new at the time) Mac OS X 10.1 Puma on it,
| mainly so I could compare the experience of using the two OSs
| side by side.
|
| The Mac experience was just so smooth compared to the desktop
| Linux experience. I've been using Mac exclusively since 2003, and
| it was all due to that free used G4 tower.
| jamespo wrote:
| Well... you get what you pay for.
| mk_stjames wrote:
| Something I'd like to reminisce on for a second is the absolute
| amazing combination of both form and function the G3 and G4
| standard tower case was, in my opinion. It was a machine that
| looked sleek and futuristic while also being 'made for work'.
| They were heavy beasts, but had the integrated handles. And the
| hardware layout inside... with the side panel that mounted the
| motherboard on the side that folded out with no tools, just a
| pull on the latch.. and the PSU cable and hard drive cables all
| made to route to where they ran at the hinge, allowing the fold
| out to be so clean and presenting the whole board so perfectly.
| The closest modern equivalent is something like a HP Z8 series (I
| now own an 840 as a workstation), but with GPUs and CPU coolers
| being so massive, it just cannot be as elegantly packaged as
| those simpler PPC machines.
| samstave wrote:
| But that was apples FU: Pay us a premium because we are good at
| asthetics.
|
| Thos machines sucked -- Look at SGI their cases were stellar in
| design even if the guts were mediocre RISC and difficult OS...
| and they were like 25K for a desktop and 500K for a rack-sized
| server.
|
| When we built the Presidio complex for Lucas (I was the data
| center designer) they were throwing out $500,000 SGI racks and
| even turned a few of them into keg-erators... SGI had the BEST
| physical case designs.... ( I suppose thats why the tech museum
| is on the SGI campus)
| smoldesu wrote:
| > But that was apples FU
|
| Let's be realistic, the _actual_ "FU" didn't come until they
| announced the G4 cube and redesigned iMac.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| I had a G4 cube and it was also very nice, except i think
| the power supply was on the power cord (a brick), if I
| recall.
| jrnichols wrote:
| I have a lovely G4 Cube here at home still. The power
| supply is a strange and large external brick, yes.
| lostgame wrote:
| As someone who considers the G4 iMac to be the single most
| beautiful piece of computing technology - perhaps any
| technology - she's ever seen, (I still keep two operating
| at home) I just have to say if it was some sort of mistake;
| it was the best one the ever made.
| samstave wrote:
| I was just talking to price per compute... Its fine they
| made a piece of art... but thats what you paid for, not a
| machine. I have tons of machines, two of my current
| laptops are flagship OMEN gaming for $3,000 a piece.
| Flimsy plastic bullshit.
| leoh wrote:
| Ironically HP has a machine called the G4 in the Z8 lineup,
| though it uses a Xeon chip.
|
| Btw, I'm surprised you like the Z8 series. The single core and
| sum compute with total of cores looks like a terrible value (eg
| when looking at various benchmarks for the Xeon) -- ie
| thousands of dollars for a machine with a chip that appears far
| less powerful than the latest i7s or Ryzens.
|
| Curious what I'm missing.
| mk_stjames wrote:
| My Z840 is a few years old.. almost 8 years old actually. It
| is a dual Xeon with 32 cores and 256GB of ECC ram which is
| important for the computational fluid dynamics software I
| use. Brand new this machine would have probably been $20k...
| I purchased it for just about $2000 and this was years ago,
| they can be had for much less now. These type of workstations
| for CAD, CFD, FEA engineering work are very lucrative when
| purchased second hand as compared to buying new.
| touisteur wrote:
| (multiple) GPU, lots of cores (some z8 are dual proc too),
| lots of opportunity for nvme and loaaads of memory (with ECC)
| is what I like in z8 workstations.
| nemo44x wrote:
| It's still a sexy beast. Looks modern even 23 years later.
| nineteen999 wrote:
| Completely subjective. I thought it looked dated at the time.
| space_ghost wrote:
| I also have fond memories of the G4 case for this reason - it
| was a breath of fresh air after so many years of dealing with
| cumbersome Whiteboxen.
| jtbayly wrote:
| Beige...
| fredoralive wrote:
| I always liked the original G3 in particular, the bold blue
| colour and the huge "G3" on the side really make it stand out.
| Then they toned it down for the G4 (grey, no big letters), and
| did weird not quite successful evolutions like the mirrored
| drove doors model that didn't improve upon the original.
| Lammy wrote:
| "We think we've got the most incredible access story in the
| business, and you know what it's called? It's called 'a door'."
| https://youtu.be/XzbFgzgy1mc?t=2546
| amatecha wrote:
| I had forgotten how awesome the G3 towers look. I've got G4
| and G5 towers, but not the G3... guess I better keep an eye
| out for a nice deal on one! My G4s were $5 and free,
| respectievly, so hopefully I can be similarly lucky for a G3
| hahah
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| Would bet there are still quite a few of these found in
| recording studios across the world.
| MBCook wrote:
| I was still using/building PCs at the time. I waited years
| hoping someone would build an ATX version of that case but it
| never happened for some reason.
|
| Patents, cost, who knows. But I would have bought it.
| bombcar wrote:
| Some of the datacenter designed servers you can find have
| similar tool free parts.
| cortesoft wrote:
| I still have my G4 tower... mostly because it is too heavy to
| get rid of
| oblib wrote:
| Your comment cracked me up!
|
| I still have one too. It was pretty to look at but probably
| the worst new Mac I've ever owned. Within a year it was
| obnoxiously loud and pretty much obsoleted after just a
| couple years.
|
| In contrast, I bought a new "Late `09 Mac Mini that I just
| replaced with a used late 2014 Mac mini about 2 months ago.
| That `09 was a real workhorse for a lot of years.
|
| The `14 only cost me $330 at OWC with 16GB RAM and is running
| the latest versions of the software I use and the only
| software I needed to pay for an update was BBEdit, and that
| only cost me around $35. I think I paid around $1200 for that
| G4 "Silver Door" tower.
| at-fates-hands wrote:
| True story - a bike shop I worked for actually ran all of our
| POS software off of G3's for years. We had them stuffed under
| the counter with those G3 monitors, keyboards and mice.
|
| The look on people's faces when they came in and realized none
| of our stuff ran on Microsoft gave our shops street cred in the
| cyclists and mountain biking communities.
| robinsonb5 wrote:
| I still have two of the PCI G4 model at work, mothballed but
| not yet evicted in case I ever need the data on them! (I also
| have a G3 which did many years' service as an imagesetter RIP!)
|
| I never particularly liked the aesthetics of the tower case but
| the practicality of the design is nothing short of
| breathtaking.
| hot_gril wrote:
| > The closest modern equivalent is something like a HP Z8
| series
|
| What about the new Mac Pro?
| muro wrote:
| There is a new Mac Pro?
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Sad saga ==> High-end CPU delayed six months. :-/
| compiler-guy wrote:
| The derisive term "speed dump" evolved out of the term "speed
| bump" which is what people called it when a vendor shipped a new
| machine with a higher clocked cpu, but no other changes.
| Lammy wrote:
| > In order to get one model in the G4 lineup down under
| $2,000-and to get it out to customers as soon as possible Apple
| placed a 400MHz G4 processor onto a slightly modified version of
| the blue-and-white G3's logic board and put the board in the new
| Power Mac G4 case.
|
| One really shitty thing Apple did alongside this was release a
| firmware update for the actual Blue&White G3 which prevented it
| from booting with a G4 CPU swapped in, something that worked fine
| with the original 1.0 firmware:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20021002071131/http://docs.info....
|
| Luckily the block was easily and quickly undone by the various
| upgrade manufacturers, but it shouldn't have been there to begin
| with: https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/powerlogix-g4-firmware-
| upda...
| Tepix wrote:
| It's happening all the time, for example AMD B450 boards
| received PCIe 4.0 compatability via a firmware update before
| AMD asked the mainboard manufacturers to pull the feature
| again.
|
| Or now nVidia is offering DLSS 3.0 with their new Geforce 4000
| cards, however it appears very likely that they could also do
| it with the older cards. Statements to the contrary seem far
| fetched. nVidia has done this in the past, too (RTX IO comes to
| mind).
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-11-09 23:01 UTC)