Subject: Re: When will the YDL 2.2 iso be available for FTP download?
From: Timothy A. Seufert (tas@mindspring.com)
Date: Wed Mar 20 2002 - 15:49:04 MST
At 12:07 AM -0600 3/20/02, Robert Brandtjen wrote:
>two problems with all of that Tim - 1) you can't upgrade an Apple G4 - no
>chips to upgrade with - they could certainly stand the heat - a simple
>heatsink and fan would do the trick.
Ummm, didn't I just say that the G4 (AGP) and later would be the most
likely candidates for 7450 upgrades?
I've heard that a rule of thumb in the Mac accelerator industry is to
wait until there are a large number of target machines which can be
accelerated ~2x before beginning development of an entirely new kind
of accelerator. (Technical difficulty obviously would affect this.)
Reading between the lines, they probably need to recover engineering
costs quickly to stay afloat -- these are small companies.
Most early G4s were 400 and 450 MHz. Only recently have 800-900 MHz
7450s become available. Powerlogix is currently advertising for
"beta testers" who own Apple machines made from 2000 to present.
Conclusion left to the reader.
>2) Speed bumbs were out there up until Apple was having trouble competing
>against the likes of xlr8 and powerlogix - suddenly, they couldn't/wouldn't
>sell them any higher then 500 mhz - even though power logix announced a 1 ghz
>long time back - never appeared.
In years of scanning xlr8yourmac daily I never saw any such
announcement (and it would have been there if anywhere). The only
GHz PPC announcement a "long time back" I can think of was XTrem, and
that was more or less a hoax.
>same happend to their announced dual
>processor setup , they announced it months before Apple had one available,
>then it never showed up.
Sonnet and Powerlogix are both shipping dual processor upgrades of
various kinds.
>as far as the IBM 1 ghz chip goes, It was announced on all the mac sites at
>the time - while it may not have been a full chip - it was a working
>prototype - I distincly remember reading their own white papers on it and
>their prediction that the 1 ghz ppc chip would be out by early 2000 as a
>production chip - in fact, byte magazine (print version)predicted they would
>beat Intel by a year or more to the 1 ghz barrier. the promise of the PPC
>chip died with the falling out after Jobs canned IBM and the clones. while i
>can understand his need to kill clones, I could never understand his need to
>piss IBM off. Common sense dictates you go with the company that actually
>builds a computer that uses them.
That comment makes no sense. Motorola built computers that used
PowerPC. Mostly embedded single board computers, but also some
workstations.
And Mac clones. It was Motorola which had sunk a big investment into
designing, manufacturing, marketing, and direct sales of Mac clones,
only to have the whole business killed in its infancy. They lost a
_huge_ amount of money on it. The head of Motorola SPS at that time
said that Motorola was pissed, and went so far as to say that future
PPC development would primarily target embedded systems, since the
desktop was so unreliable. Some observers would say that they've
done just that.
As for IBM... Their problem was with the failure to establish a
common platform for running MacOS and Windows NT and OS/2. The
writing was on the wall for that dream long before the end of Mac
cloning (which only sold more MacOS seats). There was faint hope
that CHRP Mac clones might allow it to revive, but realistically I
don't think that anybody at IBM was banking on it. IBM's internal
needs were already satisfied by their own more exotic PPC designs for
their big iron and high end workstation hardware, so they just pulled
out of the joint design center.
In fact, it's a good bet that the fruit of that GHz circuit demo was
POWER4 all along. POWER4 is awesome, but just a tad impractical for
use in a Mac.
-- Tim Seufert
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