|
Power Macintosh G4 - The Real Story Source: Macmarines Digest #56 - 09/08/99 - Reprinted with permission. Some of you may have read the MacWeek article entitled "G4 upgrade roadblock?" written by Daniel Turner. Here is the URL: http://macweek.zdnet.com/1999/08/29/upgrade.html Daniel's concluding remarks publicly point out TeraGlobal's ability to run a PowerPC G4 processor in a Blue and White Power Macintosh G3. The public and the press rarely have all of the facts regarding product decisions as is the case here. There is also a significant amount of confusion regarding what a Power Macintosh G4 really is or how significantly this product impacts the computing industry. This email represents an inside perspective on these issues. I have been an aggressive Macintosh advocate since the first unit shipped. Now, as the Chief Technology Officer and a Director of a reporting and publicly traded corporation I have an entirely new perspective regarding how Apple Computer operates. TeraGlobal is also a licensed Value Added Reseller (VAR) for Apple Computer which represents additional obligations. To make things even more complicated TeraGlobal has been under numerous non-disclosure agreements with both Apple Computer and Motorola in order to have early access to both the new processor and the new Power Macintosh. There probably will not be a "Pirates of San Diego" movie, but there have been a few roller coaster rides over the past several months between Apple Computer and TeraGlobal. I would not want to be an executive at Apple Computer for all the money in the world. Imagine working in an environment where one slight miscalculation in a press release represents a dramatic fluctuation in inventory or profitability. Many members of the press and analysts are just dying to bury Apple Computer. My personal position has always been for Apple Computer to diversify into services considering the sum total of their intellectual property. This represents the current business opportunity space for TeraGlobal. The new Power Macintosh G4 is allowing TeraGlobal to deliver true convergence in a communication service with operating costs no other systems integrator or communication service provider can compete against. TeraGlobal is at the right place at the right time during Apple Computer's hard fought success. If not for the Seybold conference and the preparations made for it I would have continued to question Apple Computer's decision to not support a PowerPC G4 upgrade path for the Blue and White Power Macintosh G3. Now I understand the decision completely. I cannot speak for Apple Computer in any way or provide the specifics of who and why the decision was made. However, I can provide some insight on the issue by explaining why TeraGlobal will not sell a PowerPC G4 upgrade to the public. TeraGlobal has learned the hard way that putting a PowerPC G4 into a Blue and White Power Macintosh G3 is like strapping a Saturn rocket booster to a skate board. This is not a negative reflection on the Blue and White Power Macintosh which out performs any PC compatible. The reason is that Motorola has in fact delivered an indisputable computational masterpiece that dwarfs any speed Pentium. On a Blue and White the use of AltiVec (Velocity Engine) operations should be restricted to special single purpose tasks. Beyond that the entire data throughput architecture of the computer rapidly becomes congested because of the raw power of the G4 processor. Considering through historical trends less than 200,000 Blue and White owners will even buy an upgrade, TeraGlobal could not afford to deal with the long term cost of service and support considering all the configuration permutations that will exist. Imagine the number of upset customers every time a new AltiVec tool was delivered that did not deliver the performance claimed by the owners of Power Macintosh G4 computers. The market will be flooded with "Vectorized Code" (AltiVec enabled code) in less than a year. TeraGlobal cannot afford to be defocused to pick up a quick penny in one or two fiscal quarters that will cost it dollars in actual operating cost and reputation in later fiscal quarters. I also feel strongly that if you cannot give the customer real value do not waste either parties time. There are a few companies that do upgrades right and a few sophisticated Blue and White owners that will see a return on investment from a G4. Apple Computer should pick a couple of these upgrade companies and give them the right code that permits a G4 to operate on a Blue and White. However, as TeraGlobal has decided Apple Computer needs to focus on giving its customers the highest possible return on their investment. The new processor in a new Power Macintosh G4 computer represents the best balance between a supercomputer processor and the data throughput capacity required to take advantage of it. There are currently several items of confusion in the press. Here is my attempt to correct a few of them: 1.) The new G4 processor is the Motorola MPC 7400 PowerPC processor. It is only made by Motorola. The term "PowerPC" is an IBM trademark. The MPC 7400 has the 128 bit execution unit which delivers the supercomputing performance. 2.) AltiVec is a Motorola trademark for the 128 bit Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) execution unit in the MPC 7400. Apple Computer calls the 128 bit SIMD execution unit the Velocity Engine. The AltiVec/Velocity Engine execution unit provides 162 new operation codes (opcodes) that can be called by any operating system or application hosted by the MPC 7400. 3.) Apple Computer's 400 MHz Power Macintosh G4 computer has a Power Macintosh G3 motherboard tuned to accept the new MPC 7400 processor. It represents a balance between performance and cost. The 400 MHz MPC 7400 parts are less expensive and do not stress the Power Macintosh G3 motherboard's data throughput capacity like the faster MPC 7400s will. Note that an additional 50 million cycles per second for a 128 bit execution unit represents a significantly greater increase in data throughput. In other words, the difference between a 400 MHz and 450 MHz MPC 7400 is dramatically greater than the difference between at 400 MHz and 450 MHz PowerPC 750 processor. 4.) Apple Computer's 450 MHz and 500 MHz Power Macintosh G4 computer has an entirely new motherboard designed to handle the data throughput capacity of the MPC 7400 processor. Here is a summary of what TeraGlobal's engineers have seen during the performance testing of the TeraMedia software on a 450 MHz Power Macintosh G4: a.) Main memory data throughput greater than 600 MBytes/sec b.) 2x Accelerated Graphics Port (AGP) data throughput greater than 500 MBytes/sec c.) PCI bus data throughput greater than 75 MBytes/sec d.) Hard disk drive data throughput greater than 30 MBytes/sec e.) One internal and two external Open Hardware Control Interface (OHCI) 400 Mbps FireWire ports. f.) Dual independent 12 Mbps USB ports. This allows audio to be on one independent 12 Mbps USB port while other non time sensitive I/O devices reside without interference on the other independent 12 Mbps USB port. g.) 11 Mbps wireless card port with an internal antenna for optional wireless card. h.) Full-duplex 10/100 Mbps Ethernet port. i.) High speed modem. j.) There are three open PCI bus slots. TeraGlobal uses the 2x AGP ATI Rage 128 card simultaneously with a PCI bus ATI Rage 128 card to deliver a two monitor solution. 6.) There are 500 MHz MPC 7400 processors being made by Motorola. The yields are increasing monthly as Motorola tunes their fabrication process. The lower the yield the more expensive the processor. 7.) The MPC 7400 is as fast as Steve Jobs claims. The 400 MHz MPC 7400 can execute greater than 12 billion integer operations per second or greater than 3 billion floating point operations per second. For example, TeraGlobal's new AltiVec/Velocity Engine video CODEC compresses 30 frames per second and decompresses 30 frames per second SIMULTANEOUSLY and is achieving compression ratios much greater than 100:1 in real-time. Run the numbers on streaming 320x240 4:2:2 YUV quality video - you cannot fake performance like this. A Pentium spins its wheels moving data in and out of its limited register space making it impossible to deliver the performance of an MPC 7400. 8.) The MPC 7400 consumes approximately 1/7th the power of a Pentium III. 9.) The MPC 7400 supports double precision floating point instructions. The PowerPC 750 only supports single precision floating point instructions. There is no politically correct way to say how dramatically the Power Macintosh G4 computer out performs any Pentium based computer. The press and analysts that are biased towards the PC compatible will start sticking out like weeds on a golf course. You will know whose message to trust and whose not to trust because the facts are easy to independently verify. Sincerely, Grant K. Holcomb | |