At 11:14 AM 6/11/04 +0200, you wrote:
>Sean McCoy wrote: The release of the new G5's has generated very little
>conversation around here this week. Wonder why?
>
>I think a lot of us are decided on buying the middle model which has not
>been revised yet so no news for us except that the days until it´s out must
>be numbered. Luckily I´m too busy to crossgrade at the moment so another 2-3
>months doesn´t really make that much difference to me. Although I found it a
>bit dissapointing that they only come out with one revised model I have to
>agree that Macs certainly last longer than PCs, I mean 12 months and only
>one upgrade but is that a good thing I wonder.
This issue confronts all computer users expecting more performance every
year - not just Mac buyers. Semiconductors have been following Moore's Law
up until recently but over the last 18 months or so the rate of performance
increase has been curtailed drastically.
The central issue is that the latest die shrinks -- down to 90 nm -- have
produced too much heat due to increased leakage current. This is true for
many of the designs and processes that are being fabricated by Intel, AMD
and IBM. Intel's current laptop (Centrino) designs - Banias and now
Dothian are very thermally efficient. Transmeta's chips are too but they
lag in performance.
The Opteron/Athlon 64 looks to be the pick of the bunch in terms of
performance and manageable heat. The latest 150/250/850 series runs at 2.4
GHz and is in the same performance league as the IBM fabbed chip in the
latest Macs. These processors do not need anything more than the usual heat
sind and fan for cooling though.
Intel is in trouble with the latest P4 iteration - Prescott - running very
hot and needing new case designs and seriously big heatsinks. The latest
Prescott version of the P4 is a 90nm chip and it produces over 100 Watts of
heat in versions clocked above 3 Ghz. These things run on not much more
than 1 volt so they are sucking the better part of 100 amps of current to
produce that much heat.
Reports are that the 90 nm Dothian will run like hell in a desktop system
(outperform a P4 3.4) and will do it with a modest thermal envelope - these
machines might be the ticket for low noise PC DAWs later this year.
IBM who make the chips for G5 Macs no doubt have some more tricks up their
sleeve and will be able to deliver more performance in time - just not at
the sort of rate of increase we have come to expect over the last decade or
so. Current enhancements of the now decades old CMOS process being employed
include - Silicon on insulator, Strained Silicon, Low K dielectric, even
separating the Silicon isotopes out has some promise. Dothian saves power
by not powering all sections of the die all the time.
Some manufacturers - notably IBM have patents on these tricks and licence
them to others like AMD or even fab the chips for AMD. Intel has - from
what I have read - tried to avoid cross licencing deals with IBM so it
can't use some of IBM's methods - one reason why they have fallen behind AMD.
Regards,
Murray