Waking up this morning at 5:30am to see the update from WWDC, and then from Apple’s website it has already displayed the updated PowerMac that boasts a G5 processor. Wow. 
First of all, the aluminium enclosure might not be that impressive. In fact, I found myself like the old MDD or Quicksilver PowerMac better with their white plastic case. The new PowerMac certainly has that “brush metal” theme that is populating in all Apple’s iApps. It looks “fast” and “professional”. While fitted with 9 fans, and it can still manage to be quiet. Nice.
What’s even better is in the inside. From the SPEC benchmarks, a dual 2Ghz is even faster than dual 3Gz Xeon in both integer and floating point operations. Now it also has up to 1Ghz memory bus to ensure the fast CPU is always feed, Apple certainly looks like it is going to be crowned as the speed king again.
I am still waiting for the PowerBook G5 – hopefully we will get a hint on when it is going to be released in the next few days of WWDC.
And Safari 1.0 (v85) has been released. Just get it installed, and the only thing I’ve noticed is that “bug” button disappears. Well, I might need to look harder for differences.
Well done Apple!
The G5 does look very nice. I have a feeling real world performance won’t be as impressive as Apple’s benchmarks, but I still would take one if someone gave it to me.
For the moment, I’ll just stick with my Pentium 4 and GNU/Linux, but maybe once these G5′s go down in price I’ll consider LinuxPPC again.
-Tim
Yup. While G5 is fast, price/performance wise I still don’t think it can beat the self-assembled P4/Xeon boxes, especially if you run things that Linux or FreeBSD which allows you to tweak virtually everything.
But I guess I did not come to the Mac-land for its speed anyway, but rather its experience. At home I am still using a 700Mhz P3 and 900Mhz G3 as desktop, and a 400Mhz Celery as server. I don’t do much number crunching, and they still work for me :)
Sounds similar to my config until recently… 750 MHz P3 and 450 MHz PII for test box. Although, recently I’ve added a 400 MHz Ruby iMac G3 and a Pentium 4 2.66 GHz to semi-replace the 750…