Apple officially announces the new-generation Power Mac G5 on latest IBM PowerPC G5 processors
So, Apple has finally announced its newest Power Mac G5 systems, spoken of since the last September. Starting from $1999, new computers have a number of interesting features. For the first time Apple solutions are based on up to 2GHz 64-bit IBM PowerPC G5 also used in dual-CPU Power Mac G5 systems. Besides, Apple has seriously redesigned the architecture, adding the support of AGP 8X, PCI-X, up to 8Gb memory, etc.
Initially the company will be offering three Power Mac G5 models in the market: M9020LL/A, M9031LL/A and M9032LL/A. The first two are based on 1.6GHz and 1.8GHz PowerPC G5, respectively, with the third one featuring two 2GHz PowerPC G5 CPUs. Other features include 256Mb to 1Gb of PC2700/PC3200 DDR SDRAM (up to 8Gb in four sockets); NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 Ultra (64Mb DDR SDRAM), ATI Radeon 9600 Pro (64Mb DDR SDRAM) or ATI Radeon 9800 Pro (128Mb DDR SDRAM) GPU; 80Gb or 160Gb Serial ATA 7200rpm HDDs; SuperDrive (DVD-R/CD-RW) combo.
The baseboard features three 64-bit 33MHz PCI slots or one 64-bit 133MHz PCI-X slots with two 64-bit 100MHz PCI-X slots; 10/100/1000BASE-T Ethernet; 56K V.92 modem; 54Mbps AirPort (IEEE 802.11g/b) slot; 1 FireWire 800 port, 2 FireWire 400 ports, three USB2.0 ports, 2 USB1.1 ports.
The standard system dimensions are 511x206x475mm, weight – 17.8kg.
As for the new PowerPC G5 processors, they are developed and produced by IBM, what obviously makes us think these are former PowerPC 970 chips.
PowerPC G5 processors support up to 8Gb systrem memory. In theory, 42-bit physical address space allows for 18 exabytes of virtual memory (i.e. 18x10²4; bytes), up to 4 terabytes of physical memory (2&sup42; bytes). The new CPU has up to 2GHz initial clock rates, supports up to 1GHz FSB, enabling up to 16Gb/s performance in dual-CPU mode. As you remember, PowerPC G5 bases on 64-bit ÿäðà IBM Power4 core, but has one instead of two cores. Its features include:
- Full 64-bit data paths and registers
- Dual-pipeline 128-bit Velocity Engine for single-instruction, multiple-data
- (SIMD) processing
- Two independent floating-point units for double-precision calculations
- Three-component branch prediction logic
- Native support for 32-bit application code
- 64K L1 instruction cache; 32K L1 data cache
- 512K internal L2 cache
- Microcoded instructions for up to four internal operations
- Support for up to eight outstanding L1 cache line misses
- Hardware-initiated instruction prefetching from L2 cache
- Hardware- or software-initiated data stream prefetching; support for up to eight active streams
- In-order dispatch of up to five operations into distributed issue queue structure
- Extended 162 SIMD PowerPC instructions
- Die size: 118mm²
- Up to 1GHz Elastic I/O throughput; 0.13µm process on 300mm silicon wafers with SOI (IBM fab in East Fishkill, NY)
To better understand the difference between PowerPC G4 and PowerPC G5 see the table below:
The new CPU can work with 32-bit software under such 32-bit OS, as Linux, Unix or Apple Mac OS X. At the same time, similar to AMD´s Hammer, 64-bit addressing enables the transition to 64-bit OS and apps.
And as finally, below are Power Mac G5 performance charts from Apple´s website (there´s no any other anyway).
Write a comment below. No registration needed!
|
|
