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The new operating system has more than 100 new features.
  technofile
Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983

T h e   R o a d   L e s s   T r a v e l e d
Apple unveils 'world's fastest personal computer'


June 25, 2003


By Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2003, Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2003, The Post-Standard

   Apple's new Macintosh G5 computers are so fast they exceed the speed of public relations.
   Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who values product secrecy even more than he does his famously all-black attire, had kept the press at bay for months leading up to Monday's announcement of the new line of speedy desktop Macs.
   Was Apple about to jettison the Motorola G4 chip, which can't run faster than 2.4 GHz? Was the company leaning toward a totally new design? For much of the last year, Steve Jobs and his crew at Apple refused to tell.
   But a Web designer within Apple who was testing a top-secret G5 specifications page goofed a few days before Monday's unveiling and placed the advance page on Apple's public Web site. For the precious few minutes before Apple pulled the page, anyone who stumbled onto that part of Apple's site was able to view a picture of the new silver-colored computer and read the G5 specifications.
   Some Apple watchers thought the advance peek might have been a marketing ruse to confuse the press, but it proved to be totally accurate, as Steve Jobs confirmed Monday in his keynote address Monday at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco.
   "It's true," Jobs told a crowd of more than 3,000 developers. Apple, he said, was introducing "the world's fastest personal computer," just as the brief look on the Web had promised.
   "The PowerPC G5 changes all the rules," Jobs said. "IBM offers the most advanced processor design and manufacturing expertise on earth, and this is just the beginning of a long and productive relationship."
   The new G5 models, using an IBM PowerPC chip dubbed the 970, will be available later this summer. The new IBM chip replaces the Motorola G4 chip, which hasn't seen a speed boost in many months.
   Switching chips isn't as surprising as it might seem. Apple, IBM and Motorola are business partners in the PowerPC alliance, and IBM has continued work on its PowerPC chip while Motorola languished. IBM builds the PowerPC G5 in its $3 billion chip factory in East Fishkill, N.Y.,
   G5 Macs will run at speeds of up to 2 GHz. Newer models planned for next year will run at 3 GHz or more, Apple says.
   Using industry-standard tests, Jobs compared the top-of-the-line G5 macintosh with the fastest currently available Windows PC, a model with twin Intel 3 GHz Xeon chips operating over a 533 MHZ bus. The Mac G5 was much as 41 percent faster than the PC.
   One advantage the G5 has over Windows PCs is the raw data-grabbing abilities of the new Mac's 64-bit chip. Current chips used in personal computers, whether for a PC or Mac, use 32-bit data paths. Doubling the width of the data path can speed up operations considerably and can allow the computer to access vast amounts of memory.
   (The "width" of the path determines how much data can be handled at one time. The path within a chip can be compared to a highway. Just as an eight-lane highway can carry twice the traffic that a four-lane highway can, a 64-bit chip can carry twice as much data as a 32-bit chip.)
   Apple's G5 Macs have a 1 GHz bus and a "HyperTransport" AMD support chip that vastly speeds up internal operations. As in the past, Apple will offer both single- and dual-processor models, providing a big boost to overall computer speed. (Dual-processor chips do not make a computer run twice as fast, but they provide smoother multitasking along with about 1.5 times the speed of a single processor.)
   Prices are predictably high. Jobs said the least expensive G5 will have a single 1.6 GHz chip and a list price of $1,999. The most expensive will have two 2 GHz chips and will list for $2,999. Apple's Macintosh computers are generally more expensive than Windows PCs, but they come out ahead in comparisons of features and longevity. They're also immune to Windows viruses and many other problems that plague Windows PCs.
   The G5 models can handle up to 8 GB of 400 MHZ memory and will have 8X AGP graphics-card slots, 133 MHZ PCI-X slots and 1.5 GBps Serial ATA hard-disk interfaces. They have audio inputs and outputs that can use separate digital optical and analog connections, a huge improvement over the meager audio circuits in current Macs. They also have FireWire 800 and 400 ports, Gigabit Ethernet cards, AirPort Extreme (high-speed) capability, Bluetooth wireless connections and USB 2.0.
   All G5 models come with Apple's DVD-R SuperDrive, which can record and play both DVDs and CDs.
   Jobs also showed off the next version of the Mac OS X operating system, called Panther, which will be available in stores and from Apple's site later this year for $129. The new operating system has more than 100 new features.
   Next week: A look at the new version of OS X.