RE: [MLUG - DISCUSSION] reading through Apple's marketing speak...

[Jonathan King <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

On Tue, 13 Aug 2002, Ross, Matt wrote:

> That's well worded.  I can't find anything wrong with it.  

Well, I can. :-)

> Granted, no floppy, but we're seeing that on PC's now too.

Apple jumped the gun on no floppy (they aren't redundant until cd-rw
arrives and/or the 'net is completely ubiquitous), but floppies do
indeed seem really quaint these days.  Some people were whining over 
the lack of a zip drive...but that's so very 1997.

> Not too many ports (2 firewire, 2 USB - PC's usually come with 4
> USB, and 2 firewire), but it seems very accessible.

If you get an Apple LCD panel, you get more USB ports on that, and 
the keyboard will give you 2 as well.  Any firewire device more 
interesting than a DV camera should also have 2 ports on it, so 
that's not a huge problem either.  The USB is not USB2.0, however, 
which is annoying.

> What really caught my attention was: "Ultrafast L3 Cache Feeds
> data to the G4 processors at up to 4GB per second".  Does any PC
> do that?

This is where I think the reality distortion field might be
operating over-time.  Current/just prior generation Macs have a
definite problem with memory bandwidth (no DDR, slowish bus), and
have relatively little on-chip L2 cache (256 KB).  The L3 cache is
up to 2 MB per processor, and could really help some things a lot,
but the 4.6GB per second bandwidth claim suggests either you're 
running very tight loops over smallish amounts of data and/or 
have a telepathic caching algorithm.  The whole memory system on 
these boxes still seems like quite a hack.  How hacky or how much
one should care I'm not really sure.


> Some other notable features: GUI RAID management,

That's software RAID, I believe, and it's an OS Feature rather than
the hardware per se.  An oddity related to this is that hard disk
support is 4 drives total in the case, but 2 Ultra ATA/100 and 2
Ultra ATA/66.  Weird.

> onboard dual monitor support,

Yes, but I'm not sure where these cards "rate" in the PC scheme of
things.  I'd never heard of a Radeon 9000 Pro before.

> modem and eithernet cards are
> built in, good sound card built in.

Well, at least sound that is well-supported.  Ethernet is 
10/100/1000.  
 
> In short, I think they're better than comparable PC's.

OK, so they put this up against a Dell Dimension 8200 system, and I 
can see that there's some potential here, but the high-end system
would get tromped by a comparable dual Athlon system (I believe).  
Still, a much better deal than their previous offerings, and Mac OS 
X is certainly  worth something in addition.
 
jking


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