It's very reassuring to have the latest both in the G4 and G3 line. Nice job!

I suppose it will be fan-less.
Great!

Intresting. Two of'em, please.. ;-)

this is truly awsome.....you know what would be really cool would be to have a dual G3 board using these processors.....super powerfull peg

genesi is making a lot of good moves.....keep them up guys cheers

excuse me for my confusing, but this is "G3" or "G4" ? Has Altivec?

timofonic: The 750GX is a G3 processor.

For some reason I couldn't open the IBM summary pdf with
apdf ....

That aside I've had a look around and from what I gather
the 750GX won't have altivec. However they are working on
an even faster version of the 750 clocking at 1.4Ghz and
up (codenamed "Mojave") which is rumoured to incorporate
a vector processing engine (AltiVec-style).

Of course Mojave is pie in the sky at the moment. What it
boils down to is that we'll have two upgrade options :-

750GX G3 @ 1.1Ghz (with nice L2 cache, fanless etc)
7447A G4 @ 1.5 (?) (with AltiVec and fan presumably)

Regards,

JohnB

the problem with these new processors is that they aren't cheap.

$250 for a G4 alone!

Darth, where does your $250 number come from?
Lets see what friend Neko has to say at
http://www.morphzone.org/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=1861&forum=11
*not the 1.42GHz model (for a $245 quoted price)
*same price as the old G4 when ordering >=100 units batch
Now lets see what the 1GHz G4 in Pegasos costs at a distributor...
http://www.ppcnux-projekt.de/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=3530
I think $135.85 is quite a good price and nothing we should be worried about.

Tarbos: hmm so you are saying that because the Pegasos is
offering an efficient (energy-wise) system it is more
likely we'll see CPU's available at whatever rate is best
in terms of efficiency/power and hence not likely the 1.1
G3 and 1.5 G4 ?

Or are there other factors I am just ignorant of (not
being especially hardware/electronically conversant) ?

EDIT: Also $135 strikes me as being a good price and one I
would happily pay for a G4 CPU. Hopefully the pricing we
get in the end won't vary too much from this amount.

Regards,

JohnB

JohnB, do you agree one of the not-so-many advantages PPC has over x86 is the low power consumption? If you start to compete with actively cooled CPUs, you start to compete with Athlon and P4!

It's just reasonable Genesi consequently exploits that certain quality. People go to great lengths to have a silent PC, just look at the exploding modding scene or the price of a Hush PC...
Some companies might appreciate the failsafe operation without a moving-part-cooler and I surely do and am eager to get rid of that kludged solution with cheap fan on G3 heatsink which is soldered to the CPU card so you have no chance to exchange it without breaking your warranty...

That said, it should also be obvious that the top-of-the-line G3 and G4 CPU are much more expensive since the yields thin out. MOT mentioned $245 for 1.42GHz parts and IBM gave a $160 figure for 750GX.

G3 cannot compete with G4 due to the clock speed difference, lack of Altivec etc. so that leaves it a place in the middle - please note the current gap between 299EUR G3 Pegasos and 499EUR G4 system. The complete productline could get an overhaul with 750FX-600 to start with (pincompatible with the GX, so you only need to build a single CPU card for both, bigger L2 Cache for improved performance compared to 750CXe, much less power consumption), a medium 900MHz 750GX and a top 1.2 or 1.3GHz G4. All of those CPUs now have the ability to clock down dynamically, so this could be another argument pro-Pegasos II in times the Californian power grid collapses because too much energy is consumed in silicon valley.

Hey, how feasible would it be to make all CPU cards with SMP layout so the customer could decide if he wants to buy a single or dual G3/G4 system. There could even be an upgrade service when later on you decide it would be nice to have a second CPU.

tarbos: That is a valid point and to be honest I do agree
with you. I'm actually from the RISC OS market and so you
could say efficient computing is in my blood :)

Silent/energy efficient computing is definitely the way
forward long term - that's part of the reason why, when
purchasing my Pegasos II, I opted for the fanless G3
option.

And (as you mentioned) it is a great boon for us that we
are free to just exchange the CPU for another should
additional power/more efficiency be desired.

However you can't blame me for getting a little excited
at the pipedream of a 1.5Ghz G4 Peg II :)

Do Apple try and market on efficiency or do they just
sqeeze as much power out of PPC as possible ?

And as for your speculative productline - I like the
breakdown :) Though for now we just have to wait until
Genesi are able to provide us with the final word ..

Regards,

JohnB

@JohnB:

Apple always has the top of the line CPUs, e.g. dual 2GHz G5 inside Powermac and Xserve and 1.5GHz G4 in Powerbook. Just the 750GX 1GHz is only available as 3rd party accelerator.

While the 64Bit G5 can play with the big boys, the G4 is very much falling behind the x86 world
with efficient alternatives such as Pentium-M or
Transmeta Efficeon (with integrated Ramcontroller, AGP4x, Hypertransport link).
While x86 has 400MHz datarate as standard now (800 with P4), we can be happy if it reaches 167MHz on G4 - you can do the math. The current G4 was meant to go to 1833MHz...well, it does not.
Last year Motorola decided to try making a dual-core G4 with 1.5GHz @ 25W with DDR/DDR2 controller, RapidIO bus and PCI-X (?) that might claim back lost terrain.

I'm looking forward to today's start of SNDF where some news about Motorola's products might be disclosed.

PCI-X and not PCI Express???

Quote:

In terms of features and bus speed yes, but remember the G4 is designed primarily for embedded markets these days.

That said the performance of a 1.5GHz G4 should be something similar to a 2.5GHz P4 and better than a Pentium-M until the 1.8GHz devices appear. It should pretty much destroy the Transmeta & cyrix devices on performance. Of course it will be at a disadvantage if large amounts of memory are needed but larger caches should mitigate this.

Of course give it Altivec code and it'll totally flatten everything except the G5.

Quote:

The PowerQuick III already has most of this but I don't think it's a standard G4 core.

Quote:

No, I think that's the next version. Both IBM and Motorola have tweaked their designs recently giving relatively small clock speed boosts. The clock will go up once it goes to 90um.

@timofonic:

It looks like you may be getting your PCI-Express after all (2005?):
http://www.motorola.com/mediacenter/news/detail/0,,4126_3482_23,00.html

whats the diference between normal PCI and PCI express?

Quote:

It's faster and the slots are a lot smaller, there is a bigger slot version which will replace AGP (itself a veriant of PCI).

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