MorphOS on Power Mac G5

[Piru]

http://bigfoot.morphos-team.net/test/powermacg5_showconfig.jpeg - only a day late, but oh well


And as always, questions about availability and offers for beta testing will likely be quite pointless at this time.

[Piru]

Well my SAM440ep flex should arrive next week, but I'm still happy for MorphOS.

You're now forever marked as blue troll. Enjoy :lol:

[Piru]

Bill Gates former partner, Paul Allen is in Helsinki on his 120 meter yacht

The yacht was here the 15th, and it left the same day. Not that it makes any difference...

[Piru]

What does G5s go for these days anyways ?

I just got one for 300 €. Dual 2.5GHz with 3GB RAM, 160GB HDD, Superdrive and Radeon 9600XT, incl Mac OS X Leopard.

I bet you can find ones cheaper in the US or elsewhere in europe, but the darn thing weighs 20.2 kg (44.4 pounds). This one is located by the Helsinki tram line...

[Piru]

Untrue. The PA6T outperforms the G5 quite comfortably at the same clock, at least for floating point and is on par for integer performance.

Indeed.

For integer performance PA6T has 500 SPECint2000 per GHz. 970FX has 472 per GHz. So already 2GHz 970FX beats X1000.

For floating point performance PA6T has 750 SPECfp2000 per GHz. 970FX has 564. This means that 2.5GHz 970FX is faster than X1000.

Note: For 970MP the performance per clock is higher, so these comparisons only apply to 970FX models. The numbers I could find would suggest 571 SPECint2000 per GHz and 830 SPECfp2000 per GHz, but I couldn't confirm these figures.

[Piru]

I am slightly puzzled as to why migrating to G5 seems to be happening ahead of improving support on the above machines.

I'm slightly puzzled why you think G5 is going to happen before the said machines. Sure there will be things that won't be supported anytime soon (nvidia, wlan, bluetooth), but basic robust support for the announced machines definitely comes first. Adding support for any of those technologies would require too much resources for a limited gain.

how about getting wireless networking up and running on the boxes that are supported?

I'd think it's main because adding support for for Wi-Fi Protected Access would be painful. We haven't ruled WiFi out completely but it certainly isn't a high priority at the moment.

[Piru]

Anyone considering purchasing a G5 tower should stay away from the water cooled models, as they have not aged gracefully and are leaking all over the motherboard.
Unless of course you're handy repairing water cooling systems.

Actually they aren't water cooled. The liquid propylene glycol (neon green).

I just took a look at the cooling unit in my dual 2.5GHz PowerMac G5 and it looks just fine. All the rubber pipes are ok, and there are no indications of any potential leakage. At least this particular machine has aged gracefully in this regard.

Obviously YMMV. The liquid cooling systems failed quite a lot, even as much as 20% of certain models within a year. On the other hand many liquid cooled systems are still working just fine. Go figure.

If this system dies I'll just get another.

[Piru]

Seriously though, these are the only apps that would probably benefit in that they aren't necessarily "fast enough" on a lower CPU. Of course, if one were to leverage GPU acceleration (even if only basic block decoding), the G4 is easily fast enough.

"web browsing / flash, emulators" could use GPU acceleration? How?

[Piru]

I was referring to media players / video codecs, not web browsing :confused:

Right. Well your comment didn't indicate that clearly.

Re: emulators, well, OpenGL is used to accelerate display emulation (even if only to resize the funny aspect ratio screens) in various UAE implementations, is it not?

Overlay is fully supported already. GPU won't make it any faster.

Never mind emulation of various 3D consoles of old.

That could work in theory, but I'd think in many (most) cases the 3d acceleration in emulation cannot be offloaded to the real GPU.

[Piru]

Flash has GPU acceleration.

Usable open source flash doesn't. At least not yet.

Also, I am well aware what CUDA stuff can do. None of the MorphOS boxes is likely ever going to even support hardware which has programmable GPUs, nor would we ever be able to add software support for it.

So really, any acceleration there might be would be limited to 3D pretty much. And this limits the things you can do.

[Piru]

Anyone know why Paula samples can be played in >28 khz IF a dblscan screenmode is used? I use to rip CD audio and play it back on an '040  A1200 @ 44.1 khz, @ 14 bit-sounded brilliant.

Audio HW can process 16bits at a time per horizontal tick (per channel). With PAL and NTSC modes the horizontal frequency is 15,75 kHz. Since the sampledata is 8bit it means 2 samples are processed. This gives the theoretical limit of around 30kHz.

DBLScan modes double (roughly) the horizontal frequency, and thus also the limit for the audio playback frequency.