MorphOS on Power Mac G5

[minator]

The G5 was a disaster for apple. The worst performance per watt of any CPU they'd ever used at that point.

Not true, the late G4s were worse than the late G5s.

Given that one of apple's then long running claimed benefits over "hot, power hungry x86 processors", releasing dual processor, water-cooled CPU machines with over 60W per CPU, the G5 was an embarrassment to them.

They were competitive with x86 at the time, AMD was topping out at 125W, Intel were topping out at 150W.  The 2.7GHz G5 was closer to AMD.

They'd promised 3GHz but couldn't manage it.

IBM got pretty close at 2.7GHz, Intel were quoting 5GHz at the time and got nowhere near it.

They promised lower power, cooler workstations and couldn't manage it. Meanwhile, x86 continued to get faster and less power hungry the entire time.

See above, IBM were quite competitive.

And it was the smartest move he ever made. As much as I like PPC, and I do like it, it just cannot compete with current x86/AMD64 based architectures.
Not on performance, not on power consumption, not on cost and not on any permutation of the three. Whatever your CPU needs, there are faster, cooler, lower power and cheaper x86 parts available.

Erm, look at POWER7, it's the fastest processor you can buy at the moment (the POWER CPUs have been PPC since POWER2)
At the other end there's the embedded PPCs, Intel aren't even close to those on performance/watt.
As for cost, this is determined by the size of the chip - the G5 was small, so small in fact they had problems cooling it - that's why they had to use water cooling.

Which is why this G5 v PA6T pissing contest that you are so happily engaging in is a bit of a joke, really. The PA6T may be newer, perform better per watt and depending on which source you believe, better per MHz than the G5. The G5 may clock higher and ultimately perform faster, but whichever way you look at it, they are both obsolete. Thoroughly and utterly.

In absolute terms yes, however if you are trying to argue they are using an old architecture you should be aware the Core i7 is based on an architecture that goes back to the mid 90s.  AMD is remarkably similar.

Last time I looked, there wasn't really any Amiga specific software in existence that really needs the horsepower that even these old processors can deliver.

So, they're obsolete and not very powerful - but you don't don't need them because they're too powerful?

[minator]

Yes. Well, the point with the PA6T was to be in Apple laptops AFAIK, so the goal was probably to not consume much more than a G4, while still offering performance above the G4's they were using at the time. It would never compete on Apples power desktop market though; it wouldn't replace the G5.

They were specifically designed to produce G5 performance levels.  If they upped they clock (which they said was quite possible) they probably would have replaced the G5.
As for comparisons with the G4? PA-Semi's power numbers were below the Core2Duo.

Since then, what once was "PA Semi" as well as its IP was assimilated into Apple along with its developers. Apple obviously "scrapped" the technology, used the engineering competence and patents to create their own ARM "A4" processor or whatever,

I doubt they had anything to do with the A4.  It takes years to design chips, It'll be another year or so before we see what PA-Semi have done inside Apple.
And then there's what Intrinisity will do...

and AFAIK, most of those old PA Semi developers even left Apple since then...

Erm, a small number (6) of the senior people left.

[minator]

if they brought the Graphics System over from the NeXT then it still might be the case.  NeXT was a color postscript display.

OS X uses a more advanced system called display PDF.

[minator]

In short, it's horses for courses. If you start justifying your choice of hardware by choosing compute bound tasks, why pick underpowered hardware to run them on? As cheap as you can pick up a G5 for, it isn't going to compete with an x86 box you spent the same total on (assuming you factor in the cost of the OS, which if you pick linux, is nada).

But nobody is doing this.  They are picking their hardware based on the OS, and MorphOS or OS4 do not run on x86.

Given this people do want the latest greatest hardware, and in this case the choice is X1000 or a G5.

I don't know about OS4 but the MorphOS developers work exactly like open source developers, i.e. they do things because they feel like it.  The G5 is cool* and it's a lot easier than a port to a different CPU architecture.

*Despite their reputation the later G5s ran easily cool enough to go in a laptop.  They were a lot cooler than the equivalent clocked G4s.

[minator]

G5s have definitely gotten a bad rap as far as their thermal properties go. Apple didn't help by using liquid cooling on the last units. It makes it look like that was necessary, it isn't, it's quieter. G5s at 2.7 Ghz have no more rigorous cooling requirements than an Intel or AMD processor (in fact, compared to some of those, their cooling requirements are lower).

The problem wasn't power consumption but power density.  The 970 was so small it spread it's heat over a smaller area (i.e. the chip was small the heat per mm sq was higher) and the only way to avoid this was use liquid cooling.  The actual power figures were close to AMD and better than Intel.

[minator]

Yes indeed this Mac will be faster. From the picture from the G5 Mac from the show:
Processor: 2700 MHz, FSB: 1350 MHz

AFAIK the PA6T processor in the "X1000": 1800 MHz, FSB: 1067 MHz.

So yes, performance wise it will kick "X1000" butt,  

You're missing some rather important details here...

The G5 uses an "elastic bus" to a north bridge (actually 2 busses running in different directions).
At 1.35 GHz that's 10.8 GB/Second
However control signals are sent down the same wires so it's theoretical max is just under 10GB/second.

OTOH the PA6T uses dual memory controllers, it can use the full bandwidth of both busses.
At 1.067GHz is 17.07 GB/second.

With the on-die memory controllers the PA6T is also likely to have considerably lower memory latency - (the G5 northbridge was known for being rather slow, though a faster one was introduced later on).

We will know for sure *how much* behind OS4 on the X1000 will be compared to MorphOS on a fast Powermac G5 when we see a complete comparison benchmark of the two, like the obligement test some time ago. But it will be behind.

The PA6T has a much better memory systems so I think the hardware is going to be much more evenly matched than anyone suspects.

at a quarter of the cost (in the worst case, probably much less).

This is one area where they are not exactly evenly matched!

As before I expect any decision will be down to the choice of OS and price.



Amigoid memory speeds:

060@66MHz  - 0.132 GB/s
Efika            - 0.5GB/s (on-die 32bit memory controller)
Peg2/A1/µA1  - 1.0 GB/s (not sure, might be 0.8GB/sec)
Sam 440       - 1.1GB/s (on-die 32bit memory controller)
G4               - 1.6GB/s (late model PowerBooks only, the rest ran slower)
Sam 460       - 3.2 GB/s  (on-die 64bit memory controller)
G5                - 10.8 GB/s.
PA6T             - 17.07 GB/s (2x on-die 64bit memory controller).

and just for comparison:
My laptop       - 8.5 GB/s (18 month old MacBook)
Cell               - 25 GB/s
Core i7           - 32 GB/s
Nvidia GTX 295 - 220 GB/s

[minator]

OK, I can buy the media playback argument, but web browsing isn't a very processor intensive task. Considering my habit of having multiple tabs and windows open, I'd want more video memory and a better GPU.

And there is the argument that more CPU power is always useful.

You'd be surprised. There's a lot of web apps out there and they've increasing in numbers and complexity all the time.  They're so important that the Javascript engines are starting to get JIT engines and these are being heavily optimised.  How much of that optimisation work do you think is being targeted at PowerPC processors?  Without those optimisations (or possibly even without the JIT engines at all) these apps are going to run slowly, so a G5 might actually be quite a good idea for web browsing.

Media is another good argument, many DSLR cameras now have video encoding and this is high bitrate, high definition H.264.  I'd like to see what a G4 can make of the 1080p files I record...

It's ironic but it's the other platforms are doing it the "Amiga way", they use dedicated hardware for video en/decoding (usually hardware blocks on the GPU chip).  Phones do the same, right the way up to 1080p.

[minator]

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

Flash has GPU acceleration. IE 9 and Firefox are also both getting GPU acceleration.  OpenVG, It has hardware acceleration...

Even Adobe Acrobat has a GPU acceleration option (you might want to avoid it though because it makes it even less reliable then normal).

Since GPUs became programmable people have been experimenting with GPU acceleration for all manner of different apps. This has been going on for years now, it's only now beginning to go mainstream.

It's mostly image related but with OpenCL that could open up, I can easily see audio being accelerated.

Ironically though, GPUs pretty much suck at video acceleration. That's why they have separate hardware blocks for it...