This last Monday Apple CEO Steve Jobs took the stage to deliver the keynote address at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco. The rumor mill was abuzz with unconfirmed reports of a new high-end professional desktop Mac powered by IBM’s PowerPC 970 chip. Adding spice to the suspense was what appeared to be an inadvertent posting of the computer’s specifications on Apple’s online store late at night on the preceding Thursday. It turns out that what Mr. Jobs, with tongue in cheek, called “premature specifications”, were indeed correct. With Jobs’ penchant for secrecy and showmanship, you wonder if the poor Apple Store webmaster isn’t looking for a new job.

The new PowerMac G5 (Apple’s name for the 970 chip) is a major leap forward for Apple. Previous PowerMacs have been powered by Motorola’s G4 chip, which has been, at least in terms of clock speed (measured in Gigahertz, or GHz), lagging behind the offerings from Intel and AMD. Clock speed is but one measure of a system’s performance, and the G4 chip is plenty fast for most people’s computer needs. However, with Intel and AMD’s current high-end chips clocking in at over 3 GHz, and the G4 topping out at 1.42 GHz, Apple needing a chip to keep it’s core pro graphics, audio, and video constituencies from jumping ship. The G5 does just that.

The G4 and the Pentium 4 are 32-bit chips. The new G5 is the world’s first desktop 64-bit chip. The 32-bit and 64-bit labels characterize the width of a processor’s data stream. In laymen’s terms, a 64-bit chip can move more data through the processor at a higher rate. The increase is actually exponential, not just doubled. Imagine it this way – envision the amount of data a microprocessor can handle as a flat piece of paper. With a 32-bit chip, that piece of paper is postcard-sized. With a 64-bit chip, that piece of paper is the size of the island of Manhattan.

The maximum amount of Random Access Memory (RAM) that a 32-bit PC can use is 4 gigabytes (GB). The 64-bit G5 can handle up to 8 GB of RAM. The G5 also uses a 1 GHz frontside bus, which is a “gathering point” for data going into and out of the chip.

The top-of-the-line PowerMac G5 has TWO of these powerhouse chips on board, as well as room for up to 500 GB of hard drive space (with two 250 GB drives installed). Everything else is also top-drawer. ATI Radeon 9600 Pro graphics processor. Serial ATA hard drives. A CD-burning, DVD-burning 4X SuperDrive. Gigabit Ethernet.

Just how fast is what Apple calls “the world’s fastest personal computer”. Using the industry-standard SPEC CPU 2000 benchmarks, the PowerMac G5 (both single and double processor models, in 1.6 GHz, 1.8 GHz and 2 GHz versions) toasted Dell computers running 3 GHz Pentium 4 and dual 3 GHz Xeon processors. How about more “real world” comparisons? In a series of tests using Photoshop, a pro image-manipulation application, the dual-2 GHz PowerMac G5 was over two times faster than the Pentium and dual-Xeon systems. In fact, a single 1.6 GHz G5 was 50 percent faster that the Pentium 4 running at 3 GHz. The results were the same for tests with other pro audio, 3D rendering, and scientific applications, some of which were performed on stage at the keynote address.

How much would you expect to pay for all this power? The high-end PowerMac Dual 2 GHz G5 lists for $2999, with the single 1.8 GHz and 1.6 GHz models coming in at $2399 and $1999, respectively.

© 2003 Peter F. Zimowski