G5 rev.B Rumors
The rumors of the next revision to Apple's G5's are starting to get pretty heavy. It's pretty much assured there is going to be a revamp, as they're supposed to get to 3GHz in 7 months or so, so they might want to start bumping a bit. I'm not so sure that there's going to be a big intro in January at the show, as that might be left for other announcements since the iMac, eMac, iBook & others are starting to get really long in the tooth. So perhaps within a month after, or perhaps at the show, who knows.
I'm not really interested in the CPUs per day, although I'll hope they're using a much cooler variant on a smaller process. That's not going to get really interesting until they've hit 2.5 - 2.6GHz or so.
The interesting bit is that the rumors are talking about 4 drive bays, instead of the current two, which would solve one of two of my only beefs with the G5's: only 2 drive bays, and anemic VRAM. They were such obvious omissions to such a powerful box that they raised a lot of eyebrows.
SATA is very cool and all- but there's no way current drives are going to saturate an SATA bus. Where things start to rock is with various RAID levels, especially RAID 5. The G5 is a high end workstation, screaming for RAID 5. I can see where Apple's coming from- they want to push Firewire800, XRAID and the like. But I don't think it's gone over well, not with the size of the current G5. You need at least 3 bays in an enclosure like this. That is somewhat adequate. 4 would be nice. 5 would be cool.
And VRAM? 64megs, and you have to drop $350 for a 128meg card. For the first time in years we have a display system that screams for as much VRAM as it can get, yet they're cutting it back.
And yeah, people always yell back:
"But you only need 32megs for Quartz Extreme!"
Nah. You want as much VRAM as you can possibly get, depending on the resolutions you're pushing and the amount of windows you're using. Especially if other things are using OpenGL, at which point QE is sharing VRAM with them, and slowing down. The more it can keep on the card, the better.
But I'm kind of worried about the drive bays- this could very well turn out to be wishful thinking. Then again, Apple did a turnabout on their digital audio experiment fairly quickly.
Posted by drunkenbatmanDecember 13, 2003, at 06:49 PM
