Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Technology Stocks : Apple Inc. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Eric Yang who wrote (6814)	12/13/1997 2:30:00 PM
From: Sowbug	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 213173

<<The clock speed of the chip used in Apple's current crop of G3 Macs is in my opinion very conservative. G3 chips running at 275MHz and 300MHz were found in cloner prototypes back in late Aug. Yet, it is now Dec and Apple currently only uses 3 versions of G3s running at 233,250,and 266 MHz. Why?>> The backside cache in Apple's G3 series (a new technology in consumer PCs) makes all the difference. All PCs (Wintel/Mac/whatever) spend time waiting for information to be fetched from the main memory (that's the 32 megs of DRAM in your computer). In the late 1980s, PCs began offering small caches as either CPU features (L1 cache) or add-on cards (L2 cache). The L1 cache is usually about 32-64K nowadays, and the L2 is usually 256K-1 meg. They are essentially little mirrors of part of main memory, obviating the need in many cases to fetch from/write to main memory. The backside cache is different from the L1/L2 caches. I can't explain the architecture here, but essentially it means the CPU spends much, much less time waiting around for memory accesses to finish. So you can think of an Apple G3 CPU cycle as being more efficient than a 604e/Pentium CPU cycle. Unfortunately, it's unlikely any average consumer will understand or care about the difference between cache types, so Apple is stuck with "yes, the clock speed is the same or slower, but it's way faster." Too bad most people think of MHz as being analogous to MPH. [Eric, it sounds like you know most of this already, and I apologize if it sounds condescending -- I wrote it mostly for other people reading this thread who don't know about the backside cache.] On a non-technical level, Eric, I think the real answer to your question in actually in your post. Apple has always been at a disadvantage against its clone competitors in the high-end megahertz war. Power Computing could advertise a 233 MHz machine knowing that only 100 such chips could be produced in the next month, because Power Computing's market was much smaller than Apple's, and it might have a backlog of only 20-30 orders at a time. Apple, on the other hand, might have to wait until it can receive 5,000 233 MHz chips a month before it can start selling a model based on that chip -- otherwise, it might have thousands and thousands of angry potential customers on backorder (N.B., it does this anyway!). Thus, Apple might have to go with a 200 MHz machine even though 233 MHz chips were technically available.

To: Eric Yang who wrote (6814)	12/13/1997 4:26:00 PM
From: J R KARY	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 213173

Thanks Eric and Sowbug for the interesting tech evaluation AAPL's slow release of the G 3s allowed time to respond to user found bugs before moving to faster models and volume sales . To date PC buyers only have CPU "MZ" speed comparisons to decide with and hopefully AAPL will address this in their coming advertising . Rhapsody's release will show its superiority as a 64 bit , RISC based OS , optimised to use the new , faster , backside cache . AAPL's selling window of opportunity will lie in promoting side by side "MZ" speed comparisons like Intel did with 386 v 286 . Maybe AAPL's G 3 running Office 98 against a Intel version ?