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To: Mark Palmberg who wrote (22935)	2/1/1999 11:28:00 AM
From: Richard Habib	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 213173

Mark, the only negative I see in the G4 article is the Mhz. If the info is correct, Apple will be marketing a 350-450 Mhz chip at the same time AMD and Intel are marketing 500-600 Mhz chips. Despite the promised performance of G4 Altivec, it's a sad but true fact that in processor marketing to the general public, Mhz has become the measure they look for. Rich

To: Mark Palmberg who wrote (22935)	2/1/1999 2:06:00 PM
From: Adam Nash	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 213173

http://www.appleinsider.com has some cool specs on Max, the new G4. Interesting reading. Maybe we can persuade Adam to parse some of the info into layman's terms. I'll do my best. First of all, Max is just the beginnings of the G4 series. Many people do not realize it, but there have been several G3s in the series, built with different processes. Generally, these improvements include supporting different speeds, faster, lower-power. The big news in the G4 is two things: better multiprocessor support and AltiVec. Since everyone has talked about the latter, I'll start with the former. People often wonder what it is that makes a chip have multi-processor support? After all, didn't they build a machine with hundreds of PowerPCs? Thousands of x86 chips? In general, "multi-processor support" refers to a group of technologies that help manage having multiple processors interact with each other and shared data. You can always provide this support with additional hardware and software, but it is always faster to have at least the hooks for the technology in the chipset. Apple has not been big on multi-processing to date, but that will rapidly change as the Mac OS grows up to support it. G4 is laying the groundwork for that. I won't comment any further on future G4s, however, because it's not public information (I think). AltiVec is awesome in terms of performance. Vector-processing is huge, all though it may not be obvious to the non-technical person who never really saw much use for the matrices they were forced to learn. Matrix math is the engine behind modern 3D graphics, behind audio and graphics filtering and processing, compression and decompression. AltiVec lets you basically do matrix-math in hardware. More than anything, AltiVec adds 32 new 128-bit registers, with a separate pipeline to handle them. If this is meaningless to you, all you need to know is that data in registers is the fastest data to work with, and this is a lot of it. In some ways AltiVec, like the FPU before it, is a way of making a single CPU kind-of a multiple-processor-in-one. I could really go on and on about the magic of the Permutation Unit, but I can leave that for some other time. It is magic, but like all great magic, once you know the secret it is so simple. Anyway, the G4 will require software to support it, but they should have that in hand for the Mac OS (Quicktime, Quickdraw, etc). AltiVec and MMX don't even really merit comparison, but KNI (Katmai New Instructions) and AltiVec do. I believe AltiVec is still better architected, but I need to read up more on KNI before I will make that call. AltiVec represents the first product of a new philosophy for the PPC architecture. They used to focus on double the speed at half the price and half the size, half the power. They now believe that no one cares about the size, so they are going to use the real estate to bring new functionality to the processor. It's exciting, but I wonder if they will end up bundling the G4 with AGP and "boosting" its debut even more. After all, Mac owners don't think of the G3 as a chip, but a computer. I bet the G4 will be the same.