Power Mac G5 debuts, billed 'world's fastest'

Macworld - Apple Computer Inc. today introduced the Power Mac G5, billed as "the world's fastest personal computer." It features a 64-bit processor and 1-GHz front-side bus and can address up to 8GB of memory, and its processors are clocked at speeds of up to 2 GHz. Apple said that in bench tests, the new machines handily beat the fastest Pentium 4 and dual Xeon-based PC systems available.

The systems incorporate 400-MHz 128-bit double data rate (DDR) synchronous dynamic RAM with throughput of up to 6.4GB/sec., one 133-MHz and two 100-MHz 64-bit PCI-X expansion slots and AGP 8x Pro graphics slots. The processor and its 1-GHz front-side bus can handle 16GB/sec. of bandwidth, according to Apple.

The new Power Macs get a facelift, too -- they sport a striking new aluminum case design that incorporates nine separate fans and a computer-controlled cooling system to manage the heat output from the new motherboard architecture. Apple CEO Steve Jobs told attendees of this week's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) that despite the number of fans, the new aluminum enclosure actually operates quieter than the previous generation of Power Mac G4 systems did -- 30 decibels at normal room temperature, according to Jobs.

The heart of the new Power Macs is the PowerPC G5 processor, developed by IBM. The 64-bit microprocessor features full support for 32-bit applications, sports a massively parallel architecture that can handle 215 simultaneous in-flight instructions and features two double-precision floating-point units and an optimized Velocity Engine. The chips are also designed for full support of symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) -- a key point of Apple's claim of world's fastest PC.

Based on Spec CPU 2000 benchmarks, the new Power Mac G5 was pitted against 3-GHz Pentium 4 systems and 3.06-GHz dual-processor Xeon systems. Apple's results show that the G5 won three out of four key benchmark tests. It beat the Pentium 4 by 21% in single-processor floating-point performance (and 10% slower in integer performance). In tests against the dual-processor Xeon system, Apple beat its competitor by 41% in floating-point throughput and 3% in integer computation.
More details about the benchmarking are available from Apple's Web site.

The new systems are also equipped with dual 1.5Gbit/sec. Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (ATA) interfaces and standard Nvidia Corp. GeForceFX 5200 or ATI Technologies Inc. Radeon 9600 Pro graphics cards (the ATI Radeon 9800 Pro is also available as a build-to-order option).

In addition, the new powerhouse professional desktop systems come equipped with Gigabit Ethernet, FireWire 800, two FireWire 400 ports and, for the first time on