The Hindu : Is this the world's fastest PC?

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Saturday, Jun 28, 2003

Business

Business

Is this the world's fastest PC?

By Anand Parthasarathy

BANGALORE JUNE 27. Apple machines may be bought by a small fraction of the world's personal computer users — three for every 95 Windows PC machines; but almost every technology jump in the PC business, for thirty years, has been launched by one of their products. Which is why this week's unveiling of the latest Apple desktop computer — the Power Mac G5 — is a matter of more than usual interest for PC users everywhere.

The new machine is claimed to be the world's fastest PC — and arguably the most powerful, to be placed in the hands of the lay user. The technical media is already calling it the "wireless supercomputer", because it comes with the ability to link wirelessly to the Internet using the latest WiFi standard announced only a fortnight ago. Underneath its feature-free and rectangular aluminium body, the G5 sports the first desktop processor that computes in chunks of 64 bits at a time rather than 32. The chip — the PowerPC 970 — has been made by the IBM. This is the first time Apple has not featured a chip made by Motorola. The best of the three models going on sale in August uses dual processors each clocking 2 GHz (2 billion flips a second). More remarkably, Apple features a system bus that works at a whopping 800 MHz to 1 GHz compared to its own previous models where the bus was rated at 167 MHz. This is a specification that most PC buyers are unaware of and indeed it is rarely quoted in brochures. But this huge speed boost in the may data is moved inside the computer, ensures that the Power Mac G5 delivers the highest bandwidth in the industry — 16 Giga bits per second (GBPS). Depending on the model the G5 machines come with 80 GB or 160 GB hard disks and 256 MB or 512 MB of high speed RAM.

These numbers mean that the machine can make light work of computation-intensive tasks like picture processing. Indeed, when Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveiled the PC earlier this week, he ran applications that used the picture processing software, Adobe Photoshop as well as the well known computation tool, Mathematica. Such number-crunching capacity means that users can carry out audio-video conferencing using Apple iChat, with hardly a jitter.

Interestingly, Apple has gone ahead and configured its PC around a 64 bit chip while the number one chipmaker, Intel, is still saying you don't need that level of computing power on the average desktop — yet. Intel's main rival AMD has already announced that its 64 bit Athlon chip for the desktop will be available in September. So like it or not, lay users may have to settle for moving en masse to 64 bit in the next year or two. It is quite another matter than most of us do very little work on our PCs which can exploit such supercharged capacity.

The buyers of the new Apple range will have to fork out between $2,000 and $3,000 depending on the model — which is almost twice the price of a high-end Wintel ( that is Windows software and Intel chip) machine. By the time duties are added, the prices in India could be between Rs. 1.5 lakhs and Rs. 2 lakhs. But ever since it launched the classic "Apple 2" PC in the late 1970s, Apple has always led where the other PC makers followed, be it the use of a mouse or graphical and icon-based navigation. However, in a case of poor timing Apple is still porting the current version of its operating system Mac OS 10.2 codenamed Jaguar. This is by no means optimised to make use of the extra speed offered by the faster bus and the move to 64 bit processing. The new Mac OS 3.0 ("Panther") will be available only by yearend — and it will cost users another $130.

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