
Apple Power Macintosh G5: Flame On - colinprince
http://women-and-dreams.blogspot.com/2017/11/apple-power-macintosh-g5-flame-on.html
======
robotresearcher
You know what would be nice: Apple engineers and designers finding this thread
and others like it and using it as inspiration to build another lovable Mac
Pro.

The coffee can Mac Pro was a swing and a miss: an engineering achievement of
sorts and an aesthetic bold move, but not loved by devs or scientists. I want
an excellent case I can pack full of RAM, disks and GPUs, not external
expansion with $70 cables that glitch and mess up the aesthetic in the
process.

I don't know if Apple can make enough money on workstations to keep their
attention, so maybe those days are gone.

~~~
derefr
> I want an excellent case I can pack full of RAM, disks and GPUs, not
> external expansion with $70 cables that glitch and mess up the aesthetic in
> the process.

I feel like Apple was onto something here, but they screwed up by trying to
scale _up_ the mobile paradigm (black boxes connected by cables) when there's
a very similar paradigm much friendlier to professional use—the server rack-
mount paradigm—that they could just scale _down_.

Imagine a small "compute core" just like the trashcan Mac Pro (CPUs + RAM +
GPUs, replace it all at once when the time comes)... except it's in the form-
factor of a server blade, and is sitting in a rack roughly the size of a
workstation PC.

You'd buy a "Mac Pro", and in the box would be the (very elegant, Apple-y)
rack, one "compute core module" to slot into it, and one "storage module" as
well (which is your boot device, making the compute-core diskless and so a
commodity.) You could customize your order to get a RAID storage module
instead. You could buy more pre-populated modules from Apple, or other
vendors, or buy empty modules to install whatever components you want. Third-
party empty modules would probably cost about as much as a USB hard-drive
enclosure costs today.

And, of course, the modules would all connect to a shared backplane... which
would just be PCIe. So it's all the same Thunderbolt idea, just shaped
differently.

~~~
mastazi
So basically you are imagining something like Razer's never realised Project
Christine [1], but in a blade form factor? I would like that. Also something
like that being made by Apple (which has the market power to sustain an add-on
ecosystem) would make more sense, whereas Razer would have never had enough
traction (hence the project being cancelled).

[1]
[https://www2.razerzone.com/christine](https://www2.razerzone.com/christine)

~~~
derefr
Yes! Exactly. Apple could pull this off where Razer failed.

~~~
m_mueller
I think enclosing each module like Razer did is defeating the purpose. Problem
is, if you _don 't_ enclose I imagine it's hard to get this past the
designers. Apple would need a way to make the internals themselves look good.
That being said, the old Powermac / Mac Pro towers had very nice looking
internals, I could see them exposing them like that....

Plus, it surely would have a nice looking front door.

------
yolobey
The note about the amount of fans, and how silent it is despite the relatively
large power draw is interesting. I too ended up realising this when I
purchased an Apple workstation - not the G5 but a Mac Pro, which was the first
desktop I hadn't built myself since I had a Pentium 133 from Digital.

Until the Mac Pro I hadn't considered that a modern, high power computer could
also be dead silent. It's stupid, but that was a revelation for me. I couldn't
even tell it was turned on or not, except from the occasional hard drive
seeking noise - which I fixed with an SSD. And 7 years later it still is as
silent.

Unfortunately Apple is now focusing on keyboards with no depth and whatnot, so
I'm back to building my own but I do keep in mind the lessons. My system now
has 10 fans + 1 PSU fan, all running between 700-900rpm. I can hear myself
think again.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
You could try using a third party keyboard with a mac. I run an iMac with a
mechanical keyboard, and the only thing I can hear is myself type :).

~~~
yolobey
I meant the keyboard thing in general with regards to their apparent
engineering direction. My current hackintosh does have a very loud keyboard
otherwise :)

------
pier25
This is still one of the most beautiful desktop cases ever made. Hopefully the
2018 Mac Pro will come back to a similar design.

~~~
aczerepinski
Agree with your sentiment. Also I really hope they include a low/mid range
option for folks like me who want iMac-esque computing power, but don't need
the display that comes with it.

The Mac mini is way too underpowered, but the next step up from there is
$3,000.

~~~
Keyframe
They could even name it Centris or something like that - to indicate it's in
the middle of their offering. On a serious note, try a hackintosh in the mean
time. It's not difficult at all.

~~~
kccqzy
I like the Centris idea. We might as well call the Mac Pro Performa instead to
emphasize its performance.

~~~
DerekL
Assuming it’s a Core i5/i7 with the same tower case as the new Mac Pro, Apple
should call it “Mac Tower”. The Xeon-based tower would then be “Mac Tower
Pro”.

------
srett
I got one half a year ago just for fun (and because I wanted integers to be
represented in memory the proper way round for the first time in my life. ;-))

I set it up at my workplace because my wife would kill me if yet another
desktop PC appears at home, although the design might have appeased here
enough. My colleagues just called me crazy for getting this useless old heat
producing rubbish. I managed to install debian on it, which was a bit of a
hassle (protip: If you only install one HDD, put it in the primary drive bay,
otherwise openfirmware and debian will disagree about the disk naming/path and
you'll have a bad time) but worked reasonably well in the end. Also, when
upgrading RAM I must have mixed ECC and non-ECC (or buffered and unbuffered?)
because I just grabbed the first DDR sticks I could find at work. The machine
still worked, but memory bandwidth was cut at least in half or so, notably
slower. After I made sure I had matching sticks, everything was fine and I
could enjoy the incredible speeds of DOUBLE data rate memory.

------
AndrewStephens
The first time I saw one of these was when my boss (a huge Apple fan boy at a
time when that was a difficult lifestyle choice) managed to somehow convince
the local Apple distributer to loan the office a demo machine for some reason.

You have to place the machine in the context of the time - the office was
filled with crappy desktop machines from Dell, Compaq, and a bunch of white
box OEMs. The G5 tower suddenly arrived like the monolith from 2001 with us
all clustered around like filthy apes.

We never did anything useful with that G5 and after a few months it
disappeared. But its job was done, over the next couple of years nearly
everyone uplifted by that machine purchased at least one Mac for personal use.

~~~
B1FF_PSUVM
> everyone uplifted by that machine

Darn monoliths, how do they work ...

------
makecheck
I had this type of G5 machine for _eight_ years. While I upgraded the disk and
memory at some point, and decided to upgrade the GPU, the only thing that ever
_broke_ was that I had to send in one of the displays for a couple weeks
because of a power supply issue (so the display failed, not the computer). And
when I finally decided to get rid of the machine, it still _worked_ perfectly;
I gave it to a friend and his kids have been really happy with it. My reason
for replacing the machine was purely due to needing a good Intel box for
modern software development.

Apple really built things to last, and this is something I could never
convince people of years ago. Everyone was _so sure_ that some crappy PC
costing a few hundred less was somehow _so much better_ than these “expensive
Macs” at the time, never understanding that the PCs were breaking all the time
and the Macs basically never did.

~~~
danielbarla
> Everyone was so sure that some crappy PC costing a few hundred less was
> somehow so much better than these “expensive Macs” at the time, never
> understanding that the PCs were breaking all the time and the Macs basically
> never did.

Eh, I'm the proud owner of a crappy PC costing many times less than a G5, and
it's been chugging along with since 2007 just fine. Some of the parts have
been periodically upgraded where appropriate, so calling it the same PC is
perhaps a bit of a Ship of Theseus dilemma, but there are certainly components
in there which haven't changed at all (e.g. 3x 320GB Seagate drives, which are
still going and I'm too lazy to chuck out).

Being able to build and upgrade it piecemeal has allowed me to go for good
specials, and I've generally been buying at the price / performance sweet spot
at every turn. It shouldn't be underestimated how much of a saving that gives.
I probably still haven't spent nearly the price of a G5 on it, and I have a PC
which is basically on the VR-capable performance line.

Bu basically, just don't buy the cheapest components and you should be fine.

------
macintux
They had great error-reporting features. If your kernel crashed, you'd know it
if you were anywhere within 100 yards of it because the software-controlled
fans would spin up to full blast.

------
nowherecat
I just checked and if you include the Power Usage of the Apple Cinema Display,
my machine idles at just over 180W

It's a pity, because it runs quite well - always has. I have 10.4.11 and
10.5.8 on there and favor Tiger.

I have been trying to sell it, but obviously nobody wants it. On the other
hand, i still have Ableton Live 7 and Logic installed with all my plugins,
GB's of Samples and loops on it and I am having a hard time letting go the
ability to open my old tracks...I know I will never need to, but I think I'll
always keep it for that reason.

~~~
roboyoshi
> I have been trying to sell it, but obviously nobody wants it.

You can still make a nice PC Case with it - I turned mine into a hackintosh
and it's just beautiful.

------
awiesenhofer
They also make for some beautiful furniture:
[https://www.macrumors.com/2014/10/23/power-
mac-g5-furniture/](https://www.macrumors.com/2014/10/23/power-
mac-g5-furniture/)

~~~
acomjean
Or a fine case for a hackintosh. As an owner of a intel version of that case,
its remarkable how heavy and durable it is.

g5 upgrade guide.

[https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/the-best-g5-mod-so-
far.23...](https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/the-best-g5-mod-so-far.235162/)

there is a whole forum.
[https://www.tonymacx86.com/forums/powermac-g5.139/](https://www.tonymacx86.com/forums/powermac-g5.139/)

~~~
deckar01
I used a G5 as the base for my first custom case [0]. It was a royal pain to
work with, because Apple flipped and recessed their motherboards.

[0]: [https://imgur.com/gallery/WCrF1](https://imgur.com/gallery/WCrF1)

~~~
oneplane
Isn't it more like they used that BTX standard or something like that?

~~~
gsnedders
Neither the Power Mac G5 nor 1st gen Mac Pro use any standard motherboard size
or mounting points.

------
JeremyHerrman
As a college freshmen in 2003, I used my once in a lifetime Apple Student
Developer 20% discount on a stacked PowerMac G5 dual 2.0GHz. I loved that
machine and couldn't believe how snappy OS X was on it. The way I tested UI
speed then was clicking on a menu item (say the File menu), and moving my
mouse back and forth on the other menu items as fast as I could — the G5 was
the first computer I had that could keep up and show all of the sub menus in a
flash without stuttering.

~~~
baddox
It’s funny how little tests like that can make such an impression. I
experienced the same thing with iPhones, which had the bizarre feeling (now
more normal and expected) of the content being attached to my finger when I
scrolled at any speed, even back when the newly revealed content would just be
a blank grid until it had time to paint the real content. I distinctly
remember scrolling web pages as fast as I could on my friend’s original iPhone
when it was first released, although I wonder how horribly sluggish that would
feel now.

I had been trained by twitchy FPS video games from a young age to recognize
even small frame skips in moving content, and the rarity of such frame skips
is what enamored me about the early iPhones (although I didn’t “switch” to
iPhones until the iphone 4) and made me dismiss Android phones for many years
(Android flagships have been good in this department for a few years now).

------
feelin_googley
I would bet there are still quite a few G5's to be found in recording studios
around the world, not to mention G4's and even a few G3's.

Post-2004, did Apple follow up with a suitable replacement for the G5 in that
context, i.e., audio engineering? What was it?

Addendum: By "audio engineering" I mean "DAW" use with software such as Pro
Tools, DigitalPerformer, etc. and some non-Apple, dedicated hardware for line
level inputs and outputs such as that made by Digidesign, MOTU, etc. (The
performance of "web browsing" on today's bloated web and other tasks not
related to running the above software, which may include older versions, is
irrelevant.)

Maybe Apple's acquisition of Logic had something to do with what happened?

~~~
kakwa_
G5, why not, G4 maybe a few, G3, definitely not.

I've a G3 Powerbook Pismo, it's not usable anymore for even basic task like
web browsing (yay, 60 second at 100% CPU to load gmail, and with the most
minimal setup I could come-up with).

For music, just no, for basic recording, it can do the job, barely, but for
music editing (mixing tracks, applying effects, etc), you need a decent
computer.

~~~
klodolph
The modern web is an especially poor comparison. A big part of the reason why
web works at all on modern computers is due to the intensive optimization
efforts put into browsers, efforts that aren't backported to older operating
systems or architectures. Chrome V8 will run on OS X 10.5 but not on PowerPC.
So on a modern Macbook you'll get highly-optimized code from the JIT, and on
an older G3 you'll get a much slower interpreter.

Native optimized apps that were made contemporaneously, like music studio
software, are a different story. If it worked well on a G3 in 2000 it would
still work well today. So maybe you have a bunch of plugins that you love
using that you can't track down new copies of, or you don't want to pay for
newer versions, or there's a computer in the corner with Gigasampler.

Music editing doesn't actually require that much processing power or I/O
bandwidth, at least by modern standards. Quick back of the envelope math--your
Pismo, if it runs at 400MHz, has a budget of ~200 cycles per byte to keep up
with 16 tracks at 44.1kHz. That's easily doable, even if GMail is a mess.

Anecdotally, I remember looking at CPU utilization when I was working with
DAWs back in 2000 or so, and it was never very high. You certainly can fill it
with expensive plugins or huge stacks of oscillators, but even on a G3 there's
a lot you can do.

------
bshimmin
This piece seems incredibly negative. My first ever Mac was the dual 2.5GHz G5
and I loved it - sure, it was huge, but it was also powerful (for the time,
and for a good while thereafter) and looked amazing. Yes, mine did make a
weird chirping noise periodically and I think it did eventually become a bit
unreliable, but that was after quite a few years. I have nothing but fond
memories of that machine.

~~~
mberning
I agree. It is very easy to judge it harshly in retrospect. I find the
comments about heat output especially strange. Perhaps they are forgetting
some of the hotblooded pentium 4s of the day.

~~~
robotresearcher
This was not a serious Anandtech review! It was funny and full of hyperbole.
From our nice position 14 years later it is amazing how much power draw we had
to tolerate back then.

To me it read like an affectionate piece, not a harsh critique.

That case was a beauty.

~~~
nowherecat
> From our nice position 14 years later it is amazing how much power draw we
> had to tolerate back then.

I find it incredible how indifferent and uneducated I was back then, about how
much power it uses and what the consequences are on a larger scale. I remember
keeping it powerd on 24/7 (of course with periods in which it slept). Nowadays
I am (hyper)aware of the power consumption of pretty much every device in the
house.

~~~
angry_octet
I still have a G5 for some specific software, and it has amazing power
management. Nothing at the time even came close. It would put itself to sleep
without fuss, and wake instantly and seamlessly. It certainly used less power
than my newer linux x64 box over the course of a day.

------
microtherion
Two minor details I disagree with (in an otherwise very interesting and
entertaining article):

> In the 1980s and 1990s home computers didn't use much electricity. No-one
> cared about "thermal design power"

In fact, Apple DID have a notorious prior brush with thermal issues:
[https://www.tekrevue.com/apple-iii-drop/](https://www.tekrevue.com/apple-iii-
drop/)

> When Apple abandoned the PowerPC they temporarily took a step back into a
> predominantly 32-bit world with the Core Duo, only fully embracing 64 bits a
> few years later, with the Core 2 Duo and OS X 10.7.

As far as hardware is concerned, Macs with 32 bit Intel processors only
shipped from January (iMac) to November (MacBook) 2006. I did wonder at the
time whether gaining a few months was worth saddling software with i386 slices
for several years (system frameworks had to be built for 4 different
architectures, for instance). It's true that full 64 bit software support took
a bit longer to emerge, but that may have been due to the need to support the
32 bit Intel Macs that were shipped.

~~~
phire
The main cause of the Apple III's thermal issues was Job's instance that
computers should be quiet with no fan and no vents.

And even then, those requirements should have been possible to meet, if only
the Apple III hadn't been rushed to market without enough time for engineers
to diagnose and fix these issues.

------
rconti
I've got a first-gen Intel Mac Pro. My first real computer splurge, August
2006 right when they came out. Currently with 9GB of RAM and the twin 2.6ghz
processors it came with. The computer and the Dell 2407WFP still work great to
this day. I did, however, buy a new 5k iMac last March because the Mac Pro was
simply getting too slow to edit the 20MP photos coming out of my pocket
camera.

------
andz
Loved my G5. A huge beast of a machine but a lovely design nonetheless. Would
be great to revisit the beautiful case and build something more modern in it
sometime.

~~~
blacksmith_tb
I am still happily using a stock(ish) Xeon-based 'cheesegrater' tower at home,
but if you wanted to just reuse an old (PPC or Intel) Mac Pro case to build a
new system in, there are some ATX adapter kits available[1].

1: [https://www.thelaserhive.com/product/mac-pro-atx-kit-with-
ps...](https://www.thelaserhive.com/product/mac-pro-atx-kit-with-psu-mount/)

~~~
ben1040
I had one of the Xeon Mac Pros and got way more use out of it than I expected
after putting in an SSD. It felt like a brand new computer.

It was an "Early 2008" model and I finally replaced it in 2015.

------
at-fates-hands
I remember very clearly going into the original Geek Squad offices on
Washington Ave and seeing a bunch of these lining the desks of the agents. I
was in complete awe. I asked the guy what they were (I knew they were Apple
hardware, but had never seen them before). He just quipped, "New Apple G5's,
they're insanely fast and never go down. We love em'."

------
qubex
I purchased a ”dual-dual” (”quad”) Mac Pro G5 with two 970MP processors, 8 GB
of ECC RAM, PCI Express system bus, and two SATA HDDs in November 2005 (?).
Contrary to what many will tell you this machine was not water-cooled: that
was the previous generation of G5s, which had multiple single-core processor
chips clocked at higher frequency. This machine is air-cooled and varies
between sounding like a thundering highway tuck and a jetliner on takeoff.

With a pair of CinemaDisplay 24” (?) it served as my main workstation well
into 2009, and was a truly awesome machine and I keep it in working condition
with OS X 10.7 for the purposes of nostalgia. It was by far the most
performant-compared-to-prevailing-average machine I have ever owned (back at a
time when such comparisons mattered).

~~~
oneplane
But 10.7 is not PowerPC-compatible! You probably mean 10.5?

~~~
qubex
Just checked, you’re right, I have 10.5 on it.

------
duncan_bayne
I run one of these at home as a server (NAS, Minecraft) to this day. Runs
FreeBSD 11.1 very nicely.

I was going to email the author about it but couldn't find her email address
anywhere - plenty of account details on the usual walled gardens, but no
actual email address.

Sadly this is becoming more common :(

~~~
josh64
FreeBSD is definitely the best OS to put on the G5. I have a dual core 2.3 GHz
model with 8GB of RAM running perfectly on a ZFS installation.

~~~
dfee
I have a 2008 Black MacBook (the BlackBook). I couldn't find much in the way
of installing anything on it (I'd honestly looked at Ubuntu and Debian).

I found this for FreeBSD
([https://wiki.freebsd.org/AppleMacbook#Apple_MacBook_support_...](https://wiki.freebsd.org/AppleMacbook#Apple_MacBook_support_on_FreeBSD)).
Maybe I'll give it another shot.

------
tracker1
I kind of wish that Apple would just make a "barebones" x86 case + mb... take
a stock intel design, add in a "copyright" chip (to cover OSX license/boot)
and let you add your own CPU/GPU etc (GPU from supported list, or onboard to
start).

Of course paired with an apple designed ATX/mATX case. I'm not sure full ATX
is really necessary, but at least mATX would be nice. Then leave it to the
tinkerers to put together their own... Most that would want a more powerful
desktop mac would be perfectly fine putting their own together. Then just do a
motherboard refresh each year with whatever the current chipset is.

Don't even try to be everything to everyone, and leave it to "developer" macs.
Just imho.

~~~
Eric_WVGG
You just described the "xMac", the code-name that all the fans and nerds used
for the computer they wished for during the 'aughts.

And I think there's some possibility that a computer like this is on the
horizon. Apple wouldn't announce a feature like first-class external GPU
support unless they had really big plans for it. Maybe the new Mac Pro they
promised will be more like what you're envisioning...

------
travisl12
The G5 is cool and all, but my fanboy dreams really started with the 8100/110.

601 PowerPC baby.

~~~
trm42
I have fond memories of the first PPC gen 8100/80\. They really did amazing
perf feats with the PPC CPUs. Apple managed to get lots of "faster than
Pentium" ads out of those CPUs.

Also m68k IIci was really durable and upgradeable computer. They also lasted a
lot longer than they were really needed <3

Been thinking of buys 6100/60 with PC Compatibility Card so I could have a
retro gaming station with two different architectures.

Apple had bunch DOS/PC compatibility cards for handling best of the both
worlds. The recent ones run even Windows 98...

~~~
pmarreck
I owned a 6100/60 at some point.

I remember seeing the first texture-mapped 3D demo ever on it. I was in awe.

I think that was also around the time I played a lot of Escape Velocity and
Giants: Citizen Kabuto...

------
blackaspen
I used to own one -- it was a fantastically designed machine, but holy cow was
it a good space heater. I had a south-facing second story bedroom and during
the summer, using my PowerMac, man, it was toasty in there.

------
jevinskie
I purchased a G5 tower for cheap, on a whim, from my local university surplus
store. There was a strange sign that said "may leak". I was really confused as
to why they were talking about memory leaks W.R.T. hardware. Only once I got
home and opened up the case did I realize that they meant leaking of the
liquid cooling system... I have yet to repair the cooling and boot up the
system. Any tips/guides for doing so?

I ended up using another second-hand Mac Mini G4 for PowerPC testing. Much
less hassle but also much slower. LLVM builds take _ages_.

~~~
bluedino
There's a good write-up on overhauling the liquid cooling system here:
[http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/systems/G5_CoolantLeak_Repair/G5_...](http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/systems/G5_CoolantLeak_Repair/G5_CoolantLeak_Repair_p1.html)

------
mozumder
I still use my 15 year old Dual-2.5GHz PowerMac G5 every now-and-then, as
Adobe Creative Suite still works perfectly fine on it. Best investment ever,
especially with the 30" Cinema display.

~~~
qubex
I still use my 2005 quad G5 with Mathematica. I don’t really understand all
this hand-wringing about supposedly bank-breaking power consumption.
Electricity (here, at least) is so cheap it is largely irrelevant as a
proportional variable cost. (Or at the very least, I have never thought of it
in those terms.)

------
King-Aaron
I bought my G5 tower at the end of the PPC generation, and loved the thing. I
think it was 2005 or 2006, and I ran the machine until only a couple of years
ago. During it's working life, it never skipped a beat, and for a long time
was still just as performant as anything being released new.

Then came the stage where I could no longer update OSX, couldn't really run
the internet as no new browser versions were released... The machine was
pretty much a brick.

But it was a goddamn pretty brick.

------
peterburkimsher
"Leopard runs an obsolete version of iTunes, version 10, which is faster and
easier to use than the latest version."

I still use iTunes 10.6.3 on Mac OS 10.9.5. It can sync my iPhone 4S over USB,
so my contacts & calendars & music don't have to be in the cloud.

It's so much better than the newer versions of dumbed-down iTunes. I'm
seriously considering rewriting my own version of iTunes 10 as a web app
before jumping platforms to Linux about 5 years from now.

------
pajko
Let's not forget about the notorious Xbox 360 "demo":
[https://www.anandtech.com/show/1686/5](https://www.anandtech.com/show/1686/5)

------
tolmasky
I owned a PowerMac G5, and still contend its introductory video is a thing of
beauty:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSxXgtlX8ho](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSxXgtlX8ho)

However, I remember mine being ridiculously loud. Ive promised me that more
fans would mean less noise due to the "thermal zones" described in the above
video, but, at least to my knowledge, that didn't pan out. It also had a habit
of just blasting the fans in the middle of the night like an airplane if I
remember correctly.

------
saagarjha
> I ran the trial version of Geekbench 2, an older benchmarking utility that
> runs on different platforms.

Hmm…doesn't the trial version run as 32-bit? I don't think this would be an
accurate representation.

------
filereaper
Apple moving away from PPC to x86 effectively ended any remnants of PPC in the
consumer market.

All that's left now is the server grade POWER, its really hard now for anyone
to get access to PPC without getting an expensive POWER setup.

You can see that in the ecosystem as well, ppcel builds exist from Ubuntu, but
I don't think their performance is as well tuned as the x86 ones. This is
another takeaway, if you don't have hardware in the consumer market, your
ecosystem will die out. Nobody will know you.

~~~
Decade
I don’t think either Linux or MacOS X was ever tuned well for PPC, even when
consumer PPC hardware was available.

MacOS X feels nice once you get above version 10.2 and above 1.5 GHz, but it
never felt as snappy as MacOS 9 on 300 MHz. I always thought it was suspicious
how snappy MacOS X was on the first Intel Macs, considering that NeXTstep was
on x86 but never on PPC.

Linux on PPC always felt sluggish. It felt sluggish back when Power Macs were
contemporary.

~~~
angry_octet
The graphics implementation was always inferior, just a basic framebuffer,
which could never compare to the hand tuned assembler speed of Aqua. That made
everything _feel_ slower, but Linux was as fast for everything else.

~~~
Decade
No, even starting text-processing commands in the terminal was oddly slow.
Once the programs were running, they seemed fine.

------
dfee
This (a Dual 2GHz PowerMac G5) was my first Mac. I remember buying with cash
from summer jobs before heading to college in 2005 – I named it Jupiter.

The thing was a beast and I loved it. Two years later, I bought it a
companion, the first Macbook Pro – named Mars. Later that summer, I bought the
iPhone the day it came out for a cool $599 and named it Mercury.

These were all great products, and they inspired me to start the Mac Users
Group at my university :)

------
asselstine
> "The G5's considerable weight is focused on these little pads. There were
> aftermarket cork pads, but I've used masking tape to wrap a pair of old
> cycle gloves around the handle-stands, which doesn't change the fact that in
> 1998 The Undertaker threw Mankind off Hell In A Cell, causing him to plummet
> sixteen feet through an announcer’s table."

I wasn't expecting a shitty morph!

------
ben1040
I was just thinking about how I bought a G5 Thanksgiving weekend back in 2004.

I bought the base configuration. It came with only 256MB of RAM, which
honestly was a criminally low amount for that size of machine. My wimpy 12"
Powerbook felt faster, because it wasn't thrashing all over the place like the
G5 was. I think I lasted three days before upgrading the memory.

------
Reason077
I had one of these wind tunnels for a while in the 2000s. A dual 1.8ghz model.
It looked ultra-cool, beautifully designed inside and out. But it ran really
loud even by the standards back then...

There was actually a high end water-cooled model that was notorious for
developing leaks - doubt there's many of those remaining in service these
days!

------
mhd
I never got round to get rid of my watercooled dual G5, as I was hoping way to
long to find some neat use case for it. Mostly because it's probably the most
performant non-Intel computer readily available (i.e. not some SGI Onyx
cluster).

Anyone has a better use case to either inspire me or get mine donated for the
cost of shipping from Gernay?

~~~
rhinoceraptor
You can use the (excellent) case as a PC case, you can buy kits that allow you
to fit a standard ATX motherboard in it.

------
acqq
> The Pentium M didn't just outperform the Pentium 4M mobile chip, it also
> benchmarked within a few percent of the desktop Pentium 4, while consuming
> less power and generating less heat. After a brief diversion with the
> Pentium D Intel essentially gave up on the Pentium 4 in favour of a multi-
> core development of the Pentium M, which was sold as the Core architecture.

I have a personal story: the application I worked on at that time needed some
complicated calculations and decisions during them -- and to complete every
run took a significant time, measured in minutes, or even hours, and there was
a lot to calculate. But once somebody ran the application on a Pentium M
notebook, nobody could believe at first: on the notebook it run faster than on
the Pentiums 4 desktops in the office, even if the notebook had _lower_ clock
than the Pentiums 4 desktops!

The reasons are many, if I remember what I've understood then correctly, the
Pentium 4 design was never meant to target (at least not much) the clock
speeds at which it was eventually sold. Apparently there were marketing people
in Intel who influenced the development of the new processors, who managed to
press the engineers to target always "more GHz" \-- that was simple and
easiest to sell, having more GHz than competition. So apparently the Pentium 4
design was made to conceptually enable up to 10 GHz clock speeds! Today it
sounds science fiction, but before that time the clock speed did rise a lot
for quite a years nicely. Also apparently, some engineers warned the marketing
that maybe it's not going to be easy to reach 10 GHz. "You just design the
CPU, let others design the thermal and other solutions." Of course, everything
but the CPU conceptual design wasn't successful: it's not just cooling the CPU
off that's the problem, although that is a problem enough. There are some
specific dependencies that simply don't go linearly. So in practice Pentiums 4
have been sold with the lower clock that they were designed for, most of the
customers didn't notice much.

So what were the Pentium M advantages? That was a processor developed by
another team (not even in the USA but in Israel), and with the specific goal
of doing more in less clock counts. It worked marvelously for the real life
demands, like the calculations present in our application. Compared to the
Pentium 4, the M also had more CPU cache, obviously enough for our application
to shine.

For our application Pentium M was not "within a few percent" it was really
_much better_ than Pentium 4.

~~~
angry_octet
The P4 NetBurst architecture used very deep pipelines, which allowed it to be
clocked very fast. To fill that pipeline the scheduler had to predict a lot of
branches. So if your code had an unrolled loop then it performed well.
However, if the scheduler mispredicted branches then the time to flush all
those wrong branches and refill the pipeline caused severe inefficiencies. The
'speed demon' design also suffered from power dissipation problems, excess
leakage current at high frequencies.

The Core architecture did away with the super deep pipelines, and it sounds
like that avoided a particularly pathological case in your application.

~~~
acqq
In 2004 there was already 2 MB cache Pentium M whereas Pentiums 4 had only 512
MB (4 times less). Core came out in 2006.

------
bluedino
The G5 (and the G4) were from another time. Back in the early 2000's (and late
90's) it wasn't uncommon two have two machines at your desk. One for internet
and email, the other for Microsoft Office. With OS X you could combine them
both into one machine.

~~~
justherefortart
WTF are you talking about? You think people had 2 machines to run Office and
Internet? I don't know if this is a joke or just a delusion.

~~~
krylon
I would have, if I had been able to afford to. ;-)

I have seen people use to machines for Internet and regular desktop usage for
security reasons. Back in the day, you sometimes could not even finish
installing Windows on an Internet connected machine without catching one of
those nasty RPC worms.

Having a dedicated Internet machine you could easily wipe and install from
scratch without losing your applications, settings and files was not a bad
idea, if you could afford it.

(Alternatively, one could just use a decent operating system, but that is a
different story...)

------
nkoren
> Apple fans aren't like Amiga fans, thank goodness. They know when to admit
> defeat.

NEVER!!!!!!!!!!!

------
aardvark291
»The G5 has three USB 2 ports, two FireWire 400 ports, and a FireWire 800
port. In my life I have never used FireWire to transfer data. I will probably
go to my grave having never used FireWire.«

Same.

~~~
krylon
IIRC, there was an interesting article posted here on HN about the history of
FireWire. It sounded like an interesting piece of technology, but various
circumstances prevented it ever becoming the big success it could have been.

I feel the same thing is repeating with Thunderbolt.

It's kind of funny/sad because neither technology is strictly tied to Apple
machines - I had a work laptop (Dell Latitude D630) with a Firewire port. One
of our CAD workstations has Thunderbolt on board (but, sadly no actual port).

But there were almost no peripherals to support it. The only person I ever saw
using Firewire used it to transfer digital video from their camera to their
PC.

~~~
angry_octet
It came down to licencing. Apple wanted $1 per port in 1999, which was too
expensive. Intel would rather develop their own bus (USB) than licence
Firewire from Apple. Apple eventually caved to $0.25 but it was too late.

Firewire was heavily used for digital video, still used for heaps of
industrial cameras. Still very prominent in digital audio. The multimaster bus
design, guaranteed timing and bandwidth (isochronous transport), and speed,
made Firewire a winner. A Firewire 400 drive is practically twice as fast as
USB2. So anyone who had to do lots of transfers used it.

------
Keyframe
The last non-intel and non-x86 on desktop in wide use. I miss days of
heterogenous computing at home. One could argue mobile brought that back in,
but meh. Not the same.

~~~
AHTERIX5000
What do you mean with heterogenous computing? Isn't that supposed to mean CPUs
combining different types of cores like the Cell with SPUs or AMD APU with
GPU? G5 was just a PPC implementation without any "sidekicks".

~~~
Keyframe
I meant a diverse set of CPUs and architectures on desktop, not an actual
term.

------
alexfoo
I've still got a Quad G5. Annoyed that I never got around to selling it when I
stopped using it so much.

Guess I should whack it up on eBay.

------
rayiner
Regret selling mine. Absolutely gorgeous machine.

