Apple Season

By Moshe Bar

November 10, 2003

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I just obtained my new Apple G5. It's the dual 2 Ghz PowerPC G5 deskside system. It has 4 GB of RAM, two 160 GB disks and a 64 MB Radeon 9800 Pro graphics card. Apple announced the new G5s back in June and I received my unit in early October. Apple is known for loving to let their customers beg for products, but for someone coming from the Windows world it is unacceptable to have to wait more than three months to receive a computer. It is true that the Apple Web site does not actually charge for the products until they ship, but most Apple distributors do charge the customer right away upon ordering.

Georgina (as I called my G5) is hardly a desktop system. With its 20 by 19 by 10 inch dimensions, it really wants to sit next to your desk, or in the server room. Another good reason for placing it in the server room is the noise its nine fans make to keep the CPUs at 115 degrees. The noise the dual G5 makes is comparable to a hair dryer, and it can be heard from any room of my house.

The G5 makes up for the noise and late delivery with impressive performance, exceptionally good looks, and the ability to easily upgrade.

The PowerPC processor is a 64-bit CPU with 512 KB 2nd level cache and a 1 GHz frontside bus (per CPU). A CPU able to address 64-bit is theoretically able to host address space of several exabytes in size, but the OS has to play along to achieve that. Just like Windows doesn't really give you 64-bit pointers on the Itanium or Opteron CPUs, Apple decided not to give applications 64-bit pointers in OS X 10.3 ("Panther," reviewed later in this article). Panther is able to address up to 20 GB of RAM, but still provides a 32-bit address space (up to 2 GB, not including the OS itself). Most probably Apple did this to maintain backward compatibility with 32-bit applications, of which there are 7000 as of now. Moving to 64-bit address spaces will require some porting for the ISVs and is only an urgent requirement of big enterprise applications like databases and ERP systems. OS X is still a nascent platform for this kind of software and therefore Apple (wisely) decided to keep 32-bit compatibility for the time being.

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