New G4 processor

According to Apple’s claim, the PowerPC G4 processor is the first processor that can consolidate the processing power of previous supercomputers into personal computers. With the newly added AltiVec vector processor, the G4 processor can have at least Continuous execution of one billion floating point calculations, even with extreme theoretical calculations of four billion floating point operations per second (in the industry's terms, the speed of executing one billion floating point operations per second) Called "gigaflop", this G4 processor has a processing speed of 1 gigaflop and 4 gigaflop theoretically. In the case of a similar program two years ago by the University of California, the planned 1 gigaflop supercomputer costs 50,000 dollars. Now, with the arrival of the PowerPC G4 processor generation, everyone can spend less at home. Two thousand dollars, you can own a personal super computer.

According to the Apple Computer's tests, the PowerPC G4 processor running at 500 MHz averaged 2.94 times that of the Pentium III/600Mhz, compared to the six speed tests published on Intel's website. In practical application testing, the G4 processor averages twice as fast in the daily processing projects of Adobe Photoshop. Even in some specific Photoshop special effects processing, the G4 processor has four times faster performance. Processing efficiency. The G4 processor is almost twice as fast as the Pentium III processor in terms of the speed of pressing QuickTime movie files, and it can almost instantly achieve the power of compression in the Sorenson movie file, which consumes a lot of processor computing resources. Because of the computing power of gigaflop, PowerPC G4 processor products will provide a fairly powerful application platform for graphics processing, 3D graphics computing, scientific applications, and digital video editing and processing. In addition to the use of the G4 processor, Apple has also made significant improvements on the new Sawtooth motherboards, such as increasing the memory bus bandwidth from 400 MB per second during Yosemite’s previous motherboard to 800 MB per second. The maximum number of upper memory has also been increased from the previous 1GB to 1.5GB. In addition, mid to high-end PowerMac G4 mainframes using Sawtooth motherboards will use Ultra ATA/66 hard drives, and use AGP 2X graphics acceleration bus, even the host can be connected to the FireWire perimeter, but also have additional AirPort radio communications technology Ability to expand.

In the Mac and PC's speed competition, the most commonly used as a speed indicator is the Adobe Photoshop drawing software. As the Mac market is still dominated by high-end graphics and prepress market, so if Photoshop's every move can lead in speed, for users in these markets will have a very attractive. Starting from the “twice faster than you” slogan launched by the PowerMac G3, Apple puts the biggest difference between Mac and PC on processor speed. Of course, the new PowerMac G4 host is no exception. Intel released six speed tests on its web pages for comparisons. Photoshop, of course, is also a key project for testing. According to Apple's own test results, the PowerMac G4 console can of course continue to be twice as fast as the fastest Intel Pentium III processor on the market. In fact, according to Adobe's claim, using a Photoshop 5.5 program that has been optimized for the G4 processor will be twice as fast as Photoshop 5.0 running on a G3 host, even at certain speeds , It can have a 10x to 15x speed increase. Currently Adobe has introduced the Photoshop 5.5 "Altivec Core" enhancement module. By adding a synergy module, the overall computing performance of Photoshop 5.5 can be improved. In addition, Adobe has introduced a synergy enhancement module for track effects. This provides a significant speed increase in functionality that requires considerable processor computing resources. Both of these plug-in modules will be available on the software installation CD bundled with the Apple PowerMac G4 product.