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Yes I was kinda interchanging RISC based AIX systems which runs PowerPC chip to Mac G5 PowerPC chips.



Which you shouldn't do.

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That was my intention because both does run unix to a certain degree.



I'm talking about the processors. The Power4 and the PPC 970 aren't the same chip. You're drawing a connection between them that others who aren't familiar with these processors may perceive as greater than it should be.

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But what I was refering to as a 64bit Power4 or Power4+ are these.
http://www-132.ibm.com/content/home/store_IBMPublicUSA/en_US/eServer/pSeries/mid_range/pSeries_midrange.html



I'm aware. Notice those prices? A large part of that cost is the Power4 which costs upwards of $4000 per processor. The 970 is a consumer grade processor and the Power4 is distinctly not.

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And yes the PowerPC970 is 64bit but that is not what I am talking about.



I never brought up anything about that.

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Both the IBM Pseries 6xx server and the G4 or G5 do run Unix ..yes of different flavors one AIX..the other I think BSD.



OSX isn't BSD, but it borrows VERY heavily from it. It borrows from quite a few different open source OS's. The correct name for the unix variant Apple has pulled together is Darwin.

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http://www.apple.com/g5processor/
Scroll down to the area that talks about the the G5 and IBM 64bit Power4 processor. Apple worked with IBM to leverage the Power4 technlogy to create the G5.



I'm intimitely aware. IBM's RISC server group is one of my biggest customers.

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I was comparing this...

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The PowerPC G5 can pump through more than 200 in-flight instructions at a time, a whopping 71% more than the 32-bit Pentium 4



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... I was comparing G5 to P4



But in the sentance prior, you mention the Power4 which isn't the G5 and then transition to a statement about the G5. Someone unfamiliar with the relationship between the two would likely be confused. That's what I was commenting on.

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Wheres proof? How many instructions per cycle can the P4 do? How fast is a P4 cycle in comparison to the G5.



As in all things computer related, the details are in the applications. There are countless benchmarks out at this point. In some things, the G5 is exceptional. In others, the Opteron is king. In yet more the Pentium is the best choice. It's all about what you want to do with it.

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I have gotten information from a Mac user from my company that he has rendered a 300meg+ 3D object in realtime on Photoshop with a G5 vs and a fast CPU P4 with somewhat the same GPU and found that the MAC did create it much faster almost realtime.



I have no doubt.

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But there are a lot of Unix gurus out there creating stuff for the G5 because the OS is opensource.



Darwin, the Unix core, is open source. This is not the same thing as OSX itself being open source. The majority of that OS is indeed closed.

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They are trying out their scripts and thinking this can be used for fileservers which may cost under $15,000 in comparison to some of the $50,000+ IBM Pseries servers. It may not do all the functions they need but for something 1/3 the price its one hell of a machine.



They'd probably be better off running Linux or some other BSD on a 970 based computer not sold at the margins Apple enjoys. Remember, this chip isn't sold just to Apple and IBM has intentions of taking it a lot further into exactly that space.

Regards,
Semi

Reading for those interested in this stuff:
http://arstechnica.com/cpu/03q1/x86-64/x86-64-1.html
http://arstechnica.com/archive/news/1062961031.html
http://arstechnica.com/cpu/02q2/ppc970/ppc970-1.html
http://arstechnica.com/cpu/03q1/ppc970/ppc970-0.html
http://www.arstechnica.com/cpu/03q2/ppc970-interview/ppc970-interview-1.html