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(June 23 2003) Apple announced their Power Macintosh "G5" Series of machines today, slated for delivery "in August". They recovered gracefully from their inadvertent publishing of the Power Macintosh G5 specifications on their Web site a week early - that "oops" is now being called a case of "premature specification". These new machines, combined with the long-awaited release of the OS X compatible Quark Xpress 6 are hoped to pick up a decided sag in PowerMac sales over the past 6 months.

Three to get ready: As usual, the new PowerMac G5 machines are deployed at High (Dual 2 GigaHertz), Medium (1.8 GHz) and Low (1.6 GHz) price points - I'll take you through the offerings to deconstruct what you really get.

The Dual 2 GHz machine (at CAN$4200) is the crown jewel, and the one that will be featured in all the "specsmanship" and head to head comparisons with Pentium machines. However, prior experience tells us that these machines will also be the last model to ship in quantity, because of restricted availability of the highest speed IBM PowerPC 970 processor chips (which Apple has dubbed the "G5"). It promises to be a dry summer for Apple dealers, as customer demand for the current model G4's withered to somewhere near zero today, and I wouldn't bet on quantities of the high end G5's being available until October.

Apple's dual-processor design and OS X work well together, and these G5's have a 1 GHz frontside bus (the CPU's data channel that goes to the main memory) and new high-performance circuitry (HyperTransport) to keep both processors fed with data and humming. This will be the machine to beat for high-end graphic, audio and video, or for a production machine that is under constant, heavy multitasking. My own dual-processor G4 (now just a lowly Dual .5 in the new terminology) is a wonder of multitasking capability.

The 1.6 GHz ($2,800) and 1.8 GHz ($3,400) G5 machines are single processor, which means that some of the coming advertising hype will not apply to them. The 1.8 GHz is essentially identical in configuration to the Dual 2 GHz but for having a single processor. There are some more significant differences with the 1.6 GHz.

The 1.6 GHz G5 machine does not have high speed PCI-X expansion slots, just standard PCI slots like the G4's. This is of little concern today, when there are few PCI-X add-in cards in existence to take advantage of the new slots (and most G4 owners have never installed a PCI card anyway). However it may concern video and audio professionals who are looking to the next generation of industry-specific interface cards.

The frontside bus on the 1.8 GHz is 900 Mhz, but is only 800 GHz on the 1.6 GHz G5. Apple has specified 333 MHz Dual Data Rate (DDR) memory for the 1.6 GHz rather than 400 MHz - since the frontside bus speed should be double the speed of the DDR memory, the 1.6 GHz G5 ought to be able to support 400 MHz memory. Why Apple has chosen to outfit it with slower RAM is a mystery. All told, however, the 1.6 GHz G5 is about 13 - 14% slower than the 1.8 GHz, which just a whisker off the 12.5% difference in their base processor speeds.

Both lower models use nVidea's GeForce FX5200 Ultra video card - this is all that any business or graphic arts professional will need. The sweet but pricey ATI 9600 Pro card in the Dual 2 GHz machine appeals mainly to gamers and those doing 3-D animation.

Apple finally decided to move to USB 2.0 serial interfaces on the G5 machines, a full two years late. My guess is that they delayed deliberately, to hold back the USB 2.0 standard long enough to establish their own FireWire (IEEE 1394) standard securely in the market. The G5's have FireWire 400 MBs and the new FireWire 800 MBs interfaces. Use the Firewire 400 for scanners, CD's, DVD's and tape backups, and reserve the Firewire 800 for hard drives.

One nice little touch is optical digital audio in and out in the TOSLink format, which will interface nicely with professional and quality consumer audio equipment (see one good use for the optical-out here). Combined with a reputed 30 dB fan noise level, this may lure back the recording studios scared off by the howling furies that were the recent G4 models. And in a breakthrough for ergonomics, Apple put a USB 2.0 port, a Firewire 400 port and a headphone jack on the front of the G5 machines. Halleleuja, at last.

Memory Matters: On all the G5's, memory needs to be installed in pairs, to take advantage of the dual-bank memory architecture, which speeds accesses by splitting the tasks between two identical RAM modules in adjacent slots. When contemplating memory, keep in mind that Apple is charging about $650 for two 512 Mb DDR RAM modules with a 1 year warranty (after accounting for the loss of the two stock 256'ers). Current pricing on CanadaRAM is $349 with a lifetime warranty. My advice is to order your G5 with the minimum memory and upgrade through third-parties.

Limitations: All of the G5's share a major limitation - although the G5 case is physically large, it has room for exactly three drives - the "Superdrive" DVD-R/CD-RW optical drive, and two hard drives. That's it. The hard drives are the new Serial ATA (SATA) standard, which uses different connectors than regular IDE (ATA) drives. The immediate impact of this is that you will not be able to take a hard drive full of data from a present machine and install it in the G5 - not even temporarily for transferring the data, (unless you disconnect the Superdrive - then it remains to be seen if the IDE cable will be able to be routed to where a hard drive can be placed). Likewise, there is no place for a Zip drive, second CD-RW, or tape backup. Plan to become very familiar with Firewire external peripherals.

Apple decided to implement RAID (a method of splitting data between two disks for faster access) in software, while the trend with drives in the Intel world is to handle the administrative overhead of RAID with an additional, specialized processor chip. That's a disappointment, I would expect Apple's software RAID implementation will not be as fast.

When are 64 bits not 64 bits? Apple is making a big splash about the 64-bit G5 processor, however, much of the advantage is theoretical. A 64-bit processor can only calculate 64-bit wide instructions with an operating System that is written for 64-bit operation. That operating system is not OS X. OS X "Jaguar" and the coming "Panther" upgrade are a 32-bit operating systems all the way. Therefore, you will not get the full 64-bit advantage of the G5 until some time in the future when Apple releases a 64-bit version of OS X.

The thing to cheer about is that Apple, after moving to the UNIX-based OS X, is now positioned to introduce OS-X64 or whatever it will be called, with much less pain for the users than Microsoft will have migrating its codebase to 64-bits, and the G5 processor retains full 32-bit compatibility with today's programs and OS X.

Bang for the Buck: Based on Apple's G5 performance white paper, and in terms of sheer power the best price/performance ratio is the Dual 2 GHZ. However the value is the entry level 1.6 GHz machine - IF (and this is important) you don't upgrade the RAM and hard drive through Apple to match the 1.8 GHz machine's complement. If you want a larger hard drive than the stock 80 Gb in the 1.6 GHz, and more RAM, the Apple price pushes it within spitting distance of the 1.8 GHz, and the 1.6 GHz's price-performance becomes the worst of the lot.

So for business and production graphics, get the 1.6 GHz at $2800 and upgrade it with third-party parts as needed.

If you want an all-Apple solution with 160 Gb of hard drive and 512 Mb RAM, or if you want about 13% more performance for higher end graphics, bypass the 1.6 GHz and go with the 1.8 GHz at $3400.

If you are doing digital audio or video production or intense multitasking in a production environment, the answer is clear - proceed straight to the Dual 2 Gb at $4200. The performance improvement in these fields far outstrips the higher initial price, as it's 46% to 120% faster than the 1.6 GHz.

The past two years have seen incremental upgrades to the G4 series, with processor speeds only inching upward. We've all been waiting a long while for Apple to shake up the PowerPC market and they have done so with a vengeance.

Trevor Inkpen
President, Quill Services Ltd.

Call Trevor Inkpen at Quill Services Ltd. for business technology consulting. (250) 382-6227
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