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Forged
from a long-standing partnership between two companies committed to
innovation, the G5 drives the largest performance gain in the history
of the PowerPC. The 64-bit G5 offers speeds up to 2.7GHz and can
address up to 8GB of main memory. 32-bit PCs can only use 4GB of memory. Any more than that requires the use of virtual memory on the hard drive, which is 40 times slower than using RAM. The Power Mac G5 can offer up to 8GB of RAM thanks to Mac OS X Tiger and the 64-bit G5. In fact, 64-bit memory support allows each individual application on your system to access all installable memory, shattering the 4GB barrier. So you can store entire 3D worlds, huge scientific data sets and oversized 2D images all in main memory, which lets you manipulate them faster. Theoretically, the PowerPC G5 can access up to 4 terabytes of physical memory. Impractical now, maybe, but the PowerPC G5 architecture allows for plenty of growth well into the future. And to get at that data, the PowerPC G5 features a speedy 1.35GHz frontside bus for each processor, offering a staggering 21.6-GBps throughput on dual 2.7GHz PowerPC G5 systems. That’s a huge leap over the Power Mac G4, with a bus speed of 167MHz. That means you won’t have a bottleneck getting information to the chip for processing. Each dual-processor G5 model features a bus that runs at half the speed of the processor. So you’ll get dual 1GHz frontside busses on a dual 2GHz Power Mac G5, dual 1.15GHz frontside busses on a dual 2.3GHz Power Mac G5 and dual 1.35GHz frontside busses on a dual 2.7GHz Power Mac G5. |
Learn more about the technology and performance of Apple’s G5 processor.
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Award-winning Logic The PowerPC G5 gets its smarts from the execution core of IBM’s 64-bit POWER series processors, which drive IBM’s successful eBusiness servers, with highly parallel processing, two double-precision floating-point units and advanced branch prediction logic. Apple collaborated with IBM to leverage this industry-leading design for the G5, combining an optimized Velocity Engine with a new superscalar, superpipelined execution core that supports more than 200 simultaneous in-flight instructions. But you won’t have to buy new software to take advantage of the Power Mac G5 speed boost, because Apple and IBM designed the PowerPC architecture to scale from 32- to 64-bit from the beginning. What’s more, all this power is fabricated in IBM’s state-of-the-art process technology using high-performance Silicon-on-Insulator transistors and copper interconnects. Switches store the instructions that the PowerPC G5 ultimately processes in its execution core. Making these transistors smaller and more numerous boosts performance, but presents challenges. Imagine fitting more than 58 million light switches into the space the size of your thumbnail to comprehend the feat accomplished by IBM scientists and fabrication wizards. |
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