©1995 Kevin Jaques. All rights reserved excepting that this file may be copied for non-commercial purposes, unchanged. No warranties apply. I am just a user volunteering my observations. First a bit of history. 50 years ago, they built ENIAC, which was programmed by physically moving wires. Switching was either manual, mechanical (relays), or, after a time, electronic (electron tubes). Some brilliant guy noticed his battery could drain but not charge, and discovered how to force one-way streets onto electricity. Diodes and transistors were the result. In the early 70's, two teenagers, Jobs & Wozniak, built a prototype computer in their garage. They started selling it by mail­order. At first, you built it yourself. More and more manufacturing was done by their company, Apple. The standard configuration was 4k of RAM. It had barely enough ROMs to read in instructions from a cassette­player to start up. Permanent storage was on cassette tapes. Eventually it reached the point where they sold you the finished computer, the Apple ][. It was only capable of black and white. My mom and my brother bought one of these in 1978. Equivalent competitors to the Apple ][ included the Commodore Pet and the Radio Shack TRS-80 (Trash 80). In the early 80's, Apple came out with the Apple ][+, which featured color, and floating point decimals (prior to that you simulated floating point math by keeping track of the magnitude of the number separately, like scientific notation). Apple began to dominate. International Business Machines (IBM) entered the field with what I think they called the 8086. IBM was the undisputed giant in computing, with no significant competition. In what was widely believed to be a deliberate ploy to destroy Apple at the insignificant cost of losing the micro computer market, IBM published the architecture of this device, permitting wide-open manufacture of clones. Like the Apple ][, it was an 8 bit processors, in that it processed information in chunks (words) of 8 bits. 16 bit processing was simulated. Of course you know, the Mac came out with the Motorola 68000 processor in 1983 or so, and introducing a grapic user interface (GUI) to the market. Upgrades were mainly to the ROMs containing a lot of the System code, going from the 128k ROM, to the 512k ROM, and finally to the MacPlus. Improvements were mainly to speed, up to an astonishing 25 mhz in the Portable. Eventually the 68020 came out, and is included in the II, and the early LCs. They did not include a Page Memory Management Unit (PMMU) necessary for virtual memory or 'high' memory. Also, they weren't "32 bit clean". The 68030 came out, in the IIci and others. The IIfx was faster and had some idiosyncratic thing that disappeared. Eventually the 68040 came out in the Quadra and Centris lines, and now may still be seen in PowerBooks and LCs. With each improvement, the same megahertz rating (mHz) would do more, and usually, the new processor would also be capable of higher mHz. For instance, the 68030 could go up to nearly 50 mHz. These processors were called, collectively, the 68K line. As the Mac was introduced, the 8086 line came to dominate the competition, and upgrades were made to its line, mostly increasing its speed, and moving through the 286, 386, and finally 486 models. The competition among the clone­makers ensured rapid advance even within the confines of this primitive line of computers. Intel became the dominant manufacturer and even designer. In the early 90's, the 8086 line was at the 486, which was so fast that a GUI could be overlaid on the basic system, which was still the essentially unchanged command­line interface of the 70's. The Macs too were at the 4th generation, with roughly equivalent capabilities, but beginning to fall behind in the hardware race. IBM was losing huge amounts of money as micro­processors ate away at its main­frame market, but had developed a Reduced Instruction Set Chip (RISC) processor. As is typical in all things, a small amount of the instructions did the majority of the work. The notion was to eliminate the overhead of the others and do the majority of the work at a consequently higher speed. The remaining fraction of the work would have to be handled by the software portion of the system, which would therefore be slower. IBM entered a joint venture with Apple and its processor supplier, Motorola to develop this chip. Apple was to contribute the next generation system, which we have yet to see. The Processor is the PowerPC. Oddly, Apple was the first to actually bring a PowerPC to market. The PowerPC 601 came out, a first generation RISC chip, but roughly comparable in speed to the Pentium, the 586. The PPC was faster however, and upgrades have been coming out very quickly, and by the time of writing, it would be safe to say it has out­stripped the 8086 line. It initially came out in speeds of 66-80 mhz, but soon reached speeds of 110 mhz. However, since the new super­system wasn't out, it must run an emulated version of the Mac System, which slows it down. Apple is frantically re­writing the System to be fully 'native' to the PowerPC. Apple chose this time to license clone­makers. The purpose of course, is to capture market­share for the purpose of its System software, still superior to its GUI competitors, OS/2 and Windows, which run only on the 8086 line. The Clone­makers are as follows: Daystar had produced processor upgrades for obsolescent Macs, and will be targetting the multi­media professionals who need astounding computer power; Radius, a maker of monitors, graphics cards, and accelerators, will be targetting cost­conscious graphics arts professionals. Pioneer, a Japanese consumer electronics giant, will make clones with home­entertainment capabilities. It has no immediate north american plans. Bandai, a japanese toy­maker leader will use it to challenge Nintendo and Sega for the video­game market. Leading Edge is not a licensed clone maker, and Apple made them retract their claims. However, they did buy a bunch of Apple Centris 650 logic boards, and offer a "Quatro" line for about $1KUS. Power Computing, a start­up company which includes staff from Apple and various prominent 8086 clone makers, will be basically offering cheaper, better models than Apple. MacUser tested the Power, Radius and Daystar clones, and said, "You might say the clones were not merely compatible with Macs, they were bug-for bug compatible." There is now a mother­board­design specification called common hardware reference platform (chrp) expected in late 1996. Any computer that complies with it should be able to run any or all of several operating systems: MacOS, Windows NT, OS/2, Solaris (Sun), AIX (IBM). I bought a Power 100 from Power Computing. Unlike prior computer purchases, my shipment raced to me only three weeks after the date I had hoped for. In June of 1995, I ordered the week before they began to ship. It comes in a standard 8086 style box, but boots up with the new MacOS logo, and comes with Apple keyboard and mouse. Some details follow: - comes with FWB HardDisk Tool Kit, and CD-Rom toolkit and the FWB driver (which enables write caching to improve speed) - comes with bundled Now Utilities, Now UpToDate, Now Contact Manager, Quicken, ClarisWorks, eWorld, a CD full of fonts, and perhaps a few others - comes with System 7.5, plus chosen portions of Upgrade 1.0. As I understand it, they replaced the new enabler with the old enabler. This is pre­installed, also on floppies, and also on a CD, which also includes backups of the pre­installed software. PowerTalk, QuickDraw GX, are there but not installed. - I/O daughterboard for all the ports. - video display card drives both a standard Mac DB-15 and a VGA port - friendly, fast phone response. The 800 number is on every page of the manual, begging you to call. 1-800-999-7279. - - 100 mhz, PPC 601, 8 mb ram (upgraded to 16), 500 mb drive, Sony 14" Multi-Scan monitor, the keyboard, and mouse, all came to about $4,000 US. When the dust settled after shipping and so forth, it was almost exactly $5,000 Cdn. Power PC users are probably like me. They accept that non­native applications will run slower. We didn't count on an overall slowdown by using them. However, there is apparently an overhead involved, especially with non­native extensions, from switching back and forth between native code and emulation. The August 95 "Computer Paper - Prairie Edition" tested the PowerMac 8100 and said they were "initially shocked by its apparently sluggish performanceŠ" But they found some non­native utilities which had been turned on. They said, "After turning off the offending old software, the system speeded up incredibly. In particular, software that makes good use of the PowerMac's strong floating­point calculating ability (such as 3D software, and Adobe Photoshop) is faster than any pentium. Cool. That means that my Power 100, which clobbers a PowerMac 8100, was, for a week or so after I got it, the fastest personal computer on the planet. However, I was disturbed by the reports of how the non­native software would bring down the whole thing. So I ran Norton Utilities System Info on it two ways, without extensions, and in my 'normalConfig' of about 4 or 5 rows of extensions, including file­sharing. The results did show a slowdown, but nowhere near 'shocking' or 'sluggish'. Even with full extensions, it beat everything except itself. I exported the results and include them in both text version, and a two­column formatted MSWD version as "Benchmarks.Power100". Essentially, the scores are compared to a Quadra 700, the reference system. My first computer, the Plus, scores 3.87 overall. My next to last computer, the IIci, is 10 times as fast, at 48.7, and my new Power 100 is 10 times as fast as that, at 387. PowerPC 603 is out. It is smaller, cooler, and takes less power, but is slower than the PPC 601. In fact, a 75mhz 603 is slower than a 60 mhz 601. It is intended more for portables, toasters, and other appliances. The Performa 5200 & 7500 include it. Actually, now the portable is expected to carry a 603e. The PowerPC 604 is out too. Actually, this is the first chip designed by the Apple/IBM/Motorola alliance. It has a significantly different internal architecture. It came out in the PowerMac 9500. At comparable clock speeds, it is 30­50% faster than the PPC 601. It is available at 120 or 132 mhz. The PowerMac 9500 is out. it uses the PPC 604 it introduces System 7.5.2. That system is now 95% native. it also has abandoned NuBus bus in favour of the PC world's PCI (Peripheral Component Interconnect) bus. it was no onboard video circuitry or monitor port. it has both a 10Base­T Ethernet and the AAUI ethernet port (needs adaptor to choose type of ethernet). it puts the processor and the clock chip on a daughterboard. This will permit extremely easy upgrades. It contemplates multi-processor daughterboards, though the System isn't ready. It seems crazy to buy the fast computer, when even I could change the clock chip. the motherboard's memory bus is designed to run at a flexible speed (1/3 clock) 64 bit wide memory bus. Level 2 (L2) cache of very fast RAM (2-3 times normal) is accessed first from the processor. If the data wasn't in the cache, the processor looks forther to the memory controller This is the Data Path Chip Set, and manages data flow from all parts of board to RAM The RAM is, for the first time, DIMMs (Dual In Line Modules) 70 ns (nanoseconds) is minimum speed of DIMMs comparable price to SIMMs only a few WorkStations use DIMMS so far but since processors are now 32 bit, they will soon be standard 168 pins (only 84 visible because each side of each pin is a separate electric lead) All other current Macs use 72 pin simms except the Quadra 950 (30 pin) permits RAM of up to 64 mb (SIMMs max is 32 mb). can be installed one at a time (push straight in. Little levers on socket to unseat them. if installed in pairs, memory controller can 'interleave' them, so the 64 bit bus acts as if it was 128 bits wide (10-15% speed boost). The Memory Controler also leads to 2 PCI bridge chips, each handling 3 PCI slots One PCI bridge chip goes to the I/O DMA Controller The I/O DMA Controller also takes data from the I/O channels & ports DMA is software which permits the Mac to do some I/O while processor is busy. The PCI bus is 32 bits wide & 33 mhz (NuBus is 10 mhz). Also, sustained throughput 3 times that of NuBus Theoretical throughput is 96 mb/sec. Actual rates would rarely reach 30 mb/sec Nothing can be upgraded to the PowerMac 9500. This Jaques Hardware News was brought to you by: Kevin Jaques, LL.B., B.A. Jaques Law Office 101 - 2515 Victoria Avenue Regina, Saskatchewan (SK), Canada S4P 0T2 Phone 306-359-3041 Fax 306-525-4173