front side bus.

[nikki]

Hello, just reading about the  new G5, they sound great, but what is a "front side bus" and did the G4 have it.

How does this computer compare to a fast PC.? I know what apple says but what does a average person that knows all this tek stuff say.?


Thanks for any info

[giantmike]

Every computer made in the past many (don't know exact number) years has had a front side bus. What a bus is is a set of wires (etchings on a motherboard) that connect different parts of a computer together. For instance, the PCI bus connects the PCI slots to the RAM and CPU, the IDE bus connects the hard drives and cd-rom drives to the CPU and RAM. The frontside bus is the main bus that connects the CPU to the RAM, and these components to the device busses (PCI, IDE, etc.)

It's just that a 1 GHz frontside bus is very very fast, seeing that the G4s only had 133 MHz front side bus. Obviously this is a huge improvement.

As for PC comparisons, we'll really have to wait and see how these things preform first hand before this can be determined.

[kelly]

Here's a start.

http://computer.howstuffworks.com/pci1.htm

http://computer.howstuffworks.com/

http://www.mackido.com/Hardware/bussed.html

Yes. Every Computer has a Bus. Several kinds.

The improvements in the G5 are incredible and State of the Art.

[Paddy]

Well, according to the MacObserver reporting on the keynote today, in comparison tests, the dual processor G5 "spanked" the 3.06 GHz dual processor Xeon. In the tests they ran, the results were:

Adobe Photoshop: G5 is 2.1x faster
Luxology: G5 is  2.3X faster
Mathematica: G5 is 2.1X faster

So, from the sounds of it, Apple HAS finally whomped the competition - for a while anyway. Whether the high end gamers will agree, remains to be seen. However, with one of those Radeon 9800's in there....my son is convinced it would be the ultimate gaming machine!

One thing I don't get - does Apple actually expect many customers for the high end G4 at $3,274 - almost $300 MORE than the high end G5? Unless you absolutely HAVE to have it tomorrow, what would motivate anyone to buy an older, substantially slower, noisier Mac for MORE MONEY? Someone needs their head examined.

[nikki]

Thanks, this sounds great