“That’s not a knife. That’s a knife.”
— Crocodile Dundee
The PC market has always been like the scene from Crocodile Dundee. A mugger pulls a knife on the Aussie who simply sneers at the length of the blade. “That’s not a knife. That’s a knife,” and he whips out a 2-foot-long bowie knife. With the release of the Apple G5, Apple now has the biggest knife in the personal computer market … and what a masterful blade it is. I’ve been waiting with a great bit of impatience for the release of AMD’s Athlon-64’s, which should have been out by now, and the release of the Apple G5 just nailed me on my blindside. The last I had heard they were not getting these out until next January; looks like Apple pulled a fast one like Sony just did with their Blu-Ray recorder.
In any case, the performance benchmarks of the first mass-produced 64-bit processor are impressive to say the least. The new G5’s beat the sh*t out of the dual Pentium IV 3.0 GHz, which it should considering it has another exponentional on computing power. 64-bit processors are king of the floating point which means things like XviD encoding and MP3 compression are infinitely faster on a 64-bit processor, even if it is of slower clock speed. All very cool.
Okay, so what about the G5 that is so impressive. Let’s talk about the architecture of the mobo itself. To start with you can now dump 8 GB of RAM into it, thanks to removal the the 32-bit 4GB restriction. The system also features dual-1GHz front-side bus (1 GHz!), three dual-channel 400MHz memory sockets, the new 133-MHz PCI-X expansion slots, SATA, and Firewire800. 
And yes Fyn, I am impressed even if you are not. A Duron-650 is not even sufficient for me, even right now. To quote the great B-Movie Split Second1: “We need bigger guns. BIG FUCKING GUNS! We’re gonna go get big guns, right? That’s where we’re going, to get big guns. Stone, we need some big big fucking guns!”. With that said though, I’m still waiting for the Athlon-64’s … I’m just more excited now
[1]: Split Second is the perfect futuristic movie. It is dark, depressing, with constant rain, and best of all a psychotic killer who steals human hearts. Additionally, the protagonists are only a little less psychotic: “He went over the edge. Now he lives on anxiety, coffee, and chocolate.” (in reference to Harley Stone to his new, very green partner, Dirk Durkin). Dirk Durkin was essentially there to “watch over” Harley Stone … the quote I gave earlier was Dirk much later in the movie. I should really Buy It.