Apple Pumped Up the Power Mac G4 Line to 1 GHz

yesterday. Here is the press release. The latest Power Macs sport 800 MHz (up from 733), 933 MHz (up from 867) and dual 1 GHz (up from 800) G4 CPUs plus ATI Radeon 7500 or nVidia GeForce4 MX graphics cards (up from the GeForce2 MX) as the principal changes. Hard drive sizes are also larger. In addition, the price of the entry level 800 MHz Power Mac G4 was reduced by $100 to $1,599 where it was prior to last summer. The top-end dual 1 GHz model now goes for a cool $2,999. The details on the latest Power Macs are located on this Apple web page.

The new G4 CPUs from Motorola use silicon-on-insulator (SOI) technology, as described in this CNet article, to increase the CPU's clock speed and reduce power consumption. [Paul Martin] According to this Apple web page, the new dual 1-GHz Power Mac is 72 percent faster at certain Photoshop operations that a 2-GHz Intel Pentium 4. The speed bump moves the Power Macs' speed above the new iMac line except for the low end model.

Both new graphics cards used in all three models support two monitors simultaneously, one off the ADC port and another off the VGA port. The specifications for the nVidia GeForce4 chips used in the mid and high end Power Macs as reported by Apple (1.1 billion textured pixels per second) are difficult to compare with those reported for the GeForce3 (3.2 billion AA samples per second). The GeForce3 has the same features (hardware transform and lighting and per-pixel shading) as reported for the GeForce4 except that the 64MB DDR memory is "on-chip" in the GeForce4 according to Apple rather than on-board. Apple compared the new Power Macs with the previous models using GeForce2 MX cards using Quake III Arena and the new ones are faster across the line. nVidia has a press event scheduled for next Tuesday (2/5) evening so maybe we will find out more then.

In summary, the new Power Macs represent a significant speed increase over the summer 2001 models due to the CPUs and graphics cards. They continue the dominance over Wintels for those who really need the speed, i.e. graphics (image and video) professionals. They are now better positioned against the new iMacs announced at Macworld. However, the high-end 800 MHz iMac with a superdrive (burns DVD as well as CD) and 15" flat panel LCD monitor compares favorably at only $200 more with the low-end Power Mac with a CD-RW drive and no monitor.