Re: g5 for ben
On Sat, 2005-01-29 at 11:39 +1100, Dean Hamstead wrote:
> due to the overwhelming sucess of the "Get a minimac for ben" project
> and requests now for getting him a g5. I have now decided to ask
> for interested parties to make pledges towards buying ben a g5.
Hehe :) Oh well, I don't need to be drowned in machines neither ;) A
minimac would be cool and cheap, but I don't need a desktop G5, I
already have a nice dual 2.5Ghz and an Xserve G5 at work to play with :)
However, it would indeed be useful if I had, at least for some time,
physical access (or ownership) of a new iMac G5. The chipset in those is
new, Apple did at least one very significant change to their usual
architecture which is the replacement of the good old PMU chip with an
SMU one which also takes over the fan management etc...
We have very basic support for it at the moment, but there is definitely
more work needed to properly support those new machines & chipset (I
expect all newer G5 machines to also have the SMU from now on).
Another interest is that it would make me have an nVidia based machine
so I can try to improve the support for these ;)
While getting me machines is a good idea (hint hint hint :) , it's
mostly useful when those represent a significant change in the HW
design. When they don't (like the minimac), it's a nice toy that I can
put to good use, but the linux support itself doesn't require me to have
access to the HW more than a week or two.
> The best option is to buy him a new imac g5 17" 1.8ghz
> which will cost us$1500, or for the same price a single
> cpu power mac g5 1.8ghz or for $2000 a dual powermac g5
> 1.8ghz
>
> the imac has the advantage of having a monitor etc all
> in one. the dual powermac gives ben something fun to
> fine tune smp and calculate pi to millions of decimal
> places. which always amuses me.
>
> Please discuss this matter. I think bens feedback would
> be handy.
I would expect a speed bump on the iMacs sooner or later, maybe it's
worth waiting a bit ... :)
Ben.
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