Supercomputers have helped achieve breakthroughs in almost every field of science. But almost no one outside the scientific community could possibly need one. Or so it was thought. That was before Photoshop filters started resembling the most sophisticated image processing done by NASA. And before Internet security started demanding CIA-strength cryptography. And before compressing QuickTime or MP3 files started expanding your workday. These tasks, and many more like them, have two things in common: They choke traditional processors. And they can be dramatically sped up by exactly the kind of computational horsepower that supercomputers were created to provide. But who has the money, or even the space, to have a personal supercomputer? The first supercomputer on a chip What makes a supercomputer “super” is its ability to execute at least one billion floating-point operations per second. It’s a staggering measure of speed known as a “gigaflop.” The new PowerPC G4, architected by Apple, Motorola and IBM, is the first microprocessor that can deliver a sustained performance of over one gigaflop. In fact, it has a theoretical peak performance of four gigaflops. That’s pretty phenomenal when you consider the fact that it was less than two years ago that the University of California at Irvine’s Aeneas Project, for instance, custom-built a one-gigaflops supercomputer for $50,000. Think how many Power Mac G4s you can buy with that kind of money. The Velocity Engine The secret of the G4’s revolutionary performance is its aptly named Velocity Engine. It’s the heart of a supercomputer miniaturized onto a sliver of silicon. The Velocity Engine can process data in 128-bit chunks, instead of the smaller 32-bit or 64-bit chunks used in traditional processors (it’s the 128-bit vector processing technology used in scientific supercomputers—except that we’ve added 162 new instructions to speed up computations). In addition, it can perform four (in some cases eight) 32-bit floating-point calculations in a single cycle—two to four times faster than traditional processors. The PowerPC G4 with Velocity Engine works with the PowerPC architecture to accelerate the data-intensive processing required by next-generation video, voice and graphics applications. Among the G4 key features is a vector permute function capable of rearranging data in the registers—a priceless benefit when converting data from one format to another (often necessary with voice, video and graphics apps, which typically need to save data in a number of different formats). These vector processing acceleration advantages give the G4 microprocessor a significant edge when it comes to fast visualization of large data sets, and intensive math for real-time simulations. Making the G4 perfect for everything from graphics and 3D games to astronomy, the biosciences and predictive modeling. So how does the G4 with its Velocity Engine stack up against Intel’s brand-new Pentium III processor? To find out, we went right to the source: We used a set of Intel’s own performance tests published on their web site. Using six of Intel’s tests, the 500MHz G4 was, on average, almost three times as fast as the 600MHz Pentium III (2.94 times, to be exact). These benchmark advantages translate directly into real-world advantages. For example, typical Photoshop tasks run twice as fast on the Power Mac G4 as they do on the fastest Pentium III-based PCs, with specific Photoshop filters running up to four times faster.* Compressing QuickTime files is also twice as fast. In fact, “twice as fast” is a refrain you’re going to be hearing often, as more and more software developers tap the power of the G4 with its Velocity Engine to accelerate the performance of their applications—just as Adobe has already done with Photoshop. Because gigaflops really do matter when your work revolves around graphics, animation, 3D games, video effects, 3D rendering and a host of other computation-hungry software. Chances are, you’ve never even heard of a gigaflop before. But very soon you won’t be able to live without at least one on your desk. *Suite of 10 Photoshop filters.		The PowerPC G4 Velocity Engine can process information in 128-bit chunks, compared to the 32- or 64-bit chunks in traditional processors. See the new G4 ad in QuickTime. Taking Advantage of the Velocity Engine “Currently, the G4 is significantly faster than any platform we’ve seen running Photoshop 5.5,” said John E. Warnock, chairman and CEO of Adobe. “The combination of the G4’s speed, the Apple Cinema Display, and Adobe InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator and Acrobat embodies the professional publisher’s dream system.” Other developers report similar performance boosts. DVD Fusion from Sonic Solutions allows non-linear video editing systems to publish content directly on DVD. SoundJam MP from Casady & Greene features much faster file conversion to MP3 format with greatly enhanced visual plug-ins. Animation Stand 4.1 from Linker, Media Cleaner Pro from Terran Interactive and Amorphium from Play MPEG Power Professional from Heuris all offer substantial speed increases. For the benefit of computer history buffs, Apple’s association with supercomputers goes back to the company’s early days. Story has it that Seymour Cray—founder of Cray Research and father of several generations of supercomputers—heard that Apple had bought a Cray to simulate computer design. Cray was amused, remarking, “Funny, I am using an Apple to simulate the Cray-3.” You’ll find Power Macs out in force in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence at Home project (SETI@home). In fact if you examine the numbers, you’ll see that a disproportionate share of the processing workload—relative to Apple’s share of the personal computer market—is borne by Power Mac computers. Vacuum tubes. Liquid-cooled circuit boards. Drum memories. Miles of wiring, and thousands of circuit boards. By today’s standards, the mastodons of the computer age resembled giant Rube Goldberg contraptions. “The Cray 2 looked even stranger,” Danny Hillis notes in an essay in Forbes magazine. “It bubbled in a bath of fluorocarbon fluid-cooled by artificial blood.” With names like ENIAC, ILLIAC, EDSAC and RAMAC—in a companion piece, Forbes poetically likens these ancestors of the modern supercomputer to a dynastic line of pharaohs—time was when big iron was not just enormous, it was enormously complicated. But times have changed. Now the Power Mac G4 combines the processing speed of a supercomputer with the ease of use of a Macintosh.

Intel Signal Processing Library Performance Specification  Test Pentium III Clock Cycles G4 Clock Cycles G4 Performance G4 Performance (Adjusted for MHz) 1. 1024 dim. Square (bsqr1) 1.30 0.50 2.60 x Faster 2.17 x Faster 2. 1024 dim. Multiply (bMpy2) 1.33 0.75 1.77 x Faster 1.48 x Faster 3. 1024 dim. Dot Prod (DotProd) 2.21 0.50 4.42 x Faster 3.68 x Faster 4. 256 Pt. Complex FFT (FFT) 6.94 4.00 1.74 x Faster 1.45 x Faster 5. 32 tap X 1024 dim. FIR Filter (bFir) 0.95 0.33 2.88 x Faster 2.40 x Faster 6. 32 tap x 1024 dim. Convolution 84.99 11.00 7.73 x Faster 6.44 x Faster Average 16.29 2.85 3.52 x Faster 2.94 x Faster The 500MHz G4 Processor, with Velocity Engine, is an average of 2.94 times as fast as the fastest Pentium III (600MHz) in tests published by Intel to demonstrate Pentium's speed.

Tech Specs | G4 Processor | Graphics Acceleration | Digital Video | Expansion

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