PowerMac G5 Quad Core and OS 9.2.2 - Any group of enthusiasts on this?

[Naiw]

Actually I find this very odd cause it’s the total opposite of my own experience.

I didn’t feel the x86 macs caught up with the G5 quad until around 2009/2010.

well i never used a quad G5 so there you go.. i have the single CPU 1.8ghz pci-x G5 now, but i didnt even own a G5 untill i purchased this one cheap around the time snow leopard arrived. but even it sucks way too much AC $$ juice for my liking, and was somewhat unstable; i cant imagine what the quads would have pulled from 2005-2008
im sure alot of G5 users electric bills were pretty high in that time period!

in 2006, for the work i was doing, the intel powered imacs machines were a godsend
for me it felt like the first REALLY capable multi-thread multi-cpu computer.. and i was like wow! now THIS
is what the dual G4's were trying to be... but failing at it hard. i really REALLY disliked the UI changes tthat were introduced with leopard 10.5, but Tiger was perfect for me at the time.

tiger on intel was fanastic for what i was doing at the time, which was quickly cmd-tabbing around different adobe/macromedia apps aswell as 3d / Photoshop / Illustrator / After Effects Graphics
 
i had the pleasure of using the first Mac Pro's running Tiger, and i was in awe; but! i still loved mac os 9 and was still upset they couldnt have let os9 continue on seperately for those that cared for the old os, u know, the way mac had the Apple II + Macintosh seperate lines back in the day.. i never understood why they couldnt continue to support + develop the old os for those people that chose to use it still!

http://www.oldschooldaw.com/forums/index.php/topic,147.0.html
2006 seems so far away now when i think about it!
i might have to dig up that old post i did on the forum here about hacking tiger onto the 2008 imac i have!
http://www.oldschooldaw.com/forums/index.php/topic,308.msg454.html
i thought i posted about it on m9lives but maybe my post was nuked by a certain spaniard

I have a 1.8Ghz PCI-X G5 as well (the very first released) and yes I can agree it's not all that impressive when it comes to performance.

I don't know why people keep yabbling about power bills for the G5s weren't that bad..
 
First generation 970 * 1.8 GHz PowerPC 970, 42 Watt

(These numbers are from IBM, and unlike Intel who only give the values of how much energy dissipates as heat, IBMs numbers are the total power consumption- so heat radiated is of course lower)

The next generations improved on this significantly (especially when not loaded as they could more gracefully scale down frequency)
I can't find exact digits at the moment but I think the quad PowerPC 970MP (Technically two 970MPs as the 970MP was a dual core chip) had a PEAK consumption of 100W (per CPU)- typical usage was more in the region of 40-50W per cpu.

If you look up the numbers you see neither is actually significantly higher than the G4 systems, however the G5s had huge number of expansion ports as well as firewire 400 and 800 so when fully loaded the machine could absolutely draw up to 600W or something like that but that has nothing to do with the CPU.
(And if you look up the dual core G4s you'll see they in a similar region)

And if you look up the cpu used in the first Mac Pro you'll see it's absolutely no more power efficient.

111.45W at peak load- compared to typical consumption of 65W of the Xeon in the Mac Pro 1,0.

[macStuff]

the Pentium II/III was really easy on power.. as was the 286/386/486
thats why i like the idea of using a 286/386 for a DOS based MIDI Seqeucner..
while composing .. then switching on whatever mac when im ready to mix and record

trust me the "Specs" on power on the g5 dont reflect reality  maybe its because i was using alot of peripherals but my draw was closer to like 200-300w from the single 1.8ghz g5

i tested the power draw of all my machines myself back in early 2015 and the g5 was one of the worst

[Naiw]

Tested using what?

[darthnVader]

Tested using what?

I had a 1.8 Ghz G5 Tower, the "cheap" one with the 600mhz bus. It took around 700watts at boot. My power was out for 8 days due to an ice storm, and I rigged up a generator with two car batteries a tiller, a 60 amp Ford alt, and a 750w inverter. The G5 and an 17" LCD would pull enough that nothing else could be plugged in.

It was still a great machine, and well worth what I paid for it $1600 with tax new from the Apple store in Charlotte.

I built my first Hackintoch  with the first Developer preview of Tiger on and old Dell P4, and it was fun just to hack the OS, but not really useful. However, after I Tiger shipped, I built an AMD box and hacked the Mac OS onto it, 2Ghz 64bit Athlon  with PCIE.

Had maybe $300 in the whole system, it was night and day faster than the G5, at everything I could throw at it.

That's just the way things go, a CPU a few months newer can really do a lot more, the G5 just never scaled. It was a great value when it shipped. Faster than x86, but x86 very soon surpassed it, and IBM could never produce a chipset with low enough power to be viable in a Laptop for the G5.

Apple's bread and butter at the time was laptops, that is where the market was, and that's where they were making the most money. Any Core2 will smash any G4 or G5 at just about anything you want to throw at it, and consume much less power doing it.

[macStuff]

Tested using what?

i could show u a pic but its just a power meter you can buy at any hardware store that plugs into a socket and provides an LCD screen showing how much power its suckin back

[Naiw]

Tested using what?

i could show u a pic but its just a power meter you can buy at any hardware store that plugs into a socket and provides an LCD screen showing how much power its suckin back

Ok, personally I don't trust watt meters of that type the majority don't measure RMS Watt and because of the reactive power in switching power supplies it will be inaccurate.

But however, I'm not saying the G5 is energy efficient. I just think it's silly that people use the electricity bill as an argument for not using the G5. Performance come at a cost and regardless of what angle you use the G5 was significantly faster than the top model G4s (I can agree on that the first generation, especially the uni core versions wasn't that much of an upgrade though).
But I can say for pretty certain that todays workstations use as much if not more and people don't complain about that now. (They offer more performance per watt, true. but in absolute numbers the cost per hour wouldn't be significantly different)

The actual processor was never the reason we didn't get a laptop version of the G5. Apple would never even started the work on the U3Lite northbridge if the math was against it.

Anyhow the absolute max power consumption of a 1.8 Ghz G5 would be 600W (it's PSU can't deliver more) and 1000W for a dual 2.7/quad G5.

[macStuff]

well unfortunately electricity does cost money PER MONTH.. ongoing
and logic deduced it to being not the best way for me to use my resources..
you can draw your own conclusions of course
im just sharing what happened to me in my life !

cheers

[Jubadub]

@MacStuff On a side note, Panther wasn't available for the Quad. Also, the difference in performance, and not just because of processors alone, between your G5 and the Quad G5 are simply without comparison. Naiw is right: it wasn't until much later when Intel Macs, in terms of hardware, started to really catch up to it (Quad). Incidentally, I believe Intel started shipping their spying and extremely-flawed (in terms of security exploits) IME (Intel Management Engine) starting with the Core 2 Duo, no? And while on the Duo (but not later) the IME could be hacked out, that'd also kill the ability to boot OS X (AFAIK), making any Intel Mac pointless in this regard, and the hardware, which is what would be left over, would also be useless, as there are far, FAR better x86 IME/PSP-free GNU+Linux boxes out there (using the ASUS KGPE-D16 motherboard).

But that misses all the points completely. One of the really awesome things about the Quad is its ability to still run Tiger (and Leopard), which, while awesome by itself, also contains Classic, giving us native (although virtualized) support for an absurdly vast library of classic, juicy, "real" Mac OS software, all impossible on any Intel Mac, even though emulators exist (for which you don't even need a Mac in the first place. I have System 7.5.5 and Mac OS 8.1 on a PSP myself, even). And this is just one little example.

This isn't simply a thrill or however other oversimplified, belittling way in which you put it: Having native, non-virtualized OS 9 running on a G5, particularly the Quad, is an excellent move forward as far as pushing OS 9 usability and purposefulness goes. You also are forgeting the end users, which includes, but does not limit to, the people that make it happen.

In your posts, you seemed to assume to know what it all is that is or could be attractive to make OS 9 on G5 possible for each and every one of us, and what is so awesome about having and using G5s in general, particularly in regard to the Quad, but, with all respect, and with all blunt and due honesty, you don't know. Don't assume your point-of-view to be so equally or even similarly applicable to others. (Just having another opinion, though, is obviously fine.)

[darthnVader]

@MacStuff On a side note, Panther wasn't available for the Quad. Also, the difference in performance, and not just because of processors alone, between your G5 and the Quad G5 are simply without comparison. Naiw is right: it wasn't until much later when Intel Macs, in terms of hardware, started to really catch up to it (Quad). Incidentally, I believe Intel started shipping their spying and extremely-flawed (in terms of security exploits) IME (Intel Management Engine) starting with the Core 2 Duo, no? And while on the Duo (but not later) the IME could be hacked out, that'd also kill the ability to boot OS X (AFAIK), making any Intel Mac pointless in this regard, and the hardware, which is what would be left over, would also be useless, as there are far, FAR better x86 IME/PSP-free GNU+Linux boxes out there (using the ASUS KGPE-D16 motherboard).

But that misses all the points completely. One of the really awesome things about the Quad is its ability to still run Tiger (and Leopard), which, while awesome by itself, also contains Classic, giving us native (although virtualized) support for an absurdly vast library of classic, juicy, "real" Mac OS software, all impossible on any Intel Mac, even though emulators exist (for which you don't even need a Mac in the first place. I have System 7.5.5 and Mac OS 8.1 on a PSP myself, even). And this is just one little example.

This isn't simply a thrill or however other oversimplified, belittling way in which you put it: Having native, non-virtualized OS 9 running on a G5, particularly the Quad, is an excellent move forward as far as pushing OS 9 usability and purposefulness goes. You also are forgeting the end users, which includes, but does not limit to, the people that make it happen.

In your posts, you seemed to assume to know what it all is that is or could be attractive to make OS 9 on G5 possible for each and every one of us, and what is so awesome about having and using G5s in general, particularly in regard to the Quad, but, with all respect, and with all blunt and due honesty, you don't know. Don't assume your point-of-view to be so equally or even similarly applicable to others. (Just having another opinion, though, is obviously fine.)

It would be relatively trivial to  make drivers for USB2, FW800, or Airport extreme for OS 9, yet no one has done it.

With the G5, we're talking about drivers for basically everything on the logic board, once we get past the CPU incompatibilities alone. Then you'd have to worry about if our multi threaded apps could make use of more than 2 cores.

We're talking about machines that are around 15 years old, who, that has the programming skills  is going to hack together all the things needed to make OS 9 run on a G5 with no real financial incentive to do it?

I'm not going to say OS 9 will never run on a G5, never is a long time, but how many of them will still be working machines, and how useful will they really be, most importantly, how many people will chose to even run OS 9 on them?

I think there are a few people on this board with the knowledge to get the basic system up and running, but I think it will only be to say that it could be done, not that it would be all that useful to anyone by the time that ever happens. 

[Jubadub]

Oh, mostly for enthusiasts, which, when accounted for throughout the whole globe, would mean probably less than a thousand? Maybe a few thousands? Certainly not too many, but it's been surprising me lately, upon research, how actively people still seek out those machines in all online stores globally, from eBay (especially in the US) to other similar websites in Brazil, Pakistan and the rest of Asia, and UK and the rest of Europe, and probably everywhere else, too.
Also, yeah, naturally, OS 9 on any G5 may never happen. Probably will never happen, now I realize better than I did some months ago, and I'm sure I'm bound to understand that even better in months to come. And if it is to happen, it may not be "worth it", too. All that is... evident, after all that everyone brought up so far.

But my main points on the previous post weren't any of that. They were:
1. Problems about every Intel Mac, both in software and hardware levels;
2. Why OS 9 on G5 would be awesome, even if the endeavor of importing it is close to being a fairy tale.
3. The non-global applicability of macStuff's PoV.