 In 2003, Apple released a 64-bit dual-core 1.8Ghz system: Power Mac G5. In 2023, Apple released a 64-bit dual-core 1.8Ghz system: Apple Watch Series 9. The Watch is faster and has more RAM. The G5 was too hot to put in a laptop. It'd use up S9's battery in under 2 minutes. 25 comments
 @kornel As a grumpy old person*, this is making me wonder how much battery they crammed into an S9. * I was pissed off when Apple made me pay for OS X 10.1, just to get the optimizations they should've shipped on my godawful expensive TiBook up front. @kornel @xek now Iโm imagining someone pulling up to a charging station in their EV and the car dies just a few meters away, but theyโre able to get that last bit by shunting power from their Apple Watch. Like on Star Trek, when they can just reallocate power from other systems and sources to wherever itโs needed. @rfc6919 @kornel @jimbob Same! Let's see โฆ I have a cheap NiMH AAA in front of me; it lists its capacity as 900 mAh; at ~1.2 V that's pretty much 1 Wh. Spending that in 2 minutes gives 30 W. Maybe that could sustain the smallest G5 (CPU only) when it's mostly idling? AFAICT the watch in question holds ~1/3 of that. As 2 minutes was given as a hard upper bound and seems in the right ballpark, I'd say it checks out, but there might be enough wiggle room to reduce that limit to under a minute :)  @kornel @stroughtonsmith I really miss having an universal benchmark software, which can run on all old, new and egzotic hardware to be able to compare the speeds. For example there is none available for Apple Watch or tvOS at all @kornel Good news is that we can put 2GHz system into smartwatch. Bad news is that people are putting 2GHz systems into smartwatch, that 2GHz CPUs are now required for displaying time :-(. You know, battery life still suffers with 2GHz CPUs.You can get month with bangle.js2, or day with Apple...
 @kornel But I still canโt hook my watch up to a screen and keyboard to play my fav q3a modsโฆ  I know I *completely* miss your point here but can't help thinking of the sad part that: @kornel @stroughtonsmith and 21 years before the G5, the ZX Spectrum came out with a 3.5 MHz Z80, an 8-color display and either 16 or 48 kilobytes of RAM. I'd say Moore's Law dramatically slowed (especially for single-core performance) around the time the G5 came out. @Alphacheez Mooreโs law is about transistor count per cost. Nothing to do with clock speed, and only indirectly with performance. (That said, it _has_ slowed.) |
Gregory's Server
@kornel that's awesome, but I think you're missing the point here.
The Power Mac G5 was very difficult to wear on your wrist! I still have shoulder problems from those days.