Lousy Late Night Overview of a Power Mac G5 Quad
2005 was the year of the dual core. AMD had introduced their Athlon 64 X2 and dual core Opterons to the world, while Intel scrambled to rush the Pentium D and the dual core Xeon in response. IBM and Apple certainly took note of this momentum, which brought us the PowerPC 970MP processor line. These dual core processors consolidated the costly dual processor Power Mac G5s into a much more accessible package, which relied on a half-clock HyperTransport link to allow the cores to communicate with each other.
That’s not to say that Apple wanted to do away with the dual processor machines entirely. With the Power Mac G5 already supporting a watercooling setup, they instead opted to slap two 2.5GHz PowerPC 970MPs into a single furnace of a machine that would cost you, at minimum, an eye-watering $3200. And I only paid $180 for this hulking behemoth that’s old enough to vote. That’s a price to pay for a machine, but for one that has caught my eye since I was in 5th grade, I was willing to pony up when I was able to justify a relatively short drive from Lexington, Kentucky to somewhat nearby Louisville.
I don’t have much to say about the computer in this video. I decided to see what I’d have on the top of my head to say about it - not much, apparently. Maybe I’ll revisit this with a more thought-out video soon enough.
