The Hindu : Apple brings fastest, most powerful PC to India

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Thursday, Aug 21, 2003

National

National

Apple brings fastest, most powerful PC to India

By Anand Parthasarathy

New Delhi Aug. 20. It's a data-hungry wolf in sheep's clothing and it takes huge "bytes" — 64-bits wide — at a time. Apple's latest personal computer, the Power Mac G5, as of now the most powerful and arguably the world's fastest desktop machine, was launched in India today.

The G5 is also the first machine in this class to crunch numbers in strings of 64 ones and zeroes rather than 32, inaugurating a new era of 64-bit computing for the mass consumer desktop market. This makes it a key inflection point in personal computing, which began a quarter century ago with 8-bit machines, then graduated to 16-bit processors in the early 1980s and to 32-bit systems in the late 1980s. Sixty-four bit processing has been available for high-end machines like servers but this is the first time it is being offered for the desktop PC that the majority of the world's users are familiar with.

Unveiling the new Power Mac range — three models using different speed versions of the IBM-developed G5 chip at clock speeds ranging from 1.6

GHz to 2.9 GHz — Apple's Product Marketing Manager for Asia Pacific, Richard Ng, said the doubling of the bit string to 64 would enable the computer to work with 18 exabytes (18 billion into billion bytes) of Random Access Memory compared to today's maximum with 32 bit computers, of 4 Gigabytes (four billion bytes). The low end model (1.6 GHz chip, 256 MBRAM, 80 GB hard disk) will cost approximately Rs 1.75 lakhs in India.

The mid range ( 1.8 GHz) model costs just over Rs. 2 lakhs while the top-of-the-line 2 GHz model with dual processors is priced at just over Rs 2.5 lakhs). All three models use Apple's new 1 GHz "front side" bus — the fastest in the industry. This means the data can catch a fast bus for its journey from memory to arithmetic units instead of waiting "on the bench", in a bus stop queue.

This huge jump in memory capability opens the floodgates of applications where high-speed computational arithmetic was called for. The market that would be happiest, Mr. Ng suggested, was Bollywood, which is already using cutting edge tools to create and edit digital multimedia content.

New Adobe plug-in

In a simultaneous announcement in the U.S. today, Adobe, makers of the widely used image editing software, Photoshop, launched a new plug-in (version 7.0.1) that was specifically tailored to exploit the 64-bit capabilities of the new Apple computer. The PowerMacG5 PC is also the launching pad for Apple's new "iChat AV" — an audio video online tool that brings video conferencing capability to the chat function so beloved of teenaged users.

The new software comes with the "picture perfect" iSight personal web camera.

Apple's traditional attention to detail is also evident in the mechanical features and the servicing ergonomics. This correspondent could access almost all installed components just by removing one side plate of the all-aluminium enclosure. To dissipate the heat produced during intensive work cycles, the PC comes with 9 fans which kick in when ever the temperature in any of three zones goes up beyond a set level.

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