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G4 Cube Q & A:
Technical & Performance
What are the differences between
the Power Mac G4 Cube and the Power Mac G4
Series?
The most obvious difference between the Power Mac G4 Cube and the Power Mac G4 series is the case. The Power Mac G4 series comes in a relatively large, expandable tower case, and the Power Mac G4 Cube comes in a compact 8" cube case with few expansion options. The differences, however, are far greater than case design.
The AGP-based (Sawtooth) Power Macintosh G4 series uses a logic board design with a 300-pin processor daughtercard, a high-speed "MaxBus" system bus, four DIMM RAM slots, three PCI slots, a 2X AGP slot with an ATI Rage 128 Pro video card, support for AirPort wireless networking, onboard FireWire, dual-independent USB ports, Ultra ATA/66 hard drive support onboard, and native DVD support. After installing an internal Zip drive and a single hard drive, there are two remaining 3.5" drive bays.
The Power Macintosh G4 Cube uses a logic board that is derived from the Power Macintosh G4 series, but has only three DIMM RAM slots, no PCI slots, and no free drive bays.
What is Velocity Engine? What makes the Velocity Engine improve performance?
The Velocity Engine is a 128-bit vector processing unit that is part of the PowerPC 74x0 (G4) processor series. Previously associated with expensive supercomputers, Apple explains that "162 new dedicated instructions integrated into silicon can be used to greatly accelerate intensive multimedia and math calculations. [The Velocity Engine] does this by working on a whole set of data simultaneously, rather than one data point at a time. The Velocity Engine also operates completely independent of both the integer unit and the floating-point unit, enabling all three units to process data at the same time."
What graphics subsystem is provided by the Power Mac G4 Cube?
The Power Macintosh G4 Cube features a 16 MB ATI Rage 128 Pro graphics card installed in a dedicated AGP 2X graphics slot. This card includes the new ADC (Apple Display Connector), which carries analog and digital video signals, USB data, and power in the same cable to reduce clutter.
How fast is the Power Macintosh G4 Cube compared to Windows PCs?
Although official benchmarks for the Power Macintosh G4 Cube were not released by Apple, the original Power Macintosh G4/450 is 2.65 times as fast as a 600 MHz Pentium III, and 2.16 times as fast as a 733 MHz Pentium III. One could expect the Power Mac G4/450 Cube to perform similarly, and the Power Mac G4/500 Cube to be slightly faster.
Does the Power Macintosh G4 Cube support dual monitors?
No. The Power Macintosh G4 Cube lacks PCI slots, and therefore, there is no way to add a PCI video card for the second monitor. If dual-monitor capability is a high-priority, you would likely be better served by a model in the Power Macintosh G4 series.
Does the Power Macintosh G4 Cube have a ROM?
Just like the Power Macintosh G4 series, the Power Macintosh G4 Cube does not have the traditional 4 MB ROM of earlier Macs, but it does have a Boot ROM that is around 1 MB. This is referred to as the ROM-in-RAM or "NewWorld" approach.
Apple describes the new method by saying that "a small ROM contains the code needed to initialize the hardware and load an operating system. The rest of the system code that formerly resided in the Mac OS ROM is loaded into RAM from disk or from the network. . . High-level software resides in an image called the Mac OS ROM that is read into RAM before the Mac OS begins operation. Once the Mac OS begins operation, the Mac OS ROM image in RAM behaves in the same way that the corresponding code in ROM formerly did." (Apple Dev. Note, p. 64).
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