Apple’s Power Mac G5 product line continues to pull in positive reviews from nearly every corner of the computing landscape, from mainstream press reviews to reports from special interest users such as scientists and mathematicians. Even government users have had good things to say about Apple’s pro-computers, and today we have another example of that in the form of an article featured in Federal Computing Weekly. From the article:
"The 64-bit G5 processor lets you use way more main memory and to do certain types of computations that aren’t feasible with a 32-bit chip," said Todd Benjamin, Apple product manager for the Power Mac G5. The size of main memory is related to the processor because 32-bit chips max out at 4G of RAM.
"It is good for somebody who is using video or manipulating large images in [Adobe Systems Inc.] PhotoShop," Benjamin said. "These applications will benefit from large amounts of main memory. Anyone who works with 3-D models will benefit because you can manipulate those images in memory instead of using the hard drive."
The chip is also tuned to attack the floating-point calculations that are important for many scientific applications. The chip can produce as many as four floating-point results in a clock cycle in ideal circumstances. "That is one of the reasons Virginia Tech liked this processor," Benjamin said. The university built one of the world’s fastest supercomputers last year by linking Power Macs together in a cluster.
But, Benjamin emphasizes, although Power Mac G5 machines can be used to create a supercomputer, the machines are designed to give desktop PC users more power in everyday applications. So far, the benefits of 64-bit computing have been limited to scientific workstations and PC servers running Intel Corp.’s Xenon processors. But even running existing 32-bit applications, the G5 is much faster than the G4.
There’s also an interesting anecdote about how a government office was able to continue working while many other Windows based offices were busy with virus problems. The article is a good read, so stop be FCW.com for the full story.
The Mac Observer Spin:
It amazes us that more government offices haven’t caught on to using Mac and OS X, especially in light of the many insecurities presented by Windows. It’s not like the problems that Windows has had is any secret, and the results of some of those problems can be seen in e-mail inboxes around the world, including those of the federal government.
It would almost seem that security is not the utmost concern of those whose job it is to see that our tax dollars are wisely spent. Having government workers sitting idle while IT folks combat viruses does not strike us as an optimum use of our dollars. The argument that it will cost money to swap out PCs for Macs could quickly be put to rest the first time an office survives a viral attack without noticing there was one. Employees doing meaningful work that might otherwise sit idle during an attack could more than pay for any upgrade to Macs. Once done, each time a virus is released can be counted as money saved by Switching.
Be that as it may, we are happy to see that some government offices have Switched and proven that Macs can coexist in a PC world quite well. We look forward to seeing more government offices making the Switch.