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You Say Gflops, I Say Tflops (9/2/99)
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Well, that didn't take long; scant days after Steve Jobs wowed the Seybold crowd by introducing the Power Mac G4 as the first personal "supercomputer," people who work with actual supercomputers are reportedly bristling at Steve's latest marketing move. According to a San Francisco Examiner article, "computer industry experts" claim that the G4 is only a supercomputer by the government's long-outdated standards, and Apple's latest offering falls far short by today's criteria. When confronted with this article, an unnamed government representative stated, "if those high-falutin' scientists think our criteria are out of date, they can just pack up and move to the USSR." (Well, no, not really.)
The G4-as-supercomputer claim, as you know, is based on the processor's gigaflop performance-- it can perform over a billion floating point operations per second. According to the government, that qualifies it as a supercomputer, and as such, it's basically a weapon that can't be exported to sensitive countries. But as one might expect, the government is a tad behind in its definitions, at least according to Karen Green of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. These days, non-government types in the supercomputing field say that performance needs to be more in the teraflop level-- a trillion instructions per second, or a thousand times faster than today's G4. In fact, those same folks are lobbying the government to change the export restrictions, since, as National Science Foundation spokesman Peter West puts it, "gigaflops isn't that fast anymore."
The export restrictions won't change until January at the earliest, however, and in the meantime, the G4-as-supercomputer gambit has scored plenty of free press for Apple, and the export restrictions gave rise to one of the most clever Apple commercials in year. Apple's stock just closed over 70, yet another five-year high and very close to its all-time high. So who cares if academia claims that the G4 is a thousand times slower than today's supercomputers? Hey, all we can say is, it's close enough for government work.
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SceneLink (1758)
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 | | The above scene was taken from the 9/2/99 episode: September 2, 1999: Supercomputer or not, the G4 has captured the headlines, and nothing the NCSA can say will change that. Meanwhile, rumors about Apple's deliberate crippling of the blue and white G3's upgradeability has indignant Mac users seething, and if you're hurting for slots in Apple's line of pro Macs, the Apple Store has a little surprise for you...
Other scenes from that episode: 1759: The Scandal Returns (9/2/99) Oh boy, here we go... For those of you who are starving for controversy in the Apple world of late, a big ol' hornet's nest has been kicked hard and a nasty rumor from a couple of months ago has resurfaced with a vengeance... 1760: The Four-PCI-Slot G4 (9/2/99) Four slots in the G4? It's a well-kept secret, but it's true. And we're not talking about the Yikes! model with the three open slots and the fourth for the graphics card. We're talking about an honest-to-goodness Sawtooth-based G4 with the graphics card in the AGP slot, and four more PCI slots to fill with expandy goodness (or a five-slot box with PCI graphics)...
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