Item Subject: [HP3000-L] I may be breaking some NDA or another, but...
Alfredo gushes about the new iMac, then laments:

> Problem:  My wife immediately appropriated the iMac (she loved its sleek
> design and solid feeling, as well as the great resolution of its screen).

Even though the 15-inch (13.8 viewable) shadow-mask display has only
a "normal" dot-pitch of .28, it's the vertical refresh rate that
sets it apart:

         640 x 480      117.233 Hz

         800 x 600       94.97 Hz

        1024 x 768       75.03 Hz

If you're going to be in front of a monitor all day long, you might as well
be comfortable doing so.

> We didn't get into discussing the G3 chip that powers it (and that
> reportedly eats Pentium-II chips for lunch, according to Apple's chefs),

In fact, iMac performance exceeds even other same-speed PowerMacs because
of a major architecture change.  To quote from the PDF:

       "The Apple iMac computer is different from previous Macintosh
        computers in that it has no single, large ROM that contains
        the toolbox software, the 68K emulator, hardware initialization,
        and the nanokernel.  A small ROM provides hardware initialization
        functions and provides a mechanism to load the Mac OS Toolbox ROM
        image into RAM.  The new software architecture that is centered
        around ROM-in-RAM and its ramifications has the code name NewWorld."

Since RAM is substantially faster than ROM, performance is increased.

(On a complete aside, this year's MacHack conference yielded an
implementation of the classic game Pong.  No big deal, except that
this version was written entirely in Open Firmware.  OF is present
in all PCI-based PowerMacs, including the iMac.)

For the three of you who care ;) the full tech documentation is under

  < http://developer.apple.com/techpubs/hardware/Developer_Notes/iMac/ >

Select
    iMacDevNote.pdf

(The complete direct-access URL is too long to fit on an 80-char line.)


No computer system is perfect, not even the iMac.  Still, it's
pretty darned amazing how technology has progressed in a fairly
short time.

--Glenn "no, this was not a pre-arranged tag-team Mac post" Cole
  Software al dente, Inc.
  [log in to unmask]

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