Steve Jobs introduces PowerPC G3 and Apple Online Store 1997
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Transcript
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They're not fond of rules, and they have no respect for the status quo.
You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them.
But the only thing you can't do is ignore them.
Because they change things.
They push the human race forward.
And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius.
Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.
Thanks.
Hopefully you've seen that commercial a few times.
Thank you.
We get to spend some time together this morning.
We've got some pretty exciting things to announce today.
And so we'll get going.
Everybody's been up all night getting ready for this.
So if something doesn't work or I forget something, I apologize in advance.
Think Different is our ad campaign.
It's also something that's really, we are taking to heart.
And we're thinking different about everything we do as Apple Computer Inc.,
about the products we make, about how we make them, about how we sell them.
And I've been at Apple now about four months.
And I have had the privilege of working with some really great people,
many in this audience today.
and people have been working around the clock to bring us some of the things we're seeing today.
So let's get started. Think different. We're going to think really different.
And these are the symbols of what we're going to think different about.
If you go to the Apple website, it's been down for the last 24 hours,
and people are wondering what these things mean.
Let's take a look at what they mean. The first one, a cookie.
What's that mean?
A very different chip.
Very different chip.
We are very pleased today to announce our very different chip,
which is this thing.
It is the PowerPC G3 processor.
G3 means Generation 3.
It is the third generation PowerPC processor.
This processor has been developed by the partnership put in place several years ago
by Motorola, Apple, and IBM.
And contrary to what you may read,
this partnership is alive and very healthy
and is turning out some wonderfully sweet things.
As a matter of fact, we're hitting sort of a sweet spot
in the PowerPC in the next few years,
especially compared with the Pentium.
And so we've got this incredible new chip.
This chip gets loaded onto a daughter board
with cache memory.
And this little daughter board is the module
that we use in all of our products.
Now, this is not a normal cache memory.
It's called a backside cache.
And what a backside cache is, for those of you that are not familiar with it,
is instead of putting the cache, the second-level cache,
on the same bus that you use to get to the PCI peripherals and the main memory,
it's got its own separate bus.
And that enables the overall throughput to be 2 to 3x what it has been before backside caches.
So these products basically scream.
Now, how do they scream?
Well, let's compare them.
We're announcing two speed versions of the G3 today, a 233 megahertz and a 266.
We're going to compare the fastest one of those, the 266, with the fastest Intel processor available today,
which is a Pentium II running at 300 megahertz.
And that module is Intel's processor and cache assembly that they ship to all their customers.
Well, the first thing we notice is that the PowerPC G3 is dramatically smaller.
It's 67 square millimeters versus 203.
Now, why is that important? Well, it's important for cost, but much more important, it's important for speed and power, i.e. heat.
And as you see, the G3 draws 6 watts compared to 43 watts for the Pentium II.
You can fry an egg on this thing.
So, why is that important? Why is that important?
Well, it's important because of portables.
You cannot get a portable with a Pentium II in it today.
I mean, here's the module right here.
I've got one here.
This thing draws twice as much power as a G3 portable.
Just this.
So you can't put them in portables,
and they're next generation.
The chutes, I think, is called.
You can probably...
the portable prototypes we've seen have two fans in them.
So power's pretty important.
And on power, we've got, we're a third the size,
and we're a seventh the power.
What about performance?
We love bite marks.
We think they're a pretty stable benchmark that's pretty good.
And we toast them on integer performance,
and we are faster than them on floating point.
We're 44% faster on integer performance,
and 15% faster on floating point performance.
And that's at 266 MHz compared with 300 MHz for the Pentium 2.
So we've got a lot of headroom to take the speed up,
and you'll see that coming over the next several months.
When you put it in a system, here's what you get.
We ran, I think, 16 different Photoshop tasks, Photoshop 4.0 tasks,
which is, you know, very common things that our customers do.
When you look at a Pentium 2 running at 266 MHz,
it's about a little over 800 seconds.
When you go up to the 300 megahertz Pentium,
you cut 100 seconds off of that.
When you go to a G3 running at 266,
you cut 100 seconds off of that.
So we are extraordinarily pleased
with the performance of these products.
Now, what are we putting them in?
We're putting them in some wonderful products.
Three.
Number one, the desktop.
We've got a G3 desktop.
Two, mini tower.
And three, power book.
So we got all three.
These products have been re-engineered from the ground up,
and they've been re-engineered from the ground up
to take the performance level that's only been available
on our $5,000 and $6,000 products
and bring it down into the sweet spot mid-range of our product line.
And so these products start at $1,999.
And most of the ones we'll sell will range from $19.99 to about $29.99.
Now the portable, the PowerBook, our current PowerBook,