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DMN: So anyway, continue.
Rubinstein: So in any case, our high-end system is dual 2 GHz, the fastest 64-bit processors today. We have gigahertz frontside busses, which can support 8GB per second of bandwidth per processor. 128 bit wide 400 MHz DDR RAM for up to 6.4GB per second of memory bandwidth, AGP 8x Pro, Hypertransport interconnect to the I/O, three PCI-X slots, our standard I/O with Gigabit Ethernet, FireWire 800, etc., disk interfaces are 1.5GB per second serial ATAs, each drive has its own. So this is a monster machine. The processor itself can fly over 200 instructions simultaneously, it has multiple floating unit, multiple integer units, 10 execution units total. So it's a floating point monster. It's just a really fast machine. You put that all together in a very competitive product with aggressive-design cooling, so the machine is quiet. Our high end config is a dual gigahertz machine, half a gig of memory, 4x SuperDrive, ATI Radeon 900-whatever Pro card [ATI Radeon 9600 Pro with 64MB of DDR SDRAM] , and that sells for $2999. It's a thousand dollars less than an equivalently configured 3.06 GHz Xeon machine from the price leader, which is Dell.
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DMN: Can you help me understand how the software is backward compatible? 32-bit software works with this processor -- will all Mac software work with this machine?
Rubinstein: Yes. The machine was designed very specifically so that any G4 application will run just fine on it -- no problem. However, if you take your application and you optimize it to the G5, you will get that much more performance out of it. So we see tremendous performance jumps. For example, this morning we had Photoshop demonstrated by Adobe, we had Luxology demonstrating their stuff, Mathematica, and EMagic (which is our music software) -- were all demonstrating what they've accomplished in the G5. All of them running somewhere between 2.1 and 2.3 times the dual processor 3.06GHz Xeon, except for the Emagic, where the music which was done by BT for the Matrix trailer, couldn't even run on the PC. It was too complicated, that piece of music. But it just smokes on the G5.
DMN: How much of an advantage will you get -- you're talking about if you have a 32-bit application and then you optimize it for 64-bit processors. What sort of a percentage increase in speed would you notice if it's optimized like you're taking about?
Rubinstein: It's really application dependent, and what kind of effort you go through to optimize it. There are various levels of optimization. The first benefit from 64 is really clear. That's that you get over 4GB of memory. We've finally broken through that barrier, and these machines support, with today's memory technologies, 8GB of the latest RAM. And that's a really big deal for many of our content creation people. That's number one. Number two is that we've taken advantage of some of the 64-bit math that goes on inside the processor. So we've upgraded some of the libraries, and that's a continuing effort, that we'll put a lot more effort into it going forward.
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