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You want a Motorola E1000 - accepts transflash card, has a stereo headphone jack, plays mp3s(as well as movies- and records them, 1.2mpixel camera) Moto E1000

Most of the instructors were using stock Motorola class stuff, some of which wasn't great, but if you have a good instructor that can make up for it.

The best instructor was James Lee from Onsight.com who had a bunch of custom Perl (beginning and advanced), CGI, TCL, and a few others, all of which were outstanding. These are the guys that wrote Hacking Linux Exposed and I recently got Open Source Web Development with LAMP that is just excellent, and really mirrors their training skills.

I don't know if they do classes outside of Motorola (their web page seems to indicate they do), but I'd highly recommend them.

In general, if you work at a big enough company, they probably have good internal training classes available, or can send you to classes that are good outside.

I'd be wary trying to pick one on your own, though. I had very bad luck with some "big names" like Learning Tree which seem to just cobble together classes quickly, and try to debug them with you as the guinea pigs at hundreds of dollars a pop.

Technical Library

PowerPC FAQ

Lightsoft: Beginners Guide to PowerPC Assembly Language

March 95 - Balance of Power: Introducing PowerPC Assembly Language

PowerPc Architecture

PowerPC Library

The Metroworks Code Warrior documentation also has some helpful stuff. I found a copy online a while ago, but it's gone now.

All you have to do is go to the Motorola site and look a bit: http://www.mot.com/SPS/RISC/smartnetworks/arch/pow erpc/doclib.htm

Yeah, I'd love to see a tiny sized board based on the nForce chipset. GeForce graphics, 5.1 audio, AMD cpu...mmmmm.

There's been an emerging form factor in the SBC (Single Board Computer) world recently, known as EBX. It's a 5.75" x 8.00" board built to be racked, stacked and expanded. They even have tiny pci cards (pc/104-plus). I'd love to see more consumer PCs based on these specs (especially an nForce one!). Great for those PCs you've always wanted to scatter around the house.

Plus, you could case-mod your old Star Wars lunch box.

I disagree. Capitalism has provided me, the US consumer, with choices. I can choose what cellular phone protocol I wish to use. In my case, I've chosen iDEN because I believe its a better protocol than GSM and CDMA. I'd rather have this choice than have a government tell me what protocol I WILL use. I fail to see how a government funded wireless network would be better than what we have now? All that would end up happening is that taxpayers would be forced to pay for cellular infastructure whether or not they chose to use it. Would imposing such a burden and removing the element of choice be worth having coverage in remote sparsely populated backcountry areas? I think not. Its also important to point out that, wireless networks in europe are privatized, just the protocol has been dictated by the government, so in any one country there are usually two or more GSM networks each owned by seperate companies (sometimes one is a state monopoly) Granted GSM has its strong points like SIM cards and the convenience that comes from it being a standard, however, it is my view (and that of most capitalists) that a standard should exist because the market decided upon it than because a government dictated it.

oh yeah, it's called HA-Linux (HA==High Availability).

I chalenge any one to show me 5 nine M$windows, From my personnal anecdotal experience, I would find it too hard to believe.

Now how much did you say that mobo cost? Ironically, I could only find Intel mobos on the Motorola ATX page . Nothing showed up on pricewatch. 11,700 matches for G4 Motherboard on google, barf, I give up.

Help me out, I'm as interested as the next guy in cheap computers.

Not to mention that in the Europe, cell phone technology was developed first. In fact the first ever deployment of a cell phone system happened in the Britian, with the help of phone giant Nokia.

It's true that the US is losing it's traditional technical lead to the upstarts like Linux and Nokia.

Here's Motorola's G4 fact sheet. The real lowdown on the G4 is here. Especially check out the hardware spec. (The link seems to be broken or something, though. I looked at it a few weeks ago :(

The TotalImpact page doesn't say what speed they run the L2 cache at. (The PDF spec sheet link is broken :( G4s support a range of clock divisors for the external L2 cache SRAMs, from 1:1 to 4:1. Apple uses 2:1 in their towers. (BTW, the cache RAM is external, but the control logic and stuff is all on chip.)
#define X(x,y) x##y

Here's Motorola's G4 fact sheet. The real lowdown on the G4 is here. Especially check out the hardware spec. (The link seems to be broken or something, though. I looked at it a few weeks ago :(

The TotalImpact page doesn't say what speed they run the L2 cache at. (The PDF spec sheet link is broken :( G4s support a range of clock divisors for the external L2 cache SRAMs, from 1:1 to 4:1. Apple uses 2:1 in their towers. (BTW, the cache RAM is external, but the control logic and stuff is all on chip.)
#define X(x,y) x##y

Here you go

Of course, since Moto is not in the desktop market, these are embedded mobos...

Ah, I see... yes, that IS expensive .. I didn't realise how much :) ..

Actually since writing that post of mine I started to search around the net for stuff relating to powerpc mainboards etc, not just apple offerings. I came across this:

Motorola PowerPC ATX board which looks really great, especially the part about dual 604e's at 400Mhz ... might be quite a nice system.

I can't seem to find a place to buy them online (or even get prices so I could price a system up) but I might try and get some info from that website themselves.

--

Now call me a cynic but doesn't this tell you something about the immediate future of LEO communications? Craig McCaw efectivelly controls all the cards now that Iridium is gone He was there from the beginning in Teledesic and has stepped into ICO effectively making the market a monopoly. In my experience monopolies do nothing to drive prices down so ICO and Teledesic are going to be far from affordable for a good long while - and what if both fail to meet expectations?

I just don't want to see 100 odd LEO birds up in the sky with no one paying for them to be brought to earth safely and their orbits decaying and either disrupting other services or burning up in the outer atmosphere. I saw a quote saying that these satellites are the size of a Volkswagen Beetle so that's quite a lot to burn up safely.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for wireless fast Internet access but I feel strongly that earth based UMTS or 3rd Generation GSM is going to be the way to go - it offers speeds around 3 times that of ISDN while moving and upto 2Mbps while stationary and doesn't need handsets that take us back to the old Motorola brick phones.

maybe you should look harder. the source code for hot swapping linux kernel mods are available here (http://www.mcg.mot.com/cfm/templates/swDetails.cf m?PageID=704&SoftwareID=6) ...they also give it out on cdrom.

yeah..theyre here (http://www.mcg.mot.com/cfm/templates/swdetail.cfm ?PageID=682&PageTypeID=10&SoftwareID=6). ....

The new CPU also has a second UART, and support for 2 banks of 32MB SDRAM... so we can also look forward to more memory.

Then why would Motorola bother to provide backwards compatibility with the G4? The only docs I could find to that effect on short notice were here. I know it's not a particularly clear reference, but I could probably find more, given some time. IIRC, the G5 is Motorola's 64-bit processor. One variant of the G5 will be for embedded systems, and another will be designed for personal computers.

the G4 is already out.

So are many of the processors mentioned in the article. If the predicted 1 GHz Athlon is newsworthy, so are the forthcoming higher-speed G4's. As always, that's just my opinion; I could be wrong.

The helpful answer: Try the Motorola PowerPC 601 User's Manual to learn the instruction set and architecture. This is the definitive reference, nobody bothers to write anything after this. A PPCAsm compiler comes w/ Metrowerks' Discover Programming.

The discouraging answer: If you don't already own CodeWarrior, you probably have some other stuff to learn first.

The distrustful answer: Why is your homepage www.ms.com? Maybe I shouldn't tell you this...

For many people not wedded to the desktop metaphor, the cellular phone route is much more convenient as an internet appliance than personal computers or their retarted cousins, the set-top box. NTT DoCoMo has had great success with i-MODE, which unlike WAP uses HTML. 2 Million people have signed up so far since service started this year.

It looks like millions of first-time internet users in Japan are taking advantage of some basic server-side services to leapfrog the whole modem thing. Check out Mobile Phone Subscribers to Eclipse NTT's Fixed Telephone Customers. And what can you do with an i-MODE phone? Internet-Capable Mobile Phones Support Games, Music, E-Commerce. And what do you care, anyway? DoCoMo plans i-MODE everywhere. These phones are all under 70g and 70cc. In other words, smaller and lighter than your average Snickers bar. Small screens though :) Next up: high-bandwidth streaming video and music, color displays, Java, etc.

By the way, some simple ideas like Motorola's iTAP can reduce keypad time. And of course new phones have basic voice recognition already.

[space considerations preclude listing all the myriad of companies raking in the bucks by using embedded Linux, the mp3 appliance market is a prime example]

I work at Motorola supporting the MPC821 and MPC823, which is what this camera is based on. Motorola recently announced a new MPC823e which has much larger caches than the original MPC823. The original MPC823 had 2k I cache and 1k D cache. The new MPC823e will have 16k I cache and 8 k D cache. Also, the maximum frequency for the MPC823/MPC823e is currently 81 MHz. If you want more info on the processors, try http://www.mot.com/mpc823, or hang out on comp.sys.powerpc.tech

BTW, that screenphone on our webpage? I've actually played with it, runs pretty damn well. Not Linux, but probably could be if they wanted to.

here, as was previously discussed on slashdot. 450mhz and up are .15 micron copper HiPerMOS. this is partly way they don't eat obseen amounts of power like alphas and x86 chips. can you say 10 watts typical?

SPECint95
K7 700 -- 31.7
PowerPC 7400(G4?) 450 -- 21.4
PIII 600 -- 24

SPECfp95
K7 700 -- 24.0
PowerPC 7400(G4?) 450 -- 20.4
PIII 600 -- 15.9

This info was grabbed from each of the manufacturers pages.

Motorola 7400
Pentium III specfp
PIII specint
K7 specfp
K7 specint

Of course this just gives a rough idea of the performance of each chipset.

Here is the Motorola press release: Link

Motorola's Dragonball page: Link

Wow, the last one didn't work at all. This is how it should look:

Here, just follow the links on the bottom.

No information on the VZ yet though.

Here, just follow the links on the bottom.

No information on the VZ yet though.

If the CPU were the only thing to run (I know, this will exagerate the differences) a battery could last up to twice as long if either the G3 or G4 spent most of its time chilling in the low range of usage. User driven tasks like word processing allow such idling to take advantage of the PPC doze and nap power conservation modes, which is appearantly how Apple can claim 6 hour battery life on the iBooks. Other tasks would certainly run it down faster by preventing either the processor or the disk from idling.

If the CPU were the only thing to run (I know, this will exagerate the differences) a battery could last up to twice as long if either the G3 or G4 spent most of its time chilling in the low range of usage. User driven tasks like word processing allow such idling to take advantage of the PPC doze and nap power conservation modes, which is appearantly how Apple can claim 6 hour battery life on the iBooks. Other tasks would certainly run it down faster by preventing either the processor or the disk from idling.

Other possibility: you could try getting in touch with Groupe Bull or Motorola Computer Group (at http://www.mcg.mot.com/) about that. Both make PowerPC-based boards and computers, though AFAIK they only sell to vendors and not to little saps like us. ;-)

For that matter, if you wait a little, IBM's open hardware specs ought to also generate some interest amoung hardware manufacturers.

Last recommendation: Get in touch with Yellow Dog Linux or LinuxPPC about it. They'd be happy to help you out in finding something, I'm sure. Both are pretty quick in supporting new hardware, as well; though AltiVec is not yet supported (the code has to be "vectorized" first), meaning only that its advantages won't yet make a difference in Linux, that development is already starting to get underway.

Oh, and if you're looking for news and info about Linux for PowerPC Macs, check out my site at http://linux.macnews.de/. :-)

Ethelred

Yep, it's primarily about those three things, in my own personal opinion. During the past couple of years or so, I've often wondered why a Discman-like portable CD player that can play both mp3's and regular CD's, hasn't been brought to market. I even thought quite a bit about building one myself, although I never had the engineering experience to get it off the ground.

Regarding the hardware issue, up until around 18 months ago, it just wasn't very cost effective for most large corporate entities to build a portable device that could do real time, or near-real time audio decompression. A powerful enough DSP, like something out of the Motorola 56300 series, was just too costly to develop a consumer product upon. This is probably the least significant impediment of the three, as consumer technologies will be produced that are outside the domain of the average consumer (HDTV anyone?), nevertheless it was a logical impediment at one time.

Eventually, though, the MPMan and the Diamond Rio were produced, albeit for some comparatively hefty prices. The production of the MPMan probably was of some concern to the various parties "protecting" the rights of artists, but the Rio was really what frightened them. Diamond Multimedia, a fairly large consumer electronics firm, was encroaching upon their interests, so the RIAA took them on in court. We all know what happened. Diamond set legal precedent, but drew some obvious ire from the recording industry by doing so. Since then, Diamond jumped on to the SDMI corporate bandwagon, to make nice with the RIAA and only one other consumer electronics firm- Creative Labs- has brought out a competing product. What about Sony, Panasonic, Sanyo, Sharp and all the other large electronics corporations out there; why haven't they come out with any competing products? Well, one of the main reasons is that a lot of these companies have direct interests within the recording industry. Sony, as we all know, owns a record company. Others are either investors in record companies, or they believe that they stand to lose much from a falling out with the establishment.

Imagine that you're the CEO of one of these corporations. Do you really want to risk getting blacklisted by the recording companies and by doing so, risk investor confidence in your company's stock? I really don't think so. These large companies like certainty. It pays to protect the status quo, especially if you hold all the cards. Bringing out a product that has the ability to play 150 songs on one, lone CD-R, will turn that status quo on its ear. In some places, like in my country, the recording industry has lobbied the government to impose ridiculous taxes on blank audio recording media. It isn't in their best interests for you to be able to hold that many songs on one CD-R. They will do everything in their power to thwart innovation if they stand to lose anything from the introduction of a new technology, such as mp3.

A smaller firm will have to develop a CD-based player on their own and successfully market it to the public. I'm not talking about Pine's offering, but rather, something from a larger, more established company. Until then, however, a device like this will be hard to come by and it will remain comparatively expensive. It will also obviously be looked upon as a device solely for music pirates by the recording industry, as the sheer volume of compressed music that can be fit onto one CD-R, must scare the hell out of them. They've never liked consumers being able to record their own music, so any sort of compressed audio that empowers the consumer, will compound their fears.

One final thing to consider is that such a device can only possibly appeal to people with access to a CD-R recorder. Right now that market really isn't very large when compared with the amount of people who already own some sort of regular CD player. A corporation might argue that a legitimate market for a portable audio device that'll play mp3's off of a CD-R, just isn't there yet. You can't present that argument for devices that make use of non-volatile solid state memory, as they don't require anything other than a PC and a free parallel port, or some other interface, to facilitate data transfer. This is just a lot more convenient for the general public at this time, who are interested in listening to mp3's away from their computer. I would just love to be able to play mp3 CD-R's on my Sony Discman, as I own a CD-R burner, but you have to think about all of the people who don't have immediate access to something like this.

Here's a short summary for those not inclined to look it up for themselves:

450 Mhz 7400(G4) 21.4 SPECint95 20.4 SPECfp95
Intel SE440BX2 Motherboard (550Mhz PIII) 22.3 SPECint95 15.1 SPECfp95
Compaq XP1000 (667Mhz Alpha) 37.5 SPECint95 65.5 SPECfp95

If you want a more modern VME bus PC, then go take a look at CompactPCI hardware -- it's basically PCI in a VME-like formfactor. Ziatech has a whole pile of P2 boards, as do Moto rola and quite a few other vendors. They aren't cheap, though. If we could get cPCI hardware for less than a 100% price premium, I'd be seriously considering them in a lot of places that we're using more traditional rack-mount PCs today.

First, the spec95's have been posted on the G4 or PowerPC MPC7400 as it's really called. They are
~21 for specint at 450mhz and ~20.4 for specfp
The interger is about on par with a PIII but the FP is about 50% faster when comparing to a PIII at the same speed. This doesn't, however, take into account the power of Altivec, or Velocity Engine as Apple is now calling it. As if all that wasn't enough, G4 support a 128 bit bus between processor and main memory. It is also MERSI compliant so it will be a totally bitchin SMP cpu. Look out Xeon.

Second, the use of altivec benchmarks are valid, they are afterall a part of the chip. In fact they are an integral part of the chip. Altivec can do a matrix multiplication in only a few cycles and it can pass up to 4 float or up to 16 interger operations through it in ONE clock cycle. That is power, not vapor benchmarks!

Third, Support for Altivec is as easy as recompiling in Metrowerks. They already have shipping Altivec support.

Fourth, Benchmarks are relative to what you are trying to measure. If you want to measure raw CPU performance, without measureing the performance of the OS or the Memory or the whatever, BYTEmarks ARE a good benchmark. They are just unpopular because the don't go the way that most people want them to! If you want a 'real world' benchmark that is processor intensive, timing a series of Photoshop filters or timing a long rendering is a valid benchmark when the software is optimised for both test systems, as the packages that Apple used are. People are just complaining again because the benchmarks didn't go the way they wanted. Please remember that Intel provides programmers to Adobe to optimise Photoshop for Intel CPU's and not only did Apple humiliate the PIII/600 in photoshop tests, PC Mag also said the G3/400 beat the PIII 500 in 10 of 13 Katmai enhanced plugins and the G4 is faster than the G3 on all levels! Also remember that Apple took the INTEL SUPPLIED benches of PIII that were ment to impress and it made them look pitiful. Some operations were 7X faster on the G4

Fifth, the G4 IS NOT a G3 with Altivec. The core is really different (not different like a PII vs a PIII ;-). Interger performance on G4 is somewhat faster than G3 and the FP is much faster on G4. The Velocity Engine (altivec) brings a whole new level to the G4 also.

Sixth, Apple plans to optimise core OS functions for Altivec. Not only will Quicktime be accelerated, but Quickdraw will also. For those who don't know, Quickdraw is the code responsible for rendering screen display. Imagine, 128 bit vector processing when every you move a window!
Now that is cool.

Ok, end rant mode :~)

http://www.mot. com/SPS/PowerPC/products/semiconductor/cpu/7400.ht ml

SPEC numbers can be had at here.

SPECint95(est.): 21.4 @ 450Mhz
SPECfp95(est.): 20.4 @ 450Mhz

Those are numbers without counting "Velocity Engine" aka AltiVec, however.

You forgot one that I'm sure MS would like everyone to forget:

Windows for Pen Computing!

MS seems to have removed the product information from their web site. But look here

Also, what about: Imbeded NT?

First let me state that It's not Caldera that made the MCG jump onto the linux BangWagon. It's been some time now that they speak and send patches to the linuxppc-dev list. They have openend a specific linux site one week ago or so (see the above link).

Too bad they are pushing the embedded market
I whish some linux hardware vendors would get in touch with the Motorola MCG to get Quantities of MB (603e, 604e, dual 604e's and 750 based ones) so Linuxppc users yould have the oportunitie to by non Apple branded hardware.

Bad thing is the price of a single board that why we need a Big partner( like VA) to have them in quantities.
There a discussion now on the debian PPC list on how to get PPC boards ( beginning of the thread on PPC boards )- It was said that IBM would licence the desing of its longtrail MB and that they could be easely manufactured [ if someone is listening there a Market for PPC based motherboard - With Linux as the OS - If enough boards are sold then I'm sure you could interest the QNX/Amiga people and the BeOS people too - You just need to launch the market using Linux, ...]

Just click here. Motorola Computing Group (MCG) has an entire Linux discussion base. Just register (it's free) and hop right on in.
-RISCy Business | Rabid System Administrator and BOFH

ZDNET story
Register Article
Clip 1 from yesterday at mu.current.nu:
Motorola Computer Group is going to be at the Linux Expo August 9-12 in San Jose, CA, to talk about using Motorola hardware for embedded Linux solutions.
Related Clip from Sunday on mu.current.nu: The PPTP Server is out, brought to you by Moreton Bay. If you don't remember who they are, maybe I can remind you, in February we released the first Linux port to the Motorola Coldfire family of processors. The nice thing to note, is that coldfire hardware can be had from Motorola Digital DNA at a fairly reasonable price.

ZDNET story
Register Article
Clip 1 from yesterday at mu.current.nu:
Motorola Computer Group is going to be at the Linux Expo August 9-12 in San Jose, CA, to talk about using Motorola hardware for embedded Linux solutions.
Related Clip from Sunday on mu.current.nu: The PPTP Server is out, brought to you by Moreton Bay. If you don't remember who they are, maybe I can remind you, in February we released the first Linux port to the Motorola Coldfire family of processors. The nice thing to note, is that coldfire hardware can be had from Motorola Digital DNA at a fairly reasonable price.

There are no PowerPC motherboards with AGP. Apple should be coming out with some next year (code name "Sawtooth"), but of course you would have to buy an entire Power Mac to get one.

Motorola (specifically the Moto Computer Group) sells motherboards, but they cost more than a Mac.

There are no PowerPC motherboards with AGP. Apple should be coming out with some next year (code name "Sawtooth"), but of course you would have to buy an entire Power Mac to get one.

Motorola (specifically the Moto Computer Group) sells motherboards, but they cost more than a Mac.

Quite frankly this scares me. A lot. This doesn't frighten me as much as did the rumour that motorola used the human skull as a signal amplifier for a series of its phones, but after all, this report's findings just make sense. Waves of energy going through your body don't just do absolutely nothing, do they? It's not quite the same as microwaving your head, but I know that I have been trying to limit my exposure for quite a while, but there's not much chance of that living in a big city, and working in the computer industry. Every one of us nearly has a cell phone, if not a handful of other gadgets.

i am sam i am

Why don't you look for CabltCube (neato bleue Cubes that run linux on a R4000n processor -,) They come with serial control (then you'll just need to tweak the Kernel). They do just what you want. more info can be found @ http://www.cobaltnet.com
Can also take a look @ endebed systems from motorola - but linux dev on those cutties is SLOW http://www.mcg.mot.com

I hear Motorola makes quad-G3 motherboards (although I haven't been able to find a price or source anywhere). If they're not too expensive, I might pick one up and try overclocking it... Imagine four G3s at 600 MHz each...

Motorola make multiprocessor 604-based mainboards in their MTX line: http://www.mcg .mot.com/WebOS/omf/GSS/MCG/products/boards/ppcmtx. html.

They're CHRP/PReP-compliant and ready to run AIX and PowerMAX RTOS (which we're using). And unlike Apple hardware, they readily accept standard PC peripherals!

They should run LinuxPPC just fine though we haven't tried it...

The only drawback is the price - I believe these mainboards start above US$3000 :(

-Bob

I too have objections to Apple, especially having been a NEXTSTEP/OpenStep developer and observing what Apple Enterprise has done with NEXTSTEP...

However, LinuxPPC has excellent potential and I'm glad to see Yellow Dog continuing with its plans.

There are alternate sources of PPC components - Motorola manufactures a line of CHRP/PReP-compliant ATX logic boards (in both single and dual CPU) based on the 604: http://www.mcg .mot.com/WebOS/omf/GSS/MCG/products/boards/ppcmtx. html.

They accept readily industry-standard PCI components and are based on the standard ATX form-factor, thus making a nice fit with the plethora of generic rack-mount chassis on the market (the company I work for runs PowerMAX on these).

It would be nice to see third-parties integrate systems based on this hardware - with demand, the price of this equipment will go down as it has with third-party DEC Alpha and Sparc systems.

Inexpensive and superior third-party non-Apple PowerPC equipment would be a boon to LinuxPPC, as it has been for Linux-Alpha and Linux-Sparc.

~AC

Doesn't seem very convincing to me. If people are still trying to solve QOS issues with overkill capacity then that's seems like little more than a cludge.

I should be able to do video-conferencing no problem on 10Mbit/s Ethernet (the bandwidth is there), but if the image breaks down whenever there's a burst of activity from the department file server that's a pretty fragile solution.

Overkill capacity is only overkill until someone builds a faster file server, or until you are unlucky and someone accesses a large cached file from a fast Linux machine, saturating your 'overkill' net.

Sounds to me like the difference between a real RTOS and a timesharing system. Try asking a developer who uses QNX and a 68k for a real-time app whether they would like to switch to Windows NT and an Alpha 21264-500 with overkill processing power. All the processing power/bandwidth isn't going to help you if one app decides to monoplise it.

By the way, I know that people keep trying to build RT systems out of NT. I can't imagine why. I even worked on a project that did that, and it was painful.

In the beginning there was IBM.

Well who did you expect? Transmeta? Maybe?

Anyhow, back in the mid seventies, their 801 project, which was not really a microprocessor for a while longer, really helped get RISC started. Seymour Cray was involved in an earlier proto-RISC project, but then he was a blue ribbon genius.

Well, IBM did use some of their RISC developments, but it wasn't until the early nineties that they created the POWER1 chip (which is not really all that RISCy, but that's neither here nor there - it did evolve from the 801 project, is all)

In '92, Apple, IBM and Motorola (collectively known as AIM, or the Smith Street Gang ;) got together and began developing the PowerPC design, which was based off of POWER and was intended to replace the Motorola 68000 series (which it basically did) and the Intel x86 series, which is still crawling along, much to everyone's surprise.

The first PowerPC chip was the 601, and it can be considered a Generation 1 chip in this family (G1).

The 603 chip, intended primarily for laptops, but also used in low-end systems due to it being quite cheap, was more or less a G2 chip. The version that Apple used more frequently was the 603e, which had a larger cache - critical for laptops, where a L2 cache would prove detrimental.

The big name G2 chip was the 604. Rather than being a heavily POWER influenced design it was the first 'real' PowerPC chip. Its big brother is the rarely seen 620, which expanded the design to 64 bits, but was only really used for the IBM RS/6000 machines, and maybe some others. It was kind of slow, and arrived late, and is quite large and hot, IIRC.

There was also a rumored 615 chip which would have an x86 core as well as a 604. This never materialized however, but it's a neat, if useless (probably too expensive and unpredictable) idea.

The G3 that Apple touts is really the 750 chip. I suspect that they call it the G3, because it sounds better when compared to the PII. ;)

Well, to be quite frank, although the 750 is damned fast, and exceptionally cheap (it destroyed the market for used macs) it is actually pretty weak in the FPU department as compared to the 604, and is more of a successor to the 603. It's a cheap laptop chip that's popular in desktops due to low cost and reasonable performance.

Copper wiring is also now being used in the 750's (my G3 Blue and White has a copper chip) which not only boosts clock speeds by approx 33%, but also is an excellent folk debugging remedy. ;)

A little later this year, hopefully by July (the NY Macworld show) we'll see the first Macs with the G4 processor which will have several innovations.

First, it'll have additional instructions (collectively known as Altivec) which are somewhat like the MMX extensions. They're supposed to speed up a number of 128 bit 'multimedia' operations by operating in parallel with the int and fpu. While they have been reported to speed a lot of stuff up a great deal, I think that Motorola's management heard about the MMX announcement some years back and told their designers to one-up them. It would explain why they're so late.

Also, although we're unlikely to see this on anything that actual people can afford, AIM is also going to be making multiprocessor G4 chips. That is, multiple processors on the same piece of silicon. That should be hella fast, but i doubt they'll be used in much outside of servers and the worlds' most wicked pissah photoshop box (1 GB RAM, natch)

For more information on Grank Funk... er, PowerPCs, check out http://infopad.eecs.b erkeley.edu/CIC/archive/cpu_history.html, http://www.mot.com/SPS/PowerPC/ and http://www.chips.ibm.com/products/ppc/