PowerPC G4 Upgrades Direct from Motorola?

Posted by Cliff on Monday August 26, 2002 @08:45AM from the worried-about-compatibility dept.

Gizzmonic asks: "I was looking at PowerPC upgrade cards for my Mac G3 Blue-and-White and I couldn't help but notice that the offerings by PowerLogix and Sonnet are quite pricey. So, I started poking around Motorola's site looking for the G4 or my dreams. I could probably pull a few strings at work and get them to order a G4 direct. Is there any reason that a G4 from Motorola wouldn't work with the ZIF socket on my motherboard? (Yes, I know about the G4 enabler software) Ordering from Motorola or one of their suppliers could potentially save me a lot of dough, but I'd hate to plunk down the money for an incompatible CPU. What do you folks think?"

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Here you go... by infornogr · 2002-08-26 08:51 · Score: 3, Informative

From http://maccentral.macworld.com/news/9901/29.upgrad es.shtml Motorola's solution is more hazy. The company's website claims that AltiVec will be "100% compatible with the industry standard PowerPC architecture," but doesn't say whether processors with the added technology will fit into current ZIF slots. Will the current blue G3s be able to handle either or both G4 processors? If IBM's roadmap is followed, it would seem most likely since clock-rate increases don't generally mean a radical shift in chip design. Since the Blue G3s are equipped with a ZIF (Zero insertion force) processor slot, a processor with similar size to the current G3s could be easily installed.