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New info on IBM's Power5 chip (G5's)
phreemind writes "There's some news out today on IBM's Power5, which should make an appearance next year. Interestingly, from the sound of this article, they've put a lot of work into power consumption on this processor so that it can go in anything from blades to big iron. This may preclude the need for a specialized low-heat/power version, such as the 970, for anything other than laptops. Oh, yeah, and they hope to use it to wipe Itanium off the map. Check out the article at InfoWorld."
I have to agree. To infer that the Power5 is the new G5 is a huge dis-service to the P5.
The G-series chips have been nothing special, whereas the Power-series of chips are more than impressive. Look at all the Mac faithfull drooling over the idea of the 970, which is essentially a dumbed down version of the Power-4. That is the rumored "G5" chip. Although, most just call it the 970 now instead of a G-series. Thank god.
Motorola's G5 is overdue. It is looking more and more like the 68060, a chip that came years too late, provided adequate performance when it reached market, but failed to penetrate many of the classic 680x0 platforms (Sun 3, HP 9000/300, Macintosh 68k, SGI), mostly limiting itself to embedded VME.
If any time was appropriate for Apple to move away from the PowerPC platform, now would be it. Either they will move over in the next two years to x86-64, or IBM will assume Motorolas position as the lead PowerPC designer for Apple (I realize that they have done lots of stuff, like coming up with the Power platform, in the past, but Apple seems to lean towards Motorola for actual chips).