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PowerPC 970 Running at 2.5 GHz
kuwan writes "IBM has just released a press release that indicates they have the new PowerPC 970 running at 1.8 to 2.5 GHz making it 'the fastest PowerPC so far.' IBM's original estimates were to have the chip running at 1.4 to 1.8 GHz at introduction, so this is very good news for those of us hoping Apple will use this as their next-generation chip."
Who cares how fast IBM has this running in the lab--let's see how fast those fab lines are running before we get too excited.
how many people have been holding off (or switching to other platforms) on a new Apple computer purchase for these new chips. I'm sure Apple is chomping at the bit waiting for these chips to be mass produced so that they can get them into Powermacs (and hopefully Powerbooks too), like, yesterday.
The POWERLite series (which is basically what the 970 is) is a great alternative to x86 for Apple for quite a few years ahead. Not only does IBM have an incentive to keep producing these chips at ever-greater clock speeds (something that Motorola with the G4 doesn't seem to have a great deal of interest in doing) because IBM actually uses these in their Blade servers, but it sets up a nice roadmap for successive generations of chips (the POWER5 is just around the corner, with a Power5Lite a la PowerPC 980 coming shortly thereafter? Such a chip is probably only a year and a half off and, running MacOSX, would rocksock).
Yum.
sig my booty, check my website
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Interesting: this PR release seems to confirm the planned extensions are in fact, Altivec. I haven't followed it too closely, but I thought this wasn't confirmed yet.
Guess that makes it clear this is Apple's next chip.
Whodathunk that one day we'd be reading a story titled "Apple: ..." with an IBM icon? Maybe I'm getting old, but I think it's kinda cool.
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Funny that you ask. The fact is that it doesn't matter. Remember the so called "mhz myth" well it definitely exists from a marketing standpoint. IBM could have cranked up the clock rate and achieved 0% performance increase and it wouldn't matter to most people. They just say "oh, Apple has a 2.5ghz processor, that's better than 1.8ghz, oooh, aaaah". This is the same battle that AMD fights. They are spending big bucks trying to remind people that just because that P4 is running at 3ghz, it doesn't mean that it is THAT much faster than a 2.2ghz Athlon.
will laptops be feasible?
These chips are targetted at blades. Blades require:
Laptops, on the other hand, require:
Draw your own conclusions
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