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PPC 970 Confirmed for Apple?
batboy78 writes "In what perhaps is the first 'official' confirmation that IBM's PowerPC 970's will be used by Apple, BusinessWeek claims that IBM has confirmed that it's developing a new set of chips for the Mac: 'IBM says the new Apple chip will be of the 64-bit variety, which means it can process twice as much information per cycle as existing 32-bit chips.'" CT The article has been updated to make the confirmation seem... well, far less comfirming.
Apple sales guys must hate this kind of press.
I thought it was powers of two?
32bit = 2^32 = 4Gigs memory space
64bit = 2^64 = alot more than 8gigs
This would mean that it is far greater than twice as much information.
I could be WAY wrong since I suck at math.
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For those of us who have been thinking about purchasing an Apple for a little while now, this is just one more reason to do so. I've been trying to resist the urge, but once these systems come out, I'm sure they'll be too good to resist. For someone who used to hate Apple with a passion and mock all Apple users, that's a huge step :-)
Five Dolla Moddy-Moddy?
OK, let's review. First off, this is not the regular "Byte of the Apple" columnist. Second, if I had a comment like that in my back pocket, I'd make damn sure that readers knew where I got it, who said it (if possible) and get as much detail as I could. This sounds too offhand to be authentic, and, really, the comment doesn't necessarily indicate that IBM will be building chips for the Apple. The author could simply be referring to a comment made at the Microprocessor Forum--where IBM and Moto executives deliberately avoid the A-word.
What we've got is not a smoking gun, but a shadowy silhouette of an unknown object that might be a gun and seems to be emitting some sort of vapor. If Business Week had something definite, this would be a news story and not something buried in a column.
(Pardon the troll: why does Business Week actually have a dedicated Apple columnist, anyway? They cover business: why not a column on Ford, or Charles Schwab, or Genentech? hell, it's not like it paid off for them--Apple gave the iMac story to Time.)
The past has shown this to be untrue. Apple held the CPU speed crown with the G3s when they first came out. Motorola has been screwing Apple for dropping the clones (and cost Moto big $$$), and because there is no incentive in their embedded market for fast FSB. Mark my words! This is just the beginning. IBM has the most advance fabs in the world. And they just made a deal with AMD to share process techniques. The POWER 5 (and its PPC 980 derivitive) are a hell of a lot closer then you think. Oh, you want benchmarks? http://www.macbidouille.com/niouzcontenu.php?date= 2003-05-05#5440
This article is the fluffiest piece of fluff ever to fluff the internet.
The only tidbit of info is that the article claims that IBM confirmed the chip was made for Apple. Other then that it's all fluff.
No news, you've read it all before if you know anything about it, then you already know this. 64-bits does not equals twice the computing power, PPCs do not divide up tasks in parallel better then intel chips, nor are better suited for multimedia.
Also, I doubt that this chip will even put the mac platform far enough on top to warrent more then a meh from current PC users. Intel is already ahead in bandwidth again, and unless the 970 scales into at least 2.5 ghz, intel's chips will be faster.
Not to say that it won't help the ailing macs. The G4 is much too slow by todays standards to warrent the cost. They are useful in laptops because of their low power consumption, but other then that not so great.
Also, he has no information about when or if Quark will come out. And even if it came out today, most shops wouldn't switch right away unless it was faster then the current version on the new hardware.
I'd bet money you won't see the PowerPC 970 in anything other than the PowerMac at least at first.
PowerMac = Highest Performer, iMac = Mid teir and eMac = cheapy.
PowerPC 970 isn't going to be a laptop PC unless you want to cook eggs. Can't see that nice chip being in a book just now.
(Speaking as a recent Powerbook 12" Owner too)
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
Quick everybody dump Intel and AMD stock! Their 64bit roadmaps demonstrate that they're pushing useless processors.
64 bits are coming and Apple's wise decision years ago to go to PPC mean that today it has the easiest roadmap. Itanium requires lots of rewritten software code (not just recompiled) and a lot of people think AMD's solution won't last too long. In contrast, The Power ISA has always allowed 32bit code to run on 64bit processors with little speed penalty. You *can* recompile your application code but the only program that *has* to do it is the Operating System, and even then not all of it has to be recompiled.
Apple's product roadmap seems to involve tighter and tighter coordination with IBM and their Power Series which serve many large Fortune 1000 businesses and are likely to continue to do so with 64 bit Power (and now PPC) technology.
I don't see anything in the article which cites any sources more reliable than, say, /.
As much as I am a devoted Machead, sometimes the Byte of the Apple columns lay it on a little too thick and syruppy. Objective journalism, anyone? When Windbloze columns use the same style of reporting, I get upset. However, the author is reiterating for a broader audience the same thing that we on /. are all certain will happen anyways: the PPC 970 is targetted to be shipped in Power Macs by the end of summer.
Well, all of us except maybe the diehards who are certain that this PPC 970 stuff is all a ruse, and Steve Jobs secretly wants to use the AMD X86-64 instead.
"Smart is sexy." -- D. Scully ("War of the Coprophages")
Does anybody really even care about Quark anymore? At the firm I work for no one uses Quark and no one really did. Even for brochures, newseltters, etc. Illustrator is used for everything. We have one copy that is not even currently installed (well it might actually be on all the computers) that we keep for those rare instances when we end up with a Quark file to work on, but I have not actually heard of one person who is really waitng for Quark. For anything that we would have possibly used Quark for we've switched to InDesign which is quite capable and readily available for OS X. And even those people that are waiting for it, I hardly see Quark as being the thing that helps bring Apple's profits up. -peel
Don't forget the "size of a baby's arm"... Spy magazine had a good sized collection of quotes that used that as a term of measurement. I'm not sure how many baby arms equal a bowl of Super Colon Blow...
Someday a real rain is gonna come...
The original Firewire (IEEE1394) would've been a much stronger interface platform had Apple introduced it throughout the entire product platform from its inception. But Apple took 2 years to get Firewire on all Macs from the PowerMac line down to the iMacs. That was a big mistake. Apple saved the USB standard by introducing it on all Macs when the iMac debuted. Now we have Macs that have chipsets capable of USB 2.0 (because the chips cost the same whether they are USB 1.1 or 2.0) but Apple is not advertising this or natively supporting it because of it weakening the need for Firewire (400, iLink, IEEE1394a, etc.). But if Joe Blow wants a decent scanner for a new computer purchase and doesn't want to spend $400 for a Canon Firewire based scanner, he/she/it has to settle for USB 1.1 speeds (without software driver hacks) on a new $100 USB 2.0 enabled scanner. If anything, Apple should have iPods with Firewire800 support on them to further their advantage over all the other MP3 players (yes yes, iTunes store monopoly). It would also make sense for Apple to use internal Firewire connections for the CD/DVD/Superdrives instead of relying on the ATA standard. Apple now has a great operating system, but it really needs to polish its hardware to attract more geeks with cash to switch platforms. The Apple platform holds so much promise!
"Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*
I realize IBM is making hardware for apple and that has very little to do with their software, but could IBM be attemptting to use the Mac as an enterprise platform? All of their stuff is written for Linux, which would port easily to BSD, and apple had by far the best opportunity to take out Microsoft in the Desktop space. Could IBM be attempting to Bring Apple to the Enterprise?
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