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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.
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
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.