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Motorola to Boost 0.13-micron PowerPCs
Anonymous Cow writes "From The Register: 'Speculation that Motorola may soon cease to be a supplier of processors to Apple may be premature. The chip maker yesterday said it had successfully implemented low-k dielectric materials in its 0.18 micron silicon-on-insulator (SOI) processors, bringing an estimated 20 per cent speed bump to the PowerPC line. Motorola expects to roll out the process on its 0.13 micron chips this month...'"
With this performance increase, I can't wait to see how fast and smooth all my games run on my Mac.. You know... games run. Like, uhm.
Oni. And uh... Worms Blast. And Bejeweled.
Damn it, nevermind.
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
Somebody kill the Apple. I hate to see a once innovative company suffer like this year after year.
With a user ID like "ILuvUAmiga" I just want to stab you in the face.
Sadly, most Macintosh fans would gladly pay this much just so that Aqua doesn't feel like like windows 3.11 on a 486DX-4.
Because you have to be an idiot and use a Mac (the interface is easier, there's only one mouse button, blah, blah, blah). And their area a TON of idiots out there! The natural laws of supply and demand make the Apple a great choice! :)
I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a Mac (a 8600/300 w/64 Megs of RAM) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. 20 minutes. At home, on my Pentium Pro 200 running NT 4, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this Mac, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.
In addition, during this file transfer, Netscape will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even BBEdit Lite is straining to keep up as I type this.
I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various Macs, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a Mac that has run faster than its Wintel counterpart, despite the Macs' faster chip architecture. My 486/66 with 8 megs of ram runs faster than this 300 mhz machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that the Macintosh is a superior machine.
I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use a Mac over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.
Most mac users don't know jack about tech. The whole point of the Mac is that any idiot can use it, and idiots frequently do. This is not to say that everyone who uses a mac is a bozo, but only that a lot of bozos use macs.
Now, moving on; The fact is that Motorola cannot even begin to compete with IBM where it matters, which is to say in pushing the envelope. Their semiconductor division simply does not have that kind of power. Only a very small handful of companies have the power to be among the best, and Moto ain't one of them. They should (and will) stick with their embedded market; Expect even smaller-process versions of this same processor to end up in cellphones ere long.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"