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PPC 970 Powerbooks and Powermacs in Production?
Thadddius_Brinks writes "MacWispers.com
is reporting here
that apple is currently in production of a redesigned single processor PowerPC
970 Powermac system and a 15.4 inch Powerbook. They (MacWhispers.com) are also standing by
their earlier claims about the speed of the new processor."
This article consolidates many of the major rumors surrounding WWDC including
the rumor of a new case for the Powermacs, but it raises the ultimate question: 17" Powerbook, or PPC 970 Powerbook?
Do you think the new "G5"s will sport new enclosures too..?
The current design is long in the tooth to say the least and is highly associated with the G4 processor... yet I've heard nothing about new enclosures at all..
Dude, RTFA:
"- The new Power Mac has a new case design with "metallic look plastics," and a front panel "mostly made with the same anodized aluminum surface" as the newest Powerbooks."
Its only one short page. Its not slashdotted (yet). How hard was that?
Sailing over the event horizon
Actually, the 12" pbook was out pretty damn fast.....my parents picked one up about 2 weeks after macworld.
the 17" just took about 2 months to fully ramp up production.
apple is offering sweet $300 dollar rebates to students, and they have just dropped the price on many models like the powerbook. might be a good time to jump on one.
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
I'm no fan of Jack Campbell and honestly do not believe anything his site spouts. The only time I ever hear anything about it is when (semi-)legitimate news sources pick up "scoops" from his site.
To read more about how cool a guy he is, check out the MacTable report at Macintouch:
http://www.macintouch.com/mactable.html
I am not who I say you are.
They are comparing to a single G4. Due to the G4's bad architecture, putting two of them into a computer doesn't improve performance nearly as much as it should. IIRC, you only see roughly a 25%-50% improvement. Therefore, a single 970 is about on par with a dual G4 in integer based operations and it's much faster running Altivec code.
It's actually called the PPC980, and is due next year.
Yes, the PPC980 is in the IBM roadmap, it's to the Power5 as the 970 is to the Power4.
"You've got an invalid haircut" -Warren Zevon - Life'll Kill Ya
Speaking as the owner of a dual G4... er, no. Code that's written to scale linearly scales pretty much linearly. The Maya renderer is a good example.
OK, that might addmittedly not be for the same audience as a 64-bit powerbook, but still... drool indeed!
Programming can be fun again. Film at 11.
I will take this oppourtunity to gain easy karma and inform you that 0x539 is hexadecimal for "1337" which is hacker-speak for "elite".
Random is the New Order.
Yes, but you aren't taking into account the FSB speed of the processor which is really choking the G4 right now. 167 mhz. is just not fast enough to feed the processor as fast as the Altivec unit can process instructions.
The 1.8 ghz. PPC 970 should have a 900 mhz. FSB, fed by dual bank DDR400 (PC3200) memory it will really cook!
"When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon
They wouldn't be supporting two operating system, it's the same operating system!
64-bit PPC architecture can run 32-bit PPC code just fine as-is. Which is part of the reason that there are claims of stock MacOS X 10.2.6 being run on these PPC970 machines.
-psy
" well, I've read some moderately convincing arguments that - because of the low latency, 4GB/sec L3 cache that the current top end G4s sport - memory bandwidth is not the bottleneck that we'd all like to believe. It seems that the REAL bottleneck is simply the low clock speed and lack of integer and FP execution resources that the 7455 has available."
The only problem with that argument is that the bus tops out whenever you're churning on a large dataset.. like video editing...
There's no doubt that the L3 helps, but actual memory bandwidth would help a whole lot more.
You've got that backwards. Macs use the carriage return, decimal 13 (0x0D) as their line break character. Unix uses the line feed, decimal 10 (0x0A). DOS (and therefore Windows) uses the asinine CR-LF combination, which is also the standard marker for line and command endings in most text-based internet protocols, such as SMTP.
For those youngsters not in the know, these "control" characters really did control things. On a paper teletype machine, a carriage return would move the print head back to the left side of the carriage. A line feed would advance the roller one line. The combination of the two would prepare the teletype for printing another line, so in a way Windows does it right.
In reality, using two characters to mark an end of line is a major pain in the ass. I wish everyone would standardize on using just an LF.