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?

Comments

Performance claims need clarification

[John Harrison]

It isn't clear from the last paragraph of the article if they are comparing a dual G4 to a single 970. The other option is a single G4 to a single 970. A dual 970 doesn't seem to be an option since they don't seem to be in production currently.

Does anyone have any clarification on this? With the rumours that the 970 chip is actually less expensive for Apple than the G4 I was hoping for dual 970 boxes at price points similar to the current crop of PowerMacs.

Re:Performance claims need clarification

[azav]

Actually, from what I have heard, the duals "balance the drain". By that I mean that though you don't feel it being a load faster in day to day activities, you feel less of a slowdown when one process would bog the processor. - so overall, the entire system feels smoother - nere I say snappier.

My own bets

[Dark Paladin]

1. That the 970's are being produced, but so far, there's still small numbers, so either only folks at the Developer's Conference will first crack, or you'll have to wait for a bit of time before you can actually get your hands on one (kind of like when the 12" and 17" first started shipping).

2. The major OS Upgrade to 64 bits will happen in a few more months - either way, I expect that OS 10.3 will cost another $50 - $100 (depending on how they do it).

3. The G3 iBook line will be slowly phased out, and replaced with G4 based systems.

4. Dual processor systems by Christmas or so.

5. iTunes for Windows sooner than we thought.

6. Somewhere in this timeframe, new Xserves will start to appear with the 970 chip and the 64-bit server operating system (which should be interesting for folks running "big ass" database/graphical rendering farms.

So either way, I'd say we'll "see" the devices, a few "first adopters" will play with them, pass judgement, Ars Techana [SIC] will write a big ass article on them, and "everybody else" will pick them up later.

Hopefully somebody can convince Valve that Half Life 2 would really run rather nicely on these boxes so I don't have to spend money upgrading my old Wintel Game Box.

Re:My own bets

[Dylan Zimmerman]

The 970 is already being produced en masse. Because of Apple's contract with IBM, they get a bunch of them pretty early.

According to ThinkSecret, Panther is going to launch sometime in September. They also say that a special 64-bit version of Jaguar called 'Sméagol' is being built for the new PowerMacs (known internally as Q37). It could be finalized as early as WWDC. Why would they have a special version of Jaguar if they didn't have the 970's rolling off the production lines already? Seriously. If Apple thought that they couldn't get them to people quickly, they wouldn't bother recompiling the entire OS for them. They would just wait a month to release them. They don't want a repeat of the bad publicity they got as a result of the 17" slowness.

Apple is moving away from Motorola chips entirely. IBM still makes the G3. In all likelihood, Apple is going to keep the G3 in the iBook and just start using IBM chips instead of Motorola ones.

I sure hope so.

Again, I really hope so. I've been itching to spend all of my money at the iTunes Music Store, but I don't have a Mac.

I would imagine that the Xserves would use the real thing. The Power4 uses more power and produces more heat than the 970, but it also has an insane MTBF. Besides, you wouldn't need a dual Power4 since it's already two cores on a single die. Pretty cool design, really.

Re:MacWhispers and Macrumors etc

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh sure. Would that be the Thinksecret that, in 1999, predicted Apple was about to release an Intel version of the iMac that ran Windows?

Or the one in June 2000 that predicted that Apple was about to drop the entire PowerMac line and just sell laptops and all-in-ones?

Or the one in August 2001 that predicted Apple and AMD had collaborated on a "secret" CPU design code-named "Twostone", a 48 bit CPU with 16384 registers, that was going to replace the G3 and run it in emulation just as the PPCs had emulated the 68000?

Or maybe the one that, in September 2002, predicted Apple was about to release a cordless phone, FOR NO REASON WHATSOEVER.

I hardly would describe them as a dependable source of unfounded rumours.

Mac rumor sites vs. Slashdot

[Gizzmonic]

Slashdot is not a place for rumors.

To top it off, the person who runs Macwhispers is completely morally bankrupt, and is most likely fabricating the entire story.

I'd like to see some real competition for high performance CPUs as much as the next guy, but let's not lose our heads to con artists like this guy...we will know for sure in about 2 weeks ;)

I doubt the speed predictions at least.

[laertes]

Going from the Ars Technica article a while back, I don't buy the claims about the speed of the new chip.

Specifically:

On Altivec optimized tasks, these machines have as much as 2 to 2.5 times the through performance as a similarly clocked G4.

Unlike the G4, where the AltiVec unit is integrated rather nicely into the issue unit, and can issue several types of vector instructions in parallel, the 970 can only do a permute in parallel with another instruction. Hence, for some tasks, I would expect the G4 to be almost twice as fast as a similarly clocked 970.

They make a similar claim about the non-AltiVec speed, which I tend to believe. The compiler has to be a little smarter (but Apple did add a bunch of G4 optimizations to gcc anyway), but the 970 can do more per clock the the G4 can, under many circumstances. Not only can it have more instructions in-flight, but it has a much more advanced reordering unit than the G4.

Oh yeah, and when did /. just copy over Apple rumor stories? </obligatory>

Re:I doubt the speed predictions at least.

[stripes]

Unlike the G4, where the AltiVec unit is integrated rather nicely into the issue unit, and can issue several types of vector instructions in parallel, the 970 can only do a permute in parallel with another instruction. Hence, for some tasks, I would expect the G4 to be almost twice as fast as a similarly clocked 970.

The Ars review used the CPU documentation to decide the 970's Altivec was slow. It might have missed something, like maybe the G4's Altivec is always memory starved and thus runs a 25% of it's maximum speed while the 970 has lots of memory bandwidth and thus while in thery is only 50% as fast as the G4's, that manages to be 2x what the G4 really does.

Of corse it may well be slower (or merely "about the same"), because I'm not able to tell you how fast a CPU is from the pre-release docs either (I thought the TI SuperSPARC would be fast, and the P-II would be slow). Basically I'm saying "who can really tell here".

Re:Yikes

[JudgeFurious]

I haven't looked but do you get an equal number of PC rumour sites if you go Googling for that?

If not then you've got to ask yourself why is it that so many people care about what may or may not be coming along next from Apple and so few give the proverbial rats ass about the next offering from HP, Dell, or eMachines.

Apple seems to have perfected getting attention to an art. You can love them or hate them but almost nobody ignores them. That kind of PR is priceless.

Re:Shullbit

[haunebu]

Apple likes to build up stocks of computers before selling them. Building and shipping computers in the same month would be a ridiculous strain on their resources.

Er, no. Apple prides itself on having a low inventory (a couple of weeks, at the most) - all personal computer manufacturers do. If they had any more, they'd wind up in the December 2001 "5+ weeks of unsellable inventory" glut problem.

WWDC isn't exactly a place Steve Jobs likes to announce hardware products, it is really the wrong venue for such announcements. MacWorld Expo is a much better place to do things like that and is only two months away.

Except that Apple isn't going to be at MWNY this year.

No 64-bit OS for some time - my prediction

[gsfprez]

I don't get why its believed that Mac OS X has to be 64-bit to run on the 970. We've been told in numerous places (Ars, IBM's frickin website) that the 970 runs in 32-bit just fine.

SO... that being said... my WWDC announcment predictions along with what Apple has already stated

- New Macs with PPC 970
- New PowerBook 15 with PPC 970 (the 15" PowerBook is the workhorse of the line, always will be, sorry)
- Preview of Panther
- Macintosh Roadmap Roadmap showing the future... and this is the big-ass news that everyone's been talking about.

Roadmap steps will look something like this...

July 2003:
10.2.7 running on new 970-based Macs practically unmodified because the 970 handles 32-bit operation just totally fine. x.x.+1 updates between WWDC and October 2003. Developer-only release of 64-bit SDK which will not be ready for prime time, but will allow developers to make the swtich, if necessary (similar to Mac OS 9 -> Carbon transition)

October 2003:
10.3 release - all those cool updates in iApps, updates in performance and operation of Mac OS X UI that were shown at WWDC. Panther Will NOT BE a 64-Bit OS!! - why not? Does not need to be because there are no 64-bit apps! Where are the apps? They are still being worked on with the 64-bit SDK, see you at Mac World San Fran with first 64-bit apps.

Jan 2004 (MWSF):
10.3.5 release. Mac OS X will run 64-bit applications. Only apps that NEED to be recomplied 64-bit clean will be recompiled 64-bit clean (iChat, for example, does NOT need to be 64-bit). Finder will be first app to be 64-bit clean because it needs to be.

beyond that, its non-speculateable.

But i think that the real news at this WWDC is going to be the first major Macintosh Roadmap since we saw the Rhapsody one in 1997(8?). You will see where the Mac is going hardware-wise and software wise.

Apple is going to push into the small-medium server market in a hard way.... 64-bit XServes which can run horkin Oracle databases, huge fileservers, and be the backbone of big-ass renderfarms... all with Mac OS X moron-simple UI and none of the pain of cost with Windows servers or admin headache of Linus servers? Puhlease... Apple is going to kick ass and move in where Intel and AMD are just simply lagging behind.

(yes, half the guys in my wedding party have apple.com email addresses.. no, none of this information was gleaned from them.)

My predictions

[Phroggy]

The PowerMac G5 will be announced at WWDC, based on the IBM PowerPC 970. The name of the machine will be "PowerMac G5" or "Power Macintosh G5", but Apple will also advertise the processor as the "IBM PowerPC 970 processor with Velocity Engine". It's 64-bit, and they'll hype that up as much as they can.

The low-end (1.4GHz?) model will be available immediately, or within two weeks and Apple will be taking pre-orders. The mid-range and high-end (dual 1.6 and dual 1.8?) models will be shipping within a month after that. Photoshop comparisons with the latest Compaq PC will be mind-blowing, for the types of people who get excited about Photoshop performance. USB2, Bluetooth, FireWire 800 and 400 and Gigabit Ethernet will be standard features, with a slot for an Airport Extreme card.

The Aluminum 15" PowerBook will be released. We will not see a PowerBook G5 before January '04 and maybe not until March '04.

The PowerMac G5 will ship with a hacked version of Mac OS X 10.2, which will not be fully optimized to take advantage of the new processor. However, the PPC970 is designed to run 32-bit code just as well as 64-bit code, so it will still be amazingly fast. Anyone who buys a G5 will be entitled to a "free" ($29 S&H) upgrade to Mac OS X 10.3, which will ship in September for $129.

The new OS will be 64-bit native, optimized for the PPC970, and compiled with gcc 3.3. Large chunks of the Finder will be rewritten for performance and better UI, and there will be a ton of little system-wide UI improvements (adding up to a significantly better experience). One convenient new feature will be support for multiple users being logged in locally at the same time, like Windows XP (go to a login screen without quitting all your apps, second person logs in, first person's apps stay running hidden in the background, can switch back and forth between users).

Mac OS X 10.3 will include WebCore, Apple's Aquafied version of KHTML, available for any application to use. Safari will be the default browser. I suspect Internet Explorer will not be included, although of course you can download it from Microsoft. Help Viewer will be replaced (thank god) with a version that uses WebCore. Now that WebCore is available, it'll be possible for Apple to support PAC and WPAD for automatic proxy server discovery, although I don't know whether these features will make it into 10.3.

Did I miss anything? We'll see how accurate my predictions are next month...

What we can expect

[customjake]

There are doubts in my mind that Apple will use the WWDC as a launching pad for the new 970s. I do belive that Apple is currently in production of 970 machines, and plans to release them alongside Panther, whenever it releases...probably August. After all, why release an OS that's 64 bit if you don't have hardware to run 64 bit. The rest of the computer world is waiting for a viable 64 bit desktop system....there are other 64 bit processors out there.....

I do belive that Apple will have some sort of 970 based machine for the developers to look at, as well as some benchmarks for us all to drool over.

So what can we expect? Previewing Panther on a 970 based system, probably an update to the developer software (64 bit Project Builder), benchmarks of the 970, overview of 970 based hardware. Probably annouce a PPC 970 based Powerbook in the near future...END OF YEAR? Possibly a Naming change to hardware lineup, and Adjustable Displays

What is less likely? Windows verison of iTunes, PPC 970s shipping, PPC 970 Powerbooks shipping, iCam,

What is NOT going to happen? Apple PDA, Apple Cell phone,

As for the whole product line being revamped, i don't think we'll see a whole new product line at WWDC, but i think that Apple is going to be moving all it's lines away from the G4/G3 based systems. I don't even see the iBooks being converted to G4 systems, as IBM's chip lineup is known to be 20-30% cheaper than Motorola's line...

Instead of seeing G4s as the low end chips, i'd probably wager that IBMs will develop a PPC off of the 750 chip and this will probably replace the G3 systems. But i wouldn't expect to see a PPC 750 until you see a 980 in a powermac.... I think if Apple is going to IBM processors, it would be prudent that they went to an all IBM chip lineup.

Re:Next from Apple...

[phillymjs]

Chill out, rabid fanboy!

I was not slamming/mocking Apple for only shipping a single-button mouse. I'm typing this post on my G4. All I was saying is, based on their nomenclature changes they might be about to ship one with their new towers.

~Philly

Re:PPC 970 Powerbook

[statusbar]

"32 bits ought to be enough for anybody"

right?

BTW, a 64 bit processor means more than just the amount of ram you can stuff in it... Think virtual.

--jeff++