Slashdot Mirror
PowerPC 750GX Begins Sampling Next Month
Trollaxor writes "The June issue of IBM's PowerPC Processor News features an article on the latest G3, Big Blue's PowerPC 750GX. The chip, which begins sampling next month, runs at 1.1 GHz and has 1 megabyte of on-chip L2 cache. Could this be Apple's next speedbump to the iBook?" Or, maybe, they will kill the iBook altogether in favor of the 12" AlBook.
also, a g3 is faster than a g4 for non-altivec operations. I even have toy benchmarks to prove it!
I'm not going to shell out $600 bucks for a 1 gigahertz G4 upgrade for my trusty 400mhz G3 server, but I might consider a 1 gigahertz G3 if the price was under $300.
This is hardly an Apple story. The G3 (aka PPC 750) has many applications other than Macs.
P.S. It's only a G3, G4, or G5 when it is used in a Mac, otherwise it's just a plain old PowerPC.
A lot of this stuff will really hinge on Panther. It will be tough for apple to sell G3's if Panther doesn't run well on the processor. I know Jaguar runs fine for what it does, but it still misses having Quartz. How much of Panther will require more than what the G3 can handle.
What's worse is that there is no guarantee from Apple that they will even continue to really care about the G3. They are already trying to steer people away from the sub 1ghz G4's with the creation of Pixlet. So it definitely leaves a hole with concern to the G3.
I hate to say it, but the G3's time may be almost up.
Slashdot...it's like Fox news, but without the biased sl...or maybe not.
I second that Apple would never eliminate the iBook, as it is a great option for budget-conscious students! I have a Sony VAIO right now with a 15.2" screen, and all I want to do is get rid of it! It is a pain in the butt to lug around my campus all the time! I'm working all summer long so that I can afford a nice iBook, or maybe a 12" AlBook, but the iBook is much more likely because of price reasons. If Apple were to EOL the iBook line they would be eliminating a huge intro market, and with the Switch campaign and everything else, I can't see them doing that!
I agree that it's not exactly a replacement for IM per se, but it's a much more practical person-to-person video-conferencing solution than I have seen, and with audio only and a broadband connection, it's free phonecalls at the margin. :-)
Babar
If apple keeps the G3 in the iBook for another year, it may not be able to compete against other sub 1000 notebooks with desktop 2.2 Ghz P4, 15 inch displays, and combo drives. You can argue small size and battery life (I would agree), but that would still be a tough sell to those on a slim budget and don't look that far down the spec sheet. Unless Apple leverages the low power capabilities of the G3 and built a sub 5 pound notebook with a 14 inch display to replace 12 inch, I wont be able to recommend it.
You don't have to be smart to use a Mac, you just have to be smart enough to buy one
Whoops! I just got to thinking. I may be wron in the above post.
The G4 is going away, it won't clock-up enough, and Apple pays through the nose for them. The IBM 970 is a power/heat hog (compared to the G3 and G4) because it's based on the POWER4 chips. IBM has the G3, which is low power and heat, but a bit feature-starved. I don't think the 970 will ever scale down well for laptop usage, it's from a family of CPUs with no power considerations to worry of.
IBM could certainly reengineer the G3 line with some SIMD stuff from their 970, not an 'AltiVec unit' but just add some SIMD instructions to the CPU. You wouldn't even need the full set of SIMD instructions, just get the core features in. The resulting CPU would be very attractive for Apple and DVR manufacturers (for video compression).
I hope they juice up the bus if they do this, maybe they can put the memory controller/ethernet/usb2/firewire onto the chip as well (in the package, but not on-die), since those are all features that I'll bet most of their target market will want.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
Word.
I have the 600Mhz iBook with the 8Mb rage card - the last iBook to be made that doesn't support QE.
I'm happy with my CPU, but I'd kill for a QE-capable graphics chip.
I suspected that IBM would roll out these >1Ghz G3s after the G5 was announced. Now that Apple can't be embarrased that their consumer line will be equal or greater clock speed than their "pro" G4 line, they're free to bump the iBook right up there well past the 1Ghz mark.
The iBook isn't going away - it fits a particular part of the Mac market. There's a slight crossover (12" Albook or 14" iBook? - both cost about the same) but there's clearly a progression of technology from the base iBook up to the behemoth 17" Albook.