G5 PowerBook "Challenge"

CarlBenda writes "MacWorld/UK has some interesting quotes from Jon Rubinstein, senior vice president of Hardware Engineering at Apple concerning the possibility of a G5 powerbook. He's said that a G5 powerbook is "an issue of good, solid engineering" and that "a few years ago, nobody thought it would be possible to get a G4 processor in a PowerBook". Start saving your money."

Comments

Great Powerbooks await

[Rubel]

You know they wouldn't have chosen it if they couldn't make a good laptop with it.

Now, they'd better make sure they sort out that heat problem that the current 12" G4 Powerbooks suffer from.

It's called processor cycling

[Shinzaburo]

The desktop Power Mac G5 already does processor cycling in order to keep the noise/temperature/performance balance at an optimal level. Clearly a similar function will be used in the PowerBook G5, just as nearly every Wintel notebook on the market today does.

I sold a Vaio R505 that would whine up and down loudly depending on whether you were scrolling through a web page or just sitting there reading it. I just couldn't take it anymore. When it comes to choosing performance or noise level, I usually choose to have a quieter machine. But hopefully Apple, unlike Sony, will allow an easy way to control which gets priority.

Misconception: Where the heat is comming from

[Llywelyn]

> As hot as the G4 PowerBooks get, they'll need some
> hellacious cooling on these things.

While I realize that the parent post is a joke, this is a fairly common misconception I figured should be addressed eventually.

The reason why PowerBook G4 systems get hot tends to be the hard drive and has little (if anything) to do with the processor (which runs at a much lower temperature than anything Intel has offered in years).

Re:Misconception: Where the heat is comming from

[mkldev]

When people ask me about the temperature of the PowerPC processor, I like to tell them two stories.

#1. Where I work, engineers have a tendency to run their PowerMac machines 24x7 with the side open. No fan cooling the CPU. None. Try that with any PC processor, and it'll be toast (or at least shut itself off).

#2. Where I used to work, every trade show, we'd trot out an embedded PowerPC with... I think a G3 core. Guess what it didn't have on it? Fan? No, try again. Heatsink? Yup. No fan, no heatsink, and it was only slightly warm to the touch. You can probably imagine the shock on people's faces when we invinted them to touch a running CPU, forget the look of sheer confusion when it sat at about 38C. :-)

So yeah, PowerPC processors are not particularly hot, relatively speaking. The northbridge and GPU are both generally far hotter; any heat that you might feel is likely from one of those two.

There's Hot, And Then There's Really Hot

[rsmith-mac]

While putting the current .13 micron G5 in a laptop would be hard, it's not impossible. The chip itself is hot, but at lower speeds, it's not particularly hot. Desktop P4's are being put in to laptops, and those do upwards of 90wts of heat(with Prescott set to surpass 100wts), which makes for a hot laptop, but isn't impossible, as it results in a powerful "desktop replacement" machine.

The reason we're not seeing a PB G5 is because the kind of "desktop replacements" being made out of P4's are unreasonable as far as Apple's concerned. Apple wants something sleek, and they're willing to wait for it. Still, compared to the P4, the G5 is far less of a challenge to implement in to a laptop.

G3

[Phroggy]

What I'm really looking forward to is, apparently IBM is working on adding an AltiVec-compatible SIMD unit to the G3 processor, and ramping up the clock speed. A couple of those would make a sweet laptop.

Make up your own roadmaps

[hayne]

[...] I finally get enough money to buy an iPod, go get it, and then suddenly there are brand new ones out about a month or two later [...]

Otherwise, who cares about a roadmap? Are you really going to put off some major hardware provisioning decision because a roadmap claims (key word) that they will have such and such a product out by a certain time? They are almost always adjusted.

Well, you seem to be saying that you would have delayed your purchase had you known that some new models would be out in a month or two. So, at least in this case, it was in Apple's best interest to keep its roadmap to itself. They got your money earlier than they might have, and your time-to-trade-in-for-new-model clock started a bit earlier.

Since you seem to accept that roadmaps are often works of fiction, why not make up your own roadmap? Hmm, the interval between previous generations of iPods was x, so I project the next revision will be in the month of y. Then, if you delay a purchase after looking at your roadmap, you will be happy if the roadmap was accurate and new models arrived when you projected them. And if your roadmap was inaccurate, you have only yourself to blame.

If Apple published a roadmap that they didn't live up to, everybody would be unhappy about it. And there are lots of reasons why they might not introduce new models by the projected date. A manufacturer always incurs additional costs in introducing a new model so they would prefer to keep selling the old model as long as they can. If the old model is still selling well, why bother introducing a new model at all?

Re:Well, they don't want to hurt current sales...

[YouHaveSnail]

Car companies don't disguise their prototypes.

Sure they do. And just as with computer-related rumors, there are folks out there who follow and report on new developments and publish photos of suspected prototypes.

Yes, auto makers will show you their 'concept cars' as a way to generate interest. And they'll sometimes show actual prototypes as well, particularly when the prototype is close to what they expect to produce. But when GM or Ford are testing out a new engine, for example, they'll put it in a car with an existing body style. Or if they're trying out a whole new car, they'll cover the body panels with tape, or leather masking, or whatever.

Heck, I can even think of at least a couple TV spots where the manufacturers use this idea to make their new model seem more desireable. There's one, for example, where some alleged engineers are testing out a white car (Nissan Altima, maybe?) somewhere in the desert. A bunch of planes, helicopters, cars, etc. show up trying to get a look at the car, and the engineers then hide the car under a tent so that the others (press? competition?) can't see it.

So yeah, car companies do disguise their prototypes, and for the same reasons: they want to surprise the buying public and the competition with a cool new product at the introduction, and they don't want to hurt the market for the existing model until that time.

Re:"I'm not dead yet.."

[macmurph]

Apple has %7 of the laptop market with a trend towards strong growth in this area. The new G4 and speculative G5 PowerBooks, coupled with the release of MacOS X Panther 10.3 could bolster Apple's laptop markethshare to %10. This would place Apple as the number one supplier of laptops in the world.

Re:Lack of Apple roadmaps is frustrating

[Babbster]

There's a significant difference in that x86 processors are commodity items. In addition, most processor price cuts occur when newer processors arrive at the top which shove all the slower processors down a notch (or a couple of notches depending on how many new processors hit the market). This has the net effect that you'll be paying about the same amount for the fastest processor whenever you happen to buy it.

With Apple, they upgrade their product line and promptly discontinue production of the old products which means that there is no lower tier which would reap the decreased cost benefit of the upgrades. Because of this, it's not in Apple's best interest to announce upgraded product lines ahead of time because it would have a chilling effect on the sales of the products they've already produced. This phenomenon can also be noted in the game console industry where price cuts may be rumored for a while but no confirmation announcement will be handed down until the price cuts take place. For example, if Nintendo announced today that as of October 1st the Gamecube would be $99 instead of $150, that would be tantamount to Nintendo saying "You shouldn't buy a Gamecube until next month."