| Friday, April 2, 2004 |
14:47 - I've seen the future, baby-- it is POWER
http://www.macosrumors.com/33104L.html
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Naturally, nobody knows how much credence to give the content of the Mac rumor sites, of which the granddaddy has got to be MacOS Rumors... over the years, it's had its credibility shot down to nil and raised back up to stratospheric levels so many times that it's impossible to know whether to treat it as a source or oracular information, or a place for entertaining fantasy. (My suspicion is that just about all rumor sites are honest at heart, or try to be-- nobody actually sets out to hoodwink the Mac community, with a few notable exceptions like SpyMac, home of the infamous iWalk hoax.)
But MOSR has had a high enough hit-to-miss ratio in the past few years that I still keep it in my bookmarks, and I go there occasionally just to whet my appetite for things that are all but assured to appear eventually on store shelves, even if perhaps not as soon as the rumormongers should like us to believe.
So if you're interested in knowing where the POWER architecture is going to lead IBM in coming months, check out this page. It's anybody's guess how accurate it is, but it's certainly worth keeping an eye on:
The first-generation G5s used in current PowerMacs are PowerPC 970 CPUs, based on IBM's POWER4 architecture using a 130 nanometer silicon-on-insulator (SOI) process. The Xserve G5 is the first example of Macs that will be shipping based on IBM's new PPC 970FX - a faster, cooler, reduced-power version of the 970 created around a 90nm process.
Later this year, Steve Jobs' 3GHz promise will be fulfilled by the PowerPC 975, based on IBM's POWER5 architecture.
Some have speculated that Apple could (not unjustifiably) call the 975 a G6, but we're betting on the 975 as a second-generation G5.
Second-generation PPC 975's will reach as high as 3.8GHz and could viably be used in quad-processor systems. A year later, the real revolution hits with the PowerPC 976.
They're talking about POWER5, POWER6, and even POWER7... I don't know much about these IBM chip designations, but it sounds as though this development effort has plenty of steam behind it.
Make of it, naturally, what ye will.
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Brian Tiemann
