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20030608 Sunday June 08, 2003

Apple G5s - 1.8 MHz Apple From Slashdot (via Erik of course):

Apple Insider is reporting that Apple will announce computers based on IBM's 64 bit PPC 970 processor in the upcomming WWDC and will market them as G5. The new Power Mac G5s will sport a completely new motherboard design utilizing DDR 400 RAM as well as AGP 8x graphics, FireWire 800, and USB 2.0, sources said. "In the box" connectivity among the news systems is based on Hypertransport which provides 64-bit addressing and will replace Apple's multilevel bus architecture found in current systems. Initial offerings of the Power Mac G5 are said to boast 1.4 to 1.8GHz, single core PPC 970 processors, with the possibility of a dual 1.8GHz chips shortly thereafter.

Sounds good, but how long will those processors take to put in the PowerBooks? My advise - just go Intel - you'll get more customers and it'll be faster! How sweet would it be to buy a new Dell laptop and be able to run Windows, Linux and OS X on the same machine?! That would rock - and I'm willing to bet you'd get a lot of folks buying OS X. But then again, OS X is cheap - it's Apple's hardware that's spendy and it's probably a good revenue driver for them. Posted in Mac OS X at Jun 08 2003, 05:40:40 PM MDT 3 Comments

Comments:

You said... Intell can run OS X? Is Darwin that good yet, the port? It runs apps and things? I was about to get a Mac, now I will wait. On Intell, I like NewIsys 2100. .V

Posted by Vic on June 09, 2003 at 05:42 AM MDT #

Darwin can run on Intel, but not OS X. Currently, OS X does NOT run on Intel - I'm just hoping that someday it will.

Posted by Matt Raible on June 09, 2003 at 06:33 AM MDT #

There are pretty credible rumours that Apple are maintaining an x86 port of OS X somewhere deep in the bowels of the company, or at least are in a position to get an x86 version out pretty quickly. This makes sense: both Darwin and NeXTStep have x86 versions, so an x86 OS X isn't a great leap. On the other hand, it's not just a case of porting the OS. There are a huge number of applications that Apple does not control that would have to be rebuilt for the new architecture. This would be a pretty painful process for Apple to go through (although they did it once before with the move from 68k to PowerPC) Apple 'going Intel' also wouldn't mean you'd just be able to go out, buy a PC clone and install OS X on it. Any Apple/Intel box would require some Apple-proprietary BIOS. Steve Jobs killed the Apple clone market once, he's unlikely to open it up again, especially since the cut-throat hardware margins in the PC world would leave him with no leeway to play with new and cool hardware designs. Finally, though, one of the reasons Macs can get away with the form factors they do, is because the PowerPC uses less power, and generates less heat than the equivalent Pentium. If the G5 has a similar advantage, Apple would be stupid to throw away their trademark sleek designs. CPUs are so fast nowadays that unless you're a gamer (and a gamer will use a PC no matter what), the raw speed difference between top-end Mac and PC desktop hardware isn't really that noticeable from day to day.

Posted by Charles Miller on June 09, 2003 at 05:51 PM MDT #

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Matt Raible is a Web Architect who enjoys developing applications with open source technologies. Contact me for rates.
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