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news of 2003-03-10
PowerPC 970 & PowerPC 7457-RM Rumour Roundup
On Wednesday, 12. Mar. 2003, CeBIT will start. It's time for a little bit of history. Here we go. :)
Late last year, IBM surprised the industry and the Macintosh crowd with a slimmed down version of the big iron Power4 processor aimed at the high end desktop workstation market. The processor named PowerPC 970 would be a 64bit PowerPC processor, binary compatible with 32bit PowerPC processors. Plus it'd also have an AltiVec engine, a first for IBM, which previously was against that engine but had developed its own SIMD engine for the later G3 series' processors, the Sahara or PowerPC 750FX used in Apple's latest iBooks.
Although Apple denied having plans for using the PowerPC 970, which was to be released in mass production in late 2003 at speeds of 1.4 to 1.8 GHz, the press saw a light at the end of Apple's own processor tunnel in IBM's processor development. Around the same time, a Motorola roadmap made the rounds of rumour sites, that put a PowerPC 7457-RM at up to 1.833 GHz on the very same horizon: Late 2003.
In a few days, IBM will present blade servers at CeBIT with PowerPC 970 processors running between 1.8 and 2.5 GHz. This certainly looks like IBM is well ahead of its original plans. But a press release is just a press release, and IBM hasn't yet said what the processors will cost and when the higher end 2.5 GHz parts will be available.
To repeat what Steve Jobs said just before both new PowerPC processors (the 970 from IBM and the 7457-RM from Motorola) made rumour site news - and people were asking Mr. Jobs whether a switch to AMD 64bit processors was a viable choice...
"We like to have options." And one of the most obvious options Apple has, is to use the PowerPC 970 only in the highest end PowerMacs and move PowerBooks and consumer machines to advanced G4 processors such as the PowerPC 7457. (fryke)
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[ written by fryke™ on 2003-03-10 at 02:01 CET ]
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