Cool, now we know for sure that Apple will never use IBM's high end cpu's in any future PowerMac.
Why? They cannot implement AltiVec into Power4 processors! OS X would be slow on those machines because it is optimized for AltiVec, Dual G4's etc. Apple's programmers would have to do everything from beggining and consumers would suffer. No more AltiVec enhanced scrolling, MPEG-2 encoding, real-time effects with FCP, fast iMovie rendering, iTunes...
Not to mention other pissed off 3rd party developers (especially Adobe)! So shut up about IBM chips, its not going to happen! Macs would become overally slower then with G4's.
whoever said apple were going to use high end IBM cpus ?
The GPUL is a desktop cpu like the G4 is, it's just got features from the Power4 that would make it as powerful as a highend cpu, especially in a dual config with it's 6.4Gb/s of bandwidth and 2 SiMD (Altivec/VMX/Velocity Engine) units per cpu.
Silicon Strategies Article
I'm sure you've read this already but here's a little more info on the PPC* 970 :
Essentially a derivative of the company's Power4 microprocessor, IBM's PowerPC 970 adds 64-bit PowerPC compatibility, an implementation of the Altivec multimedia instruction-set extensions and a fast processor bus supporting up to 16-way symmetric multiprocessing.
Here's more info :
IBM's approach to implementing a 32/64-bit architecture appears straightforward. The 970 supports full 64-bit registers and addressing. When a flag bit is sent it triggers a 32-bit mode in which the high-order words on an arithmetic logic unit and on memory addresses are ignored. In either 64- or 32-bit mode, the processor issues up to eight instructions per clock cycle.
Thus, 32-bit PowerPC applications run unchanged on the 970. However, a 32-bit operating system would have to support new data structures in its memory management unit and new interrupt handlers.
and this pretty much explains why the IBM chip is very real possibility :
Besides the 64-bit capability, the PowerPC 970 includes IBM's first support for what Motorola calls the Altivec instruction set and Apple refers to as its Velocity engine. IBM simply cites the capability of the 160 vector instructions in its SIMD engine to speed graphics and multimedia operations. IBM had opted not to support the instruction extensions in its 32-bit PowerPC family but will bring them into the new 64-bit line. "Adobe has been the premier company taking advantage of [the Altivec extensions]," said Krewell of Microprocessor Report.
It
has got Altivec (just a motorola name for the 128bit SiMD unit anyway) it's got 2 of them aswell. 1 PowerPC cpu with 2 Altivec units could be like a dual G4 on 1 chip when running certain tasks like audio/video compression, software synthesis and those worthless RC5 and SETi crunch tests people like to refer to when comparing Mac and windows PC performance.
The 970 also sports a cache-coherent, 900-MHz processor bus capable of data rates up to 6.4 Gbytes/second. It will support symmetric-multiprocessing configurations of up to 16 CPUs. That capability could be valuable for Apple's new line of Xserve entry-level servers.
6.4Gb/s memory bandwidth, The G4 can only handle a measly 1.3Gb/s not even enough to fully saturate the 1 altivec unit the PPC 74xx series has.
So I think we'll see Motorola chips at 1.5Ghz in the next mac line up and then when the GPUL is ready, apple will move to the IBM chip.
* PPC = PowerPC as in 601,603e,604,604e,750,7400,7410,7450,7455 or G1,G2,G3 and G4 if you prefer. IT ISN'T A POWER4
