beatle888:
Hum, I'm not sure how you see a huge heatsink as a workaround for a DDR FSB. A huge heatsink would work very well with a huge, slow fan, resulting in a very quiet machine which the current G4 towers are not. Nothing to do with DDR though.
And yes, Apple certainly did release the Xserve with DDR 266 (133x2) RAM and a 133mhz FSB, this is a known fact.
eric_n_dfw:
I want to see some benchmarks of "normal usuage" and games. The current benchmarks are too few and too specialized to mean anything to most people.
tjwett:
No current G4 chip supports a DDR FSB, although Apple has made a chipset that supports DDR RAM. This means that when the CPU is reading/writing to/from the RAM, it still has to travel down a single data rate FSB which elliminates much of the benefit of DDR. In general usuage, a well-benchmarked VIA chipset for Pentium III's which was also SDR/DDR in this fassion showed a 0% to 5% general performance increase over it's SDR/SDR relative. I do not expect much more from general use on Apple's Xserve chipset, although certain benchmarks do go very fast. These benchmarks are no more relavent to most of us that the Photoshop backoffs are.
esome:
The hugeness of the cooling system could aslo simply be for a much more quiet computer. A huge heatsink with a huge, slow-spinning fan just breezes away the heat with very very little noise. This is much more plausible than quad G4's.
I am not sure if quad G4's are even possible, but if they are, realize that the shared FSB would become a major performance bottleneck.
DeusOmnis:
Yeah, Apple wishes they could just lift the Athlon's FSB and make it work with their stuff. That's not the real world though, for one thing, the FSB must be matched to the processor, which means that no DDR FSB can exist with a G4 that supports it.
SPG:
Regardless of what Apple or Moto wants, CPU's are not designed on the backs of envelopes and rolled out the next day. Major designs take years, small ones take no less than many many months, and the fabs need months to get a production line started after the CPU is finsihed. It does not matter if Apple is desperate and their customers are mad, Moto cannot be expected to roll out a CPU for six months and then brush it aside. It took them far longer to design it and get production ramped up. A DDR-FSB-supporting G4 around February would not surprise me, but one in a month would.
So wait a month and see how things play out.
