Hello all, this is the first time I've posted to this forum, however I've been reading it for a while. Actually, what prompted me to post was the torrent of misinformation from mr. army_guy.
1. the itaniums are server class processors, not workstation class processors. mark that the xeon is intel's workstation class, and pentium is the consumer class. the g5 is a more general workstation/server processor. it works well for both tasks.
2. the itanium was intel's failure, and came out far before both apple's and amd's 64bit implimentation. it's way overpriced and underpowered. the itanium 2 is decent and competes with the amd's opterons and the g5, although the opterons usually have the advantage. the g5 and opteron also support 32bit execution, where the itaniums do not. the intel and amd platforms, however, do scale up farther in number of processors. However, a dual processor system (intel, amd, or apple) makes a respectable server, cluster node, or workstation.
3. unless you are doing development, games have nothing to do with a workstation. even then you have test systems which match the spec of your customers, i.e. consumer-class computers. for instance, one can spend 10k on a decent rendering system for a workstation which would do very poorly with 3d games. the requirements are totally different, with games placing a high priority on a short (real-time) rendering pipeline.
It's fine to say these systems do not meet your needs as a consumer or a professional, but please refrain from distorting the discussion with semi-facts/definitions.
Also, cray uses supercooling to bring the conductors to a superconductive state, thereby exponentially increasing the efficiency. pcs stay well away from that, and it has nothing to do with watercooling, except that one can usually have a much larger radiator than heatsink.
Back to topic, though... The facts about the heat disipation of the 970fx are sort of muddled. All of this is news to me, so by reading this thread and a couple others, it just looks like there's a small chance the processor will make it into a powerbook in a week.
Just wondering, though... Surely there has to be a ton of people out there in the manufacturing plants, and droves of hardware testers who would know of the immediate release of a powerbook g5. I mean, it's not a small task. Wouldn't it have been leaked that they are on the way?
And surely they wouldn't be shipping to stores already, right (referring to the price changes of the powerbooks in stores)? Usually apple announces a new product is ready to ship and then it actually ships at least a month later.
I was looking at a history of apple releases and it showed something like an 8 month period between the announcement of the g4 (or maybe it was the g3) powerbook and the actual finished product.
But my question is, how do we usually get the rumor info? Is it usually from the hardware plant, or the shipping agency, or from a dev guy, or a tester, or what?
I'm just wondering, 'cause it seems to me like there should be a lot more noise if it's a powerbook g5 release.
