Originally posted by greenstork
Apple needs to develop a mobile processor.
Just like Intel is having problems fitting a P4 into a laptop, so too is Apple, having trouble with it's G5. It seems like everyone forgets that the PPC 970 is a derivative of the Power 4, a server class chip. It was never designed for a laptop, but engineers are really trying to shoehorn it into one. If it comes at the sake of battery life, who needs it. Why would you want a mobile processor that's not efficient, it truly is one of the best measures of laptop performance.
But you seem to forget the reason why Intel needed a mobile chip. It's because the Pentium 4 was such a massively inefficient chip designed for only one thing: to crank the Mhz rating as high as possible. The P4 has CPU stages that are meant to do nothing! And for all this, it trades off power like no tomorrow because it was designed for a desktop system exclusively.
At 130nm, the 970 is not a good candidate for a laptop at the speeds that Apple is likely considering. At 90nm, this might be a different story, but we have few if any details to go on that. All we really have is that Apple wants a PBG5 by the end of 2004, so we will almost certainly get one by then, be it the 970 or some other related chip.
So we come to the Centrino, why is it a good laptop chip? Well, mostly because it is power efficient, it only cranks up the Mhz when you need it (albeit slowly from what I've heard from others) and it doesn't use an excessive amount of power in the process. And it is fast, at least fast enough for most things you want to do.
But look at that again - all that really says is fast when you need it, and not power hungry. Ya know what - if I had that on my Desktop, it might save me some money on my light bill too. After all, we've got energy saver refrigerators, water heaters, washers and dryers - why doesn't my Computer try to save me some money too? The damn thing is on all the time, it shouldn't consume anymore power than I need at any one time.
And thus we come to my final point, Apple is not likely to use two different CPUs for Desktop & Laptop because people want the same things in both places. Imagine a CPU that is blazingly fast when it goes all out, and yet when all your doing is writing a paper hums down to the slowest it can get away with. And instantly springs back to life when you switch to a game. Is it possible? You bet, the 970 already does this to a limited extent
now when it hums down to 1.3 Ghz and back up to max. That can most certainly be refined to drop down to half speed or less. Additionally there is technology out there to turn off processor units that are not being utilized by the current instruction stream for additional power savings. All this has been rumored for inclusion into the next PPC.
There is no reason to split design resources when the only real difference between what people want can be placed in a switch that says "More Speed or Better Power Efficiency".
