Originally posted by Snowy_River
Two things, from what I've read, Moto may be on a course to produce 7457s by the end of the year, but IBM wants to be well on the way to the 90nm 970 by then.
Yes, the 7457 is supposed to be in production somewhere between Q2 and Q4, depending on which Moto docs you look at. However, nowhere have I read that IBM "wants to be well on the way to the 90 nm 970 by then." I think this is just over-optimism on the part of some in the Mac rumors community, who believe what they want to believe rather than what the evidence would suggest that they ought to believe. Remember, IBM has barely even committed to shipping the 130 nm 970 by the end of the year (they have only said "2H 03" for the 970...now, maybe production is going better than expected, but if so they certainly haven't admitted it yet). And at CeBit they implied that there will be another release of the 130 nm 970s (i.e. running at up to 2.5 Ghz). So even if they really beat expectations and somehow managed to get the 970 out of the door by the end of the summer, they would still have another batch of 130 nm 970s to release in, say, winter. Thus it is safe to assume that they probably will not be producing 90 nm 970s until well into 2004. It's not impossible that they could produce them earlier, but certainly we have no good reason to believe that they will.
Anyway, how often have we heard Moto say 'we'll be shipping the new chip by [insert time frame], and it'll blow you away...'?
Look, I am not going to defend Moto's record on shipping processors! Who would? Nevertheless, the fact that the 7457 is already sampling means a lot (specifically, it means that it's at about the same stage in its life as the 970 is currently, according to IBM's indications back in October). And I am sure that Apple has a much better idea of when it will ship than you or I do - if they have good reason to expect that the 7457 will ship before the end of the year, then presumably they will use it.
So, I'd guess that if the 7457 ships, it'll be the new chip for the iBook (which might move to the 7455 in the mean time), while the PowerBooks go to the 970.
I seriously doubt the iBook would move to 7455. Too hot. Maybe 7457 if the Powerbook moves to 970, since they should be available around the same time. But actually, I really like the 750FX for the iBook...if they let it run above 1 Ghz and upped the memory bus speed to 150+ mhz, then it would be a nice little chip for the iBook - super low power, cheap, and pretty zippy.
rather irrelevent. The G4 has been the fluke. If you look back farther, almost every time Apple has had a chip that can be shipped in a mobile configuration it has done so, releasing the chip at the same time in both PowerBooks and PowerMacs. The easiest example is the G3. Both the G3 PowerBook (aka Kanga) and the first generation G3 PowerMac were released in November of 1997.
"Every time" is like two times at most (G3 and the 603e...sort of). Well, two out of three isn't that bad. So if the 970 were well suited to mobile applications, then I might agree with you (though I still claim that the 970 Powerbook will NEVER ship before the 970 tower, which is what many are implying). But...
So, if we are to assume that the 970 is mobile friendly, then we can draw the conclusion that Apple will release PowerBooks with it.
I would strongly dispute this assumption! The 970 is not "mobile friendly." 19 watts at 1.2 Ghz...certainly it could be worse, but I wouldn't label it as "mobile friendly." The Pentium 4-M, which is a terrible mobile chip, dissipates between 20-30 watts dependening on the core voltage setting, so the PPC 970 does intrude upon the lower range of the Pentium 4-M's power dissipation. The latest 7455 dissipates 14 watts at 1 Ghz (see
http://e-www.motorola.com/brdata/PDFDB/docs/PPCSALESFACT.pdf), and even it is considered to be a little hot. So while I agree that it is feasible to put the 130 nm 970 into a Powerbook (at low clock speeds), I would certainly NOT call it "mobile friendly" or imply that it would be in any way easy to design a light 970-equipped Powerbook with good battery life. Because at the end of the day, it's just not a great mobile processor, at least not before a process shrink. Better than the P4-M, yes, but that is not saying a whole lot.
