The small production Xserve has a back order of 4-6 weeks. That seems to be entirely due to a lack of enough 970FX processors and its unlikely that IBM has another 9XX PowerPC in production right now, other than the 970 and 970FX. So, in order for the PowerMacs to have a processor upgrade Apple needs to get a much larger supply of 970FX processors than is being supplied currently. Its very unlikely that Apple would up the demand for 970FX processors, and thereby lengthen the delivery time for PowerMacs, by introducing a G5 iMac in the next month or so. Instead, I'd expect Apple to announce a 1.5GHz G4 iMac in the interim, and perhaps a completely new iMac in 2-3 months when faster chips are available in sufficient quanities.
Apple could help justify the prices of iMac computers by upgrading the performance substantially. But, in order to do that there has to be a adequate supply of much higher performing processors.
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I suspect Apple will put the 970 into the G5 iMacs. There are plenty of them being made, and the current news is that the "old" G5 towers are being discontinued to clear the channel for the June upgrades. That means a big pile of 970 chips and no systems to put them in.
The iMac is a consumer system and doesn't need the latest-and-greatest version of the G5, as long as it has something to justify the "G5" logo on the side. (If Apple had an unlimited amount of 970FXs, sure they might put those in the new iMacs, if only as a way of doing a large-scale engineering test of using that chip in thermally-constrained designs (practice for the G5 PowerBooks).
Phinius said:
It sure looks like the 970FX was designed with a small 512MB L2 cache in order to reduce the costs of manufacturing. Why else would IBM only put 512KB of L2 cache, instead of 1MB like Intel did with Prescott? It could very well be that Apple intends to move the PowerMacs to the Power5 derived 9XX PowerPC processors in January, then bring the highest performing and cooler/cheaper 970FX processors to the iMac consumer line. With a likely larger die size from adding SMT and a doubling of L2 for the G5 processor after the 970FX, Apple could have both the consumer and pro line processors topping out at the same frequencies and yet still differentiate them by as much as a 50% boost in speed offered by a bigger cache and SMT on the pro line. Apple could then offer a single processor PowerMac running at the same frequency as a iMac and yet charge substantially more for the PowerMac.
By SMT, do you mean the same thing Intel calls HyperThreading? Since most G5 systems are SMP (multiple actual CPUs), why would Macs need single-chip pseudo-multiprocessing? Especially since it seems to complicate doing real SMP with those chips (you can't do SMP with a Pentium 4, you have to use a Xeon for that on the Intel side).
Cheers,
Crikey
