PPC 970 for Apple... Confirmed?

[Freg3000]

Originally posted by Vonnie
Not if Steve is able to completely overwhelm us with Panther goodies

"Panther, so good you don't care about PPC970 anymore"

I can just imagine everything sitting watching the keynote looking at their watches thinking..."Ok, he's spent an hour on a Panther demo......when is he getting to the 970?"

 

[ddtlm]

Snowy_River:

There is one problem with this. Is it economical for Apple to wait until the end of the year in order to get the 7457 (when we are given to understand the 7457 will be shipping), rather than update the line to the 970 now (assuming the 970 is available and is suitable for a mobile computer in its initial release version).

Despite all the rumors I don't see any reason to think that the 970 will be shipping in anything till September at earliest, and I thought they said the 7457 will be shipping in the 3rd quarter and was already sampling. In addition to be being cheap and easy for Apple, the 7457 should be a compelling laptop chip, and additionally, its not clear that Apple has enough engineers to design radically new motherboards in as rapid sucessession as would be needed for a fast transition to a PPC970 laptop.

illumin8:

64-bit processor means you can now have 64-bit registers, so technically your processor is now operating on chunks of data that are twice as large as before.

Yes, if you ignore the AltiVec registers, and also ignore the floating point unit which could do 64-bit numbers all along.

 

[Vlade]

If they officially said its for apple, wouldn't that mean that it is coming out soon? It wouldn't be a good idea to announce it now if the PPC 970 is coming out in december, because that would kill powermac sales now.

 

[ddtlm]

Vlade:

It is possible, even likely, that the reporter pulled the "for Apple" part out of his rear end.

 

[magitekkn]

Originally posted by mymemory
BTW, I hope a 970 chip for my Pismo very soon too

As someone else pointed out, putting a 970 on a slower, 32-bit bus would cripple it horribly... For proof of the travesty of putting chips on memory busses that are too narrow look to the 'road apple' section of www.lowendmac.com where you'll see how horrible it can be when a 32-bit processor is put on a 16-bit bus, same thing for a 64-bit 970 on a 32-bit bus.

 

[mymemory]

Apple users in Caracas

This picture was taken this morning down town, I'm the guy with the had. This is the MUG I manage congregate expenting for a new chip.

The National Guard are taking their positions in case no chip is revealed.

 

[maxvamp]

ddtlm

Despite all the rumors I don't see any reason to think that the 970 will be shipping in anything till September at earliest,

I can... back to school sales... If apple is to have maximum success in selling this chip this year, they need to have at least one machine out with the 970 by mid-august.
While I do not believe that a sing, or even dual 970s will show up in a laptop for quite a long time, this would ideally be the machine to introduce, and then roll out PMs ASAP.

Max

 

[beulahman]

Originally posted by yzedf
I did not see the sequence of characters that spell out either "970" or "Gobi." Whos to say what they are working on. Could be the next generation airport base station, or iPod, or iWalk or iPhone or or or...

No, but it did say "64 bit" which Gobi isn't. The 970, however, is.

 

[Abstract]

I didn't read the entire thread, but is there any doubt that IBM is producing the 970 for Apple at this point? Seriously, disbelieving at this point is just being silly.

 

[ddtlm]

magitekkn:

The G4's are running on a 64-bit FSB. The bitness of the bus has nothing to do with the bitness of the processor.

maxvamp:

If apple is to have maximum success in selling this chip this year, they need to have at least one machine out with the 970 by mid-august

No, for maximum success they'd have had the 970 out yesterday, or in Janruary, but they didn't have it available because they couldn't do it, and the same may very well be true for some time to come.

 

[sedarby]

Re: Re: PPC 970 for Apple... Confirmed?

Originally posted by freundt
Uhh.. whoever said this doesn;t know what they are talking about.. As we all know, as it has been beaten into our heads multiple times, in multiple stories, throughout multiple threads, 64 bit != 2x 32 bit speed.

_f

Actually the article is correct. Twice as much information is correct, twice as fast would be wrong.

 

[pyrotoaster]

The Real Insight

Arn, how could you have missed this piece of the article?

From BusinessWeek
That's not even counting an anticipated initial speed boost in the new chip's clock cycle to well over 1.8 Ghz -- and likely well beyond that over the course of the year.

Clock speed confirmations! That's something to get excited about!

With processors beyond 1.8 GHz by the year's end, I see one very happy anniversary coming in January... (I leave us all to speculate here)

 

[The Ancients]

Woo Hoo - they get faster and faster

Originally posted by mathiasr
What is actually fun is when he writes "gigahertz per second"

Hmmm, let's extrapolate (which is what this game's all about it, isn't it?)

m/s = speed
m/s/s = acceleration

Ghz = speed
Ghz/s = acceleration

Therefore, the new machines will keep getting faster and faster as they're used. Love to see how IBM/Apple solved the heat problems on these babies...

..k

 

[The Ancients]

Spoiled?

Originally posted by Dont Hurt Me
Maybe we wont have to hear anymore garbage like apple will use the g4 next year or amd is.... or marklar and intel yap yap yap.

We can but hope - spoiled with a big fat FSB, hypertransport and an ATI GPU. See, now that's not too much to ask for is it?

Edit: Forgot about Serial ATA.

 

[Remus]

Re: Re: PPC 970 for Apple... Confirmed?

Originally posted by freundt
Uhh.. whoever said this doesn;t know what they are talking about.. As we all know, as it has been beaten into our heads multiple times, in multiple stories, throughout multiple threads, 64 bit != 2x 32 bit speed.

_f

Like I said in another tread. IT may be that this is just a business writer that does not understand computers. He may have assumed (yes I know never A$$-U-ME anything )

 

[Fender2112]

More 64 vs 32...

I read an artical the other day that descibed how the 970 differs from the G4. My terminoloy may be off, so don't blast me. But I think I got the concept right.

The G4 can process 5 instructions per cycle. That's 4 in the pipeline and 1 result. The 970 handles between 8 and 12 depending on what's in the pipeline with one of them being a result. I took this to imply that the 970 can handle about twice as many instructions per cycle. With the 970 starting at 1.8 GHz and the G4 at 1.42 GHz, we get somthing like this:

970: 8x1.8= 14.4 Gig instructions per second
G4: 5x1.42= 7.1 Gig instructions per second.

This implies to me that the 970 will be about twice as fast as a G4 and this speed has very little to do with 64 or 32 bit numbers.

Please toss me a life jacket if I missed the boat on this.

 

[arn]

looks like the author misspoke.

correction posted/ article updated

arn

 

[The Ancients]

Steve at it again?

Uh huh. Looks more like Steve Jobs got wind of it to me!

Originally posted by arn
looks like the author misspoke.

correction posted/ article updated

arn

 

[josepht]

It's official, sort of...

Now that the statement made has been edited/retracted, I now consider it a confirmation that Apple will use the chip. I was waiting for Apple to get wind of that and make someone change what they said.

 

[AidenShaw]

Re: It's official, sort of...

Originally posted by josepht
Now that the statement made has been edited/retracted, I now consider it a confirmation that Apple will use the chip. I was waiting for Apple to get wind of that and make someone change what they said.

I'm not sure that I'll buy that - it implies that The Lord God Jobs is OK with the line "it does say its new PowerPC chip will work on Apple platforms" which I find to be extremely unlikely.

 

[Masker]

Re: Woo Hoo - they get faster and faster

Originally posted by The Ancients
Hmmm, let's extrapolate (which is what this game's all about it, isn't it?)

m/s = speed
m/s/s = acceleration

Ghz = speed
Ghz/s = acceleration

Therefore, the new machines will keep getting faster and faster as they're used. Love to see how IBM/Apple solved the heat problems on these babies...

..k

I know all the people that keep talking about this are just being goofy, but this bugs me: your car can accelerate, but does that mean that it keeps getting faster the longer that it runs? Simply because it's a higher derivative doesn't mean that it would have a CONSTANT acceleration.... [Edit: removed goofiness]

Just because the guy mispoke, doesn't mean that you guys aren't also mistaken. And, if you're going to get all physics on us, use the correct term: velocity not speed. [Edit: Hmmmm. For cps or Hz, velocity isn't exactly right, either...]

 

[alset]

970 News is a Joke

That update to the article is hilarious. News of the 970 is getting pretty old.

Dan

 

[P-Worm]

Could IBM be using the 970 elsewhere?

It looks as though Steve is OK with them saying that the 970 can work in Apple computers, just not exculisively (which the first statement sort of implied). Do you think that IBM will be using the 970 for things other than Macintoshs? Maybe there own desktops? Seems a little unlikely, but we don't want to be swept with the current...

P-Worm

 

[ddtlm]

josepht:

I still think that it is far more likely that the author didn't know what he was talking about. What are the odds that some random journalist who is plainly not knowledgeable about processors got a leak of this importance? What are the odds that if he did get a real leak, that he would just mention it in passing, rather than identifying how important it is?

Also note that if he did really get a leak, Apple could do nothing to make him change his story. This is not the same thing as a product picture.

 

[Snowy_River]

Originally posted by ddtlm
No, for maximum success they'd have had the 970 out yesterday, or in Janruary, but they didn't have it available because they couldn't do it, and the same may very well be true for some time to come.

True, true. But we have some significant rumors from various sources that suggest that this is no longer the case. And, if the rumors are right, we may well see the 970s very soon...