Here is some corporate news.

Vince knows a great deal about IBM & probably also about Motorola. Where, in the shadowy world of government and corporate SPY vs. SPY, is Motorola?

There's been some talk on the forum about Macs being progged to bring down the Net, about Deutch getting in trouble for keeping his desktops and his Powerbook. The U.S. Army has switched to Mac servers. Etc, Etc.

Happy Saturday,

vM

ZDNet > Tech News > Mac > Intel-AMD: Can the PowerPCs keep up?

By Stephen Beale, MacWEEK.com March 30, 2000 4:26 PM PT

Mac users can be forgiven for feeling some processor envy these days. As the Power Mac G4 chugs along at a maximum 500MHz, PC manufacturers have already released systems with 1GHz CPUs from Intel and AMD. At equivalent clock speeds the PowerPC G4 still delivers better performance than Intel's Pentium III, especially when running applications that take advantage of the G4's Velocity Engine (aka AltiVec). But the growing gap between Mac and PC hardware has to be cause for concern, especially given recent signs that a rift continues between chip partners IBM and Motorola.

There could be good news in the short term. MacUser UK, citing unnamed sources in the Apple-IBM-Motorola alliance, reported Wednesday that Motorola (NYSE: MOT) will deliver 600-, 700- and 800MHz versions of the PowerPC G4 this fall, followed by a 1GHz version in the first quarter of 2001. According to the article, the new chips will also feature other enhancements, including improved multiprocessing support, a second Velocity Engine vector-processing unit and backside caches of up to 4MB.

The publication also reported that the new chips will be less power-hungry than the current G4 CPUs and may be cooler even than the G3. Apple has said the G4's heat and power consumption prevents its use in the company's PowerBook line, which still runs on the G3.

Motorola's road map

Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL), following its usual policy, declined to comment on the future availability of faster G4 chips. But much of the news is in keeping with the PowerPC road map that Motorola laid out last October at the Microprocessor Forum in San Jose, Calif. At the time, the company said it was testing G4 processors with AltiVec technology running at up to 700MHz; the chipmaker also promised that the G4 would eventually hit a top speed of 1GHz.

Waiting in the wings, Motorola said in October, is the PowerPC G5, a 64-bit chip that will also support 32-bit processing to ensure compatibility with current applications. The company said the G5 would be available in one to two years at speeds of up to 2GHz.

However, there are questions about Motorola's ability to deliver new processors in sufficient quantity, which led to last year's debacle in which Apple announced 400MHz, 450MHz and 500MHz G4 systems, only to downgrade them by 50MHz later because of supply constraints.

That prompted Apple to sign up IBM as an alternative supplier of the chips. The wrinkle is that AltiVec is Motorola's technology, and IBM has balked at adding the extension to its own PowerPC designs. With IBM supplying G4 chips with AltiVec, it appeared that the two companies were once again on the same page.

However, IBM Microelectronics spokesman Michael Loughran told MacWEEK.com that IBM has not actually licensed AltiVec. Instead, the company has a deal with Motorola to manufacture the latter's G4 design. "That does not mean we have licensed the AltiVec instruction set from Motorola to incorporate into PowerPC designs of our own, for use in Apple or any other system," he said. "We have not struck any such deal with Motorola nor do we have any plans to pursue it."