Future of Powerbook G5 looks grim

[cyberprince]

Found this on the Apple Insider website today:

For Apple to produce a PowerBook equipped with a G5 processor will be the "mother of all thermal challenges," chief financial officer Peter Oppenheimer said during Apple's Q1 2005 conference call today. The likelihood of such a product emerging in the near future is increasingly looking grim.

Link can be found here.

[Maccess]

Apple made a similar statement when all of its desktops were using 040 chips and its laptops were stuck with 030s. Six months later they introduced the 040 laptops. hehe... apparently Motorola had developed a more power efficient 040 chip that used less power, and dissipated less heat.

Will the G5 powerbooks arrive? You bet they will, but don't count on it until the next Macworld in July.

In the meantime, don't fret about it. Apple's Mac OS X 10.3, and to a lesser extent 10.4, can't even take advantage of the 64-bit processing that the G5 offers, that's why G4s and G5s at the same Mhz benchmark identically. About the only advantage G5s offer over G4s at this time is a RAM limit higher than 4GB.

[Eric]

Isn't that a good thing, since a lot of us will be buying the Mac Mini and the other newly-released Apple goodies. A year of waiting would give our checkbooks the necessary 'palugit' for the next round of Mac purchases. :roll:

[Kenneth]

Isn't the 600MHz front side bus of the entry level powermac G5 a huge difference versus say the 167MHz system bus of the minimac, emac or powermac 1.25 G4?

[piedad]

Don't lose hope. The direction of the G5 is either the dual-processor one or having an ability to run multiple operating systems at the same time. Read this: http://asia.cnet.com/news/systems/0,39037054,39210426,00.htm ... confirms that apple is ready to use this new cpu in 2005.
Also: http://www.technewsworld.com/story/machardware/processor-39200.html

[piedad]

Oh, forgot this one:
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1617479,00.asp
"Rohrer said with PowerTune, the G5 will likely be down-clocked to enable it to enter the 15- to 30-watt range needed to produce a G5 notebook. A dual-core version of the processor could also boost performance at slower speeds."
This article was published in June of 2004, while the earlier article I mentioned appeared just this January.
If you put the two together, it is thus likely that the next powerbook will use the dual-core G5 but with lower clock speeds.

[Maccess]

600Mhz? are we a victim of marketing hype?

The bus doesn't really run at 600 Mhz. There are two channels running at 150Mhz, and since this is DDR, that's supposed to be equal to 300Mhz?

Since the Mac Mini also uses DDR, its 167Mhz bus is really, "333Mhz", but its not 600Mhz because there is only one memory channel.

I would imagine that the mini will perform just like the eMac 1.2Ghz, which is compared to G3s and G5s here

http://www.macintouch.com/perfpack/comparison.html#filedup

[piedad]

Here is a link to xBench results for the Mini!
http://ladd.dyndns.org/xbench/merge.xhtml?doc1=90960