Linked by Nicholas Blachford on Mon 15th Jul 2002 01:14 UTC
According to a brief paragraph on MacOS Rumours Apple may be switching to IBM POWER4 CPUs instead of the Motorola G5 for future Macs.
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I doubt this is happening, but it would be fun, and make sense.
Back in the day apple sold rebranded IBM servers. These servers are the same servers that evolved into the Power4 line of today. They didn't run MacOS, because the OS was technically lacking. Now OSX runs well on multi-cpu PowerPC systems, using that G4 from Motorola. With a little effort a 32 bit port to Power4 (Power4 does run 32 bit as well) could be done, a small team with a few months would be sufficient. Apple could offer pSeries boxes running OSX rebranded as Apple servers, to complement their recent Xserve line. With the volume they could move they could cut the prices (remember economics of scale). A little more work and OSX could run 64 bit.
Now firewire/usb/etc would have to be done with add-on cards, but still.
Forget SPECint, SPECfp. Look at TPC, Fluent, SPECjbb, or Linpack. The Power4 is wicked fast.
Then apple would have the whole scale, from the low end iMac to the high end p690 Turbo, and the whole range inbetween. Desktop, Graphics Workstation, Video Workstation, Low end server, high end server, etc.
Wow that would make me happy.