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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Just to elaborate on some earlier comments before; the Power4 does not get all its speed or bandwidth simply by adding 100MB of cache to its core, grab of the issue of the Microprocessor Report of IBM's Power4 site. Further, the Power4, despite its name, is a PowerPC processor implementing the BookE architecture. Among other things, it can run 32-bit and 64-bit PPC code natively and it can grow to accommodate extra functional units (AltiVec) should IBM wish to do that. A Pentium anything cannot even touch its performance (bandwidth or raw power)and anyone who argues that the Pentium marginally outdoes it on SPECint is smoking crack. Who cares about SPECint? It became irrelevant about 5 years ago and the Pentium 4 (Pentium Pro with SSE), is irrelevant now insomuch as Itanium, formerly Merced, formerly PA-RISC is Intel's current direction while AMD will go down the path of 64-bit x86. FYI, P4 outdoes most samples of Itanium on SPECint. So much for benchmarking.