A New Thunderbird?
More than a year ago, Motorola was working on a chip called Thunderbird that had many motherboard functions built into it, such as PCI controller, memory controller, and more. The idea was to eliminate many of the separate chip sets that must go on a typical motherboard. The motherboard can be smaller and cheaper. The processor itself was not very impressive, but it would serve the very low end market. If a Mac were made with such an all-in-one processor chip, it really could be sold cheaper and still make a good margin. I forgot about it after hearing no more. Now, someone mentioned such a chip as a possibility from Motorola, and it was on the super-long thread about the G5. I think it deserves its own thread, if something like this is really in the works now.
Anyone got news, information or rumors about it? If not, if it was wild speculation, we can just let this thread fade away into oblivion.
Anyone got news, information or rumors about it? If not, if it was wild speculation, we can just let this thread fade away into oblivion.
Comments
It'll be most useful in low cost and space-constrained products, the same way that graphics chips are favored over graphics boards in laptops.
Best of all, since both Mot and IBM have signed on to Book E, Apple could use both of them to make its chips - it wouldn't be tied to a single vendor. Book E gives Apple a lot of flexibility at the low end, which Ive and company are probably looking forward to.