It's been a while and much has happened in the interim, but some things never change, especially the over optimistic and over pessimistic fellings shared on this board. But it's good to know some things never change. One thing i don't know is how this rumor about the G5 is so widespread. So far I have yet to see one in any lab allthough I don't doubt they exist; inside Apple labs. What we have seen though, is widespread use of the 7460 which is basically a 7450 with an improved method of manufacter. Still this is nothing to sneeze at. They offer linear performance over the 7450 at better speeds. The range so far has been ~900-1400MHz but it is hard to give exact numbers due to the variety of motherboards they exist on. I was shocked when the newer motherboard we were working on were not released at the Expo this past summer. Fully working DDR-SDRAM motherboards were ready with a full assortment of modern motherboard features including Fibre Firewire at speeds up to 1600Mbps with a fibre port and 2 lower speed (800Mb) normal ports. USB1.1 was still there but the board had support for DDR-SDRAM and an advanced system bus running at 266MHz. They were to include CPU's running at up to 1GHz. Perhaps faster CPU's were hard to come by.
Of couse they could have put that plan on ice and wait for the recently announced 333Mhz DDR-SDRAM. The board was fully compatible with the newer SDRAM standard and easy to impliment. this of course would imply the cpu bus to the main controller would be accordingly sped up to provice sufficient bandwidth. Internally on the main controller (memory+PCI+peripherals (there is no seperate southbridge controller)) there is a hyper transport link from PCI controller and peripherals such as ATA/133, USB, audio (also new), etc. Firewire and ethernet have their own seperate connections. This is an advanced peice of silicon. No, to me the only reason to release this board that is all ready this Expo is simple; many of the advanced features would go unused. perhaps there would have been a lack of advanced firewire peripherals. Or maybe they wanted to see the outcome of the memory wars between RAMBUS and the DDR consortium (there was in fact RAMBUS based prototypes of G4 systems floating around that we never came in contact with). In just over a month we will see a leap in performance from Apple's high end. It should be enough to justify their role in high end applications for years to come. We'll see.
Of couse they could have put that plan on ice and wait for the recently announced 333Mhz DDR-SDRAM. The board was fully compatible with the newer SDRAM standard and easy to impliment. this of course would imply the cpu bus to the main controller would be accordingly sped up to provice sufficient bandwidth. Internally on the main controller (memory+PCI+peripherals (there is no seperate southbridge controller)) there is a hyper transport link from PCI controller and peripherals such as ATA/133, USB, audio (also new), etc. Firewire and ethernet have their own seperate connections. This is an advanced peice of silicon. No, to me the only reason to release this board that is all ready this Expo is simple; many of the advanced features would go unused. perhaps there would have been a lack of advanced firewire peripherals. Or maybe they wanted to see the outcome of the memory wars between RAMBUS and the DDR consortium (there was in fact RAMBUS based prototypes of G4 systems floating around that we never came in contact with). In just over a month we will see a leap in performance from Apple's high end. It should be enough to justify their role in high end applications for years to come. We'll see.
