FWIW, the DP 2.0 G5 I ordered on July 10th says shipping "on or before 8/29/03" - it has said that for about a week, before that it said "on or before 9/2/03"
The rumor did say nothing about the G5. It say that IBM has problem in his Fiskill plant. Then some experts said that they should not fab external designs. Which lead me to the conclusion that they have problems with external designs.The G5 is not an external design, so there is a chance that the line of products is not affected.
When there is a transition to a new fab process, problems do not only came from the fabbing process itself, but they came also from the design of the CPU itself. You cannot take the design of a 0,15 micron process, and fab under 0,13 micron process without any changes. An adaptation to the fabbing process is needed. I guess that this adaptation is much more difficult for external companies, like nvidia, rather than for IBM herself.
Production problems and plant underutilization took away $45 million from IBM's overall profit, Chief Financial Officer John Joyce said on a conference call after IBM's earnings report on Wednesday.
This is not Motorola take 2. Mototola dod not need really fast G4 that much as Apple did. IBM need at least as fast 970 as Apple does, and IBM take pride in making fast CPUs.
1. IBM will work very hard to sort out any manufacturing problem withe the 970 as they need the CPU themself as well as sell them to Apple.
2. With the plant underutilization IBM is even more intrested in selling 970 CPUs to Apple then if the plant was running at full capacity. The 1.6-2.0 GHz 970 with a1:2 bus ratio may be a goods space heater but a 1.2 GHz perhaps with a 1:4 bus or so will be comparable with a G4 in heat and better performance wise than any G4.
One year after the introduction of the G4 the top of the line model still was only marginaly faster than the previous generation G3 (the G3/450). To repeat this feat Apple has to clock down the towers so that we next summer are stuck with dual 1.8 G5 towers and a have a very slow rate of applications and OS that is working well with the G5 CPU.
For Motorola 400 MHz G4 perhaps was good in Cisco routers and other embedded applications but IBM to compete with 1.8 GHz 970 CPUs against Xeon CPUs Linux blade servers in 2004
I find it very likely that IBM will sort out the manufacturing problems sooner than that
Really.. I havn't followed this thread, but wasn't the fuss about IBM not making money of the Fishkill plant since the silicon-industry is in a recession right now. It had nothing to do with the production not ramping up to meet demand, just that the demand wasn't that large yet to start earning money.
So.. Apple, Xilinx, nVidia and all the others using IBMs Fishkill plant will get their stuff, but IBM won't make as much money as they hoped. Investing $2 billion in a brand new plant isn't an investment witch will pay off the year they put it to use, so I guess that IBM isn't too worried.. They probably will use it in 15-20 years anyway. They do plan to take it to 35 nm in 2010 or something so...
Conclusion: There'snothing to worry about concerning Appleand the G5s! And by the way.. IBM is also producing the U3 north bridge in their Fishkill plant.. it's just as important to the Power Macs as the processors them selves.
Comments
although until it's in my hands, it's all academic
Absolutely true. The Apple Store is far from reliable, especially a month out.
When there is a transition to a new fab process, problems do not only came from the fabbing process itself, but they came also from the design of the CPU itself. You cannot take the design of a 0,15 micron process, and fab under 0,13 micron process without any changes. An adaptation to the fabbing process is needed. I guess that this adaptation is much more difficult for external companies, like nvidia, rather than for IBM herself.
Production problems and plant underutilization took away $45 million from IBM's overall profit, Chief Financial Officer John Joyce said on a conference call after IBM's earnings report on Wednesday.
This is not Motorola take 2. Mototola dod not need really fast G4 that much as Apple did. IBM need at least as fast 970 as Apple does, and IBM take pride in making fast CPUs.
1. IBM will work very hard to sort out any manufacturing problem withe the 970 as they need the CPU themself as well as sell them to Apple.
2. With the plant underutilization IBM is even more intrested in selling 970 CPUs to Apple then if the plant was running at full capacity. The 1.6-2.0 GHz 970 with a1:2 bus ratio may be a goods space heater but a 1.2 GHz perhaps with a 1:4 bus or so will be comparable with a G4 in heat and better performance wise than any G4.
One year after the introduction of the G4 the top of the line model still was only marginaly faster than the previous generation G3 (the G3/450). To repeat this feat Apple has to clock down the towers so that we next summer are stuck with dual 1.8 G5 towers and a have a very slow rate of applications and OS that is working well with the G5 CPU.
For Motorola 400 MHz G4 perhaps was good in Cisco routers and other embedded applications but IBM to compete with 1.8 GHz 970 CPUs against Xeon CPUs Linux blade servers in 2004
I find it very likely that IBM will sort out the manufacturing problems sooner than that
So.. Apple, Xilinx, nVidia and all the others using IBMs Fishkill plant will get their stuff, but IBM won't make as much money as they hoped. Investing $2 billion in a brand new plant isn't an investment witch will pay off the year they put it to use, so I guess that IBM isn't too worried.. They probably will use it in 15-20 years anyway. They do plan to take it to 35 nm in 2010 or something so...
Conclusion: There'snothing to worry about concerning Appleand the G5s! And by the way.. IBM is also producing the U3 north bridge in their Fishkill plant.. it's just as important to the Power Macs as the processors them selves.