tower speculation.
i've been thinking about this since this morning. i figure there must be a big upgrade for the towers coming soon and i don't think it's just wishful thinking.
first, obviously, the new imac definitely intrudes on the tower's mindspace at a much lower price.
second, it's pretty impressive that they're sticking 800 Mhz g4's in the machine that they probably expect to sell the most of. now, i'm not a silicon engineer, but doesn't it make sense that if they have enough 800 Mhz chips to stick in their consumer machine that they are also getting good yields on higher clocked chips? doesn't the whole chip game work as a progression? ie, you don't get a ton of 800's until you're getting better at the manufacturing process, which also yields faster chips on the high end. there weren't enough 800/867 chips a few months to put them into the imac. if they're putting them in the imac now, they might be sampling at well over a ghz, right?
third, the towers didn't even get a small upgrade in speed. not even 100 mhz. seems like even motorola could scale the g4 up 100 mhz in that time and break through the ever elusive (for us) gigahertz barrier. i think that they actually didn't upgrade the towers because they didn't want people to believe that this is a plateau and start buying towers at that small speed bumped rate and piss them off by introing much faster machines in a month or two subsequently. so they held off on a speed bump to keep *some* of the people who were waiting on the mw in a holding pattern rather than having them all buy pm933's.
hmm. maybe i am being wishful, but it seems to make sense from a marketing point of view.
[ 01-07-2002: Message edited by: admactanium ]</p>
first, obviously, the new imac definitely intrudes on the tower's mindspace at a much lower price.
second, it's pretty impressive that they're sticking 800 Mhz g4's in the machine that they probably expect to sell the most of. now, i'm not a silicon engineer, but doesn't it make sense that if they have enough 800 Mhz chips to stick in their consumer machine that they are also getting good yields on higher clocked chips? doesn't the whole chip game work as a progression? ie, you don't get a ton of 800's until you're getting better at the manufacturing process, which also yields faster chips on the high end. there weren't enough 800/867 chips a few months to put them into the imac. if they're putting them in the imac now, they might be sampling at well over a ghz, right?
third, the towers didn't even get a small upgrade in speed. not even 100 mhz. seems like even motorola could scale the g4 up 100 mhz in that time and break through the ever elusive (for us) gigahertz barrier. i think that they actually didn't upgrade the towers because they didn't want people to believe that this is a plateau and start buying towers at that small speed bumped rate and piss them off by introing much faster machines in a month or two subsequently. so they held off on a speed bump to keep *some* of the people who were waiting on the mw in a holding pattern rather than having them all buy pm933's.
hmm. maybe i am being wishful, but it seems to make sense from a marketing point of view.
[ 01-07-2002: Message edited by: admactanium ]</p>
Comments
Multi processing makes sense now OSX is default, so I expect the whole G4 Tower range to be Dual or Quad by the end of this month.
4 x G4 900 is better than 1 G5 surely???