The G5 as it matures...
What is the expected top range that Apple and IBM will push the 970 (with die shrinks)? How long til we move to the 980 chip, will it still be a G5? How will it fare against the scaling and chip development of the Intel and AMD chips? What happens if IBM starts selling 970 and 980 PPC chips to other companies for a Windows Box? Is that feasible?
Comments
Originally posted by LiquidR
Why won't it? I thought at one point there was a version of NT running on a PowerPC mac.
True, but what are the chance of Microsoft porting Windows to PPC?
Importantly, since NT doesn't have anything like NeXT/OS X bundles, NT/PPC customers would have to buy versions of software built specifically for the PPC. If the experience on Alpha is any indication, this didn't work out very well at all.
Besides, right now MS has its hands full trying to move people over to Itanium. They really can't afford to splinter their development efforts even more than they have.
I'd guess that since the G5 was into'd at 2 gig ... I'd expect it to make a MINimum of 4 gig in the not-too-distant future.
If the 980 becomes a mac chip ... i'd expect it will still be a G5.
G5 will be the top architecture (available) for 4 years at least.
This is simply based on observations of past behavior ... the information is probably worth exactly what you paid for it
Originally posted by Amorph
Besides, right now MS has its hands full trying to move people over to Itanium. They really can't afford to splinter their development efforts even more than they have.
I don't think MS really cares about Itanium. Whatever CPU is out at the time, they will want to support it.
1) Move developers over to the .NET framework
2) Get rid of the Win32 foundation (or at least reduce it to a compatibility layer running in a sandbox)
3) Now MS can really do stuff with Windows (porting, framework level expansion, die MDI die)
Barto