Bah, the 970 isn't really proprietary... it's a slimmed down Power4, IBM has it too (they plop linux on them, and uh, IBM makes them). The only thing that is proprietary is the Apple rom or whatever that is that makes a Mac a Mac, but hey, you can put linux on them...
Also, I would be sickened if Apple went with Sun's chip or the Alpha... you want to talk about dead-ends...
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when a 200MHZ Mips/StrongARM/RISC (power4/PPC 970?) cpu beats it hands down!
Erm, the power4 (which is NOT the same as the 970) is looking to be midly competitive right now (at 1 Ghz vs. 2.8 Ghz P4, certainly not at all competitive if the 970 were at 200 Mhz)... if you expect it to blow away the P4, you're going to be very dissapointed. It should be pretty close in some areas, and a little ahead in others.
The 970 should stop making Apple's pro line look so laugable, and I'll finally not be utterly ashamed to buy one (I won't, until reasonable performance for $3k). If anything, with IBM backing chip production (well, anyone BUT Moto!!), we should see a good speed ramp, rather than being stuck at 500 Mhz for a year... I say 'should' because we 1) Don't know when this will be used in a Mac, and 2) if Apple will use this chip or not (unlikely, but hey, you never know.) ApplePi will need to be finalized, OS X will need to be altered (not a big deal, it seems), but it certainly won't be a bitch like the 68k to PPC jump (for users, it should be mostly transparent), in fact, the 970 will be backwards compatible to 32-bit modes (incl. Altivec)... though I'm adopting a wait and see attitude, considering some of the 'interesting' moves Apple has done in the past.
Be careful when you rail against Intel about Mhz... the Itanium 64 (which is around 1 Ghz now, if I remember correctly) handily beats the P4 with a barbed stick in most things...
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I read an article (I will post it if I find it) that said the new G5 processors will be hyper-threading.
Hmm, haven't read that... but it doesn't matter really, considering the G5 was supposed to happen a long time ago... in other words, vaporware. It is funny though, watching all of the rampant speculation regarding that thing...
[ November 03, 2002: Message edited by: MacUser3of5 ]