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http://www.insanely-great.com/news.php?id=1901
Rumor: Serial ATA or ATA-133 for PPC970-Based Macs?
By Remy Davison, Insanely Great Mac
March 28th 2003
More rumors, speculation, educated guesses about the shape of Macs to come.
Serial ATA or ATA-133 are among the hard choices Apple has to make as it draws closer
to finalizing the architecture for its forthcoming PowerPC 970-based Macs, reports
MacBidouille.
While current DP Power Mac systems top out at 167MHz, a 200MHz bus is standard
industry fare currently, and the PPC 970 can supply throughput of up to 6.4Gb/ps. As
the article notes, PC3200 memory itself is limited to 3.2Gb/ps. Moreover, a 64-bit
chip, like the 970, can handle 4GB of memory, which is beyond the limits of 32-bit
processors.
MacBidouille speculates that Apple will opt for ATA-133, arguing that Serial ATA is an
immature technology at present. The story also says that Apple will be looking for a
quantum leap in performance in order to leapfrog the Intel/AMD competition by building
in support for 4GB of memory.
Analysis: That fearless publisher of all PPC 970 rumors, MacBidouille, has done it
again. Steve may be smashing plates and gnashing his teeth, but MacBidouille has
obviously got a mole working deep inside the skunkworks of...somewhere.
Four memory slots, muses MacBidouille, for a maximum of 4GB of RAM. Certainly a
tremendous bit of marketing hype for Apple to shout from the rooftops, even if few
users ever max out their machines. Similarly, when it comes to improving two, three or
four-fold on the G4's performance, Apple will need to demonstrate the kind of
performance leap that the G3s displayed over the PowerPC 604e. While the G3 wasn't an
MP chip, few DP 604s machines were sold (mainly Daystar Genesis clones). But the G3
was that much faster than the 604 in Photoshop and other Pro apps that people went for
the G3 in droves, dumping the 604s. What's more, the G3 was faster at the same or
slightly greater clock speed than rival Pentium IIs at the time. That's the kind of
performance leap Apple has to make with the 970.
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