At 7:38 PM +0800 10/6/03, Edward wrote:
Does anyone know of any plans by Apple that will significantly change
the current line up of G4 towers? I don't want to buy now and find that
in August or September Apple has released an equivalent machine for
less dollars or the same dollars will buy more machine.
Well Edward, you need to take all the rumours with a serious grain of
salt - rampant rumours of a fast G5 in the lead-ups to previous
Macworlds over the last 12 months or more all came to naught for
example.
However, considering the reports of end-of-lifing of current G4
desktops and the many reports of IBM's new PowerPC 970 being
tailor-made for Apple (with Altivec built-in etc) really mean it is
probably prudent to wait till after Apple's WWDC to see if any of the
rumours are true. See below for a report from one of the many rumour
sites. Remember - this is still rumour so caveat empor!
As we're only talking a few weeks, I would wait. Here's hoping.
-Mart
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http://www.appleinsider.com/article.php?id=114
Apple to Announce the Power Mac G5 at WWDC
By: Kasper Jade
06.10.03
Panther, the next generation of Apple's modern-day Mac OS X operating
system, won't be the only thing turning heads three weeks from now in
San Francisco. The computer maker, which will not be attending the
Macworld "Creative Pro" conference in July, will use its annual
developers conference to showcase this summer's product offerings,
sources tell AppleInsider.
Traditionally, Apple's World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC) is
scheduled during the month of May. However, in March of this year,
the company announced that it had rescheduled its 2003 Worldwide
Developers Conference for late June, in order to provide developers
with a more complete preview release of "Panther." What the press
release did not say is that this first developer release of Panther
would be demonstrated by Apple CEO, Steve Jobs, on the company's new
line of Power Mac G5 desktop computers.
The new Power Mac G5s will sport a completely new motherboard design
utilizing DDR 400 RAM as well as AGP 8x graphics, FireWire 800
(FireWire 2), and USB 2.0, sources said. "In the box" connectivity
among the news systems is based on Hypertransport -- a universal
chip-to-chip interconnect developed by AMD and partners -- which
provides 64-bit addressing and will replace Apple's multilevel bus
architecture found in current systems. This royalty-free technology
sports a low manufacturing cost and is capable of transferring data
at up to 12.8 Gigabytes per second.
The new Power Macs will be powered by IBM's 64 bit PPC 970 processor,
otherwise known to Apple Marketing as the the "G5." Initial offerings
of the Power Mac G5 are said to boast 1.4 to 1.8GHz, single core PPC
970 processors, with the possibility of a dual 1.8GHz chips shortly
thereafter.
To accommodate the new motherboard architecture, Apple has developed
a modified Power Mac G5 enclosure, which is said to be more square
and compact than the current Power Mac G4's deep, rectangular
form-factor. It lacks the 4 curved handles found on current units,
but sports a single USB and a single FireWire 800 port on the front
of the casing, with additional ports in the rear.
According to sources, Apple plans to make the Power Mac G5 available
to the public following their introduction on June 23rd. These
initial units will ship with Mac OS 10.2, and hence, will not be
optimized for the 64 bit PPC 970 processor. Consumers who purchase
these Power Mac G5s will receive a coupon for a free copy of Mac OS
10.3 (Panther), which will ship in September and will be optimized
for the new 64 bit processor.
--
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Martin Hill mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Multimedia Consultant http://is.curtin.edu.au/eot/
Educational & Online Technologies, Information Services, Curtin University
Mobile: 0417-967-969 wk: (08)9266-3101 Fax: (08)9266-3826
