Rumor: Motorola - No RIP for G4 Yet?


Motorola has commenced manufacturing new G4 chips using a 0.09 process, according to anonymous sources cited by French hardware site MacBidouille. The story speculates that such a chip would be based on the PowerPC 7457 and could provide speeds up to 2GHz, with the benefit of more rapid I/O.

The news comes as Apple is reportedly preparing the unleash PowerPC 970-based machines, combined with a 64-bit OS X 10.3 (Panther), to be unveiled at the WWDC.

Earlier MacBidouille rumor reports have suggested that Apple has already packaged 970-equipped Macs in readiness for a late June release. Although IBM is known to be manufacturing 970s, neither Apple nor IBM will confirm Apple is a 970 customer.

Analysis: Our take is that the G4 will persist as an 'entry-level' chip, much as the G3 commenced as high-end and assumed a consumer role once the G4s were released. A 1.5 or 2GHz iMac, eMac or iBook is much more power than any 'consumer' Mac reasonably needs, It's more important from a marketing point of view than from a user's. However, as consumers compress more DV, JPEGs and MP3s, the more rapidly this occurs, the better.

We also suspect that it will take longer to engineer the 970/980 for the PowerBook and, as a result, the G4 will probably remain the high-end portable CPU for some months to come.