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Chekib Akrout, vice-president of PowerPC at IBM, has given us a few clues about what Apple might be planning with the widely-anticipated PowerPC 970, aka 'G5', reports Extreme Tech. [attrib: MacBidouille]

Although Akrout did not mention the 970, his statements regarding 64-bit processors and servers.

"Most of the processors start at 2, 4, 8, and have gone to 16 bits, with 32 bits used by most of us here," Akrout is quoted as saying. "64 bits has found a space in the server."

Akrout has long worked on the PowerPCs, joining IBM in 1992, during the heyday of PowerPC development by AIM. He is now
responsible for the Mac CPU roadmap.

Analysis: We're speculating here, but Apple's 'great leap forward' is probably to bridge the gap between desktop and server computing. The difference will be in the software; XServe will share architecture with desktop Macs, as it does already, but the paradigm will be the same: 64-bit computing for the rest of us. Server software where required. To be fair, it's AMD's idea as well.

What's also important is that it will - ultimately - bring server-like power to portables as well. Power management will be crucial, and that's where the low-power PowerPC chips should have an advantage, even over the low-power Pentiums.

And to put this in perspective, given MS's abandonment of IE:Mac, apps will obviously need to be rewritten and optimized for 64-bit computing. Why would Microsoft want to do that with IE? To build a wicked-fast 64-bit IE to run faster than the Windows/x86 version on high-octane Mac hardware and IBM processors? Where's the upside for MS?

No, if MS runs true to form, there won't be a 64-bit version of Office for quite some time - if ever. Their track record speaks for itself: sluggish bloatware with Word 6 that was laughably described as 'PowerPC native'. Office 98/2001/v.X? No AltiVec optimization for G4, even through there are plenty of graphics capabilities in Office.

Let's face it: MS will not want the best-featured, fastest version of Office to be running on Mac. Heck, you might even switch from Windows...