IBM: Apple Plans to Use Power5 (Surprise, Surprise)


IBM's vice president of IBM eServer pSeries, Karl Freund, has confirmed that Apple "plans to use" IBM's Power5 in its Macs, c|net News reports.

The interview with Freund reveals some further details of the forthcoming Power5, which some pundits have tipped will appear in an Apple product as early as mid-2005.

Freund says that the Power5 is currently "pretty late in the design cycle", which suggests it's fairly close to release. The new chips will be able to run multiple operating systems simultaneously, although Freund wouldn't be drawn on whether the processors would include dual-processing cores. However, in confidential documents from IBM, which surface from time to time, it is clear that dual cores are coming in the Power5.

The simultaneous multiple operating system support was previously done in hardware, but IBM has shifted to software so as to offer the feature on products such as its Blade servers.

Analysis: It all points to XServe and support for multiple OSes in Tiger Server, doesn't it? We still don't think the Power5 variant will appear in an Apple product until late 2005 at the earliest, but we'd have the plastic ready if it did turn out to be earlier.