[Superchicken]

Hey all, with the amount of cooling that seems to be needed for the G5s, it seems they're hotter than some people on the forums suggested... then again with the fact that the fans are quieter than the MDDS they might not be as hot as it seems.

Either way, Anyone got any info on how much power these babies consume and how that would affect being in a Power Book?
Also anyone wanna take a stab on when they'll drop down to the iMacs and iBooks?

I get the feeling Apple would more than want to drop Motorolla, and I don't think it would be very good PR to after having said just how freakishly better the Power Macs are than the old G4s, that apple would want to just come out with those Low K G4s for the next Power Book rev.

I know the P4m drops it's clock speed to save power, thus could under clocking a 1.6Ghz to like say 1.2Ghz make it cooler enough to be in a power book? I dout any Power Book users would mind being 800Mhz behind the Power Mac if it ment being twice as fast as they were before.

And if the PPC 970 has as long of legs as Apple says, IE 3Ghz in 12 months, possibly 2.5 by March, I think it would make sense to maybe have one more rev of the iMac with a G4, seeing as how this will be the end of the second year after the rev after the one comming up.

Granted the consumer doesn't neccicarly need the speed of the 970, but it would certainly allow Apple to stop worring about if the OS is going to feel slower or not.

[mac freak]

Remember, we've still heard nothing about the 15.4" aluminum PB...
Maybe at the July Macworld replacement (what was it called?) we'll hear about it
I suspect a 1.4 G5 (pulled that outta my ass).

[businezguy]

I believe the VP of marketing said the Powerbook will not be seeing a G5 for quite awhile. This could very well mean the G5 needs to go down to a .9 micron process before we will see them in a Powerbook. That is 12 months down the road (unless IBM is ahead of schedule, which they seem fully capable of doing, and it is say 6 months).

[Superchicken]

Hmmm... Low K power books with 1.25 with steve saying "yeah the G5 isn't quite ready yet for notebooks"

Hmm I wonder if apple will ever touche that PDA PPC chip IBM made...

[OreoCookie]

Well, a P4 consumes about 85 W@3.0 GHz. IBM has said that the PPC970 consumes 42 W@1.8 GHz. Scale this to 2.0 GHz, and I'd estimate about 46 W, assuming that the internal voltage remained constant. Multiply by 2 (in the dual). So you have about 100 W of thermal dissipation.

In the PC world this is a problem, because the CPU coolers have become increasingly sophisticated (they weigh up to 700 g!). I would assume that Apple has build the cooling system with future generations in mind, say up to 60 W per CPU. Gives them a bit of room.

Remember: all Dual USB iBooks have a fan. I actually need it for my 800 MHz iBook, but it never turned on on my 500 MHz iBook.

As for future CPUs: the Power5 will debut next year (2004), and I think that the release of the PPC980 will be much closer to the release of the Power5. The Power5 is supposed to double the performance compared to the Power4, so naively, I would suggest a similar ratio for the PPC980 vs. PPC970. The Power5 is supposed to consume a lot less power and have about the same transistor count!

It was specifically mentioned that the next-gen PowerPC is already on silicon (in the G5 video: `... We have already built the prototypes for the next generation PowerPC processors'). They wouldn't mention it if it wasn't true (IBM has a good track record of that).