[hcorf]

maybe ibm will never get the heat down on thier g5 proccessor. Afterall they are used to pc's where insane heat from the cpu is now considered acceptable. Do you really want your g5 laptop to sound as loud as the pc ones.

|Half the reason i went for the mac was because it was silent.

I reckon apple will wait until motorola has developed a new powerpc chip, which should have much less heat like the g4's. Then they can have a g5 laptop or imac.

anyone else agree here?
or do you think they can reduce the heat on the g5 from needing liquid cooling all the way down to a silent powerbook?

I just think the latter sounds like an impossible task, and remember reading that motorola was working on the replacement to the g4, but that it would take a while to do it. I sure hope they are still working on that.

This is all IMHO of course, i dont think i am a genius or something. Afterall, i am english, and that just wouldnt be cricket.....

[AngryAngel]

I don't think IBM being "used to pc's where insane heat from the cpu is now considered acceptable" would cause them to ignore heat production. Before the G4 (which started off as a G3 with altivec, basically), IBM made very low power/heat G3's- the original iBook had a copper-process G3 which only required a heatsink about 2 inches long and have no fans. I am sure Apple is applying a lot of pressure to keep heat production down- as they have to essentially add the cost of complicated cooling pumps, etc. to the cost of the processor when working out how much things will cost them.

All chip manufacturers worry about heat production- I'm sure the latest Motorola G4 overclocked to 2.5Ghz would require more cooling than the G5.

Unfortunately, by the nature of things, increasing clock speeds and processing power will lead to the cutting-edge machines needing more cooling than the mid-range models. When the powerbooks come with G5's (they may wait until they are on a smaller process than 90nm) they will not be as fast as the powermacs. This may be like a return to the days of the motorola 68040, 68030 and 68020 (early nineties)- when the top-end computers were twice as fast (or more) than the low end models (which more closely follows the price comparison of the models) where as in the late '90's everything had a G3 but had the same price differences.

[OreoCookie]

The problem is not the heat output, the G5s consume a lot less than current P4s. The problem is heat density, meaning the heat per square centimeter which is still very high.

IBM is rumored to develop a replacement for the venerable PPC 400 series (often found in printers) and they intend to build a super computer with it. It is dubbed PPC 300, the first incarnation is supposed to be the PPC 350, 64 bit wide and with excellent performance-energy consumption ratio.

All of that is based on rumors, though, but I am quite confident, they are working on something.

IBM has also build a dishwasher-sized supercomputer cube with their old low-energy chips (512 x PPC440) and intends to do so with newer-generation ones (which would probably be the rumored PPC350, IBM has sold the design of the PPC400 series, I believe).

With a chip (or several for that matter), Apple could build a PowerBook.

As for now, I think there will be a PowerBook in January the earliest, probably even later.