“The key to [Apple's Power Mac G5's] success will be throughput. The specs of all of the interconnects — between the two CPUs, between CPUs and memory, to and from the support chip set, and between the chip set and I/O busses — scream by desktop PC standards. Each processor has its own 1GHz bus. Memory bandwidth is 6.4GB per second. The 64-bit expansion bus runs at 133MHz and conforms to the PCI-X standard commonly reserved for servers. The graphics accelerator is fed by an 8X AGP (Accelerated Graphics Port) Pro bus for maximum speed and an ample supply of electrical power. In the Power Mac G5, data does not spend much time on the bench waiting for the bus,” writes Tom Yager for InfoWorld.

Yager writes, “IBM handed Apple the gift of a lifetime with its PowerPC 970 (dubbed G5 by Apple as a follow-on to its current G4) processor. Based on the potent Power4 core used in IBM’s high-performance computers, the 970 is the first PowerPC chip capable of running 64-bit software. By extension, the Power Mac G5 is Apple’s first 64-bit computer, and the first 64-bit desktop machine to hit the market. It can address more memory (the first G5 holds up to 8GB of RAM) and store more and larger floating-point numbers in the CPU. The processor’s internal capacity for data storage (small data blocks called registers) has been markedly expanded, as has the pipeline for instructions awaiting execution.”

Full article here.