“Motorola’s erstwhile chip division, Freescale, is expected to launch its latest G4-class processor, the MPC7448, today at its Smart Networks Developer Forum, being held this week in Frankfurt,’ Tony Smith reports for The Register. “The new chip is Freescale’s first 90nm G4 and is based on the company’s e600 core, the foundation for Freescale’s upcoming line of dual-core chips. The 7448, however, contains just one core, clocked to beyond 1.5GHz. It contains 32KB of L1 cache and 1MB of L2, double the 512KB of L2 found in the MPC7447A currently driving Apple’s PowerBook G4 and iBook G4 notebooks. Indeed, the 7448 is likely to provide Apple with its next notebook speed bump, as the company struggles to fit the hot-running PowerPC 970FX – aka the G5 – into a laptop.”
Full article here.
http://www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/site/overview.jsp?code=DRPPCDUALCORE
MPC7448: 1 MB L2 Cache, less than 10W @ 1.4 GHz.
MPC8641D: Starting at 15 watts.
Freescale’s Press release: http://www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/site/display.jsp?nodeId=093623&filePath;=/media_center/news_releases/2004/ncsg/09-28-04_DUALPROC.htm&title=News Release&tid=FSH
so, uh, is this good?
Yes, hairbo. While this doesn’t apply to the Power Mac, Xserve, PowerBook or iMac, it will look good for the eMac, and iBook.
The bad thing is that the MPC7448 is expected to sample in 1H 2005, and the MPC 8641(D) is expected to sample in 2H 2005.
This appears to be very good news. What good is increased CPU performance if the battery life is degraded or the laptop heats up to uncomfortable temperatures?
Shifting to a 90nm process was apparently not sufficient to enable putting a high performance G5 into a Powerbook. It should be possible to put a lower clock speed G5 into a Powerbook, but would it have any real benefits relative to the current G4?
I am afraid that the Powerbook won’t go beyond the G4 until IBM delivers on the next generation of PPC CPU’s (has anyone heard anything recently about them?). In the meantime the current G4 is pretty darn good and the 90nm G4 appears to represent a reasonable incremental enhancement.
The only problem is that won’t be available until some time next year.
I’m thinking these G4’s are gonna rock. It will be the catalyst to get me to buy a nice 17″ dual core G4 1.6 Ghz laptop. Mmmmmm, I can taste it!
Availability!
They can change the name but it is still Motorola. Don’t put off buying decisions waiting for Freescale to learn the 90 nm fab process.
We will probably see a G5 in a Powerbook before we see a 90 nm G4 in an iBook.
The achilles heel of the G4 chip was it’s limited bus speed scalability. Most of the speed increase of the new iMac G5 is the fact it runs faster than 166mHz and gets full benefit of the DDR RAM. The new Freescale G4+ or whatever it will be called lacks that limitation and will be a big improvement. The dual core could well be a monster.
gutted…
I knew the g5’s weren’t coming soon, but i was secretly praying!!! I thought… just thought…
that with the advent of the imac we may have them towards the back end of next year : (
ah well, imac it is then
Y’know, I just can’t fathom the woeful wishing for a G5-powered laptop. The major advantages of course, are 64-bit applications and the ability to address scads of RAM (which may not fit in a laptop case). I sincerely doubt that anyone considering CPU or RAM intensive computing would want a laptop for any real heavy lifting. Battery life and heat dissipation simply render that a non-factor. So what’s the deal? Bragging rights?
fool…
i’ve got a 17″ Ghz laptop at the moment why would I want to upgrade to another G4 17″… I’ve had this model for nearly 1.5 years and i’m dying to spend some hard earned cash on something from apple (for tax relief purposes)
as you’ll note I said i’d be happy with them being available at the back end of next year, not tomorrow!!!
NoPCZone has hit the nail on the head. with such a crappy FSB, the chip just cant touch the G5
My impression is that more and more apps will be written for the G5 and sixty four bit processing. If so then wouldn’t it be a big advantage to have the G5 laptop since you will have the most current chip and so it will stay current longer. Am I right in this?
Buffy,
NoPCZone stated that the forthcoming G4 doesn’t have the FSB limitations of the current chips, so it should have vastly improved performance, and as he said as well, the dual core G4 could well change the computing landscape.
Jack A,
As far as I can tell, the big selling point of 64-bit processors is the ability to address vastly greater amounts of RAM, which make them attractive for things like database applications (you can keep large segments of a Db in RAM and reduce seek times dramatically). I’m just wondering if there are many people out there who need to run enterprise-class applications on a laptop, and the physical limitations of a portable in terms of actually being able to accomodate the vast datasets such applications typically work with, or if battery life wouldn’t be a factor for such work. It seems to me that someone who works with such applications and who needs portability would be better off with good VPN software and a high-speed connection. Let the heavy iron do the heavy lifting.
I am profoundly ignorant of the advantages 64-bit computing could give to other fields which might benefit from portability (video editing comes to mind), and would greatly appreciate it if someone could set me straight on this.
As the article points out, the FSB speed on the 7448 is only 200 MHz. Compare that to 533 MHz on the slowest G5 Apple sells and 167 MHz on their fastest G4, and you can see that isn’t such a big performance increase after all. Neither is a 1.5-GHz clock speed. I may be more impressed by Freescale’s dual-core chip when (& if) it arrives, but this just seems like old-fashioned Moto to me: Last year’s specs at this year’s prices, delivered next year.
I tend to think that the 7448 will probably be implemented first into the Powerbook, and later the iBook, until either a) the single and dual core MPC8641 are ready for mass shipping, or b) Apple somehow does come out with a G5 based chip.
Otherwise, the current Powerbook configuration will become the iBook’s, and the 7448 will be used in the next PB upgrade.
I read back in january that IBM was developing a G3+altivec chip that was to run at >2GHz where is it now ?
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