“An Apple With Two Cores?” at Forbes.com speculates that the Freescale chip’s power consumption is low enough, in the range of 15 to 25 watts, that it could be used inside a PowerBook.

While the chip Freescale described on Tuesday–which bears the arcane product name MPC8641D–probably isn’t going into a Mac anytime soon, there’s nothing stopping Freescale from adapting it and making a dual-core chip aimed at Apple’s flagship product, says Kevin Krewell, analyst with Instat/MDR, the market research outfit that hosted the Processor Forum event.
One important clue is that the chip supports the AltiVec, a set of chip instructions that set out how certain types of computing tasks are handled on the chip…
AltiVec instructions are crucial to the operation of modern Macs and have been ever since Apple released the first PowerMac G4 computers. The very fact that IBM–which had previously eschewed AltiVec on its PowerPC chips–even mentioned AltiVec in its Processor Forum presentation in 2002 (see: “IBM Remains Coy About Apple Chip”) was seen as a crucial clue that the IBM chip was being aimed at Apple.

“An Apple With Two Cores?” at Forbes.com speculates that the Freescale chip’s power consumption is low enough, in the range of 15 to 25 watts, that it could be used inside a PowerBook.

While the chip Freescale described on Tuesday–which bears the arcane product name MPC8641D–probably isn’t going into a Mac anytime soon, there’s nothing stopping Freescale from adapting it and making a dual-core chip aimed at Apple’s flagship product, says Kevin Krewell, analyst with Instat/MDR, the market research outfit that hosted the Processor Forum event.
One important clue is that the chip supports the AltiVec, a set of chip instructions that set out how certain types of computing tasks are handled on the chip…
AltiVec instructions are crucial to the operation of modern Macs and have been ever since Apple released the first PowerMac G4 computers. The very fact that IBM–which had previously eschewed AltiVec on its PowerPC chips–even mentioned AltiVec in its Processor Forum presentation in 2002 (see: “IBM Remains Coy About Apple Chip”) was seen as a crucial clue that the IBM chip was being aimed at Apple.