[Ed: The following was posted publicly by an Apple SciTech mailing list member; PowerPage.org has confirmed the source but the source has requested anonymity on our site. -PK]
I attended a briefing today on IBM’s high performance computing technology,which is hinged on their Power4 CPU (this CPU has awesome performance in thevarious real-world benchmarks I have seen). After the briefing, I asked thepresenter (a chief engineering manager from IBM) about the Power4 derivativefor desktops and low end servers to be announced in October. You may recallthat there has been speculation that this CPU would find its way intoPowerMacs in the future. Well, it sounds like this CPU is not in Apple’sfuture — the “over 160” vector instructions are not AltiVec (even thoughAltiVec has 162 instructions), and there are technical issues that wouldprevent AltiVec from ever marrying with Power4 or its successors.Furthermore, the guy came right out and said that they have pitched thedesktop Power4 to Apple, but Apple was not interested.
So, although Power4-based PowerMacs seemed like a promising (and likely)possibility, it looks like it won’t happen. I guess we will have to waitand see what Apple has in store for the future . . . .