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Seybold: New G4 System Expected

According to a News.com article (“Apple may unveil 500-Mhz chips at Seybold“), Apple is not expected to announce Kihei, the next insanely great iMac revision, during Steve Jobs’ Seybold Seminars Keynote Address. Rather than spilling those fruit-flavored beans, Senor Jobs is expected to refresh the Power Macintosh desktop lineup with new 500 MHz Power Macintosh systems. What kind of 500 MHz processor, you ask?

More important than raw clock speed, the new G4 PowerPC chips, as Apple is expected to call them, will for the first time feature Motorola technologyfor speeding up multimedia and communications functions. PowerPC chips withthe technology, dubbed AltiVec, are supposed to be able to process 16 times the number of data “chunks” foreach “tick” of the chip’s clock cycle compared to previous designs,Motorola has said previously. Insome applications, this could translate into anywhere from a doubling to athirtyfold increase of performance, the company has claimed.

The article alludes to G4 processors and it seems likely that Apple will announce the first G4-based systems today. While it will be easier to merely ship 500 MHz speed-bumped G3 chips, it’s not exactly “major news,” as noted yesterday. Either way, these super-fast systems should be available immediately for preordering at the Apple Store.

By Jason O'Grady

Founded the PowerPage in 1995.