The G5: Dear lord that's fast.

The G5: Dear lord that's fast.

Apple has apparently screwed up and posted tech specs for the new G5 tower machines on their online store. The G5s are new 64bit processors that are actually IBM’s ppc970 chip. They are expected to be officially announced Monday at Apple’s Worldwide Developer’s Conference.

For the past couple of years Apple hasn’t really been able to compete speed wise. Their computers have been fast enough to get work done but if you were only after speed Intel and AMD had better offerings. Apple has been milking everything they can out of the aging G4 platform but the underlying architecture has been getting in the way. Anyway, on with the specs:

• 1.6GHz, 1.8GHz, or Dual 2GHz PowerPC G5 processors
• Up to 1GHz processor bus¹
• Up to 8GB of DDR SDRAM
• Fast Serial ATA hard drives²
• AGP 8X Pro graphics options from NVIDIA or ATI
• Three PCI or PCI-X expansion slots
• Three USB 2.0 ports
• One FireWire 800 and two FireWire 400 ports
• Bluetooth and AirPort Extreme ready
• Optical and analog audio in and out.

These machines are going to be fast. Very very fast.

Industry analysts have predicting that if Apple was going to use the PPC970 their first machines would be in the 1.2ghz to 1.6ghz range and would not appear til atleast Q1 2004. But here we are. :)

The G5 chips are 64bit chips and the current OS X is a 32bit system. A single processor G5 should be on par speed-wise as a dual G4 system at the same clock speed when processing 32bit code. The G5s will get a significant performace boost when the new 64bit enhanced version of OS X (code named Panther) comes out in Septemeber.

Apple is also expected to announce a G5 powered 15” powerbook Monday. Which is the computer I’ve been waiting for. I’m giving myself until september to save up.

We’ll see how this all actually works out next week. I’m excited.

¹: The system bus speed is how fast all of the internal components of a computer can talk to each other. The current fastest G4s have a 167mhz system bus while the fastest Pentium 4s have a 533mhz system bus.

²: Tom’s Hardware Guide has the skinny on Serial ATA

Xian 08:55 AM, 06.20.03 - p-link