[CUBE] Sonnet 800Mhz Upgrade?...

[mentholiptus]

On Saturday, November 23, 2002, at 12:04 PM, Robert Jagitsch wrote:

> Unfortunately 7457 not til Q3 2003, they haven't even sampled chips 
> yet, and they have not announced speeds either. This is based on a 
> meeting we had with Mot last Thursday.



That's cool....and ya gotta remember, Apple likes things hush hush, and 
because they're not very fond of the 3rd party processor upgrades, 
motorola both sets their pricing and releases information accordingly. 
Also note how motorola doesn't spread the word before Apple makes an 
announcement, otherwise we'd all know what we're getting in january 
(Using the apollo G4 as an example...it was released in an Apple tower 
before moto gave the official scoop since up until then it was all just 
rumor). So, in a sense, Apple makes motos PPC product announcements 
;¬)...not counting the VERY general PPC roadmaps.

Actually, wouldn't the information you get from motorola probably 
synonymous with what Apple would tell you? They are a PPC alliance, 
after all...Apple, IBM, and Motorola. (for those who don't know, it's 
AIM)

Which raises a question on my end. If motorola sets the price of the 
fastest G4 chip to $300 per chip in a block of 10,000 (making 10,000 
units the lowest practical buy for a 3rd party developer), do they 
offer a better deal if one were to buy, oh, say 500,000 chips? Because 
that would be a great deal for Apple, who buys the largest amount of 
G4's by far. Hell, one of their worst G4 configs ONLY as far as sales 
are concerned sold around 150,000 machines (this machine being the G4 
Cube ;¬)  )

Isn't IBM supposed to begin PPC 970 production in mid '03? Do you know 
if that chip is going to be pin compatible with the current line of 
G4's? I heard that it is fully Alti-vec compatible, but because 
Alti-vec is a registered motorola name, IBM just has to give it a 
different name (VBX?...something like that anyway), even though Apple 
can still call it the "Velocity Engine".


jesse





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