Aha! 970's!

[CJ Scaminaci]

Hey,

Continuing the discussion of the 970's, as pointed out by Macintosh 
News Network the new 970's are rumored to be 64 bit processors. You can 
find the article here: http://www.macnn.com/news/19694.  This could 
mean a lot for Apple....particularly...64 bit processors would give the 
average user a 2X increase in speed right off. But only for the 
operating system. Applications would have to be re-written to take 
advantage of of chip. Not to mention a virtually unlimited amount of 
memory. Two to the 32nd power gives you about 4GB of possible physical 
memory as demonstrated by our limit of the same amount. But 2 to the 
64th power gives...well.....a really big number. So you would be 
limited to the amount of memory you can shove down your computers 
throat. Now that IBM makes the processors instead of Motorola we can 
have faster speeds as well as more processors available to us. Now 
imagine 64 bit 1.8Ghz machines....please excuse me while I 
drool.....This is what is rumored to be on the top of the line. 
Anyway...Panther is supposed to be optimized for 64 bit machines. See 
this article http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,3959,1121736,00.asp. Alas 
our current 32 bit processors will still run it but the 64 bit machines 
would just be sweet. These machines are supposed to release in 2 weeks 
at WWDC. But Panther won't ship on them. Instead they will ship with a 
hybrid Jaguar that will run on 64 Bit machines. But this will only be 
temporary until Panther is released and all is well in the universe.But 
everything I say is based on those two links plus some other input from 
other sources. So I could be wrong...

CJ