[Ti] The Benchmarks - Question about G5 portable

[b]

John Griffin paused, thought it over, and spoke thusly:

>What I want to know is: Does anyone have any information about whether a G5
>Mobile processor is in the works. I have done several different searches and
>have come up empty on this.
>
>If we had some idea of how imminent the release of a G5 notebook is, it
>would certainly help in determining when to upgrade.
>
>My understanding is that the present G5 chips operate so hot you could buy a
>G5 machine and use it as a furnace as well as a computer.
>
>jg

A furnace? All I can say is, don't try it north of the Equator in 
winter time. (more on 'heat' below)

An educated 'guess' is that, just as with the processor that ended up 
in the Titaniums, a newer version of the IBM  G5 chip will have to 
come out first. In other words, don't hold your breath.

As far as rumors go, there are better ones than anything to do with a 
G5 portable:

My favorite is IBM releases their version of the G3 with Altivec, 
(basically it was supposed to be IBM's G4) and Apple releases a 
dual-G3 laptop. That is actually very possible, workable, and would 
give all of the G4 PowerBooks a great run for the money.

Where does this notion that the G5 runs so hot come from? The GPU 
(graphics processor) in the Titaniums runs hotter than anything 
except the hard drive. I think the area where 'house' current gets 
squeezed down to PC-board levels also generates a lot of heat. 
According to stats the G5 consumes 46.7 watts, and that's the 2 Gig 
running flat out. If you want to heat up a room, you'd be better off 
with a 1.33 Dell laptop, much more efficient for generating twice the 
heat. (And they make nice Linux web servers, to boot). Dell laptops, 
at the top end of their range, quality/speed-wise, crank out 90 watts 
of heat. Excess heat, over time, degrades performance. Hence the 
mythical quality of the CPU speed thing.

The Titaniums, as far as CPUs go, consume far less energy than any 
Intel chips that are out there.

One of the things that might keep Apple from popping a G5 into a 
laptop, right away, might be that they would rather keep the wattage 
in a comfortable range. That could easily result in a G5-based 
machine that was only marginally faster, on paper, than the 
already-popular G4 books. Not such a wise move, considering they're 
'lucky', in a way, that IBM is cutting them in on the G5 action, 
anyway. Remember IBM is going to be using what they must hope are 
huge numbers of G5s to run servers and whatnot. If the IBM G5, 
scalable, Linux-running, server takes off, well, the plant over there 
in Fishkill (or wherever) is going to be in overdrive.

~flipper