[Ti] The Benchmarks - Question about G5 portable

[Erik Gaderlund]

At 17:13 -0400 09/19/03, b wrote:
>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up in the Titaniums, a newer version of the IBM  G5 chip will have 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.
>
>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.

I heard from an Apple engineer that the problem was that since the G5 
can put more traces into space, that it puts out the same amount of 
heat has the G4 chip, but, that the die of the G5 is smaller, thus 
you have a higher heat/area ratio that would create problems with 
cooling.  Though they've worked it out on the towers, and there were 
links to a UK site that talked with an Apple engineer about the 
issues with getting G5 into a portable 
(http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/top_news_item.cfm?NewsID=6916), and 
he did point out that we were saying the same thing about the G4 
processors, so we only need to wait.
Maybe multi-core G4s!

erik g