adinoto's blog

As my previous posts on low powered chip concerns, for government, and endusers as well, again I’d like to make a brief review on how a cooler chip is matter (for us).

A PowerBook G5 won’t be around sooner than we expected. A lot of people keep dreaming about having in their hand a G5 based PowerBook this Q1 2005. Stop dreaming. Apple is very concern about asthetics. So they won’t be releasing a 2″ thick portable. How’s that look to today’s 1″ PowerBook 17″ to you? A whimps right?

I check out IBM sites today on PowerPC chips product roadmap guess what I found. A G5 chip found in newer PowerMac G5 (a 970FX) compare to a plain 970 processor on early PowerMac G5 is still way churn more heats than a G4 (Freescale/Motorola) or IBM positioned to be a low power chip G3 (750FX/GX).

Check out the table:
First Generation PowerMac G5 (PowerPC 970) produce 51Watt @ 1.8GHz
New PowerMac G5 (PowerPC 970FX) produce 12.3Watt @ 1.4GHz and 24.5Watt @ 2.0GHz

Now compare it to a G3 (PowerPC 750FX and GX) from IBM:
G3 (PowerPC 750FX) produce a mere 5.4Watt @ 800MHz
G3 (PowerPC 750GX) produce ~9Watt @ 1GHz

Now compare it to a G4 (Motorola/Freescale PowerPC 74xx):
G4 (PowerPC 7447A) produce 18Watt @ 1.42GHz
G4 (e600 PowerPC 7448) produce 10Watt @ 1.4GHz
Dual Core G4 (e600 8641D) produce 15Watt @ 1.5GHz

Compare to Intel Pentium 4 based Prescotts core that produce more than 103Watt heat dissipation any PowerPC should rocks!!

Of course there’s performance per heat dissipate and performance per clock and performance per price ratio we should consider (later on this) but everybody knows that G3, G4, G5 is performance chips (not just like other low power x86 chip which produces low power but also low performance).

My question is why Apple not opt a Dual Core G4 for this seasons PowerBook and called it a PowerBook G5 Mobile or even more screaming like PowerBook Dual G4 😀

Sounds good to me, how about you?