It turns out the chip isn't a particularly cool chip, even though it is manufactured on a 90 nm process. At 1.7 GHz, it puts out 30 Watts:
In other words, it puts out almost as much heat as both cores combined of a higher clocked Intel Core Duo chip, and each core alone would on average be faster than the G4 1.7 in native applications, even despite the new G4's bump in L2 cache.
3 comments:
I still miss PowerPC though. Don't get me wrong I know the Core Duo is a great chip, but are Apple really going to get into the game of speed bumping Macs as frequently as PC suppliers do, or are we going to drop behind at time still?
I will miss the nice coloured graphs on the Power Mac pages telling us much faster the G5 (and G4 before it) are than some boring Dell box with an x86 at it's heart. I guess the biggest dissapointment is that there will never again be even the possibility that the fastest Mac is quicker doing media or whatever than a decent fast PC. The playingfiled has been levelled.
I guess now we will see who can code for x86 performance better once Vista lands...
On the other hand, the MPC7447A uses the same amount of power at full steam. However, a comparison of the MPC7447A and the MPC7448 indicates that the MPC7448 typically operates at a similar (N-Spec) or lower (L-Spec) wattage than its predecessor.
In fact, it seems that aftermarket CPU upgrades for PBs may include the MPC7448 in the future. I personally wonder about the possibility of the dual core PPC in a PB. That would be sweet.
(here's an interesting take on the Intel/PPC switch)
The aftermarket manufacturers must be salivating over this, though, as well as the upgrade-purchasing customers. :)
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