G4 7448 now available... finally

We first started talking about the Freescale PowerPC G4 7448 CPU way back in 2004, and fully expected to see them in the wild by 2005.

Boy were we ever wrong. It is now almost 3 years later and only now are we finally seeing those 7448 upgrade cards available for purchase. The max speed is 2.0 GHz for single-CPU cards, and up to 1.8 GHz for dual-CPU cards. Unfortunately, no Cube-specific upgrade cards are offered.

As expected, these 90 nm chips are cooler running, and thanks to their 1 MB L2 cache (double that of the 7447A) and improved Altivec execution, they are also much faster clock-for-clock compared to previous G4 chips. xlr8yourmac has the first review.

While a huge improvement over previous G4s, it's too little, too late. The US$679 dual 1.8 upgrade card is still significantly slower overall than even the low end $599 1.66 GHz Core Duo Mac mini.

Apple TV, Dissected

Anandtech has gotten its hands on an Apple TV unit and dissected it for our benefit. Some of its innards:

1) 40 GB 2.5" laptop hard drive
2) nVidia GeForce Go 7300 64 MB, with Turbo Cache support
3) Intel 945G chipset
4) ULV 1 GHz Pentium M Dothan?
5) 256 MB RAM

I wonder if Apple is utilizing the GeForce Go 7300 for H.264 decode assist.

TechRestore also has some pictures.