#IBM POWERPC G5 PROCESSOR 2GHZ MAC#
In conjunction with IBM, Apple took a very different approach when designing the Power Mac G5. Apple eventually prevailed on IBM to design a chip with a velocity engine, and the PowerPC 970 (a.k.a. Motorola was falling behind on clock speed, and IBM emphatically was not interested in producing G4 CPUs. Things didn’t get any better when the next generation of G4 Power Macs was introduced in July 2000 with no increase in clock speed, although Apple did add a second G4 CPU to the 450 MHz and 500 MHz models. IBM had reached 600 MHz with the G3 in 1998, so a lot of Mac users were frustrated with Apple’s choice of the Motorola G4. It wasn’t until February 16, 2000, that Apple again added a 500 MHz G4 model to its line. Apple addressed this by scaling back CPU speed of each Power Mac G4 model by 50 MHz on October 13, 1999. Although Apple announced a 500 MHz Power Mac G4 on August 31, 1999, Motorola simply wasn’t able to produce 500 MHz chips in sufficient quantity. Unfortunately, while IBM was making significant progress on the clock speed front, Motorola was languishing. Motorola decided that it was time to add a “velocity engine” to the RISC architecture, and its AltiVec unit was the primary difference between the G3 and G4 family of CPUs. IBM wanted to remain true to the RISC concept and kept pushing clock speed higher and higher, eventually reaching the 1.1 GHz mark. The next big step was the PowerPC G3 CPU, which was optimized for real-world performance and offered a lot more processing power per CPU cycle than earlier PowerPC designs.įrom here IBM and Motorola diverged. The first fruits of these were the Power Mac 6100, 7100, and 8100, designed around the PowerPC 601 CPU and introduced in March 1994. In the early 1990s, Apple had joined with IBM and Motorola to produce a new family of Reduced Instruction Set (RISC) CPUs based on IBM’s POWER architecture but also implementing some features of Motorola’s 88000 design. Yes, and the new enclosure introduced on June 23, 2003, lives on as the housing of the Mac Pro. 2008: Has it really been five years since Apple introduced the Power Mac G5?