G5 PowerBook - Never? So where now for laptops?

If there is an update before the Pentium-M based PowerBooks arrive, it will be a minor one -- probably just the 7448 with the latest notebook drives and batteries, and that's about it. Any big changes will wait for the x86 machines.

Keep in mind that it's altogether possible that we'll start seeing Intels in Macs in 6 months, not a year. If that does happen, it's possible there will be no more updates until then.

At this point it seems very unclear as to where Apple will go with the PB line. I would think that they would not want to introduce Intel CPUs into this from the start. It is too risky. These are used by professionals to earn their keep. If some huge problem arises just after they sell the first 100,000 or so that would be very bad. One would think that Apple would start with something like the Mac Mini where problems could be tolerated for a few months till they were fixed.

On the other hand, the announcements from IBM were lackluster. A 1.6GHz G5 that uses more power than the faster G4 is not attractive. A dual core G4 would be more useful.

If we move beyond public information to speculation then one could wonder whether Apple will receive faster chips than the ones IBM announced. For example, maybe they will get 1.8GHz and 2.0GHz PPC970FX chips for PBs and 3.0GHz PPC970MP chips for towers? IBM could square this with the public announcement by saying that their announcement pertained only to publicly available chips, not those reserved for Apple.

I'm in desperate need of a laptop as I'm moving house across continents soon and shipping the G4 iMac just isn't economical.

With the Laptops both iBook and PowerBook screaming for an update I'll hold out as long as I can, probably until the end of August.

After that I'll just get a refurb if there's nothing new on offer.

From the Non-apple point of view there will not be a faster laptop, Currently laptops are taking there place with portabilaty, Not speed.

iBooks will probly run Celeron processors and PowerBooks will probly have Pentium Ds or Pentium 4s in them.

Originally posted by pyriX
As for iBooks running celerons, while that is a fine and cheap processor for office tasks, I would prefer one of the low end Pentium M's, as celerons have a much less efficient architecture from what I have seen of them. If iBooks had celerons, they would of been better off staying with G4's.

Just my $0.02AUD

I AGREE. The celeron chip sucks. I would never own another one. A low end M chip would be the way I would want to go. The biggest problem is they are dog slow but you get what you pay for.

Originally posted by womblingfree
Think Secret have reported that Apple is concentrating on their Intel based PowerBook after many (failed) attempts at a G5 PowerBook.

I am not sure where all the "Failed Attempts" talk comes from. How can Apple fail when IBM can't release a chip that will even work?

There are no failed attempts, just no attempts at all since the IBM dropped the ball.

Originally posted by pyriX
...the bowerbook/ibook line is desperatly screaming for an update in both design and guts...

...OK - so what do you want in a new design that the current lines lack?

Originally posted by Blackcat
It seems likely Apple has had a PB G5 ready to go since the iMac G5 debut, but needed a cooler CPU.
You're probably spot on. I think everyone recalls that the new PowerBook models showed up in the G5 plist files last summer with the 10.3.5 update, along with the new iMac, which turned out to be the iMac G5.

Originally posted by DHagan4755
You're probably spot on. I think everyone recalls that the new PowerBook models showed up in the G5 plist files last summer with the 10.3.5 update, along with the new iMac, which turned out to be the iMac G5.

I'm always amazed how some people seem to think Apple waits for a box of CPUs then starts to design the machine around it. :)

Originally posted by aplnub
I AGREE. The celeron chip sucks. I would never own another one. A low end M chip would be the way I would want to go. The biggest problem is they are dog slow but you get what you pay for.

As far as I can tell, the crippled P4 Celeron is just about dead. The next chips to use the Celeron name will be single core versions of the lower-mid clocked of the upcoming dual core designs, In essence, this years Pentium-M will be next year's Celeron-M.

Originally posted by pyriX
Widescreen on the low end. intergrated sub on the 17" powerbook. I saw somwhere that Asus was making the new notebooks, and they already have a notebook like this.

Intergrated card readers, and colours OTHER than white. No Intel inside sticker.

...why do you assume they'll have intel-stickers? They're not yet made - and if they have: PEEL IT OFF!

There is no current white PowerBooks made by Apple on the market - if you really want other colors, you'll get it at http://www.colorwarepc.com/products/select_apple.aspx

If the PowerBooks are going to stay at 32-bit for the next couple of years, then I'd rather wait for a dual-core Yonah PowerBook than get a PowerBook with the new recently announced Freescale G4. With that in mind, could be possible that the new Freescale G4 processor would go into the iBooks (further blurring the difference between it and the PowerBook for a brief amount of time), and then, several months down the road, Apple would release Yonah PowerBooks? If not, would it make more sense if Apple just simultaneously released single core Yonah iBooks and dual-core PowerBooks (again, assuming that the plan is to stay at 32-bit for the next couple of years)?

If the plan is to move the PowerBook to a 64-bit processor, then whatever processor Apple plans to use is something we haven't heard of yet, considering it's pretty much official that the newly announced IBM processors will not be going into a PowerBook.

For what it's worth -- not much I suspect -- we seem to have confirmation that IBM was working on a G5 powerbook: see

eweek's "We have the right watts" article (http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1833126,00.asp?kc=EWRSS03129TX1K0000611)

which quotes an IBM VP as saying

They had Freescale primarily for the low-end and mobile solutions, and they really had IBM focus more on PowerBook, xServe and iMac. That's where we collaborated deeply with Apple.

So now we can say with some certainty that either Thinksecret is right in speculating that the G5 powerbook project was abandoned, or we can look forward to a portable companion to the G5 iMac.

If there's any truth in the latter, let's hope it's packing something a little more impressive than the the 970FX!

Rumor from Engadget: Apple recruiting Sony VAIO engineers to build the first Intel PowerBook? (http://engadget.com/entry/1234000537052498/)

Will the first Intel PowerBooks be designed by a team of ex-Sony engineers? Could be. A reliable source tells us that Apple has been having trouble playing catch up with the learning curve for designing using the Intel platform and that in order to have an Intel-based PowerBook out by next year theyve been scrambling to recruit an engineering team with some experience building light and thin Intel-based laptops. And how are they going to do that? By poaching from Sony apparently, apparently theyve hired a headhunting firm in Japan which has been trying to recruit as many current Sony VAIO and ex-Sony VAIO engineers as they can in order to have a team in place as soon as possible. Sounds a little crazy, but it wouldnt be the first time that Apples turned to Sony for assistance you might recall that they had Sony help them design the very first PowerBook way back in 1991.

I certainly hope Apple does not DOWNGRADE the PB from a G4 to a Yonah. Should we really have to wait until Q2 '06 just to be stuck with a 32-bit, slow bus, AltiVec lacking chip after all this waiting time?

I have an x86_64-bit laptop already (AMD based), why would Apple put a low-end 32-bit cpu in a POWERBOOK in Q2 '06 when 32-bit cpu's will be even more old news?

Apple's gotta have something better than Yonah up it's sleaves for the next powerbook. My first choice would be the new 970FX, or at least a mobile Althon 64 like my PC notebook. Intel's mobile chips have been getting slower and slower in performance if you check the benchmarks (although power consumption has improved). If we're waiting until Q2 '06 for an Intel PB, Intel should be supplying it with a DUAL CORE 64 BIT mobile cpu. It doesn't make sense to put a chip thats slow by today's standards in tommorow's machine.

OS X running on Intel isn't the issue, that's pretty much a flip of the switch as OpenDarwin already runs on both. It's the 3rd party apps. that are taking the time in terms of software. The biggest problem developers are voicing in that their code just plain doesn't run as fast on Intel as it did on PPC at least with media intensive apps. SSE3 appears to be litterally 1/3rd as fast as Altivec. So switching to Intel ends up being a significant downgrade performance wise, even in the Desktop market. At least initially. It's two bad IBM didn't act quicker.

I strongly believe Apple should unleash a PowerBook G5 in the meantime while Intel improves it's cpu performance. I don't even think "Yonah" is a worthy project for Intel, they already have a ton of low end mobile 32-bit cpu's. Intel should consolidate it's product line into 64-bit cpus for mobile apps and 64-bit cpus for desktops. And if dual core technology is availible, make new chips dual core and drop the single core product lines.

Common Imagine if Ford continued it's Model-T line along with it's new vehicles. Intel should drop it's Celeron line and Celeron D lines. Just sell the P4 HT as the low end cpu, and the P4 HT Extreme Edition and Pentium D's as the mid range desktop cpus. And Xeons and Itaniums for the high end.

And for mobile cpu's there's too many choices as well. They have a Celeron M and a Pentium M and a Pentium 4 M with more lines on the way.

Originally posted by ngmapple
OS X running on Intel isn't the issue, that's pretty much a flip of the switch as OpenDarwin already runs on both. It's the 3rd party apps. that are taking the time in terms of software. The biggest problem developers are voicing in that their code just plain doesn't run as fast on Intel as it did on PPC at least with media intensive apps. SSE3 appears to be litterally 1/3rd as fast as Altivec. So switching to Intel ends up being a significant downgrade performance wise, even in the Desktop market. At least initially. It's two bad IBM didn't act quicker.

I strongly believe Apple should unleash a PowerBook G5 in the meantime while Intel improves it's cpu performance. I don't even think "Yonah" is a worthy project for Intel, they already have a ton of low end mobile 32-bit cpu's. Intel should consolidate it's product line into 64-bit cpus for mobile apps and 64-bit cpus for desktops. And if dual core technology is availible, make new chips dual core and drop the single core product lines.

Common Imagine if Ford continued it's Model-T line along with it's new vehicles. Intel should drop it's Celeron line and Celeron D lines. Just sell the P4 HT as the low end cpu, and the P4 HT Extreme Edition and Pentium D's as the mid range desktop cpus. And Xeons and Itaniums for the high end.

And for mobile cpu's there's too many choices as well. They have a Celeron M and a Pentium M and a Pentium 4 M with more lines on the way.

I agree that Intel's FPU performance leaves something to be desired but 64-bit really means nothing in a laptop. The major benefit is it's able to access amounts of RAM that are greater than 4 GB, and unless you are putting 4 GB modules in your Powerbook there is no benefit (Now that I think of it I don't think the small modules exist at that size). On top of that the few instances the 64-bit address space could be needed, the task will probably be run on a desktop, workstation or cluster which has the rest of the system design to go along with it and not the relatively slow busses and hard drives of laptops. Unless you intend to run a 1+ GHz bus and a 7,200 RPM 3.5 inch drive off a battery.

Originally posted by ngmapple
OS X running on Intel isn't the issue, that's pretty much a flip of the switch as OpenDarwin already runs on both. It's the 3rd party apps. that are taking the time in terms of software. The biggest problem developers are voicing in that their code just plain doesn't run as fast on Intel as it did on PPC at least with media intensive apps. SSE3 appears to be litterally 1/3rd as fast as Altivec. So switching to Intel ends up being a significant downgrade performance wise, even in the Desktop market. At least initially. It's two bad IBM didn't act quicker.

Dude your pulling this info out of your ass. A fully ported application to the Intel platform will be as fast or faster.

Please read facts before dreaming up fantasy literature.

http://developer.apple.com/documentation/MacOSX/Conceptual/universal_binary/

The biggest problem is they have to re-write not because it's slower. Plus if VMX was so great why didn't IBM include it in there Power-5 CPU.

The benchmark test your probly basing your info on is RC5. Distributed.net FAQ warns that the RC5 benchmark is a poor thing to use to characterize the performance of a CPU. It relies heavily on rotate instructions, which not all processors implement equally well (they're not used that often). Altivec has a vector permute unit that has a 128-bit vector rotate instruction. SSE does not have such an instruction. That's why the G5 performs so much better in that benchmark. It's a nice thing if you're software is really dependent on bit manipulation (crypto, stuff like that), but what most apps use the vector unit for is FMACs (multiply-accumulate instructions), and AltiVec and SSE do those equally fast.

Originally posted by ngmapple
That's not entirely accurate. 64-bit can mean two things 64-bit REGISTERS and 64-bit ADDRESSING. The G5 has both (and I think this is the same case with the AMD 64 architecture). Your are partially right and partially incorrect. In terms of 64-bit ADDRESSING, the benifit only lies in the ability to address more RAM. However in terms of 64-bit ARITHMETIC REGISTERS, the numbers/variables or whatever to be crunched can be twice as long, in some cases doubling performance like a dual core configuration can.

I wont argue with you becuase you sound like you know what your talking about (doesn't everyone these days?) BUT-

Dual core, 64bit dont double anything. They improve the performance, but if you were expecting your Halo framrates to double, you would be sorely disappointed.

Just my $0.02AUD

Originally posted by pyriX
Hell, I'm not even sure if Tiger is 64bit capable. Panther wasn't.

Tiger is completely 64-bit capable at its UNIX level but not at the GUI level. Read here ( http://developer.apple.com/macosx/64bit.html).

All I know is that Yonah will be widely available around march 2006 as a dual core with speed up to 2.16GHz, and a 667MHz FSB.
I believe it will be an UPGRADE from any G4 based PowerBook, which we know won't be faster that 1.8GHz ( slightly overclocked 7448 ) at best.
If Apple has (had) trouble designing the Intel PowerBook (who said it was gonna be easy?) they may use Freescale's 7448 in a last update during this fall/winter.
I'm sure that the first Intel based Macs will be good machines, maybe not flawless, but as good as any PPC based.
I also believe that we may see this chip (yonah) across the iBook and mini lines a few month after the release of the 1st Intel based Mac (if it's the PowerBook), maybe in a single core format though.

Yonah's fine for an iBook or MacMini, however the 667Mhz bus of Intels upcomming Yonah is half as wide as AMD's EXISTING mobile cpu architecture. Remember when the PowerBook used to be the most powerfull laptop on the market? Now it's simply going to be on PAR with the average PC notebook, in terms of performance.

Yonah's fine for an iBook or MacMini, however the 667Mhz bus of Intels upcomming Yonah is half as wide as AMD's EXISTING mobile cpu architecture. Remember when the PowerBook used to be the most powerfull laptop on the market? Now it's simply going to be on PAR with the average PC notebook, in terms of performance

Do you have any technical data , what so ever, to suggest that 667 MHz bus will limit performance of Yonah?

BTW, I just got a 1.73 GHz PM (Dothan) (533 MHz FSB, dual DDRII) Fujitsu notebook and it cleanly outruns a 3.2 GHz Northwood 800 FSB HT Dell desktop in terms of video encoding, Matlab, and other such CPU intensive tasks. Just to give you an idea of current state of Pentium M power.