Motorola loopt zwaar achter op schema bij de ontwikkeling van de G4 aka PowerPC 7400 aka 'Max'. Het was ooit de bedoeling dat het ding ergens midden '99 geïntroduceerd zou worden, maar dat gaat nu mooi niet lukken. Hier heb je het nieuws van The Register:
Reasons for Motorola's delay are unclear. One suggestion has it that the company is having a problem implementing copper interconnect technology, but this seems unlikely given IBM's success with the technique. And the two companies are now, of course, the best of friends.More likely, Motorola is having a tougher time integrating the AltiVec vector processing module onto the same silicon as the main CPU core. The AltiVec unit isn't too complex in its own right (as these things go), but connecting it to the CPU core might well prove trickier than Motorola imagined. AltiVec is designed to operate in parallel with the processor and is rather more complex that the PIII's Streaming SIMD Extensions.
Whatever the cause, it still leaves Apple in a very sticky position. It had intended to use Max to give its next Power Mac release, the Power Mac G4, a major speed hike. The Power Mac G4 is set to contain an updated motherboard that implements Intel's 4x Advanced Graphics Port (AGP) spec. AGP provides graphics cards with a dedicated channel to the processor and direct access to the computer's main memory. The slower 2x AGP spec. is now a standard in Wintel boxes.
