MacOS Rumors heeft de specs van de Powerbook G4 op een rijtje geplaatst:
- 400-550MHz PowerPC 7400 processors. 1MB backside L2 caches standard at 200-275MHz.- 100MHz main bus, 64 bits wide.
- Standard 14.1" flat panel display with improved clarity, brightness, and wide-angle viewing. Rumors of an available 15.3" display with 1280x1024 resolution remain unconfirmed.
- Approximately 25% thinner than Lombard, and 1-1.5 pounds lighter. This will bring it firmly into the Ultrathin class. Horizontal dimensions of the computer are limited by the flat panel display, but could be reduced slightly. The new enclosure is expected to continue to be black, but could include some translucent components in Dark Grey and "Ice."
- RAM type remains unclear; 100MHz-compliant SO-DIMMs (the Small Outline SDRAM modules used in current iMacs, iBooks, and Powerbooks) are expensive and hard to find at present, but this could easily change between now and WWDC. Another possibility is that these machines could use traditional DIMMs -- unlikely, but it could help reduce costs and improve performance for the Powerbook line, and is by no means an impossibility inside the Powerbook enclosure, which is expected to contain enough room for at least two full-size DIMM slots if Apple considers it a useful feature.
- 2X (133MHz) AGP on-board with a second-generation RAGE Mobility-based graphics chip and 8-12MB of SGRAM. Support for a second independent analog display is expected.
- UltraDMA/66 storage bus with high-performance hard disks starting at 8GB and ranging up to 18GB, 7200RPM versions. [break] Verder wil Steve er FireWire in stoppen, eventueel ter vervanging van de SCSI controller. Klinkt allemaal erg leuk. Tevens bij MacOS Rumors info over MacOS 9 en Altivec performance verbeteringen: [/break] Also, the first reliable report we've received of Mac OS 9 running on a dual-processor G4 machine (a Yosemite) suggests that running against 8.6, performance of common system tasks is already accelerated dramatically by Altivec (OpenGL-based games and rendering applications simply screamed with even a single 450MHz G4, between 4 and 10 times faster than the same apps running on a 450MHz G3) -- and with two 450MHz PPC 7400's, we saw OS 9 outrun 8.6 on Quake 3: Arena by over 40%; in fact, it was likely higher than that, but we seemed to hit a frame rate ceiling at around 120fps. The dual G4 under OS 9 stayed near that rate even in the most complicated environments (a dozen-plus netgame players, weapons fire and explosions virtually covering the field of view, all high-quality options on at 1024x768 pixels). Even the most optimistic of us were shocked by how high these numbers were -- something that could bode very well indeed for the next generation of Mac gaming.
