Motorola heeft een nieuwe revisie (met o.a. gefixte 500MHz bug) van de G4 processor klaar staan. CPU's met snelheden van 600MHz en hoger staan gepland voor begin 2000, zo bericht MacOS Rumors:
New information from Motorola sources has painted a picture that is far rosier than today's outlook on the G4 processor family.By all accounts, the Revision 2.8 PowerPC 7400s are nearly ready for production, and should begin to ramp up within a month's time. These updated chips, with the Rev 2.7 "errata" fixed, will raise the performance bar to 550MHz and shortly after the first of the year, to 600MHz. A 650MHz version is expected 8-10 weeks after that.
Then, some time around May 2000, the second-generation G4s will surface. Running at 700-900MHz, these will sport additional processing units, deeper pipelines (allowing higher clock rates), a smaller wiring process, an on-chip 256K L2 cache, and lower-power operation. Current G4s use approximately 11.5 watts -- these will use approximately 8.5. Still too high for portable use, but significantly reduced.
These new G4s will rapidly accelerate in clock speeds, and should reach 1.1GHz during the fourth financial quarter of 2K. With 256K on-chip L2 caches, backside L3 caches up to 4MB, extra Integer and Altivec processing units, and a more streamlined overall design, these chips should offer an up to 120% performance improvement over current G4s at the same clock speed (depending on the task at hand).
While there are still dark days to be weathered for the G4, there is and end in sight -- and by all indications, a bright future beyond it.
