Joined: 3-Feb-2004 Posts: 584
From: Lincoln, England
@BrianK
Motorola stopped focusing on the desktop chip market long ago, with only Apple buying chips and clock speeds dropping behind it just didn't make sense to pour the money into development that it would need to catch up. Instead it focused entirly on the embedded market using the PowerPC chips to cover the areas which it;s other ships couldn't - high processing power but low power consumption. They didn't give up completly but they just wern't commited to high cloock speeds any more and focused on power consumption, this means that while a dual core would be a huge processing powe increase don't expect a huge clockspeed increas, a few hundreds megahertz probably (200-300?) but maybe not even that (the 7447A was up 233mhz from the 7447 which was up 267mhz from the 7445. The one good thing I can see about this chip, esspecailly from an AmigaOne point of view, is that Motorola have a habbit of making their PPC chips mincompatible (all 744x and 745x AFAIK) so that would make an upgrade module relativly painless, although until AOS4 gets SMP support it will be as useless as the 64bit fetaure of the G5. Also note taht that article (Dual core G4) is over a year old.
Joined: 3-Feb-2004 Posts: 584
From: Lincoln, England
@BrianK
Note the 970MP will be pin *INCOMPATIBLE* with the 970/970FX, this means more work in a design and a different motherboard if the current design reaches production beofre then. Something that strikes me as odd is that the chip is reported to be 3ghz use a 1ghz bus which means that it has a 3x multiplier. To date the chips all have a 2x multiplier on whatever bus they use e.g. 1ghz for a 2ghz chip. The Momentum docs state that the CPC925 northbriudge can do a maximum of a 1ghz bus (The 970FX based PowerMacs use 1.25ghz and so run at 2.5ghz) this could simply be outdated info from when the chips had a maximum speed of 2ghz.