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June 20, 2003 11:54 AM

The rampant speculation that Apple is about to release new hardware based on the IBM PowerPC 970 (aka the G5) processor has been confirmed, sort of. Yesterday, one of the graphic images that Apple uses in the product pages got mixed up, and the file that shows the specs for the G5 was put out on Apple.com.

Stevie Boy Blue has been a pretty notorious secret keeper, and lawsuits have been the result of leaked secrets before. This time though, pretty much everyone knew the G5's were coming. IBM said they were, and rumors leaked Apple's manufacturer that large quantities of processors were in hand and machines were being made. Others have seen the pallette coming into various apple store with notes not to open them until the announcements happens.

It's pretty hysterical that the actual details were leaked by Apple. Who ever made the mistake is going to get ripped a new asshole. My thanks got out to him/her though, because it makes the buying decision easier to make (ie, don't buy a G4 and wait a week and buy a G5). Here's what was leaked...

  • 1.6GHz, 1.8GHz, or Dual 2GHz PowerPC G5 Processors
  • Up to 1 GHz processor bus
  • Up to 8GB of DDR SDRAM
  • Fast Serial ATA hard drives
  • AGP 8x Pro3 PCI or PCI-X expansion slots
  • One FW800, two FW400 ports
  • Bluetooth & Airport Extreme ready
  • Optical and analog audio in and out
The max amount of RAM seems pretty huge to me, but the real story is that the 1.6's and 1.8's are single processor units. My guess is that the dual proc 2.0 ghz's are going to be in the $3k range, and the low end will be around $1800, but that's just a guess. At any rate, I think it's a mistake to buy a single processor unit these days. Because...
The PowerPC 970, on the other hand, is designed from the ground up with multi processing in mind--IBM intends to see the 970 used in 4-way or higher desktop SMP systems.
I'm dreaming of ultra fast DV to MPEG conversions, and iMovie transitions previews and rendering. /drool