Panther, the next generation of Apple"s modern-day Mac OS X operating system, won"t be the only thing turning heads three weeks from now in San Francisco. The computer maker, which will not be attending the Macworld "Creative Pro" conference in July, will use its annual developers conference to showcase this summer"s product offerings, sources tell AppleInsider.
Traditionally, Apple"s World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC) is scheduled during the month of May. However, in March of this year, the company announced that it had rescheduled its 2003 Worldwide Developers Conference for late June, in order to provide developers with a more complete preview release of "Panther." What the press release did not say is that this first developer release of Panther would be demonstrated by Apple CEO, Steve Jobs, on the company"s new line of Power Mac G5 desktop computers.
The new Power Mac G5s will sport a completely new motherboard design utilizing DDR 400 RAM as well as AGP 8x graphics, FireWire 800 (FireWire 2), and USB 2.0, sources said. "In the box" connectivity among the news systems is based on Hypertransport -- a universal chip-to-chip interconnect developed by AMD and partners -- which provides 64-bit addressing and will replace Apple"s multilevel bus architecture found in current systems. This royalty-free technology sports a low manufacturing cost and is capable of transferring data at up to 12.8 Gigabytes per second.