A look into the future of the chipset that Macs use is expected when IBM announce their new 64-bit Power4 processor, which is expected to support the Altivec multimedia extensions which have been set out by Motorola and Apple.
The announcement is expected at the Microprocessor Forum 2002, which will be held in California in a few days. Unlike the original Power4 this will only have one processor core and is expected to be fully compatible with PowerPC technology through extensions implemented by IBM.
A spokesman from The Microprocessor Report has said "Because it supports a full 32-bit environment, this chip should be able to boot the Mac OS just fine," and he has also commented on the likely impact the announcement at the show stating "I expect there will be a fair amount of discussion about this part".
The likelihood of Mac developing their system to the 64-bit architecture any time soon is unlikely as this is a major job but their recently release Xserver could run with it, although only in 32-bit mode. Apple aren't expected to make any major announcements about this architecture until late next year but with "a vector processing unit implementing over 160 specialized vector instructions" to boost multimedia applications users can be quite optimistic about the future of the Mac.
View: Microprocessor Forum 2002 Homepage
News source: SiliconStrategies.com
