New Powerbooks

Hi All,

Just wondering why Apple does not increase the bus speed of the Powerbooks?

Everyone wants faster processor, well a 1.67 Ghz chip would not be that bad on a fast bus, but not on 167Mhz bus. Talk about hamstringing a system, PB's have all this ultra cool stuff plugged into a bus from 6 years ago.

Just a thought !

Joe

The fsb isn't a bottleneck...

Most PCs had ancient bus speeds up until the last couple years as well. I never saw the point in this. It's like having a 500 horsepower engine inside a barn on wheels!

Please explain your thoughts!

jbsengineer said:

The fsb isn't a bottleneck...

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gunnerjoe said:

Please explain your thoughts!

Click to expand...

oops... correction. fsb IS indeed a bottleneck... dont know what i was thinking.... long day at work.

it is a bottleneck. and i dont know much about the g4 architecture. can someone enlighten me??? but my powerbook with a 167mhz fsb does kick some *** against my other pc's with huge FSB's. my ibook with a 133mhz fsb still kicks....

btw, intel has obviously overblown there FSB's to the point where it doesn't make even sense. having a fast FSB speed and slow memory is obviously not going to help. AMD has gone in the direction of balancing the FSB and Memory speed and has really done a decent job. for whatever apple is doing with there archtecture it's awesome. do they use more than the data path of just the FSB to communicate between the components? i know the G5 uses bi-directional FSB's which help ALOT...

Josh

jbsengineer said:

oops... correction. fsb IS indeed a bottleneck... dont know what i was thinking.... long day at work.

it is a bottleneck. and i dont know much about the g4 architecture. can someone enlighten me???

Click to expand...

I think the real bottleneck might be with Freescale, the manufacturer of the G4 series of processors. They don't have the near-unlimited financial resources to make a decent processor for Apple's computers like IBM (the maker of the PowerPC 970) does. Maybe if they had more money, they could push out a better product - but who knows?

I hope Apple ditches Freescale soon in any case.