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PowerBook Speed Bump Coming Soon? - Plus PowerBook Mystique Mailbag

by Charles W. Moore

Now that the question of what Apple was going to do about the iBook has been answered -- make it more like the PowerBook, the focus shifts to the Power Book line, which was last refreshed in January. In the normal scheme of things, we would logically be expecting a round of speed bumps, feature enhancements, or even a new model release, at Macworld Expo Paris in September, now only a few weeks away.

Of course, these are not normal times, with the clock counting down to the release of Intel-based Macs next June, and with portables expected to be in the changeover vanguard. But it still a long time till June, and it’s not a credible scenario that Apple would try to go 18 months without a PowerBook both update, so September is looking likely, with late October/early November another fallback possibility. Apple doesn’t confide in me about such things, so this is just deductive speculation.

Aside from the chronological realities, as noted, the recent iBook updates have narrowed the specification gap between consumer and professional Apple portables to the point where it’s easier to list the remaining distinctions than the similarities, e.g.: better keyboard, higher resolution widescreen displays on the two larger PowerBook models, more video power with monitor spanning supported, gigabit Ethernet, the availability of keyboard backlighting on the 15-inch and 17-inch models, analog sound in, PC Card slots on the 15-inch and17-inch models. I’ve probably over looked an item or two, but the point is that a lot of that you get for the substantial extra cost of a PowerBook is stuff that is great to have, but which a lot of us can live without quite happily.

I can’t help but think that sales of the 12-inch PowerBook especially, delectable little machine that it is, are going to suffer now that a SuperDrive equipped 1.42 GHz iBook is available for two hundred dollars less than the combo drive a LittleAl ‘Book, and four hundred dollars less than a Super Drive equipped LittleAl.

Or is that part of the plan? When I was about this far into roughing out this column, I happened upon an AppleInsider item following the same line of speculation, or perhaps in their case actual insider intelligence. Anyway, that article suggested that some very modest (30 MHz), PowerBook speed bumps, RAM specification enhancements to dual-channel DDR2 SDRAM which can reach higher frequencies with less energy consumption than standard DDR SDRAM, and perhaps higher resolution 1920 x 1200 Wide Ultra eXtended Graphics Array (WUXGA) displays, were slated for introduction at MacWorld Expo Paris, but perhaps would be delayed until later in the fall due to a shortage of Power PC development resources at Apple with the major focus of activity shunted to Intel-based projects. The article also implied that the refreshments would be for 15 inch and 17-inch PowerBooks only, with no indication of 12-inch PowerBook enhancements.

So, could it be that Apple is going to phase out the LittleAl, at least temporarily until a new subnotebook Intel-based PowerBook is ready, with the newly-refreshed iBooks to take up the transitional slack? It’s at least a plausible theory. The 12-inch PowerBook really a sort of premium iBook anyway, incorporating a lot of the dual-USB iBook’s engineering, and built in the same Asustek factories, while the 15 inch and 17-inch models are engineered and built by a another Taiwanese subcontractor, Quanta Computer.

An imminent 12-inch PowerBook end of life would help explain the welcome but unexpected inclusion of hitherto PowerBook exclusive premium features like scrolling trackpads, sudden motion sensors, 512 MB of standard RAM,and standard Bluetooth on the latest iBook revisions.

As for the rumored clock speed bump from 1.67 GHz to 1.7 GHz, that sounds a bit underwhelming on paper at least. However, if the 1.7 GHz processors turned out to be Freescale’s new MPC7448 chips rather than the MPC7447A units currently shipping in PowerBooks and iBooks, the practical performance boost would be much more dramatic than the nominal 30 MHz increase in clock speed would imply.

PowerLogix and Sonnet have recently announced 2.0 GHz and 1.8 GHz G4 processor upgrades for Mac desktop computers, but those are MPC7447A chips. In a real-world performance, a 1.7 GHz 7448 should blow the proverbial doors off them.

In the spring, Freescale Semiconductor announced that the MPC7448 G4 chip was slated for full production in October. Based on Freescale’s e600 PowerPC core, the G4 7448 includes the Altivec ‘velocity engine’ that provides optimized OS X applications with enhanced performance, and will be available in clock speeds of 600 MHz to 1.7 GHz (interestingly the clock speed being rumored for the PowerBook updates) with the system bus running up to 200 MHz, along with 1 MB of L2 cache (twice the 7447A’s 512 K of L2 cache). Since the 7448 is pin-for-pin and software compatible with the previous MPC74xx processors — it could easily be plugged into Apple’s existing ‘Book designs, and being the first MPC74xx chip made with Freescale’s 90 nanometer (nm) silicon-on-insulator (SOI) CMOS process, which facilitates increases in clock and bus speeds while reducing power consumption substantially. It will reportedly consume less than a cool-running 10 Watts at 1.4 GHz, making it even more suitable for laptop use than the current versions of G4 chips.

Other MPC7448 power management features include nap and sleep modes, and dynamic frequency switching that allows the OS to reduce power on the fly. The e600 PowerPC core’s list of goodies includes improved AltiVec throughput, a single instruction multiple data (SIMD) engine that can accelerate networking applications, such as security algorithms, network stack processing, routing and more.

Or......

Also a possibility, although more remote, is Freescale’s even newer MPC8641 chip, a single core version of the dual core MPC8641D processor that integrates two e600 PowerPC cores, two memory controllers, Ethernet controllers, a RapidIO fabric interface, a PCI Express I/O interface, and a high performance MPX bus that scales to 667 MHz and consumes as low as 15 Watts. According to Freescale’s product page, the MPC8641 offers the same level of peripheral integration as the MPC8641D, but with lower power consumption. However, it is apparently not pin-compatible with the 744x series chips, and therefore its use would involve more extensive motherboard re-engineering than the 7448.

If Apple uses either of these chips, they will almost certainly be be the last PowerPC processors that make their way into Macintosh portables. Reportedly, the Intel Yonah processor (dualcore Pentium-M) is also sampling and could be available for early 2006 and it is the chip likely for use in Apple’s midterm future for the PowerBook and iBook.

Meanwhile, a MPC7448 or MPC8641 powered PowerBooks would be sweet machines, and a fitting finale to the G4 PowerBook era. Probably worth waiting a few extra weeks for.

PowerBook Mystique Mailbag

Re: Core Image uses in Tiger

From Antoine Hébert

I agree with you about the fact that Apple should keep the most features possible that are accessible by all machines running this OS. Even more confusing are .qtz files, for example the RSS feed screensaver. Those are created by Quartz Compositor, an amazing app IMHO found in the dev tools. Sadly QC only runs on Core-Image supported video cards and will give you an alert to that effect when you try to run it. But what is really bad from the user point of view is that .qtz files, which can also be opened in Quicktime, won't generate any errors on non supported hardware. On my Kiehi iMac, almost all .qtz files I tried resulted in a black output, but a few generated some animated gray rectangles. From what I've heard, the RSS screensaver and some other .qtz also work on more recent non coreimage video cards. The idea is that it all depends on whether the .qtz requires this or that Open GL that may or may not work on some cards.

Anyhow, talk about confusion for the end user!

But, really, I don't see what Apple could have done differently...They could either release Tiger only for machines with CI enabled cards, or drop CI altogether. Core Image is an important piece of the intel transition, because in some cases CI replaces altivec, and also it was a way for Apple to ensure that MS won't get a head-start on this and that future programmable video-cards won't get too entangled with Windows. Apple has no choices but to leave some users behind, because MS is about to take that risk to enable them to get closer to what Tiger is. From what I read, on "Vista", the whole interface will revert to an XP like version on machines that don't have supported video cards. So essentially, Vista's interface will look and act like XP if you have an old video card and new interface elements will be missing. Hopefully, in Tiger, almost all the interface, including the Dock and Exposé works even on machines like mine.

As for the Find tool in Panther, what does it do more than Spotlight? If you want a filename only search you can have it and many other that were in Find, and you can add them as favorites to your Finder search criteria pop-up menus by using the "Other..." option found there. By editing the default criteria .plist currently set as "Kind" and "Last opened", you could replicate the same set or a subset of the criteria used in Panther's Find tool. Or maybe change the default to have only the Filename search field. Once you made a list of the ones you need in the menu or as defaults, they would become accessible simply by hitting CMD-F. It's not easy to explain, but it's not hard to do :)

Even if I feel the issue as been exaggerated, like many, I feel that Spotlight was not exactly finished when Tiger shipped. I'm very confidant though that in Leopard many Spotlight problems will be addressed, and it will feature a much more mature interface. So it may not be a bad thing that you express what you feel should be changed, because you never know, Apple might listen :)

While next year Apple releases a mature, tried and tested version 1.5 or 2.0 of Spotlight in Leopard, MS will struggle to release their desktop search tool in time without too many bugs...

Antoine

Charles