Posted on 11/16/2001 1:07:43 PM PST by HAL9000
Insider update: G5, 7460, OS X, SGI... - 7:10 PM 11/12 - RumorThe latest from the source who has brought us several previous anonymous reports on the G5 has sent in quite a whopper with details on numerous Apple fronts. Some of the details, particularly where they involve SGI, have been disputed by other sources, so as with all rumors, trust no one:
At Apple, we are quite pleased with the way the G5 has progressed. As of noon, we received version 0.7 of the G5. Altivec performance is now at par with equivalent clock speed 7460's. We spent a late night Friday night fitting prototypes with the new revision, and spent the day saturday doing various tests.Very interesting....however, as we have mentioned previously, there have been several calls from the grapevine for us to be perhaps somewhat more conservative than this report might suggest with regard to G5 clock speeds in the year ahead, as well as with regard to a release date for the PowerMac G5. Whatever the case, time will no doubt tell the tale.Yields are now just at the commercially acceptable level. Good news is that clock speeds have been improved to the point where 1.6 Ghz chips will be in adequate quantities. Another clock speed record was also set: 1 chip tested at 2.8 Ghz, 2 tested at 2.6 Ghz, 13 tested at 2.4 Ghz, 13 tested at 2.2Ghz, and 54 tested at 2Ghz. This shows that the G5 has tremendous potential at reaching high frequencies, being this early in its life. This is in sharp contrast to Intel's Itanium, which when I spoke to an Intel engineer at the semiconductor forum, they still are not getting sufficient yields above 800Mhz, an yields on current processors are very, very poor, hence the steep price of the Itanium. Mckinley is not faring too well either, progress has not been very good on increasing its clock speed for release sometime next year. The aim is to speed bump the G5 to between 2Ghz and 2.4 Ghz for Macworld New York. Above 1.6 Ghz, the G5 will be produced in 400Mhz increments.
Apple could theoretically sign off now, but Jon Rubinstein wants to go through one more revision. All the critical bugs have now been worked out, but there are a couple of minor optimizations that will go into revision 0.8, which is due within two weeks. Likely, these slight optimizations will result in version 0.8 being declared 1.0, and mass production will go on throughout December to get a critical volume of chips for a Mid-December production run of Power Mac G5's.
Anyone considering buying a G5 better be forwarned: the chip price may mean that Apple may not be able to offer G5 Power Macs for the same price as current G4 models. There has been talk between Steve Jobs, Jon Rubinstein, and Phil Schiller about possibly offering 7460 G4's at the low end in the professional models in two configurations, which would also appease Motorola. Apple would have five models of pro desktops until G5 prices fall low enough to warrant having them in the low-end pro models. There is talk of two 7460 G4 models, and 3 G5 models. Talk is that the low end G5 model will sell for slightly more than the current 867Mhz G4. The G5 towers will also sport the quicksilver enclosure initially, which will be changed at Macworld New York. People should understand that even though the G5 is considerably more expensive than the G4, it is a steal considering that we are getting at least 60% overall instructions per cycle than Intel's Itanium, and that it is a 64-bit processor. The 32 bit version of the G5 will be solely targeted towards embedded applications, as 32-bit addressing is no longer adequate for desktop applications.
The long awaited LCD iMac will also make its debut at Macworld San Francisco. It will be available at up to 1Ghz, 900Mhz being the scenario should yields of IBM's next generation G3's not be sufficient enough at 1Ghz.
Steve Jobs has very ambitious plans for Apple's processor strategy. He recently said "We've been stuck with the G4 for over two years, that's too long". His intentions are that the G5 have a life of 18 months in the Pro models. He wants the G6 to hit initial silicon between next December, and February 2003, and release it in mid-2003. Initially, the G6 will be fabbed with a 0.1 micron process moving to .07(.065) micron. It will be built upon the HIP 8.0 process, which is still not quite finalized. It will feature Altivec II, which promises to at least double performance of the current Altivec. Early estimates are that it will contain over 100 million gates. The G6 will be introduced at between 4.5 and 5Ghz and scale up to 10 Ghz.
This week Apple has committed itself to going beyond the G6 to build a G7, and maybe beyond. Apple is looking at Motorola's recently announced Gallium Arsenide technology to give this chip insanely high clock speeds. Talk is the G7 could go as high as 20 Ghz. The G7 would debut in early to mid 2005. This renewed hope with the PowerPc architecture is in light of the fact that Cisco Systems has committed to being a significant customer of G5's for their high-end routers, and Silicon Graphics being in the last stages of abandoning development on its R16000 and R18000 processors as a cost-cutting measure. It looks very likely it will sign a commitment with Apple, IBM and Motorola within a month. It has prototype G5 chips in a prototype workstation of theirs, and is hard at work developing Irix 7.0 for the G5.
In terms of future G5 development, work is well underway on the 8510, which is a low-power SOI LoK dielectric version of the G5. It is due out in late Q4 2002, and it will be an IBM product fabbed with its 0.1 micron process. Work is also progressing on the 8550, which is due out Q1 2003. It will be a 0.1 micron chip built upon SOI LO-K dielectric. It is a candidate to receive Altivec II if it is completed in time.
Relationships between Apple and Motorola as of late could very well be described as Jeckyll and Hyde. Just three weeks ago, Steve Jobs said "I am going to sue the ass of those guys at Motorola. At the last minute, they ****** us up. They told us we would have 1Ghz G4's, and days before Macworld, the ******* told us there was a defect which would cause them to fail above 900Mhz." Days later, the relationship becomes cordial again when Motorola shows renewed interest when SGI and Cisco Systems start looking into the G5.
Anyway, I like the idea of the new G5 coming out soon, and I hope this article is at least correct about this. I'm planning on getting a new Mac early next year, and it would be nice to have on based on the G5. I also think that an LCD based Imac would be a big winner as well.
The top-of-the-line Dell Dimension 8200, with a 1.8 gig processor and 256K RAM memory, is currently selling for $1,959, and a less loaded model with 1.8 gig processor is selling for $1,139. I figure that if you added all the bells and whistles, including DVD and CD-ROM burner and 512K RAM, plus a huge hard disk, etc., you could pick it up for around $2,500.
I doubt that Apple will be beating that, since it's still in development and the Intel machines have been evolving rapidly this past year.
What is even worse is that every time he gets proved wrong about something he just pulls the report.
Like he never wrote it!
In Mhz terms the current breed of their RISC chip lags far behind their current CISC hot plates.
They will start pushing for a different benchmarking term to be embraced by the public because of this.
Apple has been doing that for a while now.
But there is no real need in the PC world for the stratospheric Mhz numbers mentioned in this fantasy piece.
Network switches and routers maybe.
MacGal: "Not tonight, honey, I have to rebuild my desktop".
Doesn't really work that way. You won't find high end Intel or Motorola General Purpose CPU chips in these devices. A lot of the processing is now increasingly done in ASICS, anyway.
Bell Labs scientists build the world's smallest transistor, paving the way for 'nanoelectronics'
FOR RELEASE THURSDAY NOVEMBER 08, 2001
Transistor action in a single organic molecule may lead to more powerful and lower-cost computer chips
MURRAY HILL, N. J. - Scientists from Lucent Technologies' (NYSE: LU) Bell Labs, building upon their recent breakthrough in molecular-scale transistors, have now fabricated an individually addressable transistor whose channel consists of just one molecule, a feat never previously accomplished. The channel - the space between its electrodes - is where the transistor's electronic switching and amplification take place.
The tiny transistors are so small - only a billionth of a meter each - that approximately ten million of them would fit on the head of a pin. Made of an unconventional organic semiconductor material and using a novel fabrication technique, they may lead to smaller, faster and cheaper computer chips in the future.
Last month, the same Bell Labs team - physicist Hendrik Schon and chemists Zhenan Bao and Hong Meng - unveiled a transistor with a single-molecule channel length. But that device could only be fabricated as a matrix of a few thousand molecules that worked in tandem. Now, in a major advance, the team has succeeded in fabricating molecular-scale transistors that can be individually controlled.
The power of computer chips typically increases as the size of its transistors shrinks. Bell Labs' single-molecule transistor is less than a tenth the size of any transistor made previously.
"This work pushes the miniaturization of electronics to its final frontier," said Federico Capasso, physics research vice president at Bell Labs. "It may become the cornerstone of a new nanoelectronics era."
The breakthrough is described in an article published today by the journal Science on their Science Express Web site (http://www.sciencexpress.org).
Scientists have been looking for alternatives to conventional silicon electronics for many years because they anticipate that the continuing miniaturization of silicon-based integrated circuits will peter out in approximately a decade as fundamental physical limits are reached. Some of this research has been aimed at producing molecular-scale transistors, in which single molecules are responsible for the transistor action - switching and amplifying electrical signals.
Bell Labs' "nanotransistors" - so-called because they are approximately a nanometer, or one-billionth of a meter, in size - appear to rival conventional silicon transistors in performance. They are made using a class of organic (carbon-based) semiconductor material known as thiols. In addition to carbon, thiols contain hydrogen and sulfur.
The main challenges in making nanotransistors are fabricating electrodes that are separated by only a few molecules and attaching electrical contacts to the tiny devices. The Bell Labs researchers were able to overcome these hurdles by using a self-assembly technique and a clever design.
They carved a notch into a silicon wafer and deposited a layer of gold at the bottom to function as one of the transistor's three electrodes. Then they dipped the wafer into a solution that contained a mixture of thiol molecules and some inert organic molecules, and let it dry. The purpose of adding the inert molecules was to dilute the concentration of thiols. As the solution evaporated from the wafer, a film exactly one molecule thick was left behind on the gold electrode. By carefully adjusting the ratio of the thiol to the inert molecules, the scientists were able to statistically ensure that just one active molecule was present in the area on top of the gold electrode. They then deposited another gold electrode on top of this film, while they built the transistor's third electrode on one side of the silicon notch.
"It is virtually impossible to attach three electrodes to a microscopically small molecule," said Bao. "We overcame this problem by letting the molecule find these contacts and attach itself to them, a process called 'self-assembly.' "
The chemical self-assembly technique is relatively easy and inexpensive and, unlike silicon, does not require clean room technology.
"Our experiment shows that it is possible to realize transistor action in a single molecule without sophisticated fabrication procedures," said Schon.
Using two nanotransistors, the Bell Labs scientists built a voltage inverter, a standard electronic circuit module commonly used in computer chips that converts a "0" to a "1" or vice versa. Though just a prototype, the success of this simple circuit suggests that nanotransistors could one day be used in microprocessors and memory chips, squeezing thousands of times as many transistors onto each chip than is possible today.
David Goldhaber-Gordon, a professor at Stanford University, commented that the Bell Labs scientists "have achieved several impressive advances toward nanoelectronics. The fabrication technique is particularly elegant in its simplicity."
Bell Labs has a long and illustrious connection with transistors. William Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain invented the transistor at Bell Labs in 1947. Their invention spawned the digital age and earned them the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1956. Over the years, Bell Labs scientists have made many of the important contributions that have helped make transistors smaller, faster and more powerful. The technology curve has culminated with the latest development of single-molecule nanotransistors.
With approximately 16,000 employees in 16 countries, Bell Labs is the leading source of new communications technologies. Bell Labs has generated more than 28,000 patents since 1925 and has played a pivotal role in inventing or perfecting key communications technologies, including transistors, digital networking and signal processing, lasers and fiber-optic communications systems, communications satellites, cellular telephony, electronic switching of calls, touch-tone dialing, and modems. Bell Labs scientists have received six Nobel Prizes in Physics, nine U.S. Medals of Science and six U.S. Medals of Technology. For more information about Bell Labs, visit its Web site at http://www.bell-labs.com.
Lucent Technologies, headquartered in Murray Hill, N.J., USA, designs and delivers networks for the world's largest communications service providers. Backed by Bell Labs research and development, Lucent relies on its strengths in mobility, optical, data and voice networking technologies as well as software and services to develop next-generation networks. The company's systems, services and software are designed to help customers quickly deploy and better manage their networks and create new, revenue-generating services that help businesses and consumers. For more information on Lucent Technologies, visit its Web site at http://www.lucent.com.
I still think that 2Ghz G5 processors sound quite reasonable, and I could imagine them going on sale within the next few months. Here's hoping.
Yes, I'm aware of the leadtime required to bring such new technologies to market. Still, the progress they've made in such a short amount of time is phenominal. I particularly like , in addition to self assembly, the fact that "clean rooms" are not required to produce chips with this technology. That alone should reduce production costs considerably.
This biggest barrier to this technology making it to market in any sort of rapid time frame, will be the ones with billions invested in silicone production plants. IMHO
I agree though: This is really cool stuff!
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