167Mhz to 1Ghz!?? I don't get it...

**senne** · June 22nd, 2003, 02:23 PM

The current PowerMacs have a processor bus speed of 167Mhz maximum. According to the rumors of the new PowerMac G5, it's going to be 1Ghz!!

How can this change so fast? I really don't get it..

**ksv** · June 22nd, 2003, 02:27 PM

Originally posted by senne
The current PowerMacs have a processor bus speed of 167Mhz maximum. According to the rumors of the new PowerMac G5, it's going to be 1Ghz!!

How can this change so fast? I really don't get it..

Nope, and it isn't true either

It's one of the elements which seems fishy about the picture from the store. The system bus of a 2 GHz 970 would be 500 MHz, as the core:system rate is 4:1 on the 970s. FSB would be 1 GHz, but that's something else.

**senne** · June 22nd, 2003, 03:04 PM

hmm, so the rumors aren't true after all! Steve! Release me from this horrible pain!

**ksv** · June 22nd, 2003, 03:14 PM

Originally posted by senne
hmm, so the rumors aren't true after all! Steve! Release me from this horrible pain!

Those specs are at least not 100% accurate. Maybe that's why they took them down so quickly

**Tigger** · June 22nd, 2003, 03:30 PM

The FSB is the Systembus.

As I understand it, 1GHz is the rate that the Processors can talk to each other.

**TommyWillB** · June 22nd, 2003, 04:40 PM

Originally posted by senne
The current PowerMacs have a processor bus speed of 167Mhz maximum. According to the rumors of the new PowerMac G5, it's going to be 1Ghz!!

How can this change so fast? I really don't get it..

It could be referring to the Hyper Transport (a.k.a. Hyperthreading) bus speed between a pair of CPUs...

**lurk** · June 23rd, 2003, 09:46 AM

Originally posted by ksv
Nope, and it isn't true either
It's one of the elements which seems fishy about the picture from the store. The system bus of a 2 GHz 970 would be 500 MHz, as the core:system rate is 4:1 on the 970s. FSB would be 1 GHz, but that's something else.

I thought the Bus on the 970 operated at 1/2 core so it would be 1 GHz on a 2GHz processor. Now that said there are lots of different busses that could be called the "system bus" but I always thought that it was the one that directly touched the processor which they meant.

Also I have heard a lot of different things about Hypertransport and I honestly have not had the time to check it out but it sounds like it is a point to point interconnect and not actually a bus. But then again marketers play fast and loose with that sort of thing at times.