Now that Intel's Sonoma is out, what will be Apple's response?

[malexgreen]

For details of the Sonoma platform see the block diagram here:
http://intel.com/design/chipsets/mobile/pix/915gm_diagram_760.gif?iid=?iid=dev_chips915GM+body_diag&

So what do you think will be Apple's response? A G5 processor will be a given, but what sort of interconnect technologies do you think Apple will add to their own chipsets to get the kind of bandwidth that's achievable by Intel's new notebook platform?

 

[Randman]

Apple tends to lead not follow in many areas, especially laptops and laptop design. While the PBs are ready for a bump (G4s not G5s, imo).

 

[nixgeek]

Apple might not have some glitzy marketing name for their solution, but I think it's a solution that's been around much longer than Centrino or anything else that is integrated: Airport.

If you look at it, Centrino was basically the sum of the CPU, miniPCI wiFi card, and chipset. Not really much different from what Apple has been doing, but as usual the Wintel's marketing spin always tends to claim they were their first, with ignorant people following along. ::sleepy::

 

[symphonix]

Apple are supporting the open standard architecture "hypertransport" for their system interconnects. So far this is only on the G5s (PowerMac, iMac, xServe) but will probably be on the next generation of laptops as well.

See http://www.hypertransport.org/ for more information.

As you can see, its more a question of Intel releasing Sonoma in response to AMD, Apple, Cisco, NVidia, Sun and Transmeta.

 

[malexgreen]

Looks like the Sonoma platform is little bang for the buck(http://www.tomshardware.com/mobile/20050119/sonoma_alviso-25.html). But maybe Apple might think about integrating graphics and going with DDR2 dual channel to improve graphics performance while still keeping battery life high.

I remember reading an article in Macworld or CNET about the latest powerbooks suffering from lower battery life than their predecessors. Probably because of the discrete graphics(?).

I doubt Apple will go with hypertransport for discrete graphics (who's going to supply them the HT graphics card, as the big suppliers are committing to PCIe?). They might use it on the FSB of the G5, if they can manage to horn it into a 1" thick notebook case.

Personally I think they should try to get Freescale to sell them a dual core PowerPC chip--or better yet a dual core PowerPC chip with 64bit addressing capability. That would be a cool selling point if they could do it this year. I can see the marketing catch phrase now: "The worlds first dual core notebook computer!".