Having increasingly become one of the leading Web sites with advanced knowledge of Apple's future plans and the technical details of powerful processors in the labs at Motorola and IBM, Architosh editor, Anthony Frausto-Robledo, was interviewed for a story, entitled, "IBM Promises Muscle for the Mac", by Robert McMillan of Wired magazine online.

"Robert put together a superb article as an introduction of what will be introduced today", said Anthony Frausto-Robledo, "I was able to assist him with the possible Linux connections and make the references to the lost CHRP platform initiatives."

IBM Muscle

Those in the know will not be surprised to learn that IBM has the capability to leapfrog Intel and AMD in processor performance. Already the tech giant manufacturers the famous Power4 microprocessor, a 64-bit processor used in workstations and servers costing in the tens and even hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The supercomputer leader, IBM once used PowerPC chips—the very ones used in Apple's most powerful Power Mac tower workstations—to power one of the most powerful supercomputers on the planet.

In the history of supercomputers, RISC processors—like the PowerPC 970 IBM will introduce today—began to challenge the specialized and very expensive vector processors used in early supercomputer designs back in the 80's. Today however, those same RISC processors can feature elements of the most powerful vector processors used to power the fastest Cray supercomputers made just a few years back.

What Motorola and IBM have learned to do over the years is to build vector processing engines (units) into their RISC processor designs, thereby giving them the ability to do powerful vector array instructions for highly optimized vector code. Such vectorization of key technical applications can allow Power Mac G4 workstations to outperform rival Windows, SGI, and Sum Microstation machines at many times faster, such as the BLAST optimizations from Apple and Genentech.

Today IBM will unveil a chip (PowerPC 970) which boroughs heavily from its most powerful RISC chip to date, the Power4. With a rough estimate of two-times performance over the currently fastest PowerPC G4 processor, we may see Apple suddenly leapfrog the industry sometime next year with machines featuring up to four (4) IBM PowerPC 970's, all running Apple's award-winning UNIX OS: Mac OS X