Power Mac G5

The Power Mac G5 was Apple Computer's marketing name for models of the Power Macintosh which contain the PowerPC 970 CPU. The professional-grade computer was the most powerful in Apple's lineup when it was introduced, and was touted by Apple as the fastest personal computer ever built. more...

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It was officially launched as part of Steve Jobs' keynote presentation in June 2003 at the Worldwide Developers Conference, and saw two revisions to the line before being retired in August 2006 to make way for its replacement, the Mac Pro.

Introduction

The Power Mac G5 was introduced with three models, all sharing the same physical case, but differing in features and performance. The 1.6 GHz model shipped with 256 MB RAM, an 80 GB hard drive, and could employ a maximum of 4 GB of RAM. The 1.8 and dual-processor 2.0 GHz models shipped with 512 MB RAM. The dual-processor model also included an ATI Radeon 9600 graphics card.

Steve Jobs stated during his keynote presentation that the Power Mac G5 would reach 3 GHz \"within 12 months\". This would never come to pass; after three years, the G5 only reached 2.7 GHz (or dual-core at 2.5 GHz) before being replaced by the Intel Xeon-based Mac Pro, which includes processors with speeds of up to 3GHz.

Also during the presentation, Apple showed Virginia Tech's Mac OS X computer cluster supercomputer (a.k.a. supercluster) known as System X, consisting of 1100 Power Mac G5s operating as processing nodes. The supercomputer managed to become one of the top 10 supercomputers that year. The computer was soon dismantled and replaced with a new cluster made of an equal number of Xserve G5 rack-mounted servers, which also use the G5 chip running at 2.3 GHz.

PowerPC G5 and the IBM partnership

The PowerPC G5 (called the PowerPC 970 by its manufacturer, IBM) is based upon IBM's dual-core POWER4 microprocessor. At the introduction of the Power Mac G5, Apple announced a partnership with IBM in which IBM would continue to produce PowerPC variants of their POWER processors. According to IBM's Dr. John E. Kelly, \"The goal of this partnership is for Apple and IBM to come together so that Apple customers get the best of both worlds, the tremendous creativity from the Apple corporation and the tremendous technology from the IBM corporation. IBM invested over $3 billion US dollars in a new lab to produce these large, 300 mm wafers.\" (This lab is a completely automated facility located in East Fishkill, New York, and figures heavily in IBM's microelectronics strategy above and beyond the partnership with Apple). The original PowerPC 970 has 58 million transistors and is manufactured using IBM CMOS 9S at 130 nm fabrication process. CMOS 9S is the combination of SOI, Low-k dielectric insulation, and Copper interconnect technology, which were invented at IBM research in the mid-90's. Subsequent revisions of the \"G5\" processor have included IBM's PowerPC 970FX (same basic design on a 90nm process), and the PowerPC 970MP (essentially two 970FX cores on one die). Apple refers to the dual-core PowerPC 970MP processors as either the \"G5 Dual\" (for single socket, dual-core configurations), or \"G5 Quad\" (for dual socket, four-core configurations).

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