Matthew Rothenberg rails against Apple’s efforts to block rumors and speculation in a new eWeek article entitled The Soul of the New Macs. Rothenberg’s comments are in reaction to this week’s news of new Power Mac G4 systems that now feature Xserve motherboard architecture and dual processors across the line.
“Apple’s anxiety not to reveal any hints about processor performance set these systems up for a bit of a fall,” said Rothenberg, who added that it’s a shame, since “there’s a lot to like about the new Power Macs.” DDR-RAM, for example, an ATA/100 bus for storage, 2MB of L3 cache, Radeon 9000 Pro and more.
“Perhaps not surprisingly, the hairiest fly in this soothing Apple ointment apparently bears a Motorola logo,” mused Rothenberg, referencing suggestions put forth by some technically-minded Mac Web sites that the processors in these new Macs may bottleneck overall performance. Rothenberg also makes passing notice of suggestions that there may be synergy with IBM’s future Power4 processor designs, a server CPU architecture that the company has scaled to desktop and embedded systems applications.
Regardless of CPU shortcomings, Rothenberg added, “… the architectural advances these machines represent already make them a compelling purchase for serious Mac users.”
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