re powerpc ruminations was re lciii powerpc in article apr ac dal ca seanmcd ac dal ca writes in article pyramid pyramid com andrem pyrtech mis pyramid com andre molyneux writes in article qksuq tt hal gnu ai mit edu mirsky hal gnu ai mit edu david joshua mirsky writes hi i own an lciii and i recently heard an interesting rumor i heard that the lciii has a built in slot for a powerpc chip is this true i heard that the slot is not the same as the pds slot is that true thanks david mirsky mirsky gnu ai mit edu well i also have an lc iii popping the top revealed one socket for an additional vram simm one socket for a pin ram simm one socket for a flat pack fpu a processor direct slot pds identical to the lc lc ii but with an additional set of connetions to one side for the full bit data path that the lc lc ii lacked that s it i guess a board with a powerpc chip could be made that would fit in the pds but that s the only place so will it be possible to have a nubus or pds powerpc upgrade or will it require a logic board swap it would be interesting for apple to come out with a nubus powerpc that allowed use of the cpu s x like rocketshare but i guess that s getting a bit fantastic i was wondering since macweek reported that developers were seeded with powerpcs on a nubus card also any word on machine arrivals or estimated speed last i heard the estimates were around times the speed of a quadra in native risc mode i heard an apple employee mumble something about the arrival of powerpc machines at a much earlier date that q but i doubt it s true finally is the powerpc developer s cd mini course available i saw it advertised in the developer s university calendar and i d like to know if it s at all interesting sean seanmcd ac dal ca radius speculated publicly that they could provide a powerpc based rocket for existing macs it would have the plus of rocketshare and the minus of nubus accelerators no true boot off the accelerator nubus bottleneck to video and other i o apple it seems will not compete with third parties here except perhaps for not yet available macs like cyclone where a powerpc slot might be advertised look for daystar and such to make powerpc accelerators one potential problem with any accelerator though is that it will need a rom companion and apple has licensed only radius with rocketshare to use any of its proprietary code apple is between the lines trying to let us know that powerpc macs will have simplified logic boards due to the magical nature of risc and that these boards should be much cheaper to build than those in existing macs perhaps then we ll see groundbreaking prices in mac logic board upgrades much the same way we ve seen much cheaper high performance cpus this year first generation powerpcs s will also hopefully have socketed cpus so that they ll be chip upgradeable to s a year later this should be possible in much the same way that s can be pulled for clock doublers if there is too much technical baggage which i doubt since the external busses are the same size width to do this perhaps we can have cpu daughterboard a la powerbook as standard to facilitate better cpu upgrades this is an area where apple has fallen far behing the intel based world perhaps catchup is in order by the way last week s pc week had an excellent story on powerpc pentium mips r dec alpha the big four on the microprocessor front for the forseeable future worth reading for technojunkies also the latest pc has a cover story on pentium read it and all the other stories about how intel is unstoppable and preeminent right now once anyone is this secure they are due to fall intel s market position will never again be as dominant as it is today especially if amd gets the go ahead to sell its s this week as it appears it might the competition from all fronts is gearing up for an awesome battle apple users should be excited that powerpc while not guaranteed dominance is a guaranteed winner even if its one of several mark
