Well, looky here; if AppleInsider's latest report is accurate, it seems that we at AtAT might owe Motorola's PowerPC design engineers a heartfelt apology. As first pointed out to us by faithful viewer Jonathan Reitnauer, an AI source claims that Motorola's development team in Somerset is "doing some really cool stuff" and even has PowerPC processors running at speeds "far beyond" the current public high-water mark of 733 MHz. (We noticed that Mac OS Rumors recently made a passing reference to Apple playing with a 1 GHz G4 in its testing labs, so that's "independent confirmation" of a sort.) Seeing as we're trusting types, we're going to take this info at face value-- and offer up sincere and humble apologies for the roughly eight or nine thousand nasty things we may have said about Motorola's design team in the past couple of years. Oops! Our bad!

Instead, AppleInsider reports that our ire should have been uniformly directed at Motorola's manufacturing division. Don't get us wrong-- we've certainly taken our share of potshots at the manufacturing side of Motorola's business in the past. But it sounds like most of the perceived sloth-like pace of PowerPC development is, in fact, the fault of the folks who actually crank out the chips (or fail to). The designers have faster chips working in the labs, but the manufacturing guys can't find a way to produce enough of them to allow Motorola to sell them as a released product... which means that while Motorola's labrats have had faster G4s working for many moons, production problems kept us stuck at 500 MHz for a year and a half.

Guess what? Apparently not much has changed. While Apple is currently shipping Power Macs running as high as 533 MHz, the 667 and 733 MHz models won't be surfacing for weeks, yet-- and possibly longer. It's the same old story: Motorola just can't seem to churn out a decent yield. Faced with yet another chip drought, the company appears to be falling back on an old plan-- namely, enlisting IBM's help to produce enough chips to satisfy demand. You may recall that Apple called on Big Blue to help the last time Motorola was having massive problems actually making enough announced and "shipping" processors. We have to think there's a pretty solid connection between IBM commencing supplemental G4 production last January and the 500 MHz Power Mac G4 (announced the previous August) finally shipping the very next month.

Is it a coincidence that the original G4 drought prompted Apple's first earnings warning that initially started its plunge back into the mire of beleaguerment? Probably not. Is another G4 drought behind Apple's recent product delays? We wouldn't be surprised. If IBM doesn't sign on quickly to save Motorola's bacon, will those product delays get nasty enough to send Apple's fiscal recovery straight down the toilet? Well, that's a plot thread for a future episode...

It's official: the Sun-Microsoft lawsuit has finally been settled. Of course, lots of you are now asking, "What Sun-Microsoft lawsuit?" That's not terribly surprising; lawsuits usually take so long to resolve that we barely remember this one ourselves, especially given our failure-prone memories and our appallingly short attention spans. Luckily, we've got a well-stocked Reruns library to refresh the dimmer bits of our broadcasting history, which means that we can re-experience the earlier stages of the case as if they're happening right this very minute. Let's hear it for technology!

The lawsuit in question was originally filed waaaaay back in October of 1997 (Over three years ago? Good lord, no wonder our recollection of this case is fuzzy-- we can hardly remember what we had for dinner last night) when Sun alleged that Microsoft had tainted its version of the Java programming language with proprietary extensions, while also leaving out certain required features in a baldfaced attempt to poison the language's platform-independent "write once, run anywhere" goal. The motive for this alleged behavior is obvious: Microsoft wants developers writing Windows software, not "run-anywhere" software. Sun won some early battles in the war; in November of 1998, Microsoft received an injunction ordering it to "fix" Java by making it comply with Sun's standards again. Then Microsoft appealed the injunction, and in August of 1999 won the appeal. It was at that point, roughly two years into the case, that we just plumb lost interest. We figured we'd check back in another year or so when something actually happened.

Well, it actually took a year and a half, but according to a Computer Reseller News article, the case has finally been settled, and the terms are interesting, to say the least. First of all, Microsoft is forking over $20 million for messing with Java-- but that's not the interesting bit, since $20 million is probably less than the Redmond Giant spends on ketchup packets in the company cafeteria every month. (They spring for Heinz, you know; only the best for Redmond's brightest!) The part that has us going "hmmmmm" is this: "The settlement also terminates all of Microsoft's Java licenses and prevents Microsoft from using the Java trademark in any new products." Maybe we're interpreting this the wrong way, but it sounds to us like Microsoft may well be ditching Java altogether. If future Microsoft operating systems ship sans Java then the language's promise may well turn into "write once, run anywhere (except for 90% of all desktop computers)."

Apparently Microsoft is going to throw all its weight behind its own alternative C# language, instead, which "one analyst called Microsoft's 'Java killer.'" Given how many programmers develop their software using Microsoft's tools and for Microsoft's platforms, we can't help but wonder what this will mean for Java's future. And with Mac OS X striving to be the best Java platform available, anything that threatens Java's future represents a challenge for Apple. Then again, since Mac OS X will obviously alter the market share mix so drastically over the course of the next couple of years, as soon as Apple has 60% of the installed base, it won't matter anymore anyway. Right? Right?

While we're dredging up ancient AtAT history, do any of you recall that 64-bit processor that was being co-developed by Intel and Hewlett-Packard which threatened to stomp all other chips, including our own beloved PowerPC? Originally we knew it by its code name of "Merced," but eventually Intel settled on the absolutely baffling official name of "Itanium." Anyway, if you thought Motorola was bad, Intel wins the lateness crown based purely on the Itanium alone. It's missed ship date after ship date, and is now something like twenty-eight years behind schedule; in fact, we're pretty sure that Intel processors that were supposed to come after the Itanium may already be shipping. Imagine the fun if Motorola shipped a G5 before they ever got the G4 out the door. (Actually, given the G4 production difficulties, that'd probably be wonderful.)

Anyway, the Itanium is apparently just about ready for prime time. Actually, let's clarify that; it's just about ready for release. Whether it actually performs well enough to live up to even half its hype is a whole different matter altogether. See, since the Itanium will begin life as a 64-bit processor in a 32-bit world, Intel's designers decided to include on-chip hardware to allow it to run in 32-bit mode, so that people could actually run existing software on it. This was widely held to be a Very Clever Thing To Do™, since an on-chip hardware emulator would surely be faster than any sort of software-based emulation, right?

Wrong. According to The Register, recent tests have shown that an Itanium running several existing 32-bit applications yielded performance comparable to a 75 MHz Pentium-- although in some situations, the chip would show a burst of speed and run as fast as a 100 MHz Pentium. Now that's performance! A three-year-old PowerBook can beat that by running Virtual PC. Between the Itanium's frighteningly slow 32-bit mode and the new 1.5 GHz Pentium 4 often running slower than a 1 GHz Pentium III, we can't help but wonder if Intel has a new design philosophy or something. But hey, it's just another opportunity for the PowerPC to catch up; hopefully Motorola won't throw this chance away.