It seems like we've been hearing about Yosemite forever. No, not the national park-- we mean the next-generation Pro Macintosh architecture, which is slated to replace the Gossamer motherboard used in today's Power Mac G3. Gossamer, you may recall, was never intended as a professional-level motherboard; its RAM and PCI expansion limitations are clues to its original consumer focus. The professional motherboard was supposed to be the Power Express, but Apple killed that project when it got out of hand and started from scratch with Yosemite. (It's a good thing that the raw power of the G3 processor enabled Apple to reposition the Gossamer G3's as "pro" systems.)

Well, good news: Apple is almost certain to unveil the new Yosemite Macs at Macworld Expo, which is only a month away. And the better news is that Mac OS Rumors has unearthed a wealth of information about the new systems' specifications. Finally, the slot question appears to have been answered: three 64-bit slots, and a single 66 MHz slot to be used with an included ATI RAGE 128 graphics card. The RAGE 128 should absolutely scream in both 2D and 3D performance, and the remaining three 64-bit slots allow the use of legacy 32-bit PCI cards-- but 64-bit cards can hold twice as much functionality as 32-bit ones, and therefore new cards might consolidate several functions that previously used to take up multiple slots. So that may have been what RFI's Robert Morgan was talking about when he said that Yosemite's three slots were enough. Pretty neat-- if the cards actually get made.

Anyway, there's a ton of information over at Mac OS Rumors, and we encourage anyone anxiously awaiting the next generation of professional Macs to take a gander. Processor speeds will range from 300-400 MHz to start, and with the fast bus of the Yosemite, the 300 MHz model is said to be 20% faster than the current G3/300. Yosemite borrows a page from the iMac and uses a smaller hardware ROM, loading most of the Mac OS ROM into RAM from disk, resulting in faster performance. Firewire and USB are standard (though SCSI is not), and there's even an ADB port for a certain level of backwards compatibility. And so on, and so on... This is exciting stuff. We don't doubt for a second that the new Macs (in the stylish El Capitan translucent cases) will make at least a brief appearance in the upcoming Apple Super Bowl commercial. Time to dazzle the world... again.