Okay, so most of you aren't overly impressed by Motorola's latest G4 breakthrough. And who can blame you? We live in a society that conditions us to place "bigger" and "faster" above concerns like "more efficient" or "environmentally friendly." Mac users at large are upset at the new G4's 550 MHz ceiling (despite its incredibly efficient power consumption) for the same reason that everyone's buying SUVs that are the size of the average single-family home and get three gallons per mile. Even the fact that the new 7410 chip should allow Apple to ship a PowerBook G4 that's both faster and more battery-efficient than anything the Wintel world has to offer is scant comfort to those for whom a GHz speed gap is simply too vast a chasm to accept. And we understand that-- after all, we find the difference in clock speeds absurd, too. Who wouldn't?

So, as usual, we have to look to the future for hope that someday the gulf will narrow instead of widening. Faithful viewer Joe pointed out a MacWEEK article which discusses Motorola's "revised" PowerPC roadmap, which the company introduced alongside the new 7410 G4. It sounds like the G4 architecture has plenty of life left in it (after all, it's not as if Motorola's really been pushing it that hard, right?) and future G4s will move from the 7410's new .18 micron manufacturing process to an even teenier .15 micron fabrication method. In addition, those future G4s will benefit from both the copper technology used today and that silicon-on-insulator technique we've all heard so much about. The result? New G4 chips with clock speeds of "up to 1 GHz."

Now, before you mount a nuclear attack on Motorola headquarters, take a moment to reflect. Okay, so a 1 GHz G4 would have been great several months ago instead of at some unspecified point in the (probably distant) future, but the G4 isn't the end-all be-all of PowerPC development. Because the roadmap also discusses the G5, more properly known as the 75xx and 85xx series of processors, which will move to a .10 micron process and a "new instruction pipeline and bus topology" which should let the chips break the 2 GHz barrier "by the end of the G5 product's lifetime."

Now that's more like it. Now all we need is for Intel and AMD to hit a brick wall at, say, 1.6 GHz just like the one that Motorola slammed into at 500 MHz, and maybe, just maybe, the PowerPC will have the slimmest of chances of once again surpassing that old, slow CISC technology like the AIM alliance promised way back when. So there's hope. Besides, if the G5 doesn't cut it, there's also the G6-- mentioned tantalizingly briefly in Motorola's roadmap, sans any details whatsoever. Given the way things are going, though, we figure we'll be long dead of old age before a Power Mac G6 ever ships. For that matter, by the time we even get to use a G5, we'll be lucky if we still have our own teeth.