While the nation impatiently awaits the resolution of our roller-coaster-ride Presidential election (not to mention the eagerly anticipated premiere of Dude, Where's My Car?), the only higher concern in the minds of the Mac community is the approaching end to the Great 500 MHz Stall-out. The most recent rumors regarding Apple's product roll-out plans at next month's Macworld Expo indicate that the company expects to introduce Power Mac G4 systems running at the breakneck pace of 600 MHz, thus putting an end to a drought that reclassified Moore's Law as Moore's Friendly Suggestion.

Now, we're quite aware that there are some hotheads out there who aren't exactly pleased with that news. After a year of waiting, they consider a jump (well, more of a hop, really, or a sort of upwards limp) to 600 MHz to be laughable at best, if not downright pathetic. After all, Intel and AMD are duking it out around the 1.5 GHz level, while we're all supposed to be jumping for joy because soon we'll have processors running at fully 40% of the clock speeds that those Wintel saps are using.

But relax; time passes quickly in this day and age, and before you know it, another year will have passed and the PowerPC will be tooling along at a healthy and strapping 1.5 GHz. What's that, you say? You thought that the G4 was only supposed to reach 1 GHz in 2001, in the best-case scenario? Yeah, we heard that too-- but we never said the G4 would hit 1.5 GHz. According to the latest dirt over at Mac OS Rumors (who continues to be the gold standard source for unsubstantiated PowerPC clock speed scuttlebutt), while Motorola continues to try and increase the G4's clock speed from "undeniably embarrassing" to a far more respectable "arguably embarrassing," IBM has plans to take the G3 to strange new heights of performance.

Check it out; rumor has it that IBM's "next-generation G3 architecture" (er, G3.5?) will not only top out at up to 1.5 GHz before the end of next year, but it'll also "improve per-clock performance up to 15% over present G3s." So whereas the Pentium 4 often performs slower than a Pentium III with a 500 MHz clock speed deficit, these next-gen G3s may well kick an entirely new brand of booty. The big problem, of course, is that Apple has pretty much bet the marketing farm on the "supercomputer" G4 and its Velocity Engine technology; for the company to switch back to G3s just for the higher clock speeds would be PR suicide.

Worse yet, there's no way Apple's ever going to ship consumer-grade G3 systems with higher clock speeds than their pro-level G4 counterparts-- so don't expect to see a 1.5 GHz iMac when the Power Mac G4 only manages to hit 1 GHz or so. Still, Apple is nothing if not resourceful; if these speedy new G3s really do come to pass, we're sure Apple will find some way to exploit their advantages. Say, what about a new dual-processor strategy-- Macs with one 1.5 GHz G3 for most office-type uses, and one 1 GHz G4 for AltiVec-enhanced applications? (Yes, we're kidding. Sort of.)