So there we were, parked on the couch and three hours into our daily grueling TV-watching routine. We were carbo-loading as we went (you really have to keep your strength up for the serious marathon sessions, you know) via the judicious ingestion of low-fat Ruffles, when suddenly our intense televisual concentration was broken by a sight so rare, so magical, that even reruns of The Mary Tyler Moore Show couldn't hold our attention: lo, we had discovered a potato chip that looked exactly like Steve Jobs. From the chiseled good looks to that mercurial impish grin, all the way down to the black turtleneck and the bottled water-- it was Steve in potato chip form. And as we gazed upon this remarkable and supremely rare find, we thought to ourselves, "wow, this must be how Motorola feels when it actually finds a 1.2 GHz G4."

What we're trying to tell you, in our own endearingly circuitous fashion, is that Mac OS Rumors has fanned the flames of Gigahertz Fever even higher. The site now claims that Motorola, while still publicly topped out at either 533 MHz or 733 MHz (depending on whether or not you're only counting shipping systems), hasn't just breached the gigahertz barrier-- it's forcefully punched right through the top. Apparently Motorola's lab rats have actually produced a 1.2 GHz PowerPC 7450, the latest iteration of the G4 architecture that's going to be used in Apple's 667 and 733 MHz Macs. (Thanks to faithful viewer David Triska for the heads-up-- clearly the man is well on his way to attaining his unstated goal of racking up the most mentions on AtAT in history.)

The problem, however, remains one of production: in three words or less, the yields suck. MOSR hints that Motorola's engineers continue to kick much chip-designing booty, but with only Apple buying G4s, the company just doesn't have the impetus to get its subpar manufacturing processes up to snuff. It's rare enough for Motorola to find a 733 MHz G4 or two, so a 1.2 GHz one is as precious as, well, a Steve Jobs-shaped snack food instance. That's why Apple is rumored to be enlisting the help of IBM once again, in order to bring such nifty advancements as silicon-on-insulator technology and smaller wiring processes to the 7450's successor: the "Apollo" 7460. If/when that alliance comes to fruition, it's possible we may see G4s running as high as 1.4 GHz-- even in PowerBooks.

In the meantime, the existing 7450 can reach 1.2 GHz-- but we're not holding our breath for Motorola to be able to produce more than three or four of them, so don't expect them in Macs anytime soon. And if you wanted to see the Steve Chip, sorry, you're too late; he has been dipped, masticated, and digested. Oh, sure, we could have gone to the news and amassed fame and fortune for our discovery, but this way we absorb Steve's power.