Trite but true: what goes up must come down. On the PowerPC front, does everyone remember when Motorola was the whipping boy, and IBM was the architecture's potential savior? You know what we're talking about: Motorola repeatedly had to lay off workers and close plants, the company had so much trouble producing G4 processors at first that Apple had to alter its product line-up, and the G4 was stuck at 500 MHz for over a year while the competition made it to 1 GHz and beyond. Meanwhile, IBM kept cranking out faster and faster G3s, and Apple hired the company to make G4s because Motorola couldn't keep up with demand. Unconfirmed rumors claimed that IBM's vastly superior manufacturing processes allowed it to nudge the G4 as high as 650 MHz, but Motorola pulled legal strings to prevent that chip from shipping because it didn't want to look incompetent in comparison. In short, "IBM good, Motorola bad."

But some aspects of Motorola's PowerPC progress have been improving lately. The G4 hit 733 MHz in January, and then 867 MHz in July; on a purely meaningless clock speed level, that's still not terribly impressive compared to Intel's frequencies, but it sure beats sitting at half a gigahertz for another eighteen months. And now there are at least semi-credible rumors flying around that Motorola is ready to unleash the G5 at up to 1.6 GHz to start, the chip has actually reached speeds as high as 2.8 GHz in the lab, and performance positively runs rings around Pentium 4 processors at comparable clock speeds. So suddenly Motorola's looking, well, kinda cool again. Whodathunkit?

But is the seesaw principle in effect? In other words, does the fact that Motorola may be on its way up necessarily signal a downward slide for IBM? Well, we can't say for certain, but at least one early sign might imply that IBM's headed for a spill: faithful viewer Gary Looft dug up an Associated Press article which reveals that Big Blue is resorting to the Big Pink in hopes of avoiding a slip into the Big Red. Personally, we doubt it's much of an omen, but IBM is laying off some 1200 employees, 1000 of whom work in the company's "chip manufacturing and development plants." Is this the start of trouble for the "I" in the PowerPC AIM alliance?

Well, uh, probably not. When you compare IBM's layoffs to those of many other big tech firms recently, it becomes clear that, in this economy, a measly 1200 pink slips practically constitutes a hiring frenzy-- especially for a company the size of IBM, who employs nearly a third of a million people. Nonetheless, fatalists and crystal-gazers alike may choose to interpret it as a sign of IBM's imminent doom. If doing so somehow puts you at ease by bolstering your sense that the universe is host to some sort of fundamental cosmic balance, who are we to stand in your way?