In case you were wondering, yes, as pointed out by faithful viewer Jeremiah Bornemann, those new Power Macs do have the long-awaited "Apollo" G4 chips inside-- more technically (and far less colorfully) known as the MPC7455. At first we weren't at all sure, because for some reason we had this wacky notion that the Apollos were supposed to have clock speeds starting at 1 GHz, but that's clearly just something we made up to make ourselves feel better. Rest assured, though, those 800 MHz, 933 MHz, and 1 GHz chips shipping in Apple's latest pro desktops are indeed Apollos, at least according to Will Swearingen, Motorola's Director of Strategic Communications, as quoted by MacCentral. And unless someone digs up some dirt tying ol' Will to Enron, the missing 18 1/2 minutes of the Watergate tape, or the Milli Vanilli scandal, we're inclined to believe him.

So these are the chips that got us all drooling some fifteen months ago, when Motorola outlined the technology at the Microprocessor Forum back in October of 2000. Apparently all the planned bells and whistles made the cut: the silicon-on-insulator technology, the optional 2 MB DDR L3 cache, the lemony-fresh scent-- it's all there, and we only had to wait slightly over a year to get it. Interestingly enough, back then we were whining that Motorola still hadn't even shipped the 700 MHz V'ger G4, which had been discussed at the previous year's conference; we assume that the V'ger surfaced in early 2001 as the 733 MHz chip in the first SuperDrive-enabled Power Mac. So there's evidently a fairly regular fifteen-month cycle between Motorola's MPF presentations and the technology actually getting into customers' hands.

Which, of course, raises an obvious question: what did Motorola show at last October's MPF? Because if history is any indication, whatever it was is probably going to wind up at the heart of an Apple product roughly a year from now, right? Thus, we spent a little time digging around for clues, and came up with this: an official Motorola press release from MPF2001 describing the MPC8540, the company's "first e500 integrated host processor to employ RapidIO interconnect technology." Apparently it's a "Book E"-based PowerPC chip that will run between 600 MHz and 1 GHz and was "designed for high-speed networking applications" and other "embedded market" uses, such as "communications, automotive, and consumer applications."

So there you have it, folks: come Macworld Expo San Francisco 2003, we'll all be gaping in awe as Steve takes the wraps off Apple's first high-performance router. Or maybe a line of digital-hub kitchen appliances, or possibly a car. But you can be sure that whatever it is, it'll have an e500 at its core and not a G5, because history always repeats itself. Without fail. Yup.