You know, we really do hate to keep bringing it up, but can somebody please do something about this voodoo curse that afflicts whichever company is trying to make chips for Apple's highest-performance Macs? Just yesterday we mentioned how some analysts think that IBM (who, as you know, was supposed to be Apple's savior from the slow death of Motorola's stagnant processor development and glacial rate of production) won't be ending the G5 chip drought for months yet-- which would be bad enough without the universe at large reminding us that Motorola is off the hook. Yes, even as IBM contends with the same sort of mysteriously low processor yields that once plagued Motorola during the Power Mac G4 days, we get word that Motorola's Freescale spinoff, no longer plagued by the curse's blight, is happily cranking out snazzy new designs.

You can't still be skeptical about this phenomenon, can you? Just think back to the surge of optimism you felt when the G5 was first announced-- and then remember how the first aluminum Power Macs shipped late, the Xserve G5s also shipped late, and the revised Power Macs surfaced months later than expected-- and even now that they're "here," 2.5 GHz G5 processors are as rare as a hamster with good flossing habits, while the 3.0 GHz processors promised last year aren't even on the radar yet.

And don't even get us started on portability; remember back when some of us actually thought that the 90-nanometer G5s were going to be small and energy-efficient enough to wedge into a PowerBook? Well, given that a pair of 2.5 GHz 90-nanometer G5s in a full-blown Power Mac requires a liquid cooling assembly the size of the engine block from a 1979 Buick LeSabre, we're becoming increasingly doubtful that a PowerBook G5 will see the light of day before next summer at the earliest.

Meanwhile, faithful viewer Porsupah tipped us off to an article at The Register which describes how a curseless Freescale plans to unveil its new chip design in October-- a dual-core PowerPC which "may also mark the next major leap in Mac notebook G4 processors before Apple gets G5 chips from IBM that are capable of integration into a top-spec portable computer." And since the voodoo-struck IBM probably won't be able to ship a portable-friendly G5 much before Twiki starts annoying the living bejeezus out of a poor, time-displaced Buck Rogers, we, for one, are getting pretty excited about the prospect of what would effectively be a dual-processor PowerBook G4 running at speeds "beyond 2 GHz." So at least we've got that going for us.

We can't just sweep this curse thing under the rug, people; why, now that it's no longer the victim of whatever cosmic whammy that's since moved on to smacking around Big Blue, in addition to this dual-core doohickey, Freescale is reportedly also refining "a faster successor to its top-end G4" and even working on "a G5-style e700 processor that combines 32-bit and 64-bit operation." Meanwhile, IBM is still trying to figure out where the poltergeist hid the keys to the silicon storeroom. Maybe an exorcism is in order?