Well, isn't this a fine pickle of a fish; here we thought that if only we could somehow squeeze just enough juice out of the flat, barren stone that was last week's batch of Apple-related non-happenings (honestly, if the news week had been any slower it'd have been traveling backwards in time), surely the following week would provide hot and cold running drama at the merest glance in every direction, right? Well, uh, no. Instead, we find the tap just as dry as it was last week, only now our stockpile of all-purpose space-padding witticisms is running dangerously low as well. If this drought keeps up and nothing interesting happens tout de suite, pretty soon all our scenes are going to consist entirely of a Steve-Ballmer-as-sweaty-ape-thing one-liner, the words "granted" and "truth be told," and some variant of the "something-y goodness" phrase construction.

Which, come to think of it, wouldn't be much different at all from every other scene we've ever produced over the course of the past seven years-- so hey, why not bring a list of alleged upcoming IBM processor numbers and specs into the plot? Sure, we usually try to avoid that sort of thing, because from the perspective of a drama-starved viewing audience, the jargony nature of someone rattling off part numbers and transistor counts is practically a one-way ticket on the express train to Snoozeville, but hey-- boredom's just another word for nothin' left to lose.

So away we go: faithful viewer frozen tundra hepped us to a recent Think Secret article which indicates that IBM's current bestest G5 processor, officially known as the PowerPC 970FX, will be followed sometime in the first half of 2005 by-- ready for this?-- the PowerPC 970GX, which, as its name so clearly implies, is a full letter better. Specifically, it'll ship "at speeds around 3 GHz" (thus finally fulfilling Steve Jobs's clock speed promise-- the "3 GHz" part, at least, not that "in one year" malarkey) and will come with a whopping 1 MB of L2 cache. That's twice the L2 cache of the 970FX; we hear an international holiday will be declared.

Still with us? If you are, that's pretty impressive, because we checked out about five minutes ago. Your attention span should be bronzed. Things do get better, though; apparently the 970GX will be a single-core version of the long-rumored two-two-two-chips-in-one dual-core 970MP processor, code-named "Antares." Of course, we've all been waiting for multi-core PowerPCs since Nixon was in short pants, and "expected availability of the 970MP remains unknown at this point," but it's still something to look forward to.

Oh, and speaking of chips in the "long-anticipated" category, PowerBook-friendly G5s (i.e. ones that suck down less power than the average toaster oven) are reportedly "in development at speeds between 1.6 GHz and 1.8 GHz," but there isn't even a vague release date mentioned, so "long" may well turn into "longer." If Apple intros new PowerBooks in January like the rumor mill says it will, the smart money's on a new G4 from Motorola-oops-we-mean-Freescale: the "almost-finished" PowerPC 7448, a 90-nanometer improvement of the current 7447A line that'll top 1.5 GHz and have twice the L2 cache. (Apparently doubling cache is all the rage with the kids these days. It's like Fonzie or something.)

Okay, so it's not exactly car-chase, shark-attack, running-away-from-a-fireball material, but we take what we can get. So keep dreaming about multi-core PowerBook G5s, and in the meantime we'll keep our fingers crossed for Apple-related sordid lawsuits, boardroom upheaval, and/or allegations of gross impropriety to rescue us from this chasm of nothingness. It's all happening any minute now, we swear.