Apple Ships Power Mac G5

Apple Computer on Monday announced that its newest desktop computer, the Power Mac G5, is now shipping in the single-processor configuration--the dual-processor 2-GHz model will ship later this month. First announced at the company's Worldwide Developers Conference in June, Apple bills the G5 as the world's fastest personal computer.

"The Power Mac G5 is a big hit with customers and developers," said Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing.

Apple said it has received more than 100,000 orders for the Power Mac G5 since its introduction, although that number was not broken down by processor type.

Speedy Systems

The systems incorporate 400-MHz 128-bit DDR SDRAM with throughput of up to 6.4GB per second, one 133-MHz and two 100-MHz 64-bit PCI-X expansion slots, and AGP 8X Pro graphics slots. The processors and their 1-GHz frontside bus can handle 16GB per second of bandwidth, according to Apple.

The heart of the new Power Macs is the PowerPC G5 processor, developed by Apple and IBM. The 64-bit microprocessor boasts full support for 32-bit applications and features a parallel architecture that can handle 215 simultaneous in-flight instructions; it also has two double-precision floating point units and an optimized Velocity Engine. The chips are designed for full support of symmetric multiprocessing.

More information on the G5 and pricing can be found on Apple's Web site.