The charm of Apple G4

The G4 is the latest PowerPC microprocessor that was developed by Motorola for use by Apple. Its development time was about two years old, and it was released in mid-October 1999. It should have produced speeds of 400MHz, 450MHz and 500MHz, but due to problems with Motorola's production, the final speeds were 350MHz, 400MHz and 450MHz. This is why Apple has to postpone the launch of its G4 Power Mac. Fortunately, all obstacles have now been wiped out.

Apple is already selling the G4, and the speed is catching up, and Motorola's wafer production is no problem. G4 operates on G3. The G4's FPU (Floating-Point Unit, the execution unit responsible for handling complex mathematical operations on the chip) is more powerful than the G3, but the general processor is no different. In fact, the G4's design premise is that the G3 architecture will only change if the G4 can generate multiple processing or gains in multimedia performance. In addition to the faster FPU, the G4 has other hardware enhancements, the Memory Management Unit (MMU), which has been upgraded to support more physical memory and up to 2MB of L2 cache memory. However, the biggest difference between G4 and G3 is the addition of a 128-bit vector execution unit and control of the on-chip hardware and its new instructions. This technology is called Velocity Engine by Apple, but Motorola called it AltiVec. The speed improvement of the G4 architecture mainly comes from AltiVec.