While ignoring my own advice and reading various Mac rumor sites today, I saw that the next generation Powermacs may ship with DDR2 memory and PCI express video cards. Being the geek I am, I wandered off to see how much throughput could be achieved with each technology.
I started my knowledge quest by reading PCSTATS PCI Express tutorial, and was blown away by the potential of PCI Express. Not only does PCI express move considerably more data than PCI (250MB/s vs. 133 MB/s), it uses serial switched lanes to move data, and allows devices on the same PCI express BUS to communicate directly without involving the chipset.
Now DDR2 doesn’t look as promising as PCI express, and requires the memory to run at a high clock rate to achieve higher throughput than good old DDR memory. I am always curious to see what Apple does, and look forward to reviewing the specifications of the next generation powermacs!