power macintosh G5

The power macintosh G5 was apple's long-awaited fifth generation powerpc-based machine. In an important move, apple decided to break with motorola, and used an IBM-designed processor. motorola had been chronically delayed for both processor design and shipment, and was at least a year away from its fifth-generation powerpc CPU.  apple and ibm had worked closely together for nearly a year of the powerpc 970 processor and the 64-bit powermac G5 represented a huge leap forward in both processor and machine design. Housed in an innovative new aluminum enclosure, the powermac G5 was the first 64-bit consumer-level desktop computer ever sold. It included a variety of logic board enhancements, including PCI-X slots, and 8X AGP slot, a serial-ATA bus, and up to 8 GB of RAM. Most impressive of all was the front-side bus speed, which was increased to half of the processor speed-up to 1.0 GHz. This represented a more than six-fold improvement over the previous powermac G4 model. 

Announced in october 2005, the powermac G5 was the first powermac to ship with dual-core powerpC G5 processors. It also included faster bus and memory speeds, larger hard drives on the low and middle-end models, better graphics cards, and PCI express expansion slots.