IBM's 90nm PowerPC 970FX... at 2.5GHz?

IBM's PowerPC 970FX won Microprocessor Report's 5th Annual Analysts' Choice Awards. The 970FX beat out the AMD Athlon 64 FX-51 and Intel Pentium 4.

Of more interest, however, is this abstract for an article entitled "IBM Takes the Lead" at the Microprocessor Report.

The author expects the 90nm PowerPC 970 to scale well:

The 970FX should yield well at 2.5GHz, up from the 2GHz speed of the 970 used in Apples Power Mac G5. This 25% increase in clock rate will not soon be matched by Intel or AMD. Prescott is struggling to eke out minor clock-rate improvements, and AMD will need to wait for its own 90nm productsdue in 2H04to achieve substantial speedups for Athlon 64.

The article, however, appears to be entirely speculative based on what little information is presently available on the PowerPC 970FX. More details should emerge as IBM presents information on the 970FX at ISSCC 2004 next week. (Feb 14-19, 2004)

Meanwhile, Appleinsider claims that development of the next PowerMac G5s were "completed early last month"... and is awaiting the delivery of these chips.