Apple's PowerBook line has not been updated since April 2004 and Apple had even officially announced that there would be no update to them until the end of the year. Reasons were said to be the fact the PowerPC G4 processors used in the current line of PowerBooks cannot exceed the speed of 1.5Ghz and that's also what Freescale's specifications say. Meanwhile, Sonnet Technologies has recently announced a new processor upgrade for the PowerMac and the Cube. This new upgrade surprisingly brings the processor speed to 1.7Ghz.

In its press release, Sonnet Technologies claims the new upgrade is based on the same processor that is used in Apple's current PowerBook G4 line and that it has 512Kb of cache. We questioned the company about the exact model of the processor used for this upgrade and if they were using any overclocking technique to reach this speed. Customer service staff stated to us: "It's based on the 7447A chip. I'm pretty sure there is no overclocking involved here. We usually don't do that sort of thing".

All that probably means that Freescale has been too pessimistic on the attainable clock speed of its MPC7447A processors and that it is possible today for them to produce these processors with speeds of up to 1.7Ghz, at least in limited quantities.

That's quite good news for the next generation of Powerbooks. It means Apple will be able to deliver a speed bump to at least 1.6Ghz early next year, as previously reported by MacosXrumors (see here and here), without even having to wait for the MPC7448 processor to go in production. Some of you were probably hoping Apple would put a PowerPC G5 in them, but we can guess it is now definitely out of question.

UPDATE: Giga Designs has also announced new single and dual processor upgrades based on the MPC7447A PowerPC G4 processor with clock speeds of 1.42Ghz, 1.6Ghz and 1.7Ghz.