Apple chip breakthrough confounds physicists

Updated : Note - Averting further ridicule, Apple changed the offending text following publication of this article. See end for details.

A remarkable achievement by Motorola in the new PowerMac computers promises to set the scientific world alight.

Apple claims that "the faster-than-light processor speed gets an additional boost with an advanced cache memory architecture that provides ultrafast, dedicated memory with massively enhanced throughput."

Faster than light? Apparently so. Until now this achievement has been limited to small particles, such as photons, as apparently Feynman (a star of Apple's Think Different ads) suggested that the speed of light was only an average.

NEC researchers in Princeton, New Jersey, a beam of light through gas 300 times faster than the speed of light, which apparently "moved so fast that it appeared to exit from the chamber before it entered".

And a black hole in the M87 has been observed emitting jets at what appears to be six times the speed of light.

However, Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity may need to be updated.

It posits that to travel faster than light requires an infinite amount of energy - which doubtless explains the presence of such a large heat sink in the new G4s. Although remarkably, Apple claims the machines run off a standard mains current.

The theory also posits that if you do manage to travel faster than light, you can go back in time, and violate causality.

It's called the 'Grandfather Paradox': what happens if you go back in time and kill your grandfather? You'd never have been born, of course.

As soon as we get our hands on one of these extraordinary machines, we too will be attempting to go back in time. (Perhaps to the year 1999, from where we can kill the Dock.)

We hope to have word from an Apple UK spokesperson very soon indeed. Hurry, before Intel pinches the idea. ®

Bootnote: Perhaps that explains why there's two processors. Maybe there's one - it's simply in two places at once? [No - that's quantum theory. Ed]. And it could look like this, only it couldn't, because this is an old G4 case beautifully modified by Kent Atlas.

Update : And so reads the original text of this article. Averting further ridicule, sometime in the afternoon Pacific Time, the reference to "faster than light" was replaced with this text:-

"The souped-up processor speed gets an additional boost with an advanced cache memory architecture that provides ultrafast, dedicated memory with massively enhanced throughput.

The power of satire, at work, for sure.

We have now learned why Apple used this marketing term - for three years - and will explain it to you tomorrow. It's even more appalling than we feared. ®