I'm afraid you're not going to get your wish - if your wish is to match Intel's GHz. The first PowerPC 970, will clock between 1.4 GHz and 2.2 GHz. The initial PowerPC 970s were reported by IBM to scale to 1.8GHz, but there has been rumour that IBM got better results than predicted. Of course again, the PowerPC 970 is supposed to do alot more than a G4 can at similar GHz. Rumor is that a PowerPC can do twice the work than a similar GHz G4.And they had better up the MHz too.
If you think the POWER4-based PowerPC 970 is impressive, just wait for its cousin from the POWER5 family -- the IBM PowerPC 980. It will reach 4.5GHz-5.0GHz+, support system busses even more incredible than the 970's 6.4GB/s FSB, include a much more powerful Altivec unit, a high-performance on-board memory controller, and countless other improvements that will mean performance levels well in excess of ten times today's. The best part is, the 980 is currently scheduled for only a little over a year from now. Of course that could very well slip...but so far, IBM has executed its timetables for the 970 extremely well -- no more opposite a story could be imagined from what we have seen out of Motorola for the past five years. Expect IBM to deliver very well on its promises to Apple to lift the company out of its hardware performance quagmire in the next two years. There can be no question, based on the very happy mood we've seen in Cupertino recently....the performance equation is going to be tipping quite rapidly and quite clearly in Apple's direction post-haste.
Speaking of Motorola, reliable sources there have said that Apple is now expecting to deliver at least two different Macs that use 200MHz DDR memory and 200MHz SDR frontside busses in the near future with the company's G4 processors. This may mean that Motorola is still having trouble with its PowerPC 7470 chips which support a DDR Frontside Bus (FSB) that could take full advantage of the DDR SDRAM memory Apple has been putting in its systems to little performance benefit (thanks to the PPC 7455's Single Data Rate FSB, which Apple runs at either 133 or 167MHz currently) for over a year now -- and are planning to ship 7455-based systems on slightly faster FSB's for the iMac or perhaps the Powerbook.