Lordy help us, our heads are a-spinnin'! And yes, it's probably just because of the fever and nausea, but there's always a chance that it was actually brought on by trying to stay on top of the latest crop of PowerPC 970 rumors. To be honest, normally we're not all that interested in dishing dirt on the 970, in large part because so much of what's floating around out there exudes less credibility than, well, Microsoft discussing the iLoo. But faithful viewer Chris over at MacUnderground notes a bit of drama brewing in the seedy underworld of rumormongers, and so we figured we'd poke our spinnin' heads in and take a look.

As far as we've been able to make out, LoopRumors claims that "two large shipments of PowerPC 970 processors went to FoxConn in Taiwan, under a purchase order from Apple Computer." How many chips are in a "large shipment," you ask? Purportedly sixty thousand. And if sixty thousand next-generation PowerPCs are really on the box-buider's doorstep in Apple's name, well, that bodes well for the appearance of the long-awaited successor to the Power Mac G4 as early as next month. Woo-hoo!

The only problem, of course, is the aforementioned one of credibility. LoopRumors is a relative newcomer and as far as we can tell, their accuracy is still pretty much unproven. On top of that, posting in the MacRumors forum, the notorious Jack Campbell of MacWhispers and/or SpyMac (we're not even going to try keeping all this straight in our current condition) flat-out states that "Foxconn is not manufacturing either the new 970 PowerBook or the 970 PowerMac. There have actually been zero PPC 970 chips delivered to Foxconn. Shame on LoopRumors."

Then again, credibility is sort of an issue on that side of the fence, as well. MacWhispers is pretty new, too, and whether or not they had anything to do with it, in our book any rumormonger who's ever had a spymac.com email address is going to be sitting under the cloud of the iWalk for the rest of their lives. Frankly, we're not terribly interested in which side is right; we're far more intrigued by the prospect of Campbell's "Shame on LoopRumors" comment igniting some sort of Mac rumors site feud and/or slapfight. Whaddaya think, guys? Nine rounds of bare-knuckle boxing?