Posted by
ryuzaki0
on from the insulation-is-good dept.
hypos writes: "According to this ZDNet article, IBM is going to add an insulating layer of oxide between the transistor and its silicon bed, which IBM claims can increase a processor's performance by 20 to 30%. Best of all, it's supposed to come to new Macs soon. "
Re:PowerPC users have always been SOL.
by
um...+Lucas
·
· Score: 5
I don't mean this to sound like flamebait, but it always seems that the PowerPC is playing second or third fiddle.
I think this is flamebait...
It gets knocked aside by x86 users on the desktop due to lack of applications.
Same thing always happens to Linux around here, but everyone seems to defend that OS.
Yeah, sure, it's nifty to do graphics/desktop publishing, but if you're serious about that, you're running an Amiga or BeOS anyway.
The Mac decimates both the Amiga and BeOS in the graphics and desktop publishing arena's. The Amiga used to be (and still is somewhat) a wonderous machine to work with video with, but it's been floundering the past several years due to not really having an owner that's been willing to pour money into it. The BeOS, yes, has a more elegant architecture, but alas, it lacks color management, postscript font support, and applications from Quark, Adobe, and Macromedia. Until it gets more apps, the BeOS will remain an oddity to everyone except it's core users.
I recall reading once that a Mac makes a nice webserver because it's too dumb to really break into or do any damage.
Well, that's true, but if you're buying a mac specifically to serve web pages, in most cases I'd say that you just wasted a pile of money... Or else you're limiting your sites functionality serverly. The mac is missing a lot of support i the server arena. Doubtless, that will change when OS X arrives, but until then.
So why do people insist on using the Power PC?
Because 99% of the computers that use PowerPC's run the Mac OS. And some people prefer that OS to those available from Microsoft, IBM, Redhat, Be, or any other. They even like it enough to spend a few more dollars on the hardware i nwhich to run it.
Why do companies like IBM spend development dollars trying to push an outdated chip architecture, when they could be pushing next generation technologies.
With Apple shipping nearly a million iMacs and G3/G4's per quarter and with Power PC chips selling for (a complete stab in the dark) $250 a piece, that translates to a BILLION dollars a year of business for IBM and Motorolla. If you ran a company, would you turn down that much money?
The PowerPC chip isn't geared towards "PC's" as it's name implies... At least in my world, i equate PC with "x86 compatible". People shouldn't be buying Power PC based computers unless (for now) they want to run the Mac OS, or for the small percentage of folks (Linux PPC users) they value to superior hardware designs enough that a few more dollars doesn't hurt. Asd for your 3 year time limit, I don't quite get it. Are you suggesting that Mac users should abandon the platform they chose and switch to Windows or Linux after 3 years for no reason? I've been computing for 15 or so years and the Mac is still my favorite platform for getting work done on and I'm sure plenty of other/. readers will agree..
Re:License the technology ?
by
tak+amalak
·
· Score: 3
Intel has no chips that use copper.
True.
Motorola/IBM own the copper technology, and Intel is severly lagging in developing it.
Not really. No one owns copper technology. IBM and Motorola both have patents on manufacturing processors with copper but any company that wants to can develop their own process of making chips with copper interconnects.
AMD Licenses it from IBM, rather that re-invent the wheel.
Actually, AMD licenses it from Motorola.
--
-- Don't lead me into temptation... I can find it myself.
Athlon (+ maybe Willamette) are *not* pure x86
by
TuRRIcaNEd
·
· Score: 3
AMD's Athlon and Intel's Wilamette are excellent x86 designs, which are severely cutting-edge. I'm not sure about the Willamette architecture, as I haven't done much reading into it, but pretty much everything from the Pentium (P6 in particular) onwards has strayed from being pure x86 in favour of a heavily pipelined architecture. In the case of the Athlon, effectively the CISC x86 instructions are emulated by splitting them down into what AMD terms MacroOps, and letting the RISC core deal with the rest.
Where the PPC scores here is that it is fundametally RISC by nature, although IIRC the PPC has a basic 68k emulation frontend for legacy purposes. However most modern apps on the Mac are tailored for the PPC, and as such, can use some of the funky RISC features to gain a speed advantage. For example, some Photoshop filters will render quicker on a G4@400MHz than on an equivalent, or higher spec x86 box, simply because the architecture is less cluttered, and the compilers don't have to take the legacy baggage into consideration. The same applies to the Alpha, in that by using MHz as a speed comparison between architectures, you are doing the more modern chips a major disservice, because they don't need to be clocked as high to gain comparable application performance.
As for the colour and font handling, he's right. The Macintosh's ease of use made it a very strong contender in the DTP arena early on, and as a result, programs like ATM and ColorSync allow a far greater degree of output control than the Windows (or Linux, sorry guys) equivalent. This is just by the nature of having existed on the platform longer, however.
-- - "How do we do it? Volume!" - The Bursar of Unseen University.
As this is getting into a fest of Mac Bashing I though I'd try and do something on-topic. So here is a little explaination of how IBM's method works (note this is not a new method as the Silicon on Saphire method has been around for years.. however IBM seems to have altered the idea by replacing the expensive saphire with cheap silica) A normal NMOSFET transistor would to something like this (side view) Drain Source MMMMM Gate MMMMMM OOOOMMMMMMMMMMMMOOOOO OOOOMMMMMOOOOOOOOOOMMMMMOOOOO SSSS######SSSSSSSSSS######SSSSS SSSS######SSSSSSSSSS######SSSSS SSSS######SSSSSSSSSS######SSSSS SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS (M Metal track) (# Doped silicon) (O Silica) (S Intrinsic silicon)
When the transistor is in operation it has a charged region (depletion zone) around it as such... Drain Source MMMMM Gate MMMMMM OOOOMMMMMMMMMMM MOOOOO OOOOMMMMMOOOOOOOOOOMMMMMOOOOO SS@S######SSSSSSSSSS######S@SSS SS@S######SSSSSSSSSS######S@SSS SS@S######SSSSSSSSSS######S@SSS SS@SSSSSSSSSSS@@@@@@@@@@@@@@SSS SSS@@@@@@@@@@@SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS
This charged region (boundary shown with @ signs) acts as capacitor which is bad (slows down the operation of the transistor). What the process does is to place a layer of oxide below the chip as shown MMMMM MMMMMM OOOOMMMMMMMMMMM MOOOOO OOOOMMMMMOOOOOOOOOOMMMMMOOOOO SS@S######SSSSSSSSSS######S@SSS SS@S######SSSSSSSSSS######S@SSS SS@S######SSSSSSSSSS######S@SSS OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO This stops some of the charged layer from forming as the charge cannot move (easily) in the oxide. Which speeds up the transistor. 'Tis a nice idea doing it with silica though which should make the chips very affordable (ie. only 2 or 3 extra process stages) (btw. this is my on words no trade secrets - not that/. would allow that;) ) -mG
-- Physicists are said to stand on one another's shoulders while programmers stand on one another's toes.
Wonder what Motorola has to say about this?
by
PenguinX
·
· Score: 3
Motorola has been trying to get a G4 over 600Mhz to no avail, while IBM has them well beyond that. This move will yet again prove that IBM is more interested in Apple then longtime Motorola. I would imagine that if Apple went solely w/ IBM that we would see a 1 - 1.2Ghz G4 by the end of the year.
Yum!
Re:Wonder what Motorola has to say about this?
by
hattig
·
· Score: 3
Well, IBM reckon that they would have 700MHz G4's next week if Motorola would let them make the damn things, so add 30% onto that and you have 910MHz G4s. Couple that with Motorolas G4+ core, which will be released in around 4 months time at 800MHz to 1GHz and you could easily have 1GHz+ G4s by the end of the year...
The G3 and G4 are the consumer PowerPC chips. IBM are pushing it - they have the POP motherboards, which are slowly starting to appear now, and with a SOI G4+ processor and AGP4x, and ATA-100 (or Serial ATA) support you would have a really good motherboard that really kicked ass. Shame the motherboards that will appear will be half-functional, but hopefully some server-level motherboards will appear for multi-G4 setups. That would be sweet, much better than a dual PIII Xeon or whatever. A G4 is around as powerful as an equivalent speed Xeon (give or take a little), and they cost a lot less than a Xeon, so people shouldn't give the processor so much stick. A PIII 700MHz Xeon with 1Mb cache can set you back $1000.
Posted with Mozilla 2000052120. Damned great now, faster than ever, looking good (the buttons are in the correct place!).
Re:Wonder what Motorola has to say about this?
by
Coventry
·
· Score: 4
IBM's PowerPC processors for thier rs6000 and as/400s are COMPLETELY diffrent from the g4 design - they are compatable on a binary level, but then again, so are the 386 and the pentium II... IBM uses very specialized processors in thier high-end systems - three integer pipelines, 2 fpus, 1000+ pins on thier interface (HIGH bandwith bus!!), tons of cache... each integer pipeline is Long, like 12+ stages, allowing for high scalablity in the Mhz of the processor... The g4 has too few stages in its pipeline, leading to it being Very hard to scale to high Mhz... copper/soi g4s _might_ get to 600Mhz - but the yeilds would be just as low as the current 500Mhz ones. Remember, the g4 is Tiny it was designed to be used in embeded apps as well as desktops - and thus was designed with as few transistors as possible. AMD and motorola have been working on a 'new' g4 that is basicly a redesign with a few more stages in the pipelines, allowing for much higher speeds.
-- man is machine
Re:Wonder what Motorola has to say about this?
by
PenguinX
·
· Score: 4
Everyone dogs MacOS - perhaps it is not the newest OS in the world and unquestionably it has it's roots for being one of the first GUI OSes out there. But let's be honest - the only idea behind MacOS to begin with was to create a perfectly functional operating system. The concept of resource forking was unthought of prior to this, and still is for the most part.
Honestly we need to give MacOS more credit, and Apple for that matter. How many people have ever been able to make a user friendly unix? or frighteningly enough a cooperative multitasking operating system work so well?
I am a Linux bigot and as much as the next - but we should give credit where due. Most of us come from the PC background where hardware needs to be kicked to work. From Apples camp the hardware is usually good enough to make do, so this concept is nearly oblivious to us.
Re:PowerPC users have always been SOL.
by
JMZorko
·
· Score: 3
... and to this I submit that the usefullness of a computer is not necessarily attached to the age of it's technology. In other words, people _use_ them, even if they're not the fastest anymore, or the biggest, or even the prettiest. I've got 2 Mac 8500s at home; one running MacOS 8.6 with a G3/366 card for audio stuff (i'm big into ambient music and sound experiments), the other running LinuxPPC on a 200MHz 604e for everything non-audio. Both of them continue to do everything I ask of them; the audio Mac still runs all of the latest Mac-based audio software well enough.
A lot of us are more interested in _doing things_ with the computer, even if it's 3 years old or more.
More info (probably won't be in Macs 'soon')
by
loki7
·
· Score: 4
Despite what the poster said, this probably won't be appearing in Macs 'soon'. SOI requires redesigning the entire chip -- it's not just a different manufacturing process. The Register (everyone's favourite source of fun rumours!) has a much more techinically detailed article.
It's a shame that/. relies so heavily on zdnet for stories. They're always technically weak. The Register isn't always accurate, but at least they're not writing for PHBs.
/peter
Re:Faster chips are always good.
by
ravenwing_np
·
· Score: 4
Faster chips are nice, but what I really want is a faster front side bus. I've been working on a long running project that deals with processing lots of large multimedia data. Even though our CPUs have been getting faster, our processing isn't taking less time because we are being IO limited.
I'd much rather have a 400 Mhz cpu with a 400 Mhz bus then a 1.5 Ghz box sitting over a 133 Mhz bus.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't mean this to sound like flamebait, but it always seems that the PowerPC is playing second or third fiddle.
/. readers will agree..
I think this is flamebait...
It gets knocked aside by x86 users on the desktop due to lack of applications.
Same thing always happens to Linux around here, but everyone seems to defend that OS.
Yeah, sure, it's nifty to do graphics/desktop publishing, but if you're serious about that, you're running an Amiga or BeOS anyway.
The Mac decimates both the Amiga and BeOS in the graphics and desktop publishing arena's. The Amiga used to be (and still is somewhat) a wonderous machine to work with video with, but it's been floundering the past several years due to not really having an owner that's been willing to pour money into it. The BeOS, yes, has a more elegant architecture, but alas, it lacks color management, postscript font support, and applications from Quark, Adobe, and Macromedia. Until it gets more apps, the BeOS will remain an oddity to everyone except it's core users.
I recall reading once that a Mac makes a nice webserver because it's too dumb to really break into or do any damage.
Well, that's true, but if you're buying a mac specifically to serve web pages, in most cases I'd say that you just wasted a pile of money... Or else you're limiting your sites functionality serverly. The mac is missing a lot of support i the server arena. Doubtless, that will change when OS X arrives, but until then.
So why do people insist on using the Power PC?
Because 99% of the computers that use PowerPC's run the Mac OS. And some people prefer that OS to those available from Microsoft, IBM, Redhat, Be, or any other. They even like it enough to spend a few more dollars on the hardware i nwhich to run it.
Why do companies like IBM spend development dollars trying to push an outdated chip architecture, when they could be pushing next generation technologies.
With Apple shipping nearly a million iMacs and G3/G4's per quarter and with Power PC chips selling for (a complete stab in the dark) $250 a piece, that translates to a BILLION dollars a year of business for IBM and Motorolla. If you ran a company, would you turn down that much money?
The PowerPC chip isn't geared towards "PC's" as it's name implies... At least in my world, i equate PC with "x86 compatible". People shouldn't be buying Power PC based computers unless (for now) they want to run the Mac OS, or for the small percentage of folks (Linux PPC users) they value to superior hardware designs enough that a few more dollars doesn't hurt. Asd for your 3 year time limit, I don't quite get it. Are you suggesting that Mac users should abandon the platform they chose and switch to Windows or Linux after 3 years for no reason? I've been computing for 15 or so years and the Mac is still my favorite platform for getting work done on and I'm sure plenty of other
True.
Motorola/IBM own the copper technology, and Intel is severly lagging in developing it.
Not really. No one owns copper technology. IBM and Motorola both have patents on manufacturing processors with copper but any company that wants to can develop their own process of making chips with copper interconnects.
AMD Licenses it from IBM, rather that re-invent the wheel.
Actually, AMD licenses it from Motorola.
--
Don't lead me into temptation... I can find it myself.
Where the PPC scores here is that it is fundametally RISC by nature, although IIRC the PPC has a basic 68k emulation frontend for legacy purposes. However most modern apps on the Mac are tailored for the PPC, and as such, can use some of the funky RISC features to gain a speed advantage. For example, some Photoshop filters will render quicker on a G4@400MHz than on an equivalent, or higher spec x86 box, simply because the architecture is less cluttered, and the compilers don't have to take the legacy baggage into consideration. The same applies to the Alpha, in that by using MHz as a speed comparison between architectures, you are doing the more modern chips a major disservice, because they don't need to be clocked as high to gain comparable application performance.
As for the colour and font handling, he's right. The Macintosh's ease of use made it a very strong contender in the DTP arena early on, and as a result, programs like ATM and ColorSync allow a far greater degree of output control than the Windows (or Linux, sorry guys) equivalent. This is just by the nature of having existed on the platform longer, however.
- "How do we do it? Volume!" - The Bursar of Unseen University.
As this is getting into a fest of Mac Bashing I though I'd try and do something on-topic. So here is a little explaination of how IBM's method works (note this is not a new method as the Silicon on Saphire method has been around for years .. however IBM seems to have altered the idea by replacing the expensive saphire with cheap silica)
/. would allow that ;) ) -mG
A normal NMOSFET transistor would to something like this (side view)
Drain Source
MMMMM Gate MMMMMM
OOOOMMMMMMMMMMMMOOOOO
OOOOMMMMMOOOOOOOOOOMMMMMOOOOO
SSSS######SSSSSSSSSS######SSSSS
SSSS######SSSSSSSSSS######SSSSS
SSSS######SSSSSSSSSS######SSSSS
SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS
(M Metal track) (# Doped silicon)
(O Silica) (S Intrinsic silicon)
When the transistor is in operation it has a charged region (depletion zone) around it as such...
Drain Source
MMMMM Gate MMMMMM
OOOOMMMMMMMMMMM MOOOOO
OOOOMMMMMOOOOOOOOOOMMMMMOOOOO
SS@S######SSSSSSSSSS######S@SSS
SS@S######SSSSSSSSSS######S@SSS
SS@S######SSSSSSSSSS######S@SSS
SS@SSSSSSSSSSS@@@@@@@@@@@@@@SSS
SSS@@@@@@@@@@@SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS
This charged region (boundary shown with @ signs) acts as capacitor which is bad (slows down the operation of the transistor). What the process does is to place a layer of oxide below the chip as shown
MMMMM MMMMMM
OOOOMMMMMMMMMMM MOOOOO
OOOOMMMMMOOOOOOOOOOMMMMMOOOOO
SS@S######SSSSSSSSSS######S@SSS
SS@S######SSSSSSSSSS######S@SSS
SS@S######SSSSSSSSSS######S@SSS
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
This stops some of the charged layer from forming as the charge cannot move (easily) in the oxide. Which speeds up the transistor.
'Tis a nice idea doing it with silica though which should make the chips very affordable (ie. only 2 or 3 extra process stages)
(btw. this is my on words no trade secrets - not that
Physicists are said to stand on one another's shoulders while programmers stand on one another's toes.
Motorola has been trying to get a G4 over 600Mhz to no avail, while IBM has them well beyond that. This move will yet again prove that IBM is more interested in Apple then longtime Motorola. I would imagine that if Apple went solely w/ IBM that we would see a 1 - 1.2Ghz G4 by the end of the year.
Yum!
A lot of us are more interested in _doing things_ with the computer, even if it's 3 years old or more.
Falling You - beautiful
It's a shame that /. relies so heavily on zdnet for stories. They're always technically weak. The Register isn't always accurate, but at least they're not writing for PHBs.
Faster chips are nice, but what I really want is a faster front side bus. I've been working on a long running project that deals with processing lots of large multimedia data. Even though our CPUs have been getting faster, our processing isn't taking less time because we are being IO limited.
I'd much rather have a 400 Mhz cpu with a 400 Mhz bus then a 1.5 Ghz box sitting over a 133 Mhz bus.
A starved CPU does no math.