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Intrinsity Claims 2.2 Ghz Chip
PowerMacDaddy writes "Over at SiliconValley.com there's an article about an Ausin, TX startup named Intrinsity that has unveiled a new chip that utilizes a new logic process with conventional fab processes to acheive a 2.2GHz clock rate. The company is headed by former Texas Instruments and Apple Computer microprocessor developer Paul Nixon. The real question is, is this all FUD, will the real-world performance be part of The Megahertz Myth, or is this thing for real?"
Fast forward to Today
We lost the complete source code, and our computers are so darn fast that the bit of code that estimates the speed of the computer over-runs it's 16 bit Int slot. The game now hangs hangs.
So we are forced to run our game in Windows to slow it down. It works half the time - it depends on the time slicing. Recently our computers are getting a bit to fast for even that - so we might have to move to an emulator.
The smart thing to do would be to fire up the hex editor and edit the cose, but that would be *cheating*
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
Just take a normal processor and put an inverter ring off to the side, running at 100mhz, and connected to nothing but power and ground.
Back in the 60s, the power of a radio was measured by the number of transistors. That is, until one radio company put hundreds of useless transistors on their board and didn't even wire them up. After that, radios started getting measured on real abilities like quality of sound. Maybe computer marketting will catch up some day, marketting meaningful numbers: minimum FPS in Quake 3!
-Ted
The real question is, is this all FUD, will the real-world performance be part of The Megahertz Myth, or is this thing for real?"
It doesn't matter if it is real or vapour, it will still fall prey to the "Megahertz Myth". Maybe someday, people will understand: non-similar architectures can't be compared by MHz alone. And even most similar arch's can't be compared via MHz, as the Intel v. AMD war will tell you.
It is even worse than that! no single metric will ever give you the whole story.
room101 -- how much can you stand before they break you?
(they always break you eventually)
I hate to add to an obviously silly conversation, but you state that Be could not run BeOS on the new G3 Macs because Apple would not release the specs for the new hardware.
Good theory. And it is what Be said.
Do you know how long it took for the PPC Linux developers to get the Linux kernel running on the new G3 machine? About 2 weeks. How many people work on the PPC specific parts of the Linux kernel? About 2 or 3. I can only guess how many software engineers worked at Be at the time, but I imagine more than 2 or 3. So, how stupid do you think people are? Be didn't get BeOS running on the G3 because -THEY DIDN'T WANT TO- just as Elwood said in a parent post to this. The fact that they lied and whined that it was Apple's fault made me lose a great deal of respect for them.
I'd also like to point out that Apple is a HARDWARE VENDER. Do you think Apple makes money selling MacOS X for err, $89 or so? Of course not. It's a loss-leader to get people to buy their hardware which has a higher markup than most consumer PC hardware. People have been talking for years about how Apple should give up on hardware and moving to software. It won't happen. Apple losing control over their hardware platform would greatly reduce the added value that their products give over consumer PCs.
In a nutshell this is saying "Someone said something, but it might be bogus, and the cycle speed really doesn't mean much anyways.". Alrighty then. This is like a "nothing to see here, move along!" type articles.
eetimes
now that the cpu isn't the bottleneck anymore lets work on memory and other buss bottlenecks..
Given that net delays are becoming the gating factor in big chip designs dynamic logic seems to me to just be a sideshow - unless the long wires are themselves the dynamic nodes (transmission lines with solitons moving on them?) now that would be interesting ...
Potentially much more interesting IMHO is clockless asynchronous logic - but CAD tools just aren't up to supporting this methodology (oh yeah and the synchronous clock based mindset is pretty entrenched too).
alright! another 2 fps in quake3!
*sigh* i want a turbo button on my computer. except, instead of halving my speed, i want it to drop down to 33MHz so i can play all my old games properly under dos.
jinkusu
There really is some intelligence and talent working for this company, I'd like to see what they can produce. Maybe in a few months, if there's no decent benchmarks (by that time, someone somewhere should have written code to use their logic, right?), then I'll jump on the "it's a myth" bandwagon, but I'm willing to give them a chance first.
Mooniacs for iOS and Android
You realize that's bullshit, right? Jobs and Gassee are both notoriously hard to deal with. Someone got rankled.
Saying that their OS was running apps slower is kindof silly when it's not preemptively multitasked. If you really wanted to, you could just steal the processor from the OS and never give it back.
And Apple stopped sharing specs because they didn't want harware competition.
That said, Be didn't stop porting because they needed the specs. They didn't need the specs. They stopped porting because they wanted to stop. Perhaps because they wanted to know that Apple would support them in the future, but whatever.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
What is dynamic logic? How is it different from conventional logic wired together with different types of gates?
Both dynamic and static logic use logic gates or blocks that are wired together. The difference is in how the gates are implemented internally, and how they pass data back and forth.
CMOS is a good example of static logic. It uses pull-up and pull-down transistor networks to make sure that outputs are always strongly asserted. This makes CMOS gates big and makes input capacitance larger than it otherwise needs to be. But, it's well-understood, has a few attractive features, and has a whole slew of design tools built for it.
Precharge logic is a good example of dynamic logic. It uses the parasitic capacitance of the output line to store the output value. The output node is charged up on one half of the clock (precharge phase), and left floating on the other half (readout phase). During the readout phase, the inputs are asserted. Inputs are fed into a pull-down transistor network that drives the output low if it should be low, and leaves it alone if it should be high. This style of logic takes up half the space of CMOS logic, has half the input capacitance, and has stronger driving capability (NFETs pulling down typically drive 2x-3x more strongly than PFETs pulling up). This means that if you play your cards right, you can make precharge logic circuits that are faster *and* more compact than CMOS logic circuits. The downsides are that designing and verifying precharge logic is a royal pain, and that you have to have a clock input into the logic block.
The article describes a more complicated dynamic logic scheme with a four-phase clock. These kinds of schemes have been floating around in research literature for years, but are usually not used because of the greater complexity and fewer tools available.
Good point that slashdot should have pointed to, say, the ArsTechnica article on the advantages of the PPC architecture instead of the Apple propaganda. Despite that, no one can doubt that there is a "Megahertz Myth" to a great extent, though perhaps not the the extent Apple suggests. Look at the AMD vs. Intel race right now - people assume that the fastest p3/4 is faster than the fastest Athlon without actually looking at performance results.
Well, I really doubt this will be fud, since that stands for fear, uncertanty, and doubt. This acticle seems to be more of a hype piece.
FUD is tearing down a competitor's product with vague statements and generalizations. FUD is not describing your own new product in glowing terms. That's just marketing BS.
I know, I know...shouldn't nitpick. But when the term FUD is so depricated on the main page at slashdot, I really must object.
... for a while in the late '99-early '00 region as a PFY sysadmin. If they say they can do something, I'd lay good money on them doing it. The level of expertise and knowledge displayed by their staff was stunning. More specifically, I do recall some of the engineers talking excitedly about this stuff at the time and mentioning breaking the 2GHz barrier (keep in mind this was in late '99), so this is hardly a publicity stunt as it's been in the works for quite a while if it's the same thing I was hearing about then...
They were the Austin branch of a company called Exponential Tech. Doing a google on that should bring you up to speed on the Apple connection. I wouldn't really consider them a startup as they've been around for several years and have designed a number of very popular things (e.g. DSPs for other chip manufacturers).
They were a great bunch to work for, especially for being kind to a rather wet-behind-the-ears sysadmin like I was. The only downside to working there was the gawd-awful commute I had to do from far NE Austin to far SW Austin. (If you're an EE type who'd like to live in Austin, they'd IMHO be a great place to work for)
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
> Why don't they benchmark the mac with anything
... all of your processing is done in realtime. The Mac runs music and audio apps faster, too. I get incredible performance in Cubase 5.0 on a PowerMac G4/733. You can fill up all of Cubase's plug-in slots and still have CPU power left over (there's a CPU meter built-into Cubase ... that's how CPU intensive it is). Latency is also better on the Mac, and that's very important in audio.
... the Mac is the best-performing machine for all of these. These are the tasks that Macs are BUILT FOR. It just so happens that everybody wants to do these things now, thanks to digital camcorders, cameras, MP3's and security. Doesn't magically make Intel machines any better than they are, no matter what the clock speed of the CPU.
> other than PS, ever, ever, ever, ever?
They also benchmark with Media Cleaner Pro, which is a very widely-used media encoding application. At this past Macworld Expo NY, a Mac with a G4/867 in it took a Spiderman movie trailer from tape to Web, and then played the result, well before the similar Intel machine (1.7GHz P4) could even finish encoding the clip. Same task, same media, same application, same RAM, same hard disk, same graphics adapter. Only thing that's different is Mac OS / Windows, G4 / P4 and the mobo. The machines even end up being equivalently-priced (I think they use Compaq workstations for these tests).
> How could anyone question the validity of an
> application that has always been primarily a mac
> application?
Photoshop has been running on both Mac and Windows platforms for years and years now. It is optimized for Intel with the assistance of Intel engineers. It is optimized for the Mac by Adobe engineers all on their own.
I work in music and audio, and it is very performance intensive
Video, music and audio, graphics, encoding and encryption
Intel uses it to sell it's Xeon chips to businesses at much lower clock rates and higher prices than the P4; Intel uses it to explain why Itanium runs at 800MHz; AMD's new chip runs at 1.5GHz, but they say it outperforms a 2GHz P4; Alphas run at 1GHz but are acknowledged to be much faster than a P4; Sparcs run at 900MHz, yet are also acknowledged to be better performers than a P4.
There seems to be some confusion. SPARC, Athlon, Alpha, and Itanium are not faster performers than P4 (except the Itanium which beats P4 at FP).
Let's have a look:
P4/1.8GHz: SPECint - 574, SPECfp - 618
Athlon/1.4GHz: SPECint - 495, SPECfp - 426
Alpha/1001MHz: SPECint - 561, SPECfp - 585
SPARC/900MHz: SPECint - 439, SPECfp - 439
Itanium/800MH: SPECint - 314, SPECfp - 655
Latency is also better on the Mac, and that's very important in audio.
... the Mac is the best-performing machine for all of these. These are the tasks that Macs are BUILT FOR.
Video, music and audio, graphics, encoding and encryption
And if Apple really wanted to let you tap into that power, they would have shared their hardware specs with Be.
The primary reason Be ported to x86 was because Apple got pissed at them for showing up MacOS on the PPC architecture. Apple took its ball, and went home.
So if you really want a fair comparison of architectures, why not compare BeOS on x86 to MacOS on PPC? I realize it's not likely, the same types of apps are not available for BeOS and probably will never be... but let's not chalk up these so-called benchmarks to the CPU architecture quite yet...
"And like that