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Will Darwin be Ported to the IBM Power 4?
eadint asks: "I have heard rumors thorough the net that Apple plans to port Darwin to the Power
4, 64 bit chip. Currently I work for a university. We are using Apple
computers and are considering the platform for our number crunching capabilities. According
to this Motorola has
no plans on producing a 64-bit chip. Does anyone know if Darwin can or will
be ported to a true 64 bit platform."
Itanium 2 faster then Power4? I doubt it. Again, this is apples to oranges comparisons. Also, has ANYONE ever seen a Itanium system? I thought not. I work on RS/6000 machines and I really doubt an Itantium 2 system could even compare to a IBM RS/6000 (Power4 Based). First off, most RS/6000 machines come equpied with SMP (sometime only having one chip installed, but most are complete). Also, the Regatta p690 machine is THE BEST in my opinion. Only thing that comes close might be the top level Sun machines. Also, this same technology was used in Deep Blue (the machine that beat Gary Kasparov many years ago). All that Deep Blue was was a specially programmed SP system (RS/6000 Super Parallel). Comparing Intel's yet to be produced Itanium 2 which is an evolutionary step of the Itanium which did not really sell all that well. Point is....POINT ME TO THE BENCHMARKS! Since you can't(no silicon kind of stops that), well we shall see. Personally, I would rather run AIX on it. It's proven at least.
Gorkman
There are some benchmars out actually. Make of them what you like.
This is the sheet for itanic2 1GHz.
And you can compare it to the others
Its still too early to see what effect the itanics will have but they look quite respectable, if they havent priced them selves out of the parket
Mouse powered Chips, Open source Processors and Lego
Here are the SPECfp benchmarks from:
. ht ml
/ mscf/hardware/results_hpcs2.html
http://www.spec.org/osg/cpu2000/results/cfp2000
IBM Corporation IBM eServer pSeries 690 Turbo (1300 MHz) 1 1202
Hewlett-Packard Comp hp workstation zx6000 (1000 MHz, Itanium 2) 1 1356
Also, go to: http://www.emsl.pnl.gov:2080/capabs/mscf/?/capabs
for benchmarks results for some real codes and further synthetic benchmarks.
I was working on a project designing a board that used Motorola's 64bit PPC. They canned the chip in October 2001. They annonuced the cancelation in private meetings to their customers that even knew about it at the first Smart Networks forum in New Orleans. It was NEVER going to be the G5. It wasn't even going to be one of their desktop processors. It was going to be built using their "Book-E" embedded processor spec, and the MMU architecture for it was completely different from the one in the green book. I think that The "we make shit up" Register started the G5 64bit rumour.
Even when the 64bit chip was still in the plans, the G5 was going to come way before it, and was always going to be an evolution of the G4 core. So, the rumors have taken us from the begining, back to the truth, with a whole lot of made up plot in between that never happened.
Ahhhh actually as of August 24 Jaguar OSX 10.2 will be released. The core of 10.2 or Darwin is now in synch with BSD4.4 which is why Jordan Hubbard left the FreeBSD project to work at Apple. Therefore you will soon see Jaguar server released and soon after that a new version of Darwin.
The main reason IMHO is that we can
get MacOSX running on POWER4 pSeries aka Regatta.
Sure, I grant you that most "unix" software
is already available for linux and/or AIX.
My own personal interest is to see Mac OS X
apps running on the POWER4 in addition to
UNIX apps. Dare to say it?
M$ Office running on MacOSX(Darwin) on
IBM pSeries 630...