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PowerPC Goes 64 bit
prostoalex writes "ExtremeTech runs a story about IBM planning to introduce a new 64-bit PowerPC architecture for desktops in October at the Microprocessor Forum. The conference agenda tells us that "this processor is an 8-way superscalar design that fully supports Symmetric MultiProcessing. The processor is further enhanced by a vector processing unit implementing over 160 specialized vector instructions and implements a system interface capable of up to 6.4GB/s"." There's also a News.com story.
You spelled it wrong, so it doesn't count.
Bob
The PC Weenies: 11 Years of Online Tech 'Too
Board meetings usually sound pretty boring, but I think I'd pay to sit in on that one.
oooo coool!
Perhaps NOW i can break away from intel. already left MS in the dust years ago..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Is that "160 specialized vector instructions" the infamous motorola designed altivec? Is this the next processor apple will use? Does this mean all that intel talk was well.... just talk?
 
anyone know?
yes i run a goth/punk/emo porn site.
There is also an eWeek story.
If these are as good as they sound, all those speculations and rumors of apple switchin to intel are going to be thrown out the back door.
Later,
Phil
Hmmm. Perhaps all the doom and gloom about PPC's future is smoke after all.
:)
Look like Apple on X86 isn't even a remote possiblity now.
Is that bad?
Isn't the PPC velocity engine 128 bit already????
I used to be under the impression that the POWER processors from IBM used the same instruction set as the PowerPC processors. Is this correct? In that case, transforming the POWER4 into a PowerPC shouldn't be much of a hassle: more something of downscaling and cutting the really big-iron features.
I really hope Apple jumps on this bandwagon: it may be their only viable alternative for the future, regardless of all the mindless speculations about a transition to x86.
the fact that PowerPC high end is comeing down to the low end well who whould have that coming .....
the intresting part will be a 1.2GHz ARM part from Samsung useing the Alpha technology
(they say its ARM10 but I think thats wrong and its just ARMv5 complient but that sounds bad in marketing speak so thedy said it was like an ARM10(I think I am not sure) )
regards
John Jones
There are a few pages of good discussion here.
The "cue the foo posts in 3, 2, 1..." posts will commence with no subsequent foo posts in 3, 2, 1...
Motorola's 85xx processor, aka G5, is 64-bit, if this article is to be believed.
Is this IBM just coming out with their own 64-bit PPC core? I thought Apple, Motorola and IBM were in an alliance? Seems to me that its quite a competitive alliance, eh?
Where do I sign up? Am I the only one that can imagine the fun you could have with this? How about an SMP Mac os X running on this beaut? Damn, that would look good (OSX is way too slow now, maybe it just needs a couple of procs for "eye-candy"...)
...if this is one of the 64-bit procs that some recent web article had an MS exec making noises about? Something to the effect of supporting *several* 64-bit procs, which means Itanium of course, and probably AMD, but who'd be left (Alpha being dead).
Interesting thought to say the least.
(Anyone else recall that article or have a link to it?)
---
Information wants...you to shut your pie hole.
PowerPC has been available in 64 bit since the introduction of the A10 in 1996.
Here's some proof.
The new multi-code die is very interesting though...
forgive me for not following mac technology much...
a PowerPC is a mac that can run some x86 applications and hardware right? if they go 64bit, how does that affect what is already in place?
MARIJUANA, SHROOMS, X: ONLINE?! - E
So IBM decides to get back into the PowerPC chip market, now that they have a more powerful chip and Apples using motorola to make theirs. Hopefully it will mean a great deal to get big blue back on the ball!
| - | - |
Back in 1993-1994 when IBM was still working on the OS/2 for PowerPC and WorkPlace OS, and Taligent and "Pink" were still on the drawing board, IBM was planning to release the PowerPC 620 Series, a 64-bit version of the PowerPC 604. They intended to use it to run a 64-bit version of OS/2 that ran on the Mach kernel.
The design was scrapped because back then the manufacturing process was way too expensive to be cost effective in mass producing the chip. And we all know what happened to PowerPC OS/2.
http://www.byte.com/art/9411/sec8/art5.htm
Why not use the proven high-performance IBM power4 design instead. Why design something brand new that will have "less" performance that the already existing 64bit single/dual core power4 design. I dont see the point, looks like a big waste of money and resources.
I requested this at IBM's PPC booth at linux world in JANUARY ;-)
what took them so long
Buttsex.
I'm an avid Mac fan, love 'em - use 'em - own 'em. But, I know that a 2.54GHz Pentium 4 will likely be quite a bit faster than even a dual-1GHz G4, much as I hate to admit. A dual Xeon will likely be even faster (with its increased cache size and a few other enhancements).
Now, the G5 (at 1.6GHz), in the works by Motorola, supposedly has SPECfp and SPECint scores to rival even the Itanium 2, which itself (supposedly) has scores that double any Intel predecessor. As usual, it seems that hope is in the wings ... but when will we get our hands on it?!?
IBM also mentions that this processor will initially be made available to high end workstations and entry level servers.
I would worry about the cost of the chip, as it may be prohibitive.
I think that if Apple were to use this chip, it probably wouldn't be for about 6 months to a year after it's debut, that is to allow prices to become reasonable.
Still #1 -- Lonely Gay Geek
Intel won the CPU war on desktop PCs. Look to servers, handhelds, game consoles, etc. for the the next CPU battle worth fighting.
From the article:
Though it's unclear what clock speed the new PowerPC will offer, IBM has been gunning for 2GHz.
Sweet! Finally Apple will have processing brawn and marketing brawn.
-- My hovercraft is full of eels.
a Beowulf....oh crap, you know the rest
Why do all these chip manufacturers go from 32 to 64?
Why not make a brand new chip at 128?!
It would propel that company to the top easily.
The project that was going to save all of us in 93, and then 94, and then .....
If only.
Head over to Ars where there's a good discussion running about this new processor, its intended market and the differences and similarities it has with existing the POWER and PowerPC ISA's including 32 bit code execution, AltiVec/SIMD implementation and such like :-)
I find it amusing that the old i486 machine had
235 instructions. The "RISC" PowerPC originally
had 225 instructions. It now has 160 more
instructions. Compare this to 69 for Sparc
and 94 for MIP-Rx series of RISC processors.
Perhaps we need a new definition for "Reduced"
as it applies to the PowerPC. On the upside, at
least you can't say the PowerPC designers are
stuck on dogma =)
The processor is further enhanced by a vector processing unit implementing over 160 specialized vector instructions and...
Yet Mac zealots will still be going on and on about how PPC is better because "Its RISC!". Never mind that the 486 only had 142 instructions total or anything like that.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Yeah you?
The question is did *YOU* read the article?
To quote:
and a little later
This chip is PowerPC all the way.
blog
The original specs for POWER/PowerPC CPU's were 64/32 bit anyways. This was set in stone over 10 years ago.
The great thing is that PPC-64 is that it's natively code compatible with PPC-32. No ISA 'extentions' (like x86-64), or instruction convertion (like Itanium), just a simple processor mode switch.
Apple would be a fool not to jump on this CPU for their high-end workstations or low cost servers.
PowerPC has nothing whatsoever to do with the x86 instruction set. It's just a brand name for a CPU architecture, like "Pentium", "Athlon", or "Alpha". In fact, it isn't even mac spesific.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
They're been delayed so long now I'm starting to wonder if they're hanging out with Duke Nukem, or even Prey fer chrissakes.
hmmm did YOU read the article?
" IBM's presentation, for example, says the company's 64-bit PowerPC processor will be designed for desktops and entery level servers. "
Does that NOT say PowerPC? Does it NOT say Desktop?
The chip is based on Power4 manufacturing and tech that's all.. it is a PowerPC.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
read this artcle...
It IS a PowerPC Chip... intended for desktops and entry level servers.
And apparently IBM wants Apple to use them too.
http://news.com.com/2117-1001-949030.html
There's a fair amount of discussion in comp.arch on this chip. Guesses are that it's adopting the Motorola e500 vector instructions, ones that work on general-purpose registers. Considering that the Power4 has a very, very, very good floating-point unit that works with the memory units to get vector-like performance, I doubt if they need FP vector ops...
it says more than 160 and altivec has 162
regards
John Jones
as at least three of the post's children will tell you...
Apple no longer benefits from not being x86...cost being the biggest issue
C'mon, you can't be privy to internal Apple component pricing and not share it with us... You are sure they pay more than Intel would charge, even though they buy processors in lots of a few hundred thousand or so, right?
and most of the time now they can't even claim a performance gain.
And the 8-way superscalar 64-bit G4 still won't help, right?
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
This sounds like a beautiful processor, and I'm guessing it's why they contracted a plant in upstate New York to manufacture the .1-micron chips. I'm thinking that this is the mutant brain-child of the Power4 and the G4. Kind of like a miniaturized Power4 with a vector-processing unit, running at 64-bits and possibly with 32-bit PPC binary compatibility built-in. It would be nice if they could apply double the SMP capability to 32-bit code.
Hopefully they'll write a really efficient compiler for it. This could be the chip to launch Mac OS X into the enterprise market.
Karma: Ran over your dogma.
The article title is a bit misleading - this isn't a new, more powerful chip, it's a new, less-powerful chip designed for consumer markets. The PowerPC has been 64-bit for a while now, but the chips have been aimed at high-end machines (especially the Power4). It seems that this is a low-end Power4 that's more suitable for desktops.
Ours goes up to 65-bits
--- What?
Lets gather around the campfire and sing a song!
Koombi Yah? I think NOT!
Oh, say can you see by the dawn's early light What so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming? Whose broad stripes and bright stars thru the perilous fight, O'er the ramparts we watched were so gallantly streaming? And the rocket's red glare, the bombs bursting in air, Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there. Oh, say does that star-spangled banner yet wave O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave?
Woo hah!
Moo, I'm a cow!
Dig it!
If I recall correctly, when Nintendo had IBM create the processor for the gamecube, IBM retained the rights to fiddle the their specialized PPC chip, then resell it. I'm wondering if the vector instructions are spillover from the Gamecube chip (I know it does a lot of fast vector math).
This will (in about 5 years) make a huge difference to the embedded systems market, especially for military applications. Defense systems are perpetually chawing at the bit for more processing power in embedded display systems. This could finally help. I'm SOOO sick of looking at 600/700/7000 series systems with no power! "Power" PC my butt!
GameCube 64 !!!
Will Linus soon be praying that AMD and Intel switch to these babies?
Power 4 architecture has an I/O architecture that is WAY too expensive for workstation/low end server use. The PowerPC 64bit, however, would be quite a CPU. To see if Apple is interested, look to see if BSD runs on Power Architectures ...
It's already there, been there for some time, and IBM told me that Apple had Darwin and some GUI running. Apple just needs the market to see that it weould be worth the investment in a new mobo/system design.
dot-sig.
This should be interesting to check benchmarks with. Now we'll be able to look at Itanium vs. Hammer vs. PPC-64. That might be a bit interesting..
PS. Check out my friend's band on this site. They're called Hat Trick of Misery.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
Won't be long before Intel headhunt the designers of this architecture and steal its secrets.
Darwin is, IIRC, 64-bit clean. As a newly converted Mac-Head I am looking forward to Apple moving to these chips. I will buy a new system and put it next to my Dual-G4 and my NeXTCube.
FYI:
Oh, I submitted this story with 3 links yesterday in the afternoon but it was REJECTED. I never will understand how they pick what goes up.
Power4 has *huge* cooling requirements, despite being copper-interconnect and all that. (it also has something like 5800 pins, btw, drawing somewhere in the range of 100A worth of current, IIRC) -- I wonder how much cooling needs to be for the 64-bit power PC if they are based on the Power4 design?
My life in the land of the rising sun.
I said "Hello" to a Muslim the other day, and he shot my daughter in the face.
Does that make me a racist?
stop lies
I say to myself. "Self, I wish this damn iBook wasn't burning a whole through my pant leg."
I do have to say that the iBooks are VERY nice though. Good performance at a great price. My wife loves hers, the only complaint either of us have with it is that it does heat up under the hard drive, and a small fan couldn't possibly hurt to push the air around and out the large vents on the left side where most of the heat builds up.
Sorry, but market forces are now as powerful as performance metrics. Apple no longer benefits from not being x86...cost being the biggest issue, and most of the time now they can't even claim a performance gain.
Intel won the CPU war on desktop PCs. Look to servers, handhelds, game consoles, etc. for the the next CPU battle worth fighting.
Until we have a monoculture in all our products, and have eliminated every trace of competition or choice, everywhere?
You waive your hands at the "invisible hand" of the free market as an argument for competitors to not even try competing for a portion of the marketplace, in effect advocating the replacement of a market with competitors with an intel monopoly.
I suspect you do not even see the contradiction in your argument, so let me spell it out for you. Monopolies are antithetical to a functional Free Market. Without competition the entire basis for capitalism functioning in any worthwhile capacity at all is removed and no free market exists. In short, without competition capitalism dies, and the free market "authority" you are alluding to becomes meaningless.
It astonishes me how people can argue "the market says" with one breath and "everyone should cave and give company X a monopoly" with the next. Indeed, one is forced to wonder if much of the current economic chaos isn't a result of an entire graduating class, perhaps an entire generation, not understanding even a little of economics in any context other than the inflated (and as it turns out largely fradulant) boom of the 1990s.
I won't even get into the fact that free markets are but one force, one tool, necessary for a functioning society or culture, another point often ignored in our western myopia, but that is a discussion for another thread.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
WTF??? how is this informative ? :
you frigging DOLTS
POWER chips are 64 bit.
PowerPC chips are 32 bit (except with these new ones).
POWER != PowerPC
POWER is used in RS/6000s and others
PowerPC is used in apple macs.
Let's hear it for the 486 - woohoo!
-- thinkyhead software and media
Great! Another chip for a linux port. ....... "
Oh and "Imagine a beaowulf of
I just could'nt resist!
I think it deserves mention that OpenPPC.org is an IBM-supported initiative to bring OpenPPC-based machines to us commoners.
Get off my virtual lawn, you damned virtual kids!
Make candies for Steve Jobs.
You know you want to.
It's your destiny.
RISC stands for Reduced Instruction Set Complexity!
This means that the format for the instruction is simple. Indeed it is in the PowerPC case, as all the bitfields in the instruction are always used for the same/similar purpose. Consequently RISC CPUs often have *more* instructions.
This is a common misapprehension. Do some research into the fascinating world of CPU design and you'll come out amazed than the x86 is still around and loving the elegance of RISC designs like the PowerPC.
smack my skank ass bitches
Let's not forget the venerable SuperH, either- what good is a 1.2GHz ARM if you need to carry an automotive battery for a minute of runtime?
... Hitachi also has multiple-core-package dreams, like a certain big manufacturer. ;)
There's a reason SH3 was chosen for the Dreamcast and the erstwhile MyLinux device - http://www.azpower.com/mylinux/ - and the designer of the latter made a compelling argument - http://www.azpower.com/mylinux/why_superh.html
The numbers may not be quite so impressive, but the power consumption and code size seems to be where it's at. On your desktop, plugged to the power grid, go wild... but on your laptop or PDA... How about those 8 hour or 8 week battery lives we had back in 1989?
A SuperH chip is more than enough for good browsing, MP3 or movie playing, and the architecture is so damn simple to plug together that, given a few advances in, say, bringing Linux and NetBSD up on it, the hardware could be practically disposable. How about a full-color laptop workstation for just a little more than Palm's latest ripoff? Or a handheld tablet the size of a Palm that can actually do something useful?
Look at the numbers on the StrongARMs in the Zaurus and iPaq... they just aren't that impressive.
No, no, these would be Appleseed clusters. Though, I do imagine that eventually you might be able to create an Appleseed of Beowulf clusters...
B-)
It's the same thing now. The POWER3 is a PowerPC 630. They're not using the old POWER instruction set anymore.
I had a 500mhz iBook running 10.1, and while the OS was pure heaven, the speed of the iBook was pure hell. I constantly said "damn, I wish this was faster" until I finally gave up when I noticed it'd take me twice as long to browse the web as on a PC. What a drag. I sold it and am looking forward to the day when I can get a decently fast iBook. Maybe the 700mhz model is a lot faster, but I'd be surprised.
$45 per U Colocation Special
Correct. gcc and AIX xlc compilers by default output the common subset - the moral equivalent of -march=486 or so.
Mostly extensions, a few dropped or changed facilities. It's worth noting that the PowerPC is much closer to its immediate ancestor the POWER2. Here are some highlights of POWER -> 32-bit PowerPC, taken from The PowerPC Architecture (IBM, 1994):
The main changes listed for POWER2 -> 32-bit PowerPC seem to be dropping several opcodes for floating point loads/stores, and some semantics of FP <-> int conversions.
"How can you claim that you are anti-crack, while still writing a window manager?" — Metacity README
enough said.
If IBM is talking openly about a Power PC processor, they probably don't have a deal with Apple. That's the opinion of an analist included int this article. So nexx-generation Macs may ship with Motorolla processors.
Gosh you're smart. Apple owns the PowerPC trademark and invented the chips, I forgot. IBM has nothing to do with it, and therefore their literature on the matter is obviously wrong. My god, we're all quaking in the shadow of your awesome intellect.
You are a fucking idiot you fuckernut
Please, compare dual G4 with dual P4. Or single G4 with single P4. Otherwise you compare nothing.
Less is more !
Could someone with a clue maybe give us some examples of why a 64 bit PowerPC is a Good Thing?
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
PowerPC was designed from the POWER architecture to replace it, and has been designed from the beginning to support 32-bit and 64-bit versions. The architecture is actually designed from the beginning to be a 64-bit architecture, and the common desktop implementations are only the 32-bit subset of the original design.
Here's some additional background info:
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Could give a lot more credibility to the rumors circulating about quad-processor Macs being tested internally at Apple.
Jesus, could you imagine the combination of Quartz Extreme unloading all your display computations to a 128MB ATI 9700 board while FOUR 1.5 or higher GHz G4s crunched your digital video projects?
My god, you'd be able to play Unreal 2003, encode a DVD from raw DV, rip and play MP3s with visualization going, all with plenty of proc. power to spare for pr0n or whatever else us legions of geeks like to do, ALL AT ONCE!!!!
How powerful can computers get before they can do more than what any one person could possibly keep track of at once?
Guys, guys! Enough! It's just a label. If it's backward-compatible with the PowerPC spec, it's a PowerPC. You're starting to sound like me:
Me: What kind of CPU is in there?
Other: 450 MHz.
Me: Yeah but what chip?
Other: A Pentium.
Me: Where did you find a Pentium running at 450 MHz?
*sigh*
"How can you claim that you are anti-crack, while still writing a window manager?" — Metacity README
First off, I know almost nothing about the technical aspects of processors, so if this sounds like a clueless question, my apologies. However, I am aware that programs compiled for 32-bit processors won't work on a 64-bit processor. If that's the case, what happens if Apple should jump to this chip? Does that mean we Mac users have yet another OS 9-to-X-type wait while developers drag their feet updating their apps or is there some way that a 64-bit processor can also handle 32-bit apps? As far as I can see, that's the only problem with Apple going to this chip. I'm not sure how eager Apple will be to annoy users who are finally seeing the light at the end of the OS X tunnel.
--Rick "If it isn't broken, take it apart and find out why."
At least they didn't give it a TLA. (Three Letter Acronym)
BTW, Macintosh is "Machine Always Crashes, If Not The Operating System Hangs"
Did your mom tell you that one?
And your iBook is actually slower than a P3-600 MHz
on most things (especially since you don't have altivec).
Hey, that's just great, but it doesn't mean the rest of us don't need faster machines just because you don't do any heavy computing. Or, should we call it a day, close Intel, AMD, Motorola and stick with the CPU speeds we have now forever? After all, it's enough for you...
Does anyone still actually use PPC anymore, besides Apple? I havn't seen many IBM machines at all with them, even the big ones. Why is IBM going through the trouble?
IBM has alread licensed Altivec from Motorola as far back as 1998-2000, allegedly to help with the design of the PowerPC variant used in the Gamecube. The PowerPC 405 embedded processor in the Gamecube contains 38 additional instructions for vector FP math (vs. the 162 in Altivec). A glance at this PDF file from the web makes me pretty sure that these aren't just lifted from Altivec. Instead of Altivec's 128-bit 4 32-bit FP vectors, Gecko adds instructions for fitting 2 32-bit FP numbers in a single 64-bit FPU register and working with them. It also adds some odd but interesting MMU features.
Anyway, I know it's been licensed because back in 2000 there was a lot of conspiracy theories that Motorola was preventing IBM from selling faster clocked PPC chips to Apple than they could produce via an obscure clause in that license. Both parties denied it, of course. I don't really believe that was the case. I think it was just bitter rumor-mongering by Mac users who were rightfully angry at Motorola for pissing away the performance (and MHz) advantage that PowerPC had on x86 chips back in the 603/604e and Pentium/PPro days.
Oh, admittedly, the MHz advantage went away as Intel/AMD extended their pipelines for that explicit purpose earning theirselves increased performance penalties for mispredicted branches and requiring increased CPI for many instructions, but I still miss the days when PPCs were faster per clock AND had higher clock rates. Now the clock rate advantage is so extreme that the PowerPCs' better performance per cycle doesn't catch up for the most commonly executed code. Once again, though, I digress.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
IBM already licensed the technology. There isn't any reverse engineering involved here. However, I think they'll call it VMX as opposed to just altivec.
IBM is already using the same processor is in RISC based servers. They are just trickling it down to the desktops. IBM is bassackwards from Intell...
Intell makes new chips for desktops and moves them up to servers.
IBM makes new chips for serves and moves them down to desktops.
You've got the wrong kind of "proprietary" in mind. Compaq used proprietary boards so that you couldn't upgrade with standard parts, were locked into their upgrade path. For a standard user, this did not offer any additional functionality.
Apple uses proprietary boards so they can offer features like autoswitching networking (just plug in an ordinary ethernet cable between two macs, and the two computers show up on each others local network), target disk mode (use a scsi or firewire cable between two macs, and one computer becomes a HDD on the second computer), instant dynamic network configuration (change your IP/ or configure multiple network devices with just a few clicks, no restarts), dynamically driving multiple monitors with multiple cards (I can plug in two graphics cards, and two monitors, then tell the mac which monitor to drive with which card, while its on.), and USB/Firewire plug and play ease that's still years ahead of windows (oh look, it's the windows hardware manager, again...). On the portables, multimonitor/external monitor support is so slick, it's enough to make a Wintel laptop user cry.
There are plenty of things you _can't_ do as a result of proprietary HW, such as move as quickly with the industry as new HW comes out (lets see how long it takes apple to get AGP 8x...*roll*), but the main differences in functionality between MacOS9 and Win9X/ME/XP is the hardware tweaks that you don't realize by using "open" HW. In the Wintel world, the peripherals people don't work with the OS people, who don't live on the same continent as the BIOS ppl, etc. etc.
Mac admins live for these tweaks, since it means hours less frustration and "pointless clicking" to set up an office of computers, or get them networking just so, using external devices, while adapting the systems to individual work flow and idiosyncrasies.
This is where I get my recommended daily allowance of "Foot in Mouth."
Synopsis: "Someone in the hardware industry has created a faster CPU".
Moderation: -1 Redundant.
-... ---
We've been running them for maybe 5 years or so - RS64, RS64II, RS64III, etc.
This post is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
I've been running into a new acronymn the last few weeks
:)
;)
;)
VMX.
Its a PowerPC vector instruction ISA...
Anywho, the most interesting run in was in an IBM publication where they referred to AltiVec/VMX as the vector instructions on a Motorola 74XX 'G4' CPU
Anywho, point is, the only people in the entire world I've heard referring to AltiVec as VMX are IBMers
But IBMers like to use alternative words to the rest of the computer industry
Anywho, my prediction is these chips feature a VMX unit
It is a very IBM sounding acronym, and matches up with other vector ISA names... MMX, SSE, SSE2, VIS, MDMX etc
---
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Jedi & Last *-fytr
Based on the award winning Power4 design, this processor is an 8-way superscalar design that
fully supports Symmetric MultiProcessing," the description says. "The processor is further
enhanced by a vector processing unit implementing over 160 specialized vector instructions and
implements a system interface capable of up to 6.4GB/s.
It's the 8-way ss + new vector instruction set that's new. The 8-way would drive the overall bandwidth requirement.
Clearly this is no longer a RISC design because the original PPC instruction set had what, 174 instructions? So add 160 more and you have 334.
If Apple ever moved to Intel, they would be crushed.
You imply that moving to x86 (Intel) would mean Apple no longer maintains a separate platform from Microsoft, but this isn't necessarily so. Just because Apple currently uses one processor architecture in their machines doesn't mean they can't switch to another while maintaining their separation from the PC world with proprietary ROMs and the like.
The idea of Apple moving to x86 doesn't mean they would release a boxed OS X that runs on a standard Dell box. More likely they'd just come out with new Macs that are functionally identical to the current machines, but with an Intel or AMD chip inside instead. That way they maintain their focus as a hardware company first, while gaining the ability to run Windows apps natively and the economies of scale that result from using CPUs that are practically commodity items.
The Mac isn't about being the fastest machine on the block, it's about being the best designed, easiest to use, most useful machine on the block.
And if a Mac had a blazing fast x86 chip inside it'd STILL be the best designed, easiest to use, and most useful machine on the block. It'd just be fast as shit as well. Not that I'm not happy with the speed of my Mac, but if the speed gap gets any wider Apple would be crazy not to consider switching.
All movements for social change begin as missions, evolve into businesses, and end up as rackets.
Not too long ago, it was announced that the Playstation 3 "Cell" processor was in the final stages of design. The article about it mentioned it being a 4 to 16 way superscalar design, and it is also being developed in part by IBM. Maybe IBM is trying to save some money here and find a new market for the PS3 chips. Since they are quite powerful and relatively inexpensive, they would work nicely in a desktop
intel said the Xscale would do 900MHz but all the test chips and produvtion has been 400MHz
so really unless you have benchmarked it (A chip which I havnt seen) you can say that
compare a 400MHz G3 against a 400MHz Xscale and then we can talk
in terms of apps like telephonery and video then the ARM wins because of the DSP extensions in terms of floating point add a VPU and then the ARM is not to shabby
regards
John Jones
That all 160 of these vector instructions take that format? I do find that a bit hard to belive.
Also, load store instructions don't take that form.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
What, you're going to blame this fiasco on one age group being myopic
Absolutely not. The wrongdoers and politicians span several generations.
My point was how commonplace the rhetoric of "free market says, so everyone should just cave and do" has become. This is a relatively new development, one that flies in the face of economic theory, free markets, free societies, and a functional society, and one that would have been laughed into submission a few short years ago.
These days one rarely hears a rebuttal, so I begin to wonder why that is and speculate that there is perhaps a group of people who do not grasp capitalism, perhaps because the only form of it they've been exposed to is the corporate perversion of it we've had throughout the late 80s, 90's, and early naughties.
Nothing more was implied or intended than that.
Oh, and if any one generation were to take a big chunck of the blame for the philosophical myopia and malaise that has engulfed so much of the American psyche over the last twenty years, I would most certainly rank my generation at the top of that list, though, as you rightly point out, the blame is a little more widely spread than that.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Right on the money there Daniel. The PowerPC chip has indeed been a 64-bit processor for a number of years now. In the server market, IBM uses the same identical PowerPC chips en masse (called SStar and iStar) in their iSeries and pSeries lines.
A Power4 chip is actually a dual core processor, so this 8-way would actually only be 4 chips. IBM packages these today in what they call MCMs (multi-chip modules) that are about 4" square pieces of ceramic with 4 processors embedded in the ceramic.
Rumour is that they will actually take a single Power4 and only enable one of the two cores to create uni-processor systems say for the iSeries and pSeries line, which both use the Power4 processor in their high ends (and pSeries recently announced some lower end P4s).
I would personally love to see a 64-bit PPC ported copy of WinXP, opens up a TON of opportunities!
Those G5 rumors are old. The e500 was announced last Oct as Motorola's first G5 processor. It is only 2 way super scaler IIRC and is an extremely low power device.
The G4 is going to have its pipeline extended again is the latest rumor.
Apperently with all the restructuring going on the G5 became embedded and to keep Apple happy they'll crank the Mhz up on the G4 by making the pipeline longer.
Go Apple. For years I wasn't interested, the Amiga was way better. Then Apple went PPC and had a great CPU, but they were tied down by their shitty OS. Cooperative multitasking in the 90s??
Finally they've got an OS that is interesting (BSD with a cool looking interface that is OpenGL powered as of 10.2(Jaguar)), but now their processors are obsolete.
If this comes out and is good I may jump from x86 again. I don't know if I'd stick with the native OSX or run Debian GNU/Linux though. Tough choice..
Correction:
This: "Intel has *not* monopolized CPU sales quite yet."
Should read: "Intel has *not* monopolized x86 CPU sales quite yet."
Actually I should also toss the "quite yet". I cannot predict the future after all.
Table-ized A.I.
gelfling wrote
and, earlier, autopr0n wrote
RISC is about reduced complexity and designing architectures for best use by optimizing compilers.
If anyone actually wants to learn something (rather than simply spouting ignorant marketing propaganda) you can check out John Mashey's periodic RISC vs. CISC article from the comp.arch newsgroup.
The essence of the RISC philosophy can be summed up in this quote from Hennessey & Patterson: "Make the common case fast and rare case correct." The question is, however, how do we know what is the common case? The answer from H&P is to look at the occurrance of various instructions in actual programs. Since most programs are generated by compilers, this amounts to looking at what is used most commonly by compiler code generation engines.
Once you have made an inventory of instruction usage, what you find is that lots of time and instructions are spent moving data between registers and memory because you don't have enough registers, and over 80% of the addressing is done with only a couple of addressing modes. In other words, compilers are simply no good at making use of most complicated instructions common in most pre-RISC architectures (including the 80x86).
When you design an architecture that caters to the kind of usage a compiler likes, you come up with an architecture that has lots of registers and performs all arithmetic operations on values in the registers, only accessing memory with simple load and store instructions supporting a few simple addressing modes (absolute address, register direct, and, possibly, register direct with immediate index). Along the way, in order to make various CPU bookkeepping tasks as simple as possible, you will use a fixed length instruction word with only a few instruction formats, and ensure than any single instruction can only cause one fault condition (memory access fault, instruction operand fault, etc.)
This general description is a pretty good match for almost all, so-called, RISC architectures: MIPS, M88000, ROMP, POWER, PowerPC, PA-RISC, Alpha, AMD29000, Sparc, ARM, Clipper, etc. The fact that all of these architectures share so many common features says something profound about the descriptive power of the term 'RISC' which cannot, easily, be said of the converse term, 'CISC'.
Just to head off the other popular mis-conception concerning RISC vs. CISC: RISC has nothing to do with the implementation features of a given processor, only with the programmer visible architectural features (number of registers, instructions, instruction encoding, etc.). Hence, no matter what name Intel or AMD use to describe the current dynamic micro-coding scheme used to salvage another generation of bloated, power guzzling, 8-bit microcontroller follow-ons, the 80x86 will never be considered a RISC processor.
.. sez heise. according to the article, it's supposed to be compatible to motorola's "Book E" spec for the G5 (MPC8540).
any grp of people that place so much emphasis on religion need to be eradicated -- as do christians