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Apple and IBM Working Together on 64-bit CPUs
Currawong writes "eWeek reports that IBM Microelectronics is working with Apple on a 64-bit PowerPC processor called the
GigaProcessor Ultralite (GPUL). Unlike previous reports, eWeek now reports that Apple is testing the chip for use with future hardware. IBM apparently also plans to use the processor in linux-based servers. It's believed IBM will disclose some details of the processor in October at the upcoming Microprocessor Forum in San Jose, California. While this story is similar to recent stories about Apple using Power4-based IBM chips in future Macs, the GPUL, unlike the Power4, is smaller, runs cooler and consumes far less power, making it suitable for desktop machines and small servers. The processor is described as having the same 8-way superscalar design fully supporting Symmetric MultiProcessing." We had a previous story about these new chips.
It would be nice, but perhaps we won't be that lucky. The current g4 duals are horrifically loud, compared to their predecessors.
a grrl & her server
I like to leave it on all the time so that I can acess my files from elsewhere without having carry any form of media (e.g. floppy / CD-R / ZIPdisk), but if either myself of my girlfriend want to work (old-fashioned pen and paper) at the desk, we really have to turn it off.
This is why people have a problem with fans - they are just too loud, even when they are quiet. A silent computer is a much more attractive idea. Obvioulsy different peole havedifferent thresholds, but in a small apartment, your threshold is often lower.
This idea was invented by Shampoo.
Except for some of the CRT iMacs which used convection to cool themselves, every G3 and G4 Mac has at least one fan.
I have a feeling that although this chip runs cooler, it will still be hotter compared to the G3, maybe the current G4.
Er... huh?
Have you ever used an SGI machine? The CPU is not anything special. I have compared SGI's side by side with Intel machines. Sure, the MIPS processor, much like any pure RISC processor, can do a few operations a little faster but the Intel chips flat out blow away those chips in 90% of the operations. Plus the Intel chips run at much higher clock speeds so it's a double whammy against the SGI. The Intel machines are way faster, even at the same clock speed.
And then you factor in price... well, the Intel hardware is just a better deal all around.
Now, I'm not talking about graphics cards. That's where SGI has made their mark. Their OpenGL hardware has usually been superb to anything available on the PC. Although that gap has narrowed over the last few years. It's no wonder SGI has had financial difficulties.
See macedition.com/nmr/nmr_20020914.php
(Disclaimer: Naked Mole Rat Reports are usually hilarious. But for the first time, on Sept. 14 there was a "guest columnist," who wrote a lame parody of those Nigerian spam messages.)
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
I think Intel has had one big reason to make their chips better performers: AMD. I don't knock IBM, but the fact of the matter is that IBM hasn't been at the top of the microprocessor curve for a few years, in my opinion. While many systems still use IBM's mainframes, quite a few systems have converted to n-way multi-processing Intel-based architectures. As far as Apple's developers having to rewrite stuff, I believe that most if not all of Jaguar (OS X 10.2) is compiled with gcc3.1 - so, for Apple it would be as simple as ensuring a decent backend to gcc3.x for this new processor (chances are that this is already 'in the works' by IBM).
I'm not sure that SGI has any particular headway any longer. Maybe against certain machines in Apple's lineup, but I know here at my current employer, we've been using SGI Octanes and Octane IIs for heavy duty image processing in our products and we're getting ready to deploy a new architecture based on a dual-Xeon HP box running Linux (to replace Irix which we use on the SGIs). Performance of the image processing applications is unchanged or better and the cost savings to the company are very decent. Incidentally, the SGIs that I know of all use MIPS processors - only machines from Digital (DEC), now Compaq, use Alpha processors, to my knowledge.
The motherboards used in current Apple products are, for all intents and purposes, 'PC' mobos. They have standard AGP & PCI slots, use PC RAM (DDR at 133MHz or more) and provide connectivity through a number of PC compatible technologies (Intel's USB bus, IEEE 1394/Firewire, Ethernet, etc.) Its not really a matter of the processor/mobo combo being PC or not, its a matter of what OS you want to run. You can get a Mac and run most of the popular flavors of Linux on it (notable exception: RedHat). No problem. I'm not sure that much of anything will light a fire under the Wintel monopoly. Just my opinion, though.
While this story is similar to recent stories about Apple using Power4-based IBM chips in future Macs, the GPUL, unlike the Power4, is smaller, runs cooler and consumes far less power
Uhm, GigaProcessor and POWER4 is the same thing, different names. GP was the internal name. It still sounds like GPUL is POWER4-based, just not a repackaging of the exact same processor.
BAH! the requirement of a fan on the processor is based on very poor heatsink design. remember a small plastic fan is cheaper than a large block of copper and aluminum. and ANY processor including the cook-your-egg AMD's can use a fanless heatsink IF the heatsink is properly designed and sized, AND your case has a poper heat chimney and vents in it's design so that convection will promote cooling.
Using fans is the cheaters way out or the cheap way out.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
What are you smoking? The Darwin kernel can scale up to 32 processors. The 2 processor limit is definitely not in the kernel itself. It is actually a probably with the design of the G4. Instead of a point to point link to the memory controller the G4s are on a shared bus. Stick more than two processors on a shared bus topology like that and your overhead is going to eat any extra performance you can manage to get.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
I think you've been playing with consoles a bit too much. 64-bit here refers to the size of general-purpose registers and memory addressing.
With 64-bit you can address over 4 terabytes. Do you feel the need for more than that?
You can also work with integers up to 18.446.744.073.709.551.615, and floating-point numbers up to 1.7976931348623158 E+308. Feel the need for more than that?
There are wider registers in the CPU (such as the dedicated SSE2 or Altivec registers), but for normal operation I think 64-bit should keep us going for quite a few years.
RMN
~~~
There's little to worry about with porting of apps. Unless you've got some seriously processor dependent assembly in your PPC binary there's little that will stop it from running on a POWER chip. The PowerPC instruction set is a subset of the POWER one meaning POWER ostensibily has more instructions besides the ones PowerPC has. It is trivial to compile an app for generic PPC code that will run on every PPC chip you can find.
I don't get what you mean by the G4 "showing its age", it isn't some ancient chip pulled out of a tar pit. It's performance problems come from the low clock speed and the lack of multiple floating point pipelines. That is more of an implementation issue than an overall design issue. The Athlon has 3 FP pipelines, the G4 has one. AltiVec is fine if you can fine the parallelism it is good at in your code. Most people for go that effort and stick to simple floating point operations. Hence the Athlon's high floating point performance.
Please people, 64-bits does not equal performance, instructions per second is the important factor. With 8 way superscalar goodness the POWER4 design gets stuff done not with its 64-bit GPRs but the fact it can suck down multiple integer and floating point operations at once and out of order. You've got the potential of 4 FLOPs per cycle in the POWER4, at just 1.25GHz that's 5 GFLOPS of plain old floating point performance. That is twice the Athlon's performance at the same clock speed. A second core would effectively double that rate since the cores on a POWER4 share their L2 cache making them look like a single chip.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Since when does Apple have any hardware engineers?
Umm... Since Woz started working in Steve Jobs garage? One of their divisions is the "Hardware Engineering Division"
Even their boards are outsourced
I'm pretty sure that the design is done in-house. some manufacturing may be outsourced.
let alone the actual chips.
I don't know if they STILL have any chip designers (I sort of doubt it) but when AIM first got started the Somerset chip design facility was a joint venture between all three partners including Apple. I believe some of the chip designers at the facility were technically on the books as Apple employees. At the very least the chip designers at Somerset worked closely with Apple.
If Apple had any ability to develop their own CPUs they wouldn't still be stuck with the pre-historic G4, they would simply ditch IBM and use their own chips.
Despite the fact that they DO have hardware engineers, and may even have a few that specialise in chip design to evaluate & work with the other two AIM partners it is obvious that they are not themselves, and are unlikely to become, a chip designers. Though because of the way patent and license agreements between the AIM partners they probably could get into it. But that would be a nightmare, they would bear all the costs and still be stuck with a single supplier (themselves) that would likely fall behind the competition.
That's the same as the pentium architecture, but it's never stopped intel from making 4-way Xeons. All serious SMP machines have cross-bar switches, such as MIPS, SPARC, Alpha, IBM POWER and Athlon.
Stick Men
Actually, I'd argue for most users the Pentium II was the point where things got fast enough to be usable. For paper writing, email and web, a Pentium II will do just fine. I know because I've been able to do all of these on a Pentium 200, which is significantly slower. (granted I was using Linux, but still.)
Where processor speed helps in my experience is a) heavy duty mathematical software and b) compiling software. For graphics, acceleration cards do far more than a processor upgrade, and memory is also a common bottleneck (or was - with the really cheap memory we have now I suspect it's less of a problem.) A fast processor can help if you have lots of excess toys running, but for doing your job the Pentium II was when that task was effectively solved.
There is a reason the computer market is saturating. People don't feel the need to upgrade so much. If they upgrade their software, it may demand more resources, but people don't feel the need to use Office XP or whatever if 97 does the job. And despite what we all think of Microsoft, it does do the job. Hence Microsoft's consideration of subscription licenses - their revenue stream is likely falling off somewhat, or at least not growing as fast.
Don't confuse Want with Need. From a marketing standpoint they may look the same, but they actually aren't. In a recession we notice that fact more.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
Actually, WinNT also ran on the NEC MIPS and Motorola PowerPC platforms.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
- Evelyn Beatrice Hall
OK, folks, a 64-bit address goes up to 2^64, which is 2^4 * 2^60. Crudely, that's about 16 * (2^10)^6, or 16 * (10^3)^6. Now let's review our metric prefixes, shall we?
So, yes, a 64 bit processor can address more than 4 terabytes. Roughly 4 million times as much as that, actually. That could be of some importance. :-)
More seriously, I can foresee within 5 years the certainty that addressing 4 terabytes would not be enough. Indeed, you could predict somebody would whine about gnu tar's 4 terabyte limit, and how they now can't back up their RAID full of pr0n. :-)
Babar
I don't have a DVD player at home, but I just got the new Monster's Inc. DVD (yes, I know I need to buy a player, but I'm cheap...). I happened to bring a brand-new ThinkPad home from the office to do some work. No RCA out, just S-Video. Cool, I can work with that.
So I pull out my S-Video cable, my computer speakers, and subwoofer, and get it all hooked up. Pop in the DVD and play it. Hmm... the TV is mirroring the laptop screen, but the video doesn't show up. After playing around with it for half an hour (and trying two different software players), I finally notice this little warning that says that "Copy protected DVD's will not output to the S-Video port" (or something like that).
WTF? Why even have a DVD drive and an S-Video port if I can't combine them? Note to everyone: Don't buy a ThinkPad if you think that there's EVER a chance you'll want to play a DVD through the S-Video port. If IBM is so damned concerned about DRM, they need to put a big sticker on the laptop that this is a DRM-enabled system. I guarantee that I will never buy another ThinkPad.
Anyway, next night, I bring home the Apple PowerBook. Hook everything up, pop in the DVD, hit play. No problemo.
This is bullshit. I have both Arabic and Hebrew in the Internationalization preferences on OS 10.2. Are you getting confused with the uproar about Microsoft not making Hebrew and Arabic versions of Office for OSX?
I live in Japan, and the main reason friends of mine are switching to OSX is because switching the whole system from Japanese to English or back is completely effortless. Change a system preference log out, log in. You can even set up a computer with one user in English and another in Japanese!
You buy a computer here and it comes bundled with a Japanese version of Windows. You want an English operating system and you'll get charged extra for it. Buy a Mac with OSX and all you have to do is change the system preferences.