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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.
the GPUL, unlike the Power4, is smaller, runs cooler and consumes far less power, making it suitable for desktop machines and small servers
Does anyone know if the chip would actually be cool enough so that it would not require a fan? One of my favorite features of the G4 is that it requires no fan whatsoever. My PowerMac G4 makes so little noise that sometimes it's hard to tell if its running or not without looking at the little glowing power button on the front.
I think this is one of the nicest features of Macintosh computers and if they need to add a fan I think that will be a real shame. On the other hand, Motorolla really hasn't gotten their act together, so Apple may not have a choice.
Karma: Chevy Kavalierma.
A key question: will this chip have DRM (aka Digital Rights Reduction) features built-in? If NOT, there could be a good market here for IBM as the free alternative to Intel.
sPh
Yes, a new 64-bit PPC processor would be great, because the G4 is really showing its age. But I don't think this will be something to drive Wintel users over to Apple. If anything, it will just help Apple hang on to its existing marketshare.
The thing to remember is that "switching" is expensive, and not just for the new hardware. When a longtime PC user switches to Apple, they have to replace all of their software with Mac versions (and in a lot of cases, say goodbye to certain titles altogether). A new PPC processor isn't going to make that any less of a reality (unless of course, it allows VirtualPC to run fast enough that it's actually usable).
A 64-bit PPC would almost assuredly be backwards compatible with 32-bit PPC applications so for current Apple users, it will be a big boost in speed without having to reinvest in all of their software immediately (although, if you want the most speed, you'll eventually need to upgrade to the 64-bit versions of your apps).
Great news for Apple, but it's not a "Windows killer".
So what is Apple's plan for all this horsepower? It seems that the current 7450/7455 G4 chips have more than enough "under the hood" to comfortable kick the likes of Photoshop and Illustrator around, not to mention the iApps, and everybody's favorite Final Cut Pro. So this news begs the question: where does the GPUL fit in to Apple's master plan?
Perhaps, just perhaps, has Apple something up their sleeve? Like a purchase of Alias|Wavefront to go along with their other recent acquisitions, and fully stack the high-end graphics deck? Or maybe pro-E has finally gotten their act together and is releasing a Mac client? Or are there going to be some new Xserves based on this chip, and maybe we'll actually see some type of installed base start to grow in the Apple-branded server market.
Who knows... but as big as this news is (for Apple-heads, at least), the upcoming developements this GPUL (potentially) foreshadows loom much larger.
So, does this mean that to compete, intel will have to migrate itanium down to commodity hardware in a hurry? What about recouping their R&D costs, and what about the cooling issues and prduction costs?
Stick Men
"New processor Z has just been released. Sources say the processor is so fast typical users won't have a need for it, but is expected to be popular among engineering and CAD users."
I first started reading this line when the 386/25 came out. Replace CAD with 3D Graphics for this decade. Every time a new processor comes around, they say almost exactly the same thing - watch for it in the press. So far the prediction hasn't shown to be true.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Most companies would have said: "sorry Motorola - you are out of gas. We just signed with Digital (Alpha) [or IBM or Intel]. Thanks for the memories". Instead Apple force-fed the entire PowerPC thing.
I wonder what their motivation was? And did Apple truely benefit in the long run?
sPh
If you read the article you'll notice that ibm is developing the cpu.
/. - never mind.
oh wait, this is
Um, no. It would mean that your "state-o-the-art" PowerBook wouldn't run the previous version of the OS.
... yes, they got "Steved".
Clearly your sarcasm detector is set too high. When I said "the one you just bought" that means today (as in just, as in not 64 bit). So when Steve Jobs gets up and says "32 bits is dead" your screwed. Just ask all the people who bought quadras so they would be able to run OS X. Then it didn't appear for a few years and
Doubtful, if a 1GHz GPUL processor runs 2x faster than a 1GHz G4 processor
Clearly you have a short memory. The "emulated" 68k mode of PowerPCs (which were also supposed to be waaay faster) weren't because the emulator didn't fit in the cache. And for christ sakes, who the hell believes what chip companies say about speed anymore?
Yea, right. Since Apple has done such a poor job of allowing old apps to continue to function with a new their new OS, NOT!
I hope your fucking kidding. Clearly your not a Mac developer if you haven't been repeatedly screwed by Apple.
Go back to sleep, you clearly need it
So what's your excuse?
I am not a number! I am a man! And don't you
I think he's alluding, not to the OS9->OSX upgrade, but the 68K -> PPC conversion. The compatibility mode was, in my opinion, a tour de force, but they screwed developers by the Lisa Pascal to C switch. It wasn't just that C became the preferred development enviornment, it was because they decided not to support Pascal at all. This was a horrible miscalculation, because it put developers using what up to then was the preferred development environment at a huge disadvantage. They had to retrain their programmers and port their applications. This left some applications stranded in emulation land for two years or more.
I think he may also be referring to the death of OpenDoc, which badly burned many developers and for which I too still have not forgiven them. OpenDoc was brilliant and so, so close to being ready for prime time when it was killed. This was a one-two punch for many small developers -- once they spent perhaps eighteen months in their C conversion, they then spent another eighteen months or two years redesigning their application for an architecture that simply went up in smoke. I knew some small innovative software developers that had, perhaps, a two or three year lead over similar applications on the Windows end, who ended up behind, a place you simply can't afford to be if you are on a niche platform like the Mac. This experience soured many developers on Apple, and prepared many of them to be well disposed to open source.
Bitterness for past misdeeds aside, I expect a 32 bit to 64 bit conversion to go more smoothly than the 68K to PPC conversion, or the equivalent conversion on the Windows side.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
G4 chips have more than enough "under the hood" to comfortable kick the likes of Photoshop and Illustrator around, not to mention the iApps, and everybody's favorite Final Cut Pro.
You have *got* to be kidding. Enough power for FCP? Dude, I routinely run 30+ minute renders for a 3 minute chunk of video on a 933MHz G4, and I'm not even doing all that much. A few filters, some text generation, a mask or two and it's walk away from the machine time.
Apple could be shipping 8-way 2GHz G4s and it still wouldn't be enough.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
Even if the new chips are clock-for-clock identical to the current G4, the mere fact that they're running on a newer bus will make the machines much more powerful.
For more info about this, head over to Ars and check out the posts in the Mac Achaia by BadAndy from earlier this summer ("Altivec, anyone?" I think it was titled). He knows a hell of a lot more about this stuff than I do; it makes for fascinating reading, and you can really understand why faster CPUs alone won't cut it for Apple.
i'd be happy to use a ppc box as my desktop while not paying apple prices.
After you've checked out IBM's prices for PPC boxes you might not mind Apple's pricing so much...
--
Reverse outsourcing: it's the future
honestly have grown to love the steady white-noise of a running computer... I find it difficult to sleep if my computer is shut off
:-).
A bit off topic perhaps, but some people I know find they can get their young babies to go back to sleep by playing a recording of, say, a vacuum cleaner. Apparently the white noise is supposed to be similar to the sound of the womb.
I'm not at all sure what this says about you. Perhaps you want to go back...
To return to the topic, I find that I don't notice the "jet engine like" whine of my PC until I turn it off. It's then that I appreciate the peace and quiet. Frankly I'm all for more efficient CPUs.
Simon
..It can easily adapt and grow with new hardware and new architectures.
Microsoft has been dependant on Intel for a long time. Their one foray into another architecture (WinNT for the Alpha) was just a proof-of-concept, and didn't go anywhere, IIRC.
The Linux kernel covers several architectures. SGI, x86, Alpha, PPC, and StrongARM are just a few.
It's really nice to finally see a real, immediate threat to Microsoft's dominance. Apple and IBM have enough revenue to run a massive advertising campaign. Even if it just involves OS-X, it'll still produce a large shift away from Microsoft's domain.
What's this Submit thingy do?
Speaking as a luke-warm Apple fan & potential switcher, this sounds cool...but so have most of the daily "ray of hope" rumors that serious Apple fans have been kicking around for years.
IBM has known for many years that an Intel/MS monopoly ain't good for IBM. (Anyone recall OS/2 for PowerPC?) Pumping up Apple with better CPU's would be good strategy, even if they make no money on the chips. But what's taken them so long?
My impression is that Motorola's attitude & situation are so bad that Apple couldn't get much out of 'em with "we'll switch to IBM" threats.
Now if someone can actually SHIP substantial quantities of non-defective chips BEFORE Intel is cranking out Pentium 6's & Itanium 4's at 10GHz...
It's easy to make up & spread cool- and credible-sounding stuff. Finding & checking hard facts is hard work.
Fans aren't that bad until you realize you can't hear as well as you used to. I work in the server closet alot (moving offices right now) and I sometimes grab a pair of earplugs.
The whine isn't bad until you realize you used to watch TV on 12, and now it's got to be 15.
In fact, our whole world (mine, anyway) is like this - far more noise than we were intended to hear regularly, and it slowly causes us to lose frequencies and ranges...
Do you find yourself trying to figure out what people said?
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
As someone who has tinnitis (hearing a constant ringning / squealing noise,) I've grown to love computer fans in my bedroom. I had an old K6-2/400 with a monster of a fan on it and one on the front that made a fair deal of noise, I found that I actually was able to fall asleep much faster with that drowning out the ringing in my head. Light music is still supreme, of course, but fan noise works about as well. Now, if we could make musical fans...
No... that is what YOU are doing. You just made up a butty conspiracy, designed to cause fear where there was none.
MS honestly talks about what they are working on. Plans sometimes change, they announce the changed plans. Same with intel, IBM and most others.
Sun is a bit secretive, but Apple takes the cake. Their secrecy IMHO is detrimental to their sales and their users. The constant legal hassling of apple rumor sites (which would not even be necessary if they were upfront) is just plain gestapo.
Well. MOSR is the only site that's both constantly incorrect and constantly paid attention to. There are other sites that are just as full of crap, but MOSR gets attention... well... because they act like they get attention.
The frustrating thing with MOSR is that they seem to never fucking learn. They might always have well placed sources for their info, but... those sources are so overly optimistic that they consistently make MOSR look like idiots.
ThinkSecret and MacRumors are both much better rumor sites, and I don't believe that they detract from Apple's sales in the slightest. Nick DePlume of Thinksecret seems to care enough about accuracy that he doesn't make many long-distance predictions. I've never seen him be very incorrect. His steadfast accuracy has made me reconsider purchase of a PC desktop, lately, because he says ATI is working on an all-in-wonder card for the mac. I believe him completely.
MacRumors has a much higher volume of information, so sometimes they come up with crap, but they never make it sound more authoritative than it is. They don't act like you can bet the farm on their information.
At this point, MOSR needs to curl up and die. Back in the day, they had enough viewers and sources that they could have been the premier rumor site indefinitely. Even with Jobs' crackdown on leaks. But their BS predictions (and crappy management) probably alienated as many sources as it did readers. So now those sources go to Thinksecret.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
> I wonder what their motivation was? And did Apple
... a PowerBook fits the bill for all kinds of people, even in audio/video.
... no UNIX compatibility in Windows, lack of internationalization in Windows (there is only one Mac OS X for the whole world, fully Unicode), the unstable NT kernel. After using Macs for a while, you come to expect FireWire and Gigabit Ethernet and Wi-Fi and you get all kinds of things done that you wouldn't otherwise, because there is a whole system there, designed and qualified and tested and well-supported by a single support team.
> truely benefit in the long run?
Their motivation was to be in on the design of the CPU, to make sure it was small, low-power, highly-efficient. Apple has always had a good chunk of their business in portables, since the first PowerBook many, many years ago, and also they were making or working on Newtons and such, and small, quiet, desktops. If you are used to x86, there are a whole host of compromises that you don't question, but Apple's systems have been smaller, lighter, quieter, and have had MUCH longer battery life for years and years and years now.
The G4 gets dissed for only one reason: it was introduced just as Intel started their marketing-driven pursuit of clock speed, clock speed, clock speed. Before the low-power G4 could ramp up in clock speed, Intel was overclocking their big fat hungry chips and talking GHz. When you examine the actual performance of G4 and P4 systems, you see that there is so much more to the story. My PowerBook G4 has 5-hour battery life while Intel portable struggle to give you 2 hours, and the PowerBook is fast, fast, fast (I use mine as a portable recording studio, for example, and it is widely used as a portable TV studio with Final Cut Pro by CNN and many others). There is one company making a "luggable" P4 system now that's like a big briefcase with no batteries at all, simply so they could use a real P4 instead of the "mobile" P4m. You take its 20-pound self somewhere and plug it into wall power and get to work. Nobody is so power-starved on the Mac side that they want that
The big beige box PC seems like such a dinosaur to me after using Macs for the past few years. The huge fans, the noise, the lack of ports, the 15-hour USB MP3 transfers, the USB Ethernet adapters, no Wi-Fi built-in on most notebooks, even today