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IBM to Release 64-Bit, 1.8GHz Processor in 2003
Professor_Quail writes "A Forbes article supposed to be released tomorrow gives some details about the new PowerPC processor that IBM and Apple have been working together on; the chip is slated to be introduced at the end of next year. The introduction of this chip should put to rest any speculation that Apple is moving to an Intel platform."
If it would run Linux... Oh! Whatever! OSX is a BSD in its core! Ok
May be it's time to switch platform... I'll think about Apple on my equipment request if computers with 64bit CPUS will be available as desktops.
All it really says is that they plan to go into production of the 64 bit chips toward the second half of next year. "Industry" experts say that it would be used in the Mac. This is certainly a far cry from Jobs saying it - if anything, I think it makes the race between the two competing chip manufacturers all the more interesting. Apple, I should think, will select the company which will allow it to compete most effectively in the marketplace - not the first one who says in a press release that they plan to release bigger, faster, more powerful chips sometime next year..
Though we all know by now that cycles per second alone does not determine performance, the average consumer does not.
Though it is a revolutionary advance, they're more apt to see "64-bit" as a useless gimmick or even see it as inferior to "128-bit" Gamecube processors, while thinking that 1.8ghz is dirt slow, especially in 2003 when Intel will be in the 3's and AMD in the 2's, even if the chips still are 32-bit.
All you need to do is make a chip oscillate fast, and Joe Customer will think it's the greatest thing since sliced bread.
So it starts off a full GHz behind Intel? That's just great!
IBM server chip seen slimmed down for Apple Macs
So the IBM version still stuffs itself with pizzas, whereas the Apple version is on Slim-Fast shakes wearing a lycra outfit and eating mostly fruit (well eating Apples would be cannabalistic, unless they bring out the PowerHannibal chip variant)... ;)
Are you local? There's nothing for you here!
hmm.. OSX and a 1.8 GHz 64-bit proc? if only they would release one that didn't look like a desklamp, or a giant pastel egg, i'd be tempted to use one.
I will take price/performance any day.
Getting the volume up is going to be difficult for IBM..
The law is a weapon of the government, not a protection for the likes of you. Surely you understand that.
with a little luck this will save us from that dreaded 2^32 time bug !
MP3 Search Engine
I frequently see articles like this on tech sites. Articles about 64-bit chips, 64-bit linux, 64-bit Windows. None of the articles explains how 64-bit equipment will benefit the user. Perhaps techies assume it's obvious; to them it might be. To the rest of us it isn't. And I don't think I'm speaking from a particularly uninformed position. So can someone please point me to info explaining not the availability of 64-bit processing, but the advantages, capabilities, tradeoffs, etc?
A full GHz behind Intel? Do you judge cars based solely on peak RPM?
Slashdotter are stupid and biased.
Now that the speculation is over about Apple moving to Intel, maybe the feebs will stop posting here about their horseshit pipe dreams of running Mac OS X on their $2.99 home-built shitboxes.
This also makes me very glad I just cut a great deal to buy a used G4/733. It'll certainly tide me over until the Power Macs with these new CPUs under the hood make their debut.
The stupid "Megahertz Myth" has one year to live. That's one grave I can't wait to piss on. The next-gen Macs will smoke those Intel space heaters, and Intel and Windows will be consigned to their rightful place in the dustbin of history.
Many people doing CAD, circuit simulation, or editing large images need more than 4 gigs of ram now. 4 gigs is all you can get with 32 bits. On intel, using evil segments, you can use 36 bit. Win2k Enterprise does this...
Also, do not forget about Moore's Law. CPU's keep getting faster. Problem is hard disks are not. So more RAM for caching will be the solution.
Checking pricewatch I see that 2 gig pc100 dimms are less than $500 each.
The law is a weapon of the government, not a protection for the likes of you. Surely you understand that.
At the end of next year? Apple thinks I'm going to wait an entire year for a processor that's considered slow by today's PC standards? I'm sick and tired of being at the low end of the technology curve. Apple may not be switching to an intel processor, but I very well may be. I love my Mac, but I'm not about to pay $3,000 for a stick in the mud.
--Bennett Prescott
Former Lord Of Packets
Good to see Apple back out on the cutting edge, where it belongs. 64-bit PPC architecture with marketable clock speed and OS X 10.2: holy smokes! Get to the back of the bus, Microsoft. Take your Crayola XP desktop with you.
I assume one of the Linux PPC distros will be on board with the new chip, once it's on the street. Fun for the whole family.
This is my post. There are many others like it. If you don't like what you read here, go try one of the others.
I was like... you know... posting a flame on slashdot while logged in... and then beep... and I was modded to -1... so nobody could see my post. So now I log in as an AC... because mods don't want to waste their points on me. AC Swith.
Slashdotter are stupid and biased.
Hrm, intel/AMD will be at what then, 4ghz? :P
:P
64 bit is nice, but I doubt the chip will be more powerful then an x86 chip at twice speed.
Keep in mind that 64 bit chips do not simply work at twice the speed that 32 bit chips do, unless they are working on 64 bit integer numbers (in which case, they will actually work faster then 2x the speed of a 32 bit chip). Unlike the move from 16 bit to 32 bit, where 16 bit integers (either -32k to 32k or 0 64k values) were to small for lots of work, especially work with memory addresses on machines with >64k of ram
Nowadays, most CPUs (including x86) have 64bit floating point coprocessors to handle most mathematical code, so 64bit CPUs won't give you much of an improvement there either.
on machines with >4gb of ram, it will be a big improvement, but with advances in virtual memory it won't be as much of an advance, since programs can work in their own 4gig memory space on systems with more then 4 gigs of ram, and the virtual memory hardware can use more then 32 bits for mapping addresses.
Anyone, one only has to look at the difference between a Nintendo 64 (64 bit CPU) and a PC (32bit CPU) to see that CPU speed (and graphics accelerators!) has a much greater impact on performance then the bit width of the CPU.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
"The introduction of this chip should put to rest any speculation that Apple is moving to an Intel platform."
Especially since Apple has never changed their mind before, about anything major.
Casual Games/Downloads
I'm pretty positive the current dual processor Ghz machines out right now are 64 bit already. So start thinking about that request now.
C'mon ... Mac OS/X for x86 doesn't really have much to do with Intel, but with Microsoft. A Mac OS/X running on Intel hardware is nothing but Microsoft's worst nightmare in terms of what it can do to its market. So it's just a trumpcard in negotiations with Microsoft (i.e. "If you stop Office/Mac, we drop the atomi^M^M^M^M^M Mac OS/X for x86").
The Raven
The Raven
This is just confirmation of threads folks on appleinsider.com and other mac websites have been following for quite some time.
Based on all the rumor and innuendo that is swirling around for the last 3 months, it is highly likely that this is indeed the chip Apple will be migrating to, and that it will be out at some point in 2003...probably the fall, though opinions on that vary.
At the Microprocessor Forum on the 15th (Tuesday) IBM will be giving a long talk on the nature of this chip, and that's the talk Mac enthusiasts have been waiting for to see what's what with the particulars...so stay tund for that to receive more information than the Forbes article had.
I'm really sucked at the lack of coherent logical thought displayed in this thread. Linux had to reinvent everything that was in BSD? Is that why Linux had multithreading, and multiple CPU support years before BSD?
Don't the wrong impression, I don't give a shit one way or another. But you are quite stupid.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
...or at least mod it Funny
Apple will get a good cpu. Motorolla fell far behind from its comfortable lead.
----
Go canucks, habs, and sens!
Preliminary ratings for a 2-core AMD Opteron are 8100+. That would indicate a chip running at about 2.5 GHz. And it will run all x86 code, including SSE2. No Altivec, but I'm willing to bet it'll still blow the G5 away.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Can you give us an example of any car that is faster then a car with an engine where the peak RPM is more then 2.2 times as high?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Linux == GNU, which is not crutchety shitty UN*X.
I don't know about you, but some people define "crutchety shitty" in terms of a monolithic kernel design. (I don't; monolithic kernels have their uses.) Linux is based on the same sort of monolithic kernel design as BSD and UNIX® systems, and the GNU/Linux operating system is based on Linux. Thus, some consider GNU/Linux "crutchety shitty" in that sense. HURD, on the other hand, runs on top of the Mach microkernel (though it'll be ported to the faster L4 microkernel before 1.0). Darwin (the open-source core on which the proprietary Mac OS X GUI runs) is essentially FreeBSD ported to Mac hardware, running on top of Mach.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Now we need to get these 64bit chips out so we can start thinking about the 128 bit chips and argue over who makes the better desicions there.
so x86-128? that could be intersting
Actualy the limits are 4 gigabytes, and 16 exabytes (2^32, and 2^64) respectively. However, there are ways to get around this limit (after all, there were 16 bit machines with more then 64k of ram, and machines today with more then 4 gigs running on 32 bits)
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I'd rather have a Power4 (which is available now of course) than wait a year for a crappy stripped Power4.
-Kevin
Checking pricewatch I see that 2 gig pc100 dimms are less than $500 each.
:P
Or you could get four 512 meg sims for $25 each
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
--the fabled G5. Now maybe I can finally afford a $%^& G3 chipped machine. Us po guys gots to use them olden pooters, my best mac is only a 166 now
%^(
still love it tho!
%^)
This is not something they should just spring on their developers.
Nerd: Derogatory term typically directed at anybody with a lower Slashdot ID than you.
Dude the PowerPC has been 64bit for a very long time. This is nothing new.
It's the efficiency of the processor that matters, which is measured in IPC, the "instructions per cycle" that it can execute.
Be careful. Some architectures require more instructions to do the same thing. For instance, on 6502 or x86, you can load an integer from memory and add it to a register in one instruction, whereas on ppc, arm, or mips, this takes two.
Will I retire or break 10K?
At least, not necessarily.
Just because these new chips will be 64-bit does not mean they will be fast. 64-bit processors require more cache and main memory (because all of the memory pointers are 64-bits rather than 32) and cannot necessarily do most common computations faster.
Say you are doing a multiply operation. Very common. The numbers are, say, 500,000 and 42. Both of those numbers are occupying a full 64-bit register, even though they could be stored in 32-bit registers easily. The multiply operation still takes the same amound of time to complete, because the register size doesn't matter unless the numbers cannot fit.
Now, software doing math with numbers greater than ~4.3 billion (what will fit in a 32-bit register) will be able to perform those calculations more quickly, but rarely are such large numbers used. Certain operations, such as encryption and advanced mathematics, will be able to calculate up to 4 times faster, but again, this will not matter much for most applications (though perhaps folding@home and SETI@home will see a speed up).
Additionally, the increased code size caused by the larger memory pointers (about 5%) can actually slow code, because the cache hit rate will drop by that same 5%.
The Opteron processor's early benchmarks (which show that it simply kicks ass) are misleading because the Opteron has other tweaks to improve speed: Twice as many registers, an integrated low-latency memory controller, probably a better branch prediction unit, and a few other minor tweaks. The speed increase is not caused by the larger registers.
That said, IBM makes some very nice processors, and if they incorporate many of their ideas into this new CPU, Apple will hopefully be very competitive. (though those 1.8GHz better have a great IPC to compete with the Clawhammer and 3+GHz P4!)
64-bits is very nice in that Apples can now address >4GB RAM per process, but few people are finding the 4GB memory barrier to be all that restrictive, less professionals working on very high-end tasks such as gargantuan 3D models with staggeringly huge textures.
I'm all for Apple every since OSX was released, but let's not succumb to the 64-bit myth anymore than we should the MHz myth.
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
Apple is moving to an Intel platform.
Invoicing, Time Tracking, Reporting
Sorry but PPC is already 64b. The 1.8Ghz is the new part.
You're so wrong that your professor just took out a gun, stuck the barrel in his mouth and pulled the trigger.
If there were no branches, what you're saying might be true in certain circumstances. But life is unpredictable as are computer programs, so GHz are king.
""lower total cost of ownership"
Which matters how for a PC that you buy.
It doesn't.
Lets be straight here. OS X is a great OS. Its the best *nix out there by a country mile.
But when it comes to performance, the mac is in the "cute" category.
I use Macs all the time, but don't get into a pissing contest with a state-of-the-art x86 processor. Its 3 times as fast.
access to more memory. When I starte this business, 4G of memory seemed infinite. Now, its not enough for things like DMBS which could benefit from having access to terrabytes of memory.
When Photoshop takes 100's of meg of memory, you don't want your desktop PC paging just because you can't really access more than 2G in Windows.
Yea, sure. Fucking flamer bullshit. I bet you hump yer dad.
"This also makes me very glad I just cut a great deal to buy a used G4/733"
In the Intel world, an equivalent PC would be about an 800mhz P3.
I hope you didn't pay more than $500-600 for something like that.
But you're a sucker, so you probably paid twice that amount.
You'd be better off saying "Hey, the Mac's performance is state of the art 1998, but at least I have a snappy interface".
But you're kidding yourself otherwise.
You make me laugh.
because you get assfucked when you buy a Mac. $2500 for an 800mhz processor. You look like the goatc.ex guy with asscheeks spread so wide that you can see his tonsils.
Listen, I'm not a windows cheerleader, but to claim some sort of voodoo that makes PPC chips faster than state of the art P4's or XP+ makes you sound like a moronoic cheerleader.
x86 performance rules the roost today. There is no chip faster in the world. Not the sun chips, not the PPC chips. Nothing. Do you know why? beause there are $BILLIONS$ being invested by 2 competitors to gain marketshare.
By contrast PPC is at 1/20th the R&D level.
Don't be a fanboy. Know your limitations.
The melting point of steel is about 1500C.
The Athlon XP uses 12% more power than the P4, and hence produces 12% more heat. The problem with Athlons is that (unlike the P4) they don't include an integrated head spreader, so all heat is concentrated on a much smaller area. The Hammer / Opteron does have an IHS, and will probably dissipate between 60 and 80 Watts of heat. That is quite good for a 2.5 GHz, 64-bit chip (compare with 135 Watts for Intel's Itanium 2).
Flamer.
I think they should just put both 32bit and 64bit processor in computer and have a chip to decide when to use each based on how large the numberical values are. if(num > ~4.3billion) ? 64bit : 32bit
I work at the University of Colorado and we have a research lab of Itanium machines that are used to study "Compilation Issues on Itanium Architecture". They are currently doing research on how to get different programs to compile under the new architecture. The current problem is they can't even get the gcc compiler to work correctly, so don't hold your breath waiting for an Intel 64 bit solution.
Harddrives are going to die soon.
They will be replaced by a "memory brick" that plugs in at the end of your new serial IDE cable.
As a reply to this GHZ flame-war going on....
It's probably been said before, but as we all know GHZ does not equate to total performance. On this note I propose the term "clock-speed" be re-coined to its more appropriate term "clock-frequency"
I know, it'll never happen. Just a thought to get J. Q. Consumer set straight.
I'll bet he humped your mom.
So I guess you *should* call him dad.
I think its time Apple start calling anything based on the power PC architecture twice its clock speed, and anyhting thats both powerPC and 64 bits at 4 times its clock speed. After all, the processor does twice as much as a 32 bit processor in a given clock.
No it does not. Do you think bits are some sort of speed measurement? Like, "bits per second"? 64-bit means the chip has 64-bit registers. Basically what that means is it can work with larger numbers and - more importantly - larger memory addresses. It will take exactly the same time as a 32-bit chip to do a specific operation (ex., add two bytes, jump to a new address in a program, etc.). The speed at which operations are done depends on the chip's design and clock speed.
So calling this new PowerPC that runs at "1.8GHz" a "7.4GHz PowerPC" is just as legitimate as Intel calling their pentiums 2.8GHz, etc. (Cause they don't really actually run at 2.8GHz. That's just one clock rate that exists at some point on the processor. Processor clocking is far more complicated than that.)
What? Of course they run at 2.8 GHz. That's the clock speed; they can't help but run at 2.8 GHz. Even if they have absolutely nothing to do, they still go through 2.8 billion cycles each second. There are clockless chips (that work at a variable speed), but the P4 is not one of them.
RMN
~~~
he said peak RPM, not dispacement...an old 'Cuda with a 440 (or any other old muscle car) is faster than an S2000..and is redlined FAR FAR lower.
------ Work is so much easier when you don't
In that case they should also include an 8-bit chip, because the vast majority of values processed by any CPU is 8 bits long.
RMN
~~~
The saint jehosephat technical committee as your proof?
I heard the St. John's boy's choir has the opposite view.
No. What he meant was "do you have any proof that doesn't make everybody laugh out loud"?
Did you know that a P4 takes 20 clock cycles to perform a multiply?
:) )
Did you know that you are an idiot? the p4 has a 20 stage pipeline, which means the process of excecuting instructions is seperated into 20 peices, and the hardware used to do each one of those pecies works on part of a diffrent instruction at the same time. So while a multiply might take 20 clock cycles to come out of the other side of the CPU, if all you have is a program with one multiply instruction followed by a hlt or something.
Most programs, of course, have more then one instruction. With a 20 stage pipline one instruction takes 20 cycles to run, but you can also perform 19 other instructions along with it... depending on how many excicution units you have along with it.
The p4 has two ALUs, each running at twice the clock speed of the rest of the CPU. (in contrast, the athlon has 4 regular speed ALUs). So in actualy, you'd be able to run 80 or so instructions in that 20 clock cycles.
Integer multiplies are actualy performed by the floating point system, IIRC, rather then by the ALU, so they won't be as fast as addition and subtraction.
The chip IBM is making is a mips based chip, and takes fewer cycles to perform all its instructions. It also has a _ton_ more registers, which means you can perform significant operations without going to or from memory.
IBM is not making a mips chip, moron. They are making a Power PC chip. the p4 has only 8 general purpose 32 bit registers, but in addition has 8 80 bit floating point registers, 8 64bit integer SIMD registers and 8 128 bit floating point/vector SMID registers.
MIPS only has 32 general purpose registers, and although they can be used however you want, several of them are 'reserved' for the stack, and things like that. Also the first register is always zero, and you can't store anything in it. So in actuality, MIPS chips have fewer registers then Intel chips. PPC chips on the other hand do actually have more registers then Intel chips though, with 32 general-purpose registers, 32 floating (64 bit?) point registers, and 32 128 bit vector SMID registers.
This doesn't really help your argument, though: Reading or writing a number to memory is about 100 times slower than an arithmatic instruction.
it's true that reading from memory takes a long time, and that's why modern CPUs don't do it very often. They use these things called "caches" you know? The vast, vast majority of memory access doesn't actually need to hit ram.
But to use those coprocessors, you have to go into modes like mmx. And bolted on extra instructions like mmx have restrictions on them, like not being to do mmx and floating point math at the same time.
No, I was talking about using floating point math for integers larger then 32 bits, rather then splitting 64 bit ints up into 32 bit chunks and adding them with carry (which takes more then two instructions). MMX doesn't allow 64bit int math, as far as I know, but rather allows you to sacrifice floating-point math for accelerated 8, 16, and 32 bit math. It's always interesting in that Mac fans seem to think that Intel chips suddenly lost the ability to do integer math and floating point math at the same time when they gained MMX.
Anyway, that's really beside the point due to the fact that, as you can see, MMX no longer uses the floating-point registers.
For the future, 64-bit is the way to go, and x86 is not. I think one of these IBM processors will be the ideal linux machine. (It'll be low power too, so I won't need a hairdrier-loud fan like I do with my athlon
since when are those separate things?
Might not hurt to learn a thing or two about how computers work before opening your mouth.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Ok, so macs will get faster, but wont it be too late? 4 ghz pentiums should arrive at late 2003
Open Source Java Web Forum with LDAP authentication
... that it'll be one or the other?
Right now Apple uses processors from IBM and Motorola. It isn't that hard to see the relationship just reversed if Motorola can't deliver a higher performance processor than IBM. IBM supplying the power, and Motorola working on low power, low heat 64 and 32-bit processors for the PowerBooks and all of the consumer machines.
If IBM flawlessly integrates Altivec compatibility with VMX, and given that Motorola's got quite a bit of Altivec experience, Apple could get the technology into the whole line.
Everything about IBM's Power4 processor is amazing. Amazing technology, amazing size (680 million transistors), amazing power requirements, amazing performance. And it's amazing that anything so complex can work at all. This beast has 5,200 pins on the package and consumes 500 watts (that's right, half a kilowatt) of power. Actually, Power4 is more than a processor, it's an entire neighborhood of processors. It's sold as a module comprising two processor cores per die, and four die per module, making eight 64-bit processors and 680 million transistors in one unit. Each individual die contains 174 millions transistors and measures a sun-blocking 400 mm2 in IBM's 0.18-micron 7-layer copper process.
:P
8 CPUs stuck together, 1.33 times faster then a p4. And with only 12.36 times as many transistors! (And just 10 times as many interface pins, and power use!)
If IBM's 'scalling down' is more then by more then 25%, it'll be slower then intel. If it's by less then 95%, it'll be more expensive
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
2^16 = 65536 = 64k. Do the math yourself.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
not direct 16 bit addressing.
2^16 = 65536 = 64*1024 (64k). The math is pretty simple.
Obviously most 16 bit systems use some scheme to store more then that. I don't know about most 8 bit systems, but the z80 used a pair of registers (h and l) to store addresses, giving them a total of 64k or ram they could access at once.
8 bit direct addressing only gives you 256 bytes of ram, or 1/4th of a k. I think intel's 4004 chip had this limit (the first integrated CPU ever made)
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Are you saying super-exhuast riceboy cars have engies that rev to 13.2k RPM? Even a civic SiR only goes up to 7.3k :P
Sure, clock on a computer dosn't mean everything, but it does mean something.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
... because they perceive M$ OS to be clunky, junky, and unsafe at any megahertz!
yah, ibm has difficulties with fabs!? get a clue!
Hi,
My name's Tony. I work at a law firm. My PC used to hiccup at me all the time, blue screens here, illegal operations there. I didn't know what to do. All I know is the macros for my legal documents used to take forever. I'd start a macro then answer the phone, and it wouldn't be done until nearly after I said "Hello, this is MacIntyre and Finch, how can I help you?" How annoying???
That's when I realized I needed to address more than 4 gigs of memory. I mean really, when you're sending out C&D letters to 180 million people you need real power!
Then I got this new 64 bit Apple machine and it's like "WOW", man do those macros fly!!!
Hi! My name's Tony and I work for the RIAA...
-dameron
Uhm you know, Linux is available for 64-bit processors, at least for the pSeries boxes (PPC - PowerPC proc). http://www.penguinppc.org/ && (http://www.linuxppc.org/ || http://www.linuxppc.com/). SuSE has a distro for this, I believe. Not so sure about RedHat - although I think their 7.1 release did have a port for PPC.
"International Business Machines Corp. Monday announced a microchip for personal computers..."
and:
"(TRANSMISSION EMBARGO UNTIL 12:01 am EDT/0401 GMT)"
Note that it says "announced," past tense. They didn't announce it Monday, October 7, so my guess is they are about to announce it tomorrow (as I right this on Sunday). Looks like Forbes made a boo-boo.
There ain't no rules here; we're trying to accomplish something.
Remember that those 36 bits won't help us guys who need more than 4GB in _one_ process. 36 bits is nice for servers to run 16 processes, 4GB each, in parallel. But it can not run a process with a 64GB footprint. chm.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
No surprise that the 486 was faster: the Performa 640 used a 68LC040 which lacked an FPU and had no L1/L2 cache, while the 486/DX2-66 had an integrated FPU and often came with 256K of L2 cache memory.
Oddly enough, the Performa 640/Quadra 630 was one of those Macs that came with a 80486 daughtercard that plugged into the 68040 motherboard.
System 7.x and Windows 3.x: the worst of both worlds.
k.
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
....how about this link, fuckhead?
so it would be easier on the programmer to use a cisc instruction
Actually, it's "easier on the programmer" to use C. The true advantage of CISC "bytecode" style instruction sets is that they have a small binary code footprint, which improves the performance of instruction caches. Not that I'm implying x86 is good bytecode or anything...
Will I retire or break 10K?
I fucking hope so. It's time for this dinosaur to become extinct.
Well, the problem is that CPUs are getting a lot faster than RAM, too ... That's why "newer" Alpha processors, for instance, support L3 cache as well.
The Raven.
The Raven
Can you imagine a beowulf cluster of these?
:(
I'm going to get kicked off of Slashdot for this, aren't I?
Sig.i>
Let's see, so we'll have a 1.8 Ghz PPC CPU by the end of 2003. By then Moore's law predicts we'll have a 5 ghz 64-bit x86 CPU. Now more than ever I see a reason for Apple to "make the switch" to a x86 architecture.
They're not even the same ISA, they just have a similar name.
Of course, Apple could switch to POWER4. Unfortunately, a single POWER4 tends to cost more than an entire Mac.
Nice try. Looks like you even caught a couple of dumb moderators too.
MS would love Apple to switch to a complete x86 architecture.
If Apple went toe-to-toe with the 1000lb Gorilla, they'd be dead within 18 months. Remember, Apple is fundamentally a hardware company. Moving into an ultra-low margin commodity hardware market from a high-margin monopolistic hardware market to compete with a software company would be moronic.
that's the way to take advantage of economies of scale!!!
amd or intel would have been smarter
Guess they'll move to registers that are 64 bits long and instructions too?
versus the 32-bit MIPS-like architecture..?
Any idea whether it's going to be binary compatible like hammer or completely break stuff? Or is binary compatibility is going to be done via the os?
When will Apple have a box powerful enough for Doom 3?
I would like to attack your thesis in two parts.
1. If larger word size doesn't equal more speed, how come there are no high-performance 8 or 16-bit architectures? Part of the improvement is that by doubling the register size you double the amount of data that can be kept in registers. This can be beneficial where you couldn't keep enough data in before.
2. If larger words don't benifit your program, then don't use them. Inevitably, Mac OS will have to support 32-bit programs in a 32-bit address spaces for compatibility. So you can compile for the word size that works best for you. You can still take advantage of more than 4G of RAM even if some (or many) processes run in 32-bit address spaces simply by keeping more stuff in RAM and less on disk. This is the major advantage to 64-bit.
Now, for the bonus statements.
Soon 4G of RAM will be so cheap people will think it is stupid if they cannot install more than that. So it is needed from a marketing standpoint.
Your parallel between these multiple operation registers and the Intel architecture is flat out wrong. Intel doesn't have the ability to address all the bytes of their register individually, only the bottom and 2nd from bottom. So partially the problem is the assymmetry. Second of all, Intel cannot do two operations at the same time in the register, merely access parts of it. The post you are responding is referring to vector processing where you can do 4 multiplies at once in a single register. This is called vector (or SIMD) processing and is useful for DSP and media operations. For example, you can gamma correct the R,G, and B components of a 32-bit pixel with a single operation. This is useful enough that Intel, AMD and PowerPC (IBM/Moto) already have it in the form of MMX, 3DNow! and Altivec. This is the only form of segmented registers PowerPC supports.
The problems you spoke of with Intels accessing subregisters (AL,AH) was a design tradeoff in Pentium Pro and was corrected in Pentium II and has not been a problem since. They erroneously assumed all code would be recompiled for the new processor. This was a good idea for a server product but not true when Intel mainstreamed the processor as their high-end processor.
IP address; Paris
Name: 10.27.1.12
64 bit is no miracle cure, I'm surprised everybody has hyped it as much as they have. It does lift the 4gb RAM limit (which can be overcome by segments too, but is more of a ugly hack), hardly an issue for todays desktops but perhaps for tomorrows. It does provide much more accurate calculations for various scientific uses (which can actually be quite a few things that don't sound very "scientific", for instance I could probably use it running some more exotic economic theories (wave theory, chaos theory) or simulations, maybe things like voice recognition.
But from what I've read of theoretical papers, the biggest advantage is the increased number and size of registries. To keep it short, one can keep a lot more information inside the CPU simultaniously. I've looked a bit into assembly programming and today most of the registries have designated "tasks", while the new registers are all general-purpose (and twice as big). It's difficult to say how much of a difference it'll make, but I believe it'll lead to a decent performance boost for all applications.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
okay, that sounds right at first, but...
what about the possibility that intel will increase the number of registers some time in the future? wasn't stated in some of the recent articles, that the registers are the worst shortcoming of x86 technology?
i would bet that intel will change that with the announcement of their 64bit-cpus. potential reasons:
a) that legacy plagues the pc platform for a while
b) 64bit cpus are a great change and they maybe will not be fully compatible for all old programs.
c) that way they can offer some super new things on a processor, so that new software coded for registers en masse will never ever run on old hardware, tempting programmers to code only for new systems (more ease with more registers) and then forcing users to upgrade rather quickly (just like the switch from 286 to 386 - 386s can do anything even today, although lame as hell, with the lack of protected mode, 286s were trash very quickly)
so i would predict the change from 32 to 64 bit will equal that from 286 to 386.
a) peak 8 instructions/ cycle.
b) 10 times OO window.
c) 5 times as fast bus.
d) Large buffers for OO loads/stores!
e) Excellent branch predictors.
f) 3 L1 cache ports! [2 load 1 store].
I'd say 64bit is nice add on in apple sight for a great chip. Unfortunately describing these issues would puzzle average Joe so much that they wouln't understand.
But I think apple could reuse their old hype and multiply the values by great numbers!
BTW: Apps spend plenty off time in OS libraries so MAC may be faster, as apple has a LOT more intensive optimizing those than MS...
And we all know how important for performance is to optimize code.
Photoshop for instance is good example such app, under NT it spends 67% off time in OS provided libraries.
I think apple have optimized ALL functions called by photoshop HEAVILY...
Jouni Osmala
ps. Not a mac zealot. x86/linux @home.
If IBM offers that new chip based linux desktop cheap enough I may switch platform,
next fall.
Emacs is good operating system, but it has one flaw: Its text editor could be better.
Why did Apple put BSD on top of Mach? Why not just fork BSD directly to their own liking and skip the Mach layer?
5GHz vs 1.8, 32-bit vs 64, 150 watts vs 2, if WinTel goes DRM it won't matter.
I like my Freedom, spelled with capital F, backed by the Constitution, explained by dead guys on currency. Not to be confused with the sappy corporate 'freedom' that's so popular w/the ignorant, and shoveled by the puppets (Homeland Security, Whiskey-Tango-Foxtrot?!).
WinTel boxes me in a corner, I go to Apple (might anyway). Apple rots and goes Corp, it's time to look at Sun. Etc, etc until someone is found w/a clue or I make (yeah, I could do it too) my own. Won't you? Will it matter what the clock speed or bit width is?
I'm not alone, and it's those market conditions that will dictate the survival of platforms in the next 2 years, not technical ability (other than an obvious braindead product release).
(anonymous coward my ass, has anyone noticed that it's terrorism to speak our minds in public now?)
There is more to this new chip than just 64 bit address space (bringing several terabytes of RAM in range). For instance, 8 intructions per clock cycle, (vs G4's 3 - not sure about P4) and high bandwidth memory access.
Don't get me wrong!
You paid $1400 for a year old, 800mhz computer.
Oh well, at least you probably feel all warm and gooshy inside. I suppose that accounts for $800. Because the HW is worth $600.
when there is no benifit to using a risc instruction over a cisc instruction, a cisc instruction would be prefered since it does more with less keyboard work.
Keyboard work doesn't matter much. The MIPS architecture specifies a full complement of macroinstructions. Heck, somebody on the gbadev list mentioned writing a macro assembler that took 68000 assembly language and emitted ARM machine code.
In effect, CISC now stands for "compressed instruction set coding".
Will I retire or break 10K?
maybe it doesn't use fstab out the box for the typical single partition setup but it doesn't stop you from using it. heres the contents of my /etc/fstab that I use:
/Volumes/.named ufs rw 1 2 /Volumes/.src ufs rw 1 2 /Volumes/.swap ufs rw 1 2
LABEL=named
LABEL=src
LABEL=swap
one is for a chrooted BIND, one is to contain src code of app I've compiled myself, and the other keeps the swap files into their own partition.
--
What is pirate software? Software for inventory of stolen treasure?
EVERY situation I've seen a large Sun used it could have been handled with Linux
You need to get out more.
I've worked on several large scale Sun projects within the finance industry - Each with more than 1 million pounds worth of hardware. In each case the choice of the hardware was influenced by the following factors:
1. Which platforms does the application run on - (You'd be surprised how often the answer is - SPARC/Solaris only - less so these days, but many small finance ISV's still only support SPARC/Solaris)
2. Which database platform is required. (More often than not it's Sybase, sometimes Oracle, hardly ever anything else - DB2 rarely) Sybase will normally recommend SPARC/Solaris as it's their development platform. Likewise Oracle - authough they tend to be a little more platform agnostic.
3. How much downtime is acceptable - or put another way how much will downtime cost the business in real terms. For a major commercial bank, loosing their general ledger for example, will not only make it impossible to settle but they could be closed down by the finacial regulators. For an exchange, if they loose the ability to process trades and have to suspend the market, they will loose money directly (their profit on each trade) and may also have to pay customers compensation for their loss of earnings.
4. What availability figures will a particular vendor be willing to gaurantee (technically and financially). All large hardware vendors are very conservative on this - all vendors have product reliability issues from time to time - many customers refuse to admit responsibility for their mistakes (patch management, environmental issues). Going to court is expensive for all concerned, so vendors normally try to placate an angry customer with a better discount or by free hardware. Customers in turn appeciate the relationship and continue to place large orders. Many vendors are only willing to gaurantee very high (more than 5 nines) availability figures on their highest end server and disk products.
5. Large systems are likely to be more reliable than small systems from the same stable. Fact. The systems vendor has spent more money in R&D to make it so. They typically have more redundant/better quality components, dynamic partitioning capabilities (seldom used dynamically, of course) better systems management capabilities, more data replication options. Most importantly, larger systems are administered better, during the implementation phase the sys admins are trained, their systems runbook is developed, patch management and backup strategies are developed and the systems are tested properly. Human error (or process) is almost always to blame when large systems incur significant downtime.
6. How credible is the vendor? What platform is your major competitor using? If a particular vendor (systems and software) it's likely to be for a good reason - they understand the market, have strong relationships with ISV's, produce strong products and have decent service people to fix things when they go wrong.
7. The principle of locality of data. Many (not all) finance systems will benefit from keeping data in memory. High end 64 bit chips have large (8 or more Megabyte) E-caches. High end SMP 64 bit machines can address hundreds of Gigabytes of memory with (mostly) uniform performance and good reliability. Data is more likely to be in memory when it's needed, therefore you can process more trades per second, run risk analysis faster and generally make money faster.
Finance is a risk averse industry, in order to maintain transactional integrity, with robust reliability, with decent disaster recovery and finally good performance. They are willing to spend the money on (and often require) high end 64 bitness. In fact the cost of the hardware often pales into insignificance in comparison to software costs, running a datacentre, employing decent architecture design, systems admin and programming people, not to mention hardware support contracts, leasing DR fibre pairs, etc. etc.
# init 5
Connection closed.
Oh...
Which is why Apple won't do that unless they're compelled to, i.e. if Microsoft stops Mac development.
And how exactly would that help them? They are on x86 then, true, but it would still be MacOS X. Software written for Windows would still not run, though they'll perhaps be able to make use of (modified) Wine.
I think actually the situation is reverse: Should Apple release MacOS/x86, Microsoft would stop developing Mac software, thus probably dooming Apple.
When I read that, it sounds just like the RIAA claiming Billions of dollars of lost revenue due to P2P and pirating. They claim anyone who copied music would have purchased it at full price, and they probably claim full album price in each individual song, even though some people copy many songs from an album. Bottom line, they claim lost income for something that would never have become income dispite the situatiion, and they inflate the amount that it would have been even if it had worked the way they say it should.
You on the other hand claim that you would be making $250 to $500 if you were doing something other than tinker with your PC, or that you are losing that much by tinkering rather than doing something else. On a weekend no less.
The RIAA needs to get realistic and so do you.
There is nothing so silly as other peoples traditions, and nothing so sacred as our own.
I hate to burst your bubble, but Macs are good until the year 29940. That's not a typo. Twenty-nine Thousand Nine Hundred Forty. I'm guessing that the neon-colored plastic egg will have decomposed by then. The MacOS 9 Date & Time control panel(and the underlying code) will only last until 2040, but MacOS X has no such limit.
You lose. HAND.
http://www-3.ibm.com/chips/news/2002/1014_powerpc. html
moox. for a new generation.
Generating 64bit code from a compiler will often run slower than equivalent 32bit code. For example; all of the binaries in /usr/bin on Solaris9 are 32bit, both for backwards compatibility and for performance - there are nearly 600 files. There are separate sparcv7 (32bit) and sparcv9 (64bit) binaries for only very few commands. Of these, some are 64bit so that they understand the 64bit kernel structures (adb, mdb, truss, the 'p' commands (pmap, pcred, pstack etc.) and there's sort. sort is the only command compiled to 64bit for performance. It's the only command deemed likely to encounter a large enough dataset to benefit from being 64bit.
# init 5
Connection closed.
Oh...
They dont make geeks like they used to...
Me and my wife recently made a new geek... and I guarantee you we did it the old fashioned way
"the cpu is like the brain of the computer" ????!?!
what year is this? 1983?
worst. article. ever.
Is that the same power4 that uses 1.5 kW? (Yes, that's 1500 W of power.) Hmmm... I'll believe there is competition to Intel when I actually see it in action. We're all still waiting on the Power4...
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
"In order to fully understand the math, you have to assign a dollar value to your time. I find that about $250 an hour is a good number for me during the week; since I value my weekends more, I arbitrarily assign a value of $500 an hour..."
:-)
Okay dude, I totally agree with you that the Mac is _not_ more expensive, but your hourly wages are a little optimistic. Even at $250 an hour you probably wasted $50 writing that reply. That's just not good business.
"Politicians find new names for institutions which under old names have become odious to the people."
According to The Register, late last year (http://www.theregus.com/content/archive/22328.htm l)
[supposedly accurate benchmark numbers]
GHz 1.2 1.4 1.6
SpecInt2000 987 1151 1340
SpecFP2000 1005 1173 1359
"By comparison, Intel's 2GHz Pentium 4 has recorded SpecInt2000 and SpecFP2000 scores of 656 and 714, respectively, according to www.specbench.org If accurate, the G5 figures are impressive indeed."
I am curious where the G5 is... I had hoped to have heard more about it by now.
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
Of more concern than the Intel vs. Motorola, the 32 vs. 64bit, and the Mhz myth questions is whether Apple, by switching to an Intel-based chipset, will be constrained to join the TCPA (i.e.-Palladium) conglomerate. Since Apple has taken a pretty strong stand on user freedoms one has to wonder if they would even switch to a hardware/chip platform which would demand the type of restrictions that the TCPA is proposing. For more on TCPA (and Palladium) - http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/%7Erja14/tcpa-faq.html
Why doesn't Motorola just make a PowerPC CPU that takes an external 2GHz clock and internally divides it in half to run at 1GHz? Then Apple can market a "2GHZ Mac" and the non-tech masses will flock to it and be none the wiser.
With such flagrantly wrong statements as:
68K architecture may have 16 registers, but they are 16-bit, while x86 are 32-bit.
it makes you wonder if this guy has ever touched a 68000 in his life, or if he's just spouting incorrectly remembered facts from a college survey course.
The 68k has 16 32-bit registers. The rest of the paragraph is similarly challenged, but you really got off to a bad start.
Yes, I guess I had forgotten that the 68040 in my machine was a 68LC040. Of course, I eventually modified mine by swapping the processor with a real 68040 anyway (the rumor at the time was that Apple was soldering the processors to the motherboard - that certainly was NOT the case with mine). So, I think it IS a fair comparison, if you want to argue like the parent post did that anything Apple uses is twice as fast as anything anyone else uses.
I've diatribed before on this topic, and would like to share an insight. AltiVec very well may show some good benchmarks in some cases, but there is a very good explanation for it. The G4 chip is extremely memory bandwidth limited. It's memory bus allows for something like 1.3 GB/sec of bandwidth, and on a dual processor Mac that bandwidth is shared. Altivec can chew through a whole lot more than that in a given second. On datasets that are memory bandwidth limited (anything greater than 2 MB), a P4 will whip a G4's ass due to the 3x memory bandwidth advantage (4.2 GB/sec). On datasets that fit entirely in the internal caches (anything less than 512 KB) the P4 will whip the G4 because it also has several times the internal cache bandwidth (more than 2x depending on clock speed). The only case in which he G4 will win is data sets between 512KB and 2MB. The G4 has a fast DDR-SRAM backwide cache which the P4 doesn't. While a 1.5 MB dataset will spill the P4's cache and hit main memory, the G4 will be able to satisfy it out of the backside cache. This could very well explain certain G4 benchmarks.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
The double pumped ALU for easy instructions is running at twice clock-speed. The the complex integer instruction unit, which is infact also an ALU for mult/div/shift/etc. operations, doesn't
Actually, IIRC, there are two double-pumped ALUs in the P4. Are you sure they can't do shifts? I know they won't do muls or divs, but shifts look like a perfect operation to do in one "double-pumped" (ie, two) clock cycle(s).
IOW doing multiplies (or shifts), the P4 still isn't as fast as the P3.
If you mean per clock cycle, I'm sure you're right. From that point of view, there are very few CPUs that are as inefficient as the P4. But the point is, the P4 was designed to run at insanely high clock speeds to begin with. And I'm pretty sure a 3 GHz P4 can multiply integers as fast as any P3. I'm not so sure about FPU performance, though. The P4 really can't cut the mustard there (and eats Athlon dust).
RMN
~~~
Linux is a kernel. Kernel doesn't a unix make :-P
Does any one know what is that Linux for Power4 from IBM based on? Is it Gentoo, some clone of YDL (or RH) or Debian or what?
Less is more !
But it's still a rumor.
;)
It's vaporware until it ships. Apple could announce a successful corporate takeover attempt of Intel tomorrow.
I don't understand why we need to go to 64 bit. We need to start to invest in Asynchonous processor technology. That is where the real speed increase and internal bandwith is at. We have been doing for ages with networking, why not with processors?
eh, this sucks, I am going back to bed....
I think that the Olsen Twins deserve more mentioning. I LOVE THE OLSEN TWINS! OHhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
Why did you include the NVWS tag?
Yeah, well, I can piss way further than you can.
Damn my narrow urethra.
You know where you are? You're in the $PATH, baby. You're gonna get executed!
fascinating in fact.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Hrm, my Computer archetecture class never covered the MIPS FP... well... Actualy it probably did, I didn't really attend all that often :P
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I can tell the diffrence between then and than, when I am paying attention.
Thank you for making a relevant comment on the content of my post though.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Another poster responded to you about your first point (instruction dependancy), so I won't cover that.
The vast, vast majority of CPU benchmarks are small enough (or have been hijacked enough by x86 companies) to not need to hit ram. If you want to do interesting things like video, you'll hit RAM.
Yeah, you'll need to hit RAM, but only for data, not code. Most CPUs (including x86s) have seperate caches for data and code. Hitting ram for each instruction would be absolute murder.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Yes, and heatsinks also make it much harder to cool the chip. I mean, how is the air from the fan expected to cool the core if there's that big block of metal in the way...?
RMN
~~~
Yes, after all, IBM has a lot more experience making chips than Intel, right? And they've never had any manufacturing problems with any of their products, right? And they've just opened a new plant.... well, if it's brand new I'm sure it'll work flawlessly, right?
No worries, mate.
RMN
~~~
Do you know anything about hardware architecture? Don't bother to answer; it was a rethorical question.
Let me try to explain this slowly and in large, pretty letters.
Two ALUs do not equal twice the clock rate. The P4 has seven execution units. That does not mean it runs at 7x 2.8 GHz. Two of those seven execution units (the "simple ALUs") are double-pumped (they move data twice for each clock cycle, sort of like DDR memory transfers data at twice the clock speed). Therefore, these simple ALUs work (internally) at 5.6 GHz, on a 2.8 GHz chip. The CPU clock (the frequency with which data is moved between the main parts of the CPU) is 2.8 GHz.
The P4 has a long pipeline, which means it needs more cycles than, say, a PIII or and Athlon or a G4 to do some (resonably simple) operations. However, instructions can enter the pipeline before the previous instruction has finished executing. Think of it as a corridor: people go in at one end, and they come out at the other end. It may take 5 seconds for one person to walk across the corridor, but it won't take 10 seconds for two people to cross it, because the second person doesn't need to wait for the first one to reach the end.
This means there's a big penalty if the pipeline needs to be flushed, but as long as instructions are processed continuously (and the P4 has pretty good branch prediction / prefetch), it is quite fast indeed.
The actual time it takes to do something useful (such as multiply two numbers, compress a file, or render a 3D scene), depends on a lot of things. And it is important (a lot more important than the clock speed). But a P4 2.8 GHz does run at 2.8 GHz, contrary to what you said. If you want to discuss CPU architecture you need to understand the basic concepts, such as what clock speed means.
I am not talking out of my ass but even if I did, I suspect I'd still sound smarter than you.
RMN
~~~
If you're a hardware engineer, I hope you don't design anything that people's lives depend on! Let me just quote a couple of sentences from your first post on this thread:
"its time Apple start calling anything based on the power PC architecture twice its clock speed, and anyhting thats both powerPC and 64 bits at 4 times its clock speed. After all, the processor does twice as much as a 32 bit processor in a given clock."
And:
"calling this new PowerPC that runs at "1.8GHz" a "7.4GHz PowerPC" is just as legitimate as Intel calling their pentiums 2.8GHz, etc. (Cause they don't really actually run at 2.8GHz. [...] These published clock rates are a marketing fiction."
I really don't think anything you say (including mixing memory bus speed with CPU core speed, or references to Spinal Tap) can possibly beat those two ideas (that bigger registers make the processors faster and that clock speeds are made-up numbers).
Feel free to keep trying, though.
RMN
~~~
BTW, that post is offtopic (doesn't add to the discussion) and redundant (all that information is in the post above). It's also overrated; you should not use your karma bonus to post whines.
Moderators are free to have different opinions. What one person finds funny may be trolling to someone else. By adding several opinions (contradictory or not), you reach a more meaningful result.
Stop worrying so much about how you're modded and start thinking more about what you write. And get rid of that signature. This isn't a competition, you know?
And personally I think most of your posts on this thread would deserve a "-1, Wrong", which Slashdot definitely needs. But I usually save my mod points to mod up messages I think people should read; I rarely bother giving negative scores.
Oh boy, you can't even distinguish between FP and SIMD... what am I saying, you can't even distinguish between your head and your ass!
Hm... maybe there's a reason for that.
If you want to compare Altivec (Mac SIMD) code running on PPC with code running on x86, you should compare it to SSE2 code (x86 SIMD). A quick look at Lightwave benchmarks should make things pretty clear to you:
http://www.blanos.com/benchmark/
If you're going to compare generic FPU performance with SIMD performance, you might as well say Pentiums are faster than themselves (because P4 SSE2 is much faster than P4 FP). Duh!
And if SIMD is so relevant in the real world, howcome the Athlon XP (which does not support SSE2) is the most used CPU in intensive computation, such as climate simulations, genetic research, etc.? Why don't these guys use Macs, hm...?
Are they idiots too, like everyone except you?
Macs are indeed not as memory-bound as PCs. Why? Because, compared to x86 CPUs, PPCs are snails. The big problem with PCs right now is getting the CPUs fed (hence RDRAM, DDR-333, DDR-400, dual-channel, etc.). With Macs, even DDR-266 is a waste, because there's no way the CPU (Altivec or no Altivec) is going to crunch through the data fast enough.
Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this
big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around --
nobody big, I mean -- except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy
cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go
over the cliff -- I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're
going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I'd do
all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye. I know it; I know it's crazy,
but that's the only thing I'd really like to be. I know it's crazy.
-- J.D. Salinger, "Catcher in the Rye"
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