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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."
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..
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.
But that's a big *IF* . But it would be cool to have another option out there.
A full GHz behind Intel? Do you judge cars based solely on peak RPM?
Slashdotter are stupid and biased.
I'm sure they'll spin the 64-bit thing as being 'better' just like they've convinced their loyal followers that the mhz-myth makes an 800mhz G4 perform like a 2+ Mhz Athlon or Intel processor. By the time they even finish developing this 1.8ghz chip, those of us using 32bit chips will be chuggling along at 4ghz or so and waiting for the 5ghz on the horizon.
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
All you need to do is make a chip oscillate fast, and Joe Customer will think it's the greatest thing since sliced bread.
Not to mention most of the geek wannabes who post on slashdot.
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.
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.)
These published clock rates are a marketing fiction to begin with, so tis time for apple to release their 3GHz processors in January and that 7GHz 64 bit one the following january.
Yeah, and you guys panned the ipod too: http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23
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.
I'd rather have a Power4 (which is available now of course) than wait a year for a crappy stripped Power4.
-Kevin
For Apple, I'd say large image processing, and video editing.
The key is going to be HUGE memory support when Apple comes out with it, 16Gb or more.
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?
"Further proof that OS-X is NOT an unix OS is the fact that you can't backup HFS+ files using standard GNU tar."
/etc/fstab and so forth."
GNU is not UNIX.
"Also, OS-X doesn't include simple items such as
fstab does not a UNIX make. Besides, fstab is there and useable if you want. NetInfo is used as first choice only.
OSX is as much a UNIX as Linux is, if you wish to be pedantic. Both use GNU/BSD tools on top of a kernel.
Why bother bickering over which is the most UNIX-like or UNIX-based? This isn't a pissing contest.
-- Jared Earle | "There is no spork"
Yeah, but for this new desktop chip IBM is stripping out the dual cores and huge caches that make the Power4 such a powerful beast. The standard Power4 is too large, power hungry and expensive to be a desktop chip.
I'm pretty sure it will be a fast chip don't get me wrong, and I'm really looking forward to new Apples and IBM Linux workstations using this chip. But at the same clockspeed, I'm pretty sure the Power4 would kick the ass of this new chip at SPEC benchmarks.
I (like the poster you replied to) would be pleasantly surprised if the new chip was more than 2x as fast as similarly clocked x86 chip (ie an Athlon 2200+ at 1.8GHz). I don't expect it would be though.
Well, let's see, pay more and it works or pay less and babysit it ... gee, what's my time worth again? More than about $3,000 once every five years or so, for sure. (Yes, I said five years. I'm on a three-year-old machine now any my previous two Macs held up for five years each before they were just plain obsolete.)
Isn't this the same reason most of us are moving away from Sun to begin with?
No, it's because they cost $40k each just for the right to win the pissing contest with the ISP next door. EVERY situation I've seen a large Sun used it could have been handled with Linux on a couple of Xeons or on an Xserve and MOSXS. There's no compelling reason to use a Sun anymore other than to win the pissing contest with the sysadmins of the competitor (what competitors are left, at least).
Most of that burden will be handled by the compiler. A few developers will need to be concerned, but not the majority. Apple maintains a version of gcc, and I am certain if there is any truth to this rumor, that they are also working with Metrowerks to make sure their compilers will support the new chip (which raises all sorts of interesting prospects, since Motorola owns Metrowerks).
There ain't no rules here; we're trying to accomplish something.
They're jealous and insecure. They've spent ten years breathlessly screaming that Macs are toys and it's not an operating system if it doesn't have a CLI, then when Apple releases the coolest UNIX on the block, they don't know what to do with themselves.
Amusingly, these are many of the same people who used to spend hours trying to make their Linux installs look like NEXTSTEP. Now that NEXTSTEP is back in a kickass operating system, it's not UNIX anymore.
Sad, really.
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
2GB of RAM for single process? Easy! Now!
- PDF reformatting and printing of large and rich text documents.
- Quick search
- Caching of 300GB hard disks
- Image and video processing
A lot more can be imagined...
"This "megahertz myth" crap was around when I had a 33 MHz 68040 Performa 640, and my 486/DX2 66 blew the shit out of it.
"... "I wish you Mac people would quit making a bunch of shit up instead of talking about the strong points of the Mac like you should be."
Heh. It's a funny thing, really. It's even more complex than the IPC/MHZ debate.
At home I had a 486 33 mhz with 8 meg of RAM. At school I had access to a Mac that was running at 75mhz with 16 meg of RAM. In theory, that thing should have mopped the floor with my 486, right?
Nope.
I was far more productive on my 486. I think I was running Windows 3.1 (it might have been 95, but I'm not 100% sure of that) with PhotoStyler. The Mac was running whatever OS was popular at the time and Photoshop. It took like half an hour to print to the printer on that thing. At home, I'd hit print and moments later it was going.
So wtf, why was the Mac so slow compared to my piddly 486? Well, I'm not 100% certain, but I think it had to do with the apps more than the hardware. Whatever OS I was running, the Mac OS was significantly more sophisticated. Photoshop was multi-layered, vs. Photostyler was more like "Paint and forget about undoing it". On top of that, I think one of the students overloaded the Mac with Fonts. (sadly, Apple had the philosophy of "we'll load everything at once instead of only loading what we need right now".) My PC was tuned specifically for what I wanted to do, and it ran circles around the Mac. I definitely did not have a very high opinion of Mac back then.
Today, Mac OSX is a little processor heavy with its UI. A friend of mine bought one of their notebooks about a year ago. It was pretty and all, but it got a little lagged while drawing the fancy flashy stuff on the bottom. I have no idea what that does to overall system performance, but it makes me wonder if it'd eat into rendering times in Lightwave, for example. Maybe it's all FUD, I dunno.
Frankly, I don't give a rat's ass how many IPCs it does or how fast it is. I want benchmarks. I'm sure that processors can have all kinds of advantages and disadvantages to each other, but real world conditions always change everything. In the case of the Mac and 486 I mentioned earlier, technical superiority meant nothing. Whatever speed advantage the Mac had was lost with the apps it was running.
"Derp de derp."
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.
I remember this same discussion about 32bit processors. What's important is once it is in production, we can start developing applications that take advantage of it. Remember the run on Memory in 1995 when Windows 95 hit the shelf. Everyone had to go and upgrade their 486's and Pentium's so that they had 4-8Mb ram... now look at us, a machine with less than 128Mb what a joke. (I run 1Gb myself (yes I have dual processors too)) Having a couple of Gig of RAM is not that far off, and software that can take advantage of it isn't either.
AF-Design, web development.
I believe the "whack-ass server software" you're looking for is spelled "Linux". The z800 is the hardware.
Now, you're not, realistically, going to get 10,000 hosts in a rack, with reasonable performance on each of those hosts. Yes, Test Plan Charlie got 41,400 in a box, and a later test, 97,900 (both of those, btw, were on the 31-bit System/390 architecture; there are no public results that I know of for the equivalent test in a 64-bit environment), but those were, in fact, stress tests, not practical environments.
I don't know if anyone has done a similar study with either 32-bit or 64-bit Linux guests on a z-box in 64-bit mode. The work I've done suggests that you could fit about 5000 lightly-loaded (i.e. DNS, or not-particularly-trafficed mail, web, or news servers) machines onto a full-up zSeries with acceptable performance, assuming you were running with the notimer patch on each one.
Also: 5 to 10 minutes? You're doing something wrong. If you have either DASD that has some sort of snapshot function, or you allow a small inventory of precreated-but-not-assigned-to-customers virtual machines (when someone requests one, hand them a prebuilt one and spawn a task to build another one and put it on the queue), then the time gets down to "long enough to boot the Linux system twice" or about 45 seconds. If you're willing to live with statically assigned (by hostname, derived from virtual machine name, which is queryable with cpint) DHCP to get your IP address (requires z/VM 4.3, so you can support broadcast on the Guest LAN) then you get to skip the reboot, so the time becomes "as long as it takes to IPL the guest", or about 20 seconds. That's the time from when you click your "build me a server" button on the web form to the time you can ssh into your new server. (Well, OK, telnet, if you allow telnet; ssh will take a bit longer the first time because you still have to generate a host key. This isn't magic, you know.)
A.C.