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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."
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.
with a little luck this will save us from that dreaded 2^32 time bug !
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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?
Volume won't be a problem at all for IBM. They run more PowerPC chip fabs than Motorola. The only reason IBM isn't making G4s is Apple's contract with Motorola, which seems to be icy at the moment. IBM could create G3s that run faster than G4s and flood the market tomorrow if there weren't legal issues. IBM and Apple seem to have a serious future together.
"64 bit is nice, but I doubt the chip will be more powerful than an x86 chip at twice speed."
:) )
Where do you get twice the speed? Do you mean twice the _clock speed_? Clock speeds really, really, absolutley, do not determine speed or performance. Did you know that a P4 takes 20 clock cycles to perform a multiply? You can chop up your instructions as much as you want, and increase the clock to hell, but not change performance at all.
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.
Reading or writing a number to memory is about 100 times slower than an arithmatic instruction.
"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."
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.
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
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.
Apple, I should think, will select the company which will allow it to compete most effectively in the marketplace.
Which marketplace did you mean? It seems to me that the only marketplace of which Apple is a part is the Apple marketplace.
You're right, there aren't really any certainties until it comes out of Steve Jobs' mouth-- and even then, take it with a grain of salt. But he does get excited about shiny new things, and this sounds like it would be up his alley. Unless Motorola's keeping some secrets, I wouldn't be surprised if this is what's coming next.
All current PowerPC processors have been 32-bit, but the PowerPC ISA has always been 64-bit. That's why a 64-bit PowerPC processor will be able to run all 32-bit PPC binaries at native speed.
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").
Time to burn some karma...
The reason you won't see OS X on x86 hardware is simply public perception. If a Mac was released based on x86 hardware, the first thing people would think is "If it's x86, why isn't it running Windows?" Apple's biggest fear would be that they'd eventually get sucked (or forced) into the Windows world. Microsoft could say "Hey, you're x86 now, we're not making OS X versions of our apps anymore, just run Windows like everyone else." As others have stated, Apple CANNOT exist as just another PC company. The profit margins are razor thin and the competition is brutal.
You're also overestimating the "threat" OS X represents to Microsoft. OS X for x86 may be rejoiced by the geek community, but for everyone else it will just be given a collective shrug. Yay, another OS for the good ol' PC - all my games and apps still require Windows.
For Apple's own good and the market segment they're selling to, they have to keep "thinking different".
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DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
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.
yes, however, that one instruction might take 2 cycles :-)
old cisc procs worked like that....sure your assembly was fewer instructions than a risc, however, the cisc proc had to run more cycles per Instruction because at the machine level, it still could only move so many bits in and out of registers so many times in one cycle.
that is why risc was invented, having one or 2 operations per instruction gave the programmer much better ability to squeeze as much out of a cycle as he or she could....think of a cisc instruction as a brawd sword and a risc instruction as a scalple.
now, Intel has realised that a mixture of cisc and risc is good. some situations, it takes you just as many cycles to execute a desired outcome in cisc and risc, so it would be easier on the programmer to use a cisc instruction rather than a group of risc instruction, hence you get the fine tuneability of risc, but the lower impact on the programmer of cisc.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Everything - from software, to software support, to hardware services, to hardware upgrades, to peripherals is either priced at or above what the "commodity" white box-PC equivalent is.
1) The big savings is on support. You need far fewer techs per Mac than per PC, and you can pay them less. For that matter, in Windows-heavy businesses, they'll frequently tell users (individuals or a group of graphic artists or web designers), "OK, you can have a Mac but we won't support it all."
2) Almost all hardware upgrades and peripherals are the same as the ones you'd put on a PC. Just don't buy the hard drive or USB mouse from a Mac-specific catalog and it won't cost you any extra.
3) Sure, you can buy white-box garbage that's cheaper than anything in the Mac world. But that comes with plenty of extra costs in the long run. Most of the time, you'd be better off with Dells.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Yes, they did that to be able to do the operations in 1 clock cycle.
I've heard some people speculate that the Hammer will use a similar trick on the instruction decoder: run it at twice the clock speed so that it keeps the execution units fed. Don't know if there's any truth in it, though. Basically that's what Intel is trying to do with hyperthreading (although the approaches are different).
One thing AMD has already confirmed they've improved is the prefetch, which is much better on the XP than on the old Athlons, but is still not quite as good as the P4's. They can probably get a good 10-15% of performance there. Add the integrated memory controller, increase the FSB and cache, and you have something that'll probably be about 25% faster than current Athlons for the same clock speed (on 32-bit code). That would mean a 2 GHz Hammer would probably have a "rating" around 3200+.
By the time the Hammer is released, the P4 will probably be hitting 3.2 GHz, so I suspect AMD will not get a big lead over Intel (at least in the mainstream market, where 64-bit code won't be very important). But since neither AMD nor Intel are selling their top chips anyway, I don't think that will be very relevant. What AMD really wants is big corporate clients (like Intel has) for their low- and mid-range chips.
RMN
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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.
You want to try to emulate PPC on x86?! Good luck. PPC has tons more general purpose registers than x86 does. There is a reason why the only Macintosh emulators for x86 only do 68K emulation.
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...
Now they're going to be replaced with video editors and 3D modelers. Having 3 or 4 gigs of RAM would allow them to be productive on cheaper and cheaper machines.
One of the best, and possibly most expensive, video effects systems in the world is called "Inferno." It's sold by a company called Discreet Logic, out of Montreal. An Inferno runs on an SGI Onyx2 or Onyx 3000 computer-- one of the ones with like 12 processors that stands 7 feet high and sounds like a hurricane. An Inferno costs around $750,000.
With an Inferno, you can do visual effects for film at 2K resolution (2048x1556, usually at 36 bits per pixel) in real time. There's no tool out there that's better.
An Inferno has, at most, 2.5 GB of RAM. Many systems run just fine with 1.5 GB of RAM. (Don't ask me why, but the vendor recommends either 1.5 or 2.5 GB, not 2.0 or 3.0. That's just the way it is.)
I think you're overestimating the real need for RAM. Having more would be all well and good, but in the real world it's just not necessary for those kinds of tasks.
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