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."

Comments

Re:Thank God!

[fault0]

> The stupid "Megahertz Myth" has one year to live.

With a __1.8 ghz___ processor that will likely not have altivec?

With x86 processors nearing double the speed (if not more), how do you expect the megahertz gap to not exist?

Re:No Certainties..

[athlon02]

Apple makes money off selling their hardware though. If they sell an x86 based machine with an x86 version of OSX, that means several things:

(1) OSX apps have to be recompiled for the x86 instruction set

(2) Apple would probably have to make a strong effort to make sure their version of an x86 PC has such specific hardware that OSX wouldn't easily run on other x86 machines. And surely Apple knows a hack to get around that wouldn't be long in coming.

(3) If they didn't make proprietary hardware for their x86 machine, people would say "Why buy Apple's x86 machine when xyz company sells it cheaper?" In which case, Apple would probably have to refuse selling OSX accept on their own PCs, but that'd lock out a good part of the x86 market and not be good from a business standpoint.

I seriously don't see it happening anytime soon.

Re:Everyone will still see it as slow

[runderwo]

I'm all ears, but "MHZ Myth" "MHZ Myth" just gets stupider every time you say it.

Take a computer architecture class, and you'll find that the clock speed of a processor is not a measure of the performance of that processor. It's the efficiency of the processor that matters, which is measured in IPC, the "instructions per cycle" that it can execute.

A 2.8GHz CPU that can only get 1 IPC on average is no better than a 700MHz CPU that averages 4 IPC.