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

No Certainties..

[Choco-man]

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..

Re:No Certainties..

[Murdock037]

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.

Re:No Certainties..

[GMontag451]

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.

Re:No Certainties..

[GMontag451]

The 68K family has 16 semi-general purpose registers while the x86 has half that, and there have been 68k emulators for x86 for a long time. In fact, the number of registers to be emulated is not that important when you can't map to the registers of the host machine because there are not enougth.

68K architecture may have 16 registers, but they are 16-bit, while x86 are 32-bit. On top of that, you can get away with only mapping 7 or 8 (D0, D1, D2, A0, A1, A5, A6, A7), because the rest aren't often used. In PPC assembly, use most or all 32 registers at the same time is quite common, because with a RISC instruction set, you *have* to do everything in registers.

The number of registers is *very* important, because each significantly used register that you can't map is one that will have to be fetched from cache or from main memory very often. That adds up to a very significant performance drop.

But in any case going from 16 to 32 registers doesn't add any complexity.

Of course it doesn't add complexity. Writing an emulator is in fact quite simple. I could write a PPC emulator in Perl and have it run anywhere Perl does. That doesn't mean it will be fast. In fact, it will probably be so slow that it would literally take a month just to boot up MacOS.

I guess the complexity lies in the instruction set and the MMU.

The PPC memory manager may be somewhat trickier to implement than the 68K memory manager but not that much, and in many ways the PPC instruction set should be easier to implement than the 68K one. It has much fewer addressing modes and only one way to load to and store from memory.

Re:No Certainties..

[stripes]

68K architecture may have 16 registers, but they are 16-bit, while x86 are 32-bit.

No, the 68000 had 32bit wide registers a 32bit ALU, a 16bit data bus, and a 24 bit address space (25 bits if you count the supervisor pin). I have the databooks. I have owned computers using these. I have programed them (in C mostly, but the debugging was in assembly). The Palm's CPU32 is I think based on this, which means I even still use one :-)

The 68010 was I think the same. The CPU32 might be based on this, if so I have one.

The 68020 had 32 bit data buses and a 32 bit address space, but was otherwise the same. I've used these but not owned them.

The 030 and 040 are the same but have a built in MMU, and sometimes FPU. I have used and programmed the 040 a lot, but not owned them. I have data books for both somewhere.

The 060 was super scaler but otherwise much like the 040. Never used one. Didn't have a data book for it.

If you don't beleve me, call Moto and get a free data book. Enjoy.

On top of that, you can get away with only mapping 7 or 8 (D0, D1, D2, A0, A1, A5, A6, A7), because the rest aren't often used. In PPC assembly, use most or all 32 registers at the same time is quite common, because with a RISC instruction set, you *have* to do everything in registers.

Hmmm, I sort of disagree with this. Almost every 68000 instruction uses one or two registers, most can use far more (what with the complex non-RISC addressing modes). Almost every RISC instruction uses 3 registers (sometimes one register is used twice though). Registers are extremely important in both RISC and CISC code. Not so much on stack based machines though.

I think the real reason the 68k emulators are easier then PPC emulators is 68k CPUs are not very fast. If you ignore the almost-68K CPUs like the ColdFires I think the 68k family didn't go faster then 60Mhz. Also prior to the 68030 most instructions took more then one cycle to execute. So a 600Mhz Intel/AMD/PPC can afford to spend 10 cycles doing the work of one 68k cycle and you are still as fast as the original.

On the other hand PPCs are far far faster. I have I think a 50Mhz one in my set top box, emulating that on a 600Mhz Intel/AMD would only give you 5 or so cycles to get the work done. Worse yet the one I have in my old laptop is 500Mhz, the 600Mhz Intel/AMD gets barely more then a cycle! A brand new top o the line Intel might get 4 cycles to do the work in, but that really isn't much time!

At least not for anything that does the translation on the fly. For something that does the work ahead of time and caches it like the TranMeta Crouse, or (I think!) some 68K emulators, you can do much better, if there are loops at least.

Everyone will still see it as slow

[SexyKellyOsbourne]

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.

Re:Everyone will still see it as slow

[Jucius Maximus]

If IBM makes some whack-ass server software that actually takes advantage of the 64 bit architecture, it could provide a better performance/price, performance/power useage, performance/space, etc ratios than current server solutions.

But that's a big *IF* . But it would be cool to have another option out there.

Re:Everyone will still see it as slow

[vlad_petric]

Cause they don't really actually run at 2.8GHz.

Actually they do. What you're missing is the other component of the speed equation, namely the IPC (instructions per cycle). Intel design favors clockspeed to IPC, for obvious marketing reasons, while AMDs designs are more balanced. That's why they get similar performance with considerably slower (in terms of clockspeed) CPUs

The Raven

Re:Everyone will still see it as slow

[Hrothgar The Great]

I've taken computer architecture before, thanks, and I've also USED many computers AND I've read benchmarks and listened to the comments of many people with much more knowledge than I on the subject and NO one expert has EVER made the claim, to me at least, that any (non-theoretical) RISC processor will operate 4x more efficiently in regard to clock speed.

While I do agree that a processor running several parallel instructions could average 4 IPC and run instructions really, really fast, if said processor is based on a reduced instruction set, doesn't that mean that each instruction actually accomplishes a smaller amount? (And that the speeds therefore may be closer to balancing than the RISC one actually being 4x as efficient?) Perhaps I simply misunderstand the nature of RISC, but that's the impression I have.

Re:Everyone will still see it as slow

[LinuxHam]

If IBM makes some whack-ass server software that actually takes advantage of the 64 bit architecture

They/we already do. It's called zSeries. Like the z800. That's one whack-ass server. Imagine doing self-service web hosting that takes users from first click to a fixed IP dedicated host up and running in 5 to 10 minutes with no additional hardware. Now imagine that kind of service for up to 10,000 or more fully independent hosts in a 19" rack. If I had a some bucks and gumption to start a business, that's exactly what I would do. A z800, the fattest pipes I could buy, and some disk.

Re:Everyone will still see it as slow

[dbrutus]

According to Apple the only performa 640 was one of those hybrid dos machines. The spec is still on the Apple site. This was the era of selling crippled chips without math coprocessors. The 486DX66 that came in the box was paired with a 68LC040, thus we have an x86 chip with math coprocessor compared with a 68k Motorola chip without one. Oh yess, a *very* fair comparison.

Since no major PC computing platform uses the 68k line anymore for their CPUs why should we care about this anyway?

Re:Everyone will still see it as slow

[NanoGator]

"If I had a some bucks and gumption to start a business, that's exactly what I would do. A z800, the fattest pipes I could buy, and some disk. "

I must be tired, I thought you said "dicks" and not "disk". Given the lack of context, that made for an amusing sentence. Heh.

Re:Everyone will still see it as slow

[NanoGator]

"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.

Re:Everyone will still see it as slow

[Shanep]

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.

Therefore, with my minimum sample size of 2 machines, I can deduce that all processors can be compared with MHz alone. Further, all architectures perform exactly the same, MHz for MHz across the board for similar instructions and they all scale in a linear fashion regardless of the ratio of core speed to main memory speed or other similar limitations. There is also no such thing as this "bottleneck" crap. Bottlenecks r what yer get when your old Chev brakes down on tha intastate and bloks a lane.

PS, this is sarcasm.

NASA did a study to find the best cost/performance for their Fortran number crunching.

AltiVec is a beast. A 500MHz G4 using AltiVec ran 6.9 times faster than a P3 800 and 3.7 times faster than a 500MHz Alpha 21264. The G4 worked out to be 5.3 times cheaper per FLOP than the P3 and 8.4 times cheaper than the Alpha. Although there is no mention of Intels SIMD within this documents and the FORTRAN compilers at the time of the documents writing were very limited in their abilities to vectorize FORTRAN code to make better use of the AltiVec.

Here is a 1GHz G4 performing up to 10 times faster than a 2GHz P4 while querying a DNA database and 2 times faster at their fastest measured rates.

Saying that the MHz Myth is a Myth, based on a single experience is really idiotic. Anyone who has at least failed the first semester of a CS course would know that different architectures cannot be judged on MHz alone. Hell, even comparing different revisions of the same architecture family cannot be judged on MHz alone (a 33MHz 486DX is much faster than a 33MHz 386 for example, ignoring floating point of course). Wanna talk about CISC vs RISC vs CISC-wrapped-around-RISC?

Here are some G3's (as low as 333MHz) and a 450MHz G4 running faster than a P3 500MHz. There are plenty of graphs and numbers here which might put a fright into you Hrothgar.

Slimming?!

[T-Kir]

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)... ;)

news

[sstory]

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?

Re:news

[jhines]

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.

Re:news

[selectspec]

The first advantage is the ability to have a 64-bit address space for pointers. This allows for extensibility to address considerably more physical memory (over 16,000,000,000 GBytes). Of course, no system requires that much memory, but the added virtual space is very handy, and systems do currently buck into the 32-bit limit of 4GB. The additional virtual memory space is handy in kernel development where everything shares the same memory mapping. The spectrum of the 64-bit address space is large enough to give everyone plenty of room to play with. Makes code much simpler.

Having 64-bit pointers actually has a draw back in that the amount of memory required to store a pointer is now 8 bytes instead of 4. For some code this increases memory utilization considerably and equally increases memory bandwidth requirements. Because of this, most (except alpha) 64-bit cpus will allow you to use 32-bit addressing if you are using less than 4 MB of memory.

Memory is only one feature of 64-bit processing. 64-bit arithmetic is very useful, especially when processing lots of data. However, software must be written generally to take advantage of this feature. When working with large numbers which require more than 32-bits to express, 64-bit CPU's have a huge advantage over their 32-bit cousins. Cryptographic, compression, multi-media and parity generation applications bennifit greatly from 64-bit operations.

Re:unix time bug

[Trusty Penfold]

Switch to Windows. Windows had a bug with Year 2000, and that is passed.

Anyway, it is still a long to to 2032.

Re:1Ghz.

[Suppafly]

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.

Benefits? Depends what you do with your computer.

[WittyName]

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.

I can see the mac commercial now...

[Prince_Ali]

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.

1.8ghz in 2003?

[autopr0n]

Hrm, intel/AMD will be at what then, 4ghz? :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 :P

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.

Re:1.8ghz in 2003?

[Anonymous Coward]

64 bit is nice, but I doubt the chip will be more powerful then an x86 chip at twice speed.

Err... get your facts straight.

For floating point, IBM's Power4 chips are currently faster than Intel x86 chips running at more than 2.5 times the clock speed.
Case in point: SPECfp2000.

Removing duplicates, here's the list:

1. Alpha 21264C at 1250MHz
2. Itanium2 at 1000MHz
3. POWER4 at 1300MHz
4. SPARC64 V at 1350MHz
5. POWER4 at 1100MHz
6. Alpha 21264C at 1224MHz
7. Alpha 21264C at 1000MHz
8. Pentium 4 at 2.8 GHz
9. Pentium 4 at 2.66 GHz
10. Pentium 4 at 2.53 GHz

Re:1.8ghz in 2003?

[karlm]

64 bit is nice, but I doubt the chip will be more powerful then an x86 chip at twice speed.

As others have pointed out, the POWER4 1.1 GHz and 1.3 GHz beat 2.8 GHz P4s in floating point. You may not know that in some integer tests, G4s spank Athlons. For instance, from the distibuted.net rc5-64 finishing announcement:

Our peak rate of 270,147,024 kkeys/sec is equivalent to 32,504 800MHz Apple PowerBook G4 laptops or 45,998 2GHz AMD Athlon XP machines or (to use some rc5-56 numbers) nearly a half million Pentium Pro 200s.

If those numbers are accurate, a mobile G4 at 800 MHz is 1.42 times as fast as a 2 GHz Athlon XP at rc5-56 encryption. Clock-for-clock the mobile G4 would then be 3.54 times as fast as an Athlon XP when doing rc5-56 encryption. The workin set is very small, so caches didn't come into play. However, you can get a G4 box with 2 MB L3 cache per CPU.

Don't get me wrong, I'm glad I have my trusty Intell box. However, give credit where credit is due. IBM/Apple/Motorolla designed one heck of a CPU family. The POWER4 chip performs almost as well as the Alpha, but doesn't double as a space heater and is very easily virtualizable (which is important for os390).

Apple has never changed their mind before

[strictnein]

"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.

Intel Platform

[vlad_petric]

The introduction of this chip should put to rest any speculation that Apple is moving to an Intel platform.

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

Re:Intel Platform

[TheAncientHacker]

Guess people have forgotten ASCII. Or did you really mean:

"If you stop Office/Mac, we drop the atomi

Mac OS/X for x86").

(Just guessing you meant ^H instead of ^M)

All over Mac websites.

[mikedaisey]

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.

Re:Clawhammer for me.

[Chemical]

How can a Mac possibly have a lower TCO for the home user? First things first, they cost twice as much as a comperable PC. Second, if the logic board or one of the other pieces of proprietary hardware breaks you have to replace it with Apple parts from an Apple authorized vendor, and that will cost a fortune. I cannot possibly see how an Apple can end up with a lower TCO than a PC. I'm very curious. Please explain the logic behind that statement to me.

Re:Apple actually seems tempting?

[rampant mac]

Biege box?

That's like stuffing a Picasso into a Pinto.

Re:Apple actually seems tempting?

[Mononoke]

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.

Ok, here ya go:

XServe

Why not?

[autopr0n]

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?

Re:Why not?

[Vader82]

The Didge Viper revs to less than 6krpm.
What can beat it? Normal street cars cant. Take your 1.8L super-big-exhaust-turbo civic/integra/prelude/whatever and see what happens.

YOU GET SMOKED!

Why? Because the viper has mad displacement. More displacement means more energy per revolution, aka more computation per clock, ala AMD or the P3. P4 is more like the rice burner, revving to insane RPM but generally not doing much per revoltion. It only gets "fast" because it revs so high.

Re:1Ghz.

[autopr0n]

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.

Well, I would hope so, that's almost 400 times as fast :P

Oooh 64 bits!

[khuber]

Welcome to 1992 (SGI/MIPS) or 1994 (Sun).

I'd rather have a Power4 (which is available now of course) than wait a year for a crappy stripped Power4.

-Kevin

Re:Oooh 64 bits!

[Toraz Chryx]

The problem with that is, a .18 POWER4 is totally unfeasible for a desktop machine.

in addition, this stripped down POWER4 should clock a LOT higher due to the smaller process, and being a less complex chip. (and it'll use one hell of a lot less power)

It's just like the 604e verses G3 all over again, except the PPC7455's replacement might will be the brute force implementation :)

Re:Oooh 64 bits!

[caveat]

here's the cheapest POWER4 system i can find - $12,495. everybody bitches about how much macs cost, but i doubt it's going to be more than $4000-4500 for one with the new PowerPC. do i even have to make a point?

Re:Clawhammer for me.

[bnenning]

I've never seen a single ANYTHING to show that what you claim about TCO is true.

I've seen several. Try here for starters.

Re:Clawhammer for me.

[davidstrauss]

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.

Anyone planning on telling the developers?

[hayden]

If Apple is planning on moving to a 64-bit architecture then they'll need to start educating their developers real soon now. If everything is coded properly then there's no problem. In the real world pointers get assumed to be int size or int is assumed to be 32-bits. Also word alignment becomes an issue.

This is not something they should just spring on their developers.

Re:Anyone planning on telling the developers?

[jimbolaya]

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).

Re:Already are 64 bit

[Sivar]

36 != 64, but just because CPUs with Intel's PAE can address 64GB of RAM (2^36 = 64GB) does not make them 36-bit processors. They can only actually address 4GB at any one time, which is why any single process can use no more than 4GB of RAM (actually, 3.5GB with Linux and 3GB with Windows)

Re:Clawhammer for me.

[bnenning]

First things first, they cost twice as much as a comperable PC.

Where can you get a PC comparable to the iMac for $650? Or comparable to the iBook for $600? The price difference is not as much as you think, and can easily be made up for by ease of maintenance, lack of viruses and spyware, and better security.

What's an instruction?

[yerricde]

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.

Re:What's an instruction?

[the_2nd_coming]

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.

64-bit != speed

[Sivar]

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.

Re:64-bit?

[jared_earle]

"Further proof that OS-X is NOT an unix OS is the fact that you can't backup HFS+ files using standard GNU tar."

GNU is not UNIX.

"Also, OS-X doesn't include simple items such as /etc/fstab and so forth."

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.

Uh already 64bits, it's the 1.8Ghz that is new

[gelfling]

Sorry but PPC is already 64b. The 1.8Ghz is the new part.

Re:lol

[scrod]

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.

You clearly flunked physics

[Rui del-Negro]

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).

Re:Thank God!

[khuber]

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

Of course Pentium 4s totally smoke G4s. A Pentium 4 2.53 is three times faster than a G4 867 according to specint2000/specfp2000. Amazingly, that three times performance difference is paired with a three times megahertz difference.

System specint2000/specfp2000
AMD Athlon XP 2100+ 1733
720/613
Intel Pentium III 1133
461/320
Intel Pentium 4 2533
882/861
Intel Itanium 800
314/645
Intel Itanium 2 1000
~700/~1350
IBM POWER4 1300
804/1202
Sun UltraSPARC III 1050
537/701

Apple G4 867
257/154

What were you saying about the megahertz myth? It doesn't apply to the slow G4?

-Kevin

Problems with the Itanium

[computerchris]

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.

Re:64-bit?

[ahknight]

Lastly, why would you want to buy your hardware and software from a specific vendor? Sure it might work better, but is that level of integration really worth the money (for most of us at least.)

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).

They dont make geeks like they used to...

[Rui del-Negro]

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
~~~

Clearly you don't.

[Rui del-Negro]

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
~~~

ah, the ignorant have spoken..

[autopr0n]

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.

heh...

[autopr0n]

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.

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 :P

Re:i think

[rdean400]

Heh, some of IBM's work in PowerPC-related design already does this. The Power4 chip, which is used in the pSeries (RS/6000+) and iSeries (AS/400+) hosts 5 different architectures in the core, 2 of these are 32-bit (32-bit Power and PowerPC) and 3 of these are 64-bit (64-bit Power, PowerPC, and "Amazon"). If they put their mind to it (but I doubt they would), it wouldn't be hard.

--rdean

p.s.--"Amazon" was a codename for the chip architecture that was going to merge the AS/400 and RS/6000 lines in the early 90s. The project was scrapped, but the resulting instruction set was used in the AS/400 line during its migration from CISC to RISC architecture.

Clockspeed Doesn't Matter to Apple Users...

[Shuh]

... because they perceive M$ OS to be clunky, junky, and unsafe at any megahertz! ;c)

I can see the "Switch" add now...

[dameron]

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

Re:Already are 64 bit

[AKnightCowboy]

There are NO 64bit consumer processors currently available.

Sure there are. Sun Ultrasparc IIe's are consumer priced and fully 64-bit. You can pick up a full system for just around $1k. They're not the speediest things on the planet, but you just said 64-bit consumer level processor.

Re:Clawhammer for me.

[Twirlip of the Mists]

First things first, they cost twice as much as a comperable PC.

Yes, but you only have to buy them half as often. ;-)

And, incidentally, no they don't. You can find cheaper PCs, but most often a prebuilt system with the same features as the Mac-- like a widescreen LCD, or a Superdrive, or Gigabit Ethernet, whatever-- will be within 15% of the Mac's price.

Second, if the logic board or one of the other pieces of proprietary hardware breaks....

Speaking as a long-time Mac owner... doesn't happen. I have seen a couple of systems fail while under warranty, but those of course get repaired for free. If you're really worried about it, buy a five-year AppleCare plan. By the time your warranty runs out, you'll be ready to buy a new computer.

Please explain the logic behind that statement to me.

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 to Saturdays and Sundays. Since Macs require essentially no farting around to make them work or keep them working, while PCs-- no matter what OS they run-- require considerable set-up and maintenance time, the Mac comes out as a big winner.

Re:64-bit?

[MaxVlast]

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.

Microsoft would love Apple to

[jpmorgan]

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.

Re:Linux is available for 64 bit

[MaxVlast]

Most people think about Nintendos. My 16 bit console is better than my 8 bit console. I bet my 64 bit Linux box would be f0kk1ng gr00vy!

Re:64-bit?

[ahknight]

I would really like to know WHY some people are so adamant about burning OS X on the UNIX front.

The same reason Jehovah's Witnesses maintain that Christ came back when they preducted (circa 1917), albet invisibly and silently so that no one knew but them: people don't like to change their mental picture of the future they predicted. Linux zealots preducted Linux would make it to the desktop. BSD, somehow, did it instead. They're upset that they put their faith in the, well, wrong religion. ;)

Re:Linux is available for 64 bit

[giberti]

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.

Re:Linux is available for 64 bit

[Twirlip of the Mists]

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.