ohmygod2 wrote to us with a story from
SF Gate that Apple, unsurprisingly, is going to be one of the purchasers of IBM's PowerPC 970. At this time, though, it's unclear where Apple is going to actually *use* said chip.
Update: 10/14 15:53 GMT by
H : Follow-up to Tim's
story.
Slashdot Mirror
If they put it into one of those sexy Titanium Powerbooks, they got themselves a convert. Woot! I would love to be able to afford one.
... I guess that's the end of the rumours about Mac OS X on PC hardware. Good thing too.
I predict that Apple will use the chip in a high end personal computer.
Google News of course has pretty much all the acticles. They are all based upon the same IBM press release, but many make slightly different predictions.
By the time they get these in the new Macintosh computers....Intel will be at like 5GHz or something.
its used in the IBM z series servers and these servers can serve up like 100,000 pages per second its insane. this chip is only second to the dec alpha in FPU processing! macs running on these are going to be smokin``
Does anyone know how the two architectures will relate
----
Go canucks, habs, and sens!
psst someone tells them to use it on a motherboard
Apple has been slowly expanding in the last little while.. OS/X is becomming ever more popular and Apple's hardware is slowly but surely getting much better as time goes on.. If Apple creates a 64-bit arch market before Microsoft does, Apple could really take off and beat MS.. Dreams CAN come true!!
Critics -- notably Intel -- argue that most desktop users have no need for 64-bit processing.
then to be redundant, Intel should face up to the fact that most users have no need for 2.8 Ghz processors.
There are so many options:
- Stacked up to make that annoying table in the engineer's break room stable
- Ceramic heat thingys for toaster ovens
- Dropped out of airplanes over Alaska as a NORML protest
- Thrown at people pumping gas
- As party favors at Job's next all-night coke party
- The latest thing in West-Coast gansta rapper accessories
I mean, seriously, where the fuck else would you use a new CPU than inThere's been a dark cloud surrounding the 'G5'...
I'm not an industry insider, but I'm sure someone here may have the scoop.
Would this be the G5? Is the G5 an entirely different chip?
Clock speed does not measure processor speed. These chips running at 1.8 ghz are faster than P4's running at twice that speed. IBMs Power4 has a huge die and processes tons more information per cycle than a P4. So, if clock speed did measure speed a 100 ghz chip that does 1 operation per second would be 10x fast than a 100 mhz 486!!! right?
Now all we need is a good portable 64 bit OS. ;-)
>SELECT * FROM users WHERE clue > 0
0 rows returned
THis is an interesting story:
:)
The 970 is a derivative of the Power 4 chip (with what I assume to be the Altivec extensions)
These run in the 1.6 -2.0 Gig range
As a Risc chip
with 64 byte chunks.
Granted, I am unsure as of yet if Darwin runs 64 bit natively, but when it does, imagine a dual processor of these (with of course, quartz extreme pushing all of the video over to the Graphics processor).
Maybe I am getting my hopes up, but this is what I have been waiting for. New macintosh, here I come
Blah Blah Blah.
Well, Duh! In a computer ya doofus! Where else would a computer company use a new CPU?
They sure as hell ain't dropping it into an iPod of some vaporPDA!
so i'm guessing that this is the first iteration of this proc. (even tho from what i read, it just a stripped down version of the chips they use in their own servers). and that their roadmap indicates some kind of wild and crazy ramping up in chip speed (since 1.8GHz will be puny compared to whatever intel and amd have out by then). cuz that's the only way they'll stay competitive with x86 hoopla (unless somehow consumers magically understand the difference b/w chip clock and the speed of the chip
anyone know if ibm's powerpc architecture allows them to do this?
----
i do not use drugs, i AM drugs -- Dali
http://www.eet.com/semi/news/OEG20021014S0059
Essentially a derivative of the company's Power4 microprocessor, IBM's PowerPC 970 adds 64-bit PowerPC compatibility, an implementation of the Altivec multimedia instruction-set extensions and a fast processor bus supporting up to 16-way symmetric multiprocessing.
I hope they use a memory controller that does at least DDR 333.
The law is a weapon of the government, not a protection for the likes of you. Surely you understand that.
I predict that Apple will use the chip in a high end personal computer.
...but the 64-bit iPod project is already in high gear, so we can't stop now, can we?
Wow! That's an even better idea!
pi = 3.141592653589793helpimtrappedinauniversefactory7
http://www.wired.com/news/mac/0,2125,55722,00.html
This is being discussed all over (here, Ars, Macworld) but the Wired article takes a much more "done-deal" tone than any of the other commentary I have seen yet. It suggests the possibility of Macs with 4TB of ram too :-)
--is not to be confused with user #672982 - Bame Flait
Not being a programmer, I am wondering if this will require the rewritting of OSX and/or applications. The Mac World just went through an enormous transition to OSX. I don't know if software vendors would be so psyched to rewrite their apps. again.
When Apple started selling FireWire-based Macs, Intel immediately tried to marginalize it by saying that the technology only appealed to a niche of consumers, and oh-by-the-way here's our specs for ATA/66 and USB 2.0 (for which the detailed specs hadn't been finalized, and which didn't start hitting mainstream systems until some 2 years later).
Intel takes seriously Andy Groves's words about only the paranoid surviving.
Slashdot: SF Gate: Wake me when one of the companies comments please. They will, but be patient before yelling CONFIRMED!
Thanks
So close and yet so far from the world's perfect ID number
"Critics -- notably Intel -- argue that most desktop users have no need for 64-bit processing"
:-)
Critics -- notably Microsoft -- have argued that most desktop users have no need for more than 640kb of memory.
the 'slide
"Corporate rock still sucks. What are you gonna do about it?"
"Corporate rock still sucks. What are you gonna do about it?"
Okay, actually read the stories. "According to industry sources..." is what it says. Nowhere is there confirmation from Apple or IBM that Apple has comitted to purchasing them. This is not new, this is just the same news as the last story, only centered on one specific rumor, instead of the main story.
As soon as Apple or IBM officially states that Apple has committed to purchasing these processors, don't title the story 'Apple is Buyer...' since we still aren't sure.
Yeah, I'll admit, I've been expecting it since IBM announced the chip, and I fully expect that Apple will be the main customer. BUT, my belief (or the belief of any 'industry source', without hard proof) doesn't make it a fact.
I'm not asking that you not to rumormonger on it, I'm just asking that it not be presented as fact when it is still just rumor.
(Bah, and now I've forfietted three of my moderator points by posting in a thread I moderated in... :-( It just got me pissed off when I finally noticed that there still isn't any proof.)
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
In terms of die size, a rough measure of cost, the PowerPC 970 measures 118 mm2, against 131 mm2 for the Northwood 2.X-GHz Pentium 4. Both the IBM and Intel parts are being made in 130-nanometer CMOS on 300-mm wafers.
This indicates that the price could be competitive in desktops.
Way to go IBM!
The law is a weapon of the government, not a protection for the likes of you. Surely you understand that.
In the last few days I have heard more about this chip then I ever cared to. I think I have actually heard more about any apple product then I ever cared to. Is there nothing else to really talk about other then some proprietary piece of equipment. And the best part is people are thinking they are getting mainframe CPU for pennies. That must be IBM's new marketing ploy... NOT LIKELY!
Exactly. This is pure speculation, once again elevated to implied fact by a lazy, unverified summary. The story said no such thing, and quoted no verifiable source.
-- http://frobnosticate.com
Imagine a Beowolf Cluster of THESE!!!
Cupertino, CA - Apple Computer (AAPL) is expected to buy a record number of the new "PowerPC 970" CPU, but in a suprise move, isn't expected to actually do anything with them.
"We're doing great with the iPod, the warehouse is totally empty," said Apple VP Phil "All your Jaguar" Schiller. "Steve thought it would look more lived-in if we had some big boxes of stuff in there."
Steve Jobs was hard at work developing a new way to mispronounce the name of the new CPU and was unavailable for comment.
ZOMG I WOULD LOVE TO KNOW ABOUT YOUR FEELINGS ON MACINTOSH VERSUS WINDOWS, VI VERSUS EMACS, AND HOW YOU'RE NOT A DORK
I imagine that thoses Apple computers will only be sold to the inhabited continents.
... Just run your 32-bit stuff at 1.8GHz, and whine for the recompiles..
;)
if&when this happens it'll be HUGE.. Let's have at least multichannel DDR400 though please Apple!!! Mmmm.. 8 channels of DDR400.. The mobo'd be like 3cm thick
What's the power consumption on one of these? One of the reasons I got a G4 Powerbook was the fact that it has around 4 hours of battery life.
Despite the fact that the PPC 970 will be introduced at 1.8 GHz while the P4 is expected to be around 3GHz, the 970 will execute 8 instructions per cycle. I can't recall how many instructions per cycle the P4 executes but I believe it is far fewer than 8. Of the handful of articles I read about it, somebody said that the 970 would effectivly compete with a 4-6 GHz P4 as a result of the instructions per cycle efficiency of the chip.
Plus, it's gotta run cooler than a 6GHz P4 would. As a laptop owner, ignoring the superior performance potential of this chip, the cooling and power requirements alone would make me choose a 970 architecture over a Pentium.
like angry, white rural folk!
Your missing a ";".
sin(6cos(r)+5A)
"it's unclear where Apple is going to actually *use* said chip"
This reminded me of an exchange from the animated series "Freakazoid," when Douglas Douglas received a long-coveted computer chip for Christmas.
"Can I put it in, Mom?" he asked.
"Okay, but only in your computer."
(Well, I thought it was just as silly...)
Those who can, do. Those who can't, write technology blogs.
From the article:
"Critics -- notably Intel -- argue that most desktop users have no need for 64-bit processing. In fact, Microsoft Corp. has yet to release a 64-bit version of Windows that will run on AMD's Hammer chips."
Is it any wonder, given they just lost their defense against Intergraph's patent lawsuit which may result in them not being able to release the Itanium series?
Hey, Intel, last I checked, no one had a use for 32-bit processing or 640K of RAM on the desktop, either.</sarcasm>
blog |
http://www-3.ibm.com/chips/news/2002/1014_powerpc. html
moox. for a new generation.
Have you tried ripping DVD's to a compressed format? Um wait, that won't be legal soon. Nevermind.
too many people who submit stories to /. either dont read them, or have poor comprehension skills. But more than likely they read them and dont think about what they post becuase they are so excited to breaking the scoop. to them i say, fuck you dipshits! and yes, im having a bad day!
>>Wow! That's an even better idea! ...but the 64-bit iPod project is already in high gear, so we can't stop now, can we?
I always knew that 10 Giga Byte of space was a waste in iPod. Good that they have decided to downgrade to 64 bits !!!
I doubt IBM would design a memory controller that uses a proprietary memory interface. This would raise their memory costs enormously without providing much in return.
I would guess that IBM would build a multichannel switched memory interface to DDR SDRAM. The controller would handle say four simultaneous requests for 64-bit memory values. This is what Nvidia does in their GPUs, and it seems to work for them. I believe the Sparc chip also has a similar on-chip memory controller.
because you're obviously having trouble with your spelling.
Is that a salami in my pants or am I just happy to be me?
It's like he never even thought about what he wrote. Someone conveys the thought that marketing hype may be costing you money, but let's ignore that and perpetuate the marketing hype.
On the other hand, the "Megahertz Myth" is marketing hype aimed at opposed marketing hype, so who really cares what either Apple or Intel offer as the "fastest"?
My PowerBook G3 runs just fine, my Pentium III runs just fine. If you need the power, go for it, but if you don't, go refurbished.
Just my opinion.
This kind of technology can be more easily implemented by burning porn directly into ROM reducing lookup times to almost the speed of the bus.
Apple could appeal to the hardware hackers with offers of ROM upgrades packaged in convienent easy-to-bend pinned chips using tightly machined push-down sockets. Withing months there would be a "Burn your own Porn ROM howto" and instructions on how to mill the pin thickness down to permit easy insertion!
(puns, unfortunately, were intended)
the P4 executes 1 instruction per cycle. the G4 does 3 (the basis of apples "megahertz myth" myth), so this is a huge step up.
as for the laptop part, hell yeah. my tibook by the end of 2003 should be nearing the end of it's "useful lifespan" - whatever that is, and i'll probably sell it for half of what i bought it for then and buy the latest, greatest "G5" laptop once it's avalible. that's the plan, at least. i'm in college after all.... and apple has a tendancy to take forever to release a new laptop based on a new processor design.
moox. for a new generation.
The company, which has used Motorola microprocessors in most of its Macs since 1984
We need to remind that the first PowerPC chip that was used in Macs was developped by Motorola, IBM, Apple and Novell (yes, Novell).
Hey, come on. Read the article you linked to!
I did. Processor busses and memory speed are different. AGP is going to eat into that processor bus. Also in a SMP scenario, the processors need to talk to each other to keep the memory coherent. Not to mention peripherals doing DMA, etc.
The law is a weapon of the government, not a protection for the likes of you. Surely you understand that.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/14/technology/14SLA S.html
GHz are not a real measure of performance. You can have a machine with 50 GHz, but if it's running junk programs that don't take full advantage of it, it's worthless. Apple is one of the few companies to realize that pure speed does not equal quality.
I'm wondering though.
I remember part of the reason apple went with motorla G4's was for the altivec engine. Back when Motorala and IBM split they forked the powerpc chip (the then G3), when this happened the definition for the chips changed slightly.
Motorola's definition of the G4 was a faster chip with the altivec engine. This is what allows for superfast processing during high floating point calculations (similar to MMX only phatter). This was also the part Apple was talking about when they used to advertise "twice as fast as pentium pc" because during those moments of super-intense number crunching, they were. IBM's definition of the G4 was a chip made with copper, shorter pipelines things like that. How is the switch to an IBM chip going to affect altivec? Since it's motorola technology I think it's safe to assume it won't be on the IBM chip. Will the IBM chip suffer at all during those slowdowns? Or will the extra 32 bit data path, in conjunction with copper, etc... be more than enough to make up the difference?
/* oops I accidentally made a comment, sorry */
i'd like to see the source of your "P4 executes 1 instruction per cycle" or perhaps clarify on what you mean by "executes"...
because even after a basic architecture course in college your would realize that all modern processors have multiple functional units which allow for much more than a single or even 3 instructions to be on the fly in a processor. I took my graduate architecture course from someone who was on the design team of the P4 and he eluded to us that the P4 has something like 130ish instructions on the fly at any given time, not just 1...
dave
People often don't mention the effect that processor pipeline length (and effective branch prediction rate) has on performance.
Let us assume that the PowerPC 970 (AKA GPUL) will have a 10-stage pipe (AFAIK). "Average code" is 20% branch instructions, and a good branch prediction unit can give 90% correct predictions. So this leads us to need a pipeline flush every 45 instructions (on average). We then need to add the pipeline length to this number to get the number of cycles that the chip needs to be fully ready for the 46th instruction.
So:
PPC970 = 56
G4 = 53
P3 = 56
P4 = 66
On the first run of a piece of code the branch prediction unit will only get a 50% prediction rate (i believe). This prediction rate would also be the case if the cpu was running complex code that had random branching. The string of instructions before a pipeline flush would then be 10 instructions.
In this case the numbers look a little different and the g4/p3/PPC970 camp looks really good:
PPC970 = 20
G4 = 17
P3 = 20
P4 = 30
So to run this code at the same speed, the P4 would have to run 50% faster then the P3/PPC970 and 75% faster then the G4. Remember, when you are doing serious multi-tasking, the branch prediction unit will not get a 90% prediction rate as its resources will be split between several different applications.
Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?
robotboy, projected performance of the 970 based is that it will be basically a 2 for 1 against a P4. So a 1.8Ghz 970 will be roughly equivalent to a 3.6Ghz Pentium4. But then again, we've all heard that before, except this time we can kind of look at the Power4 to get judge of what this processor will do.
Over 10 years ago I remember all the "twice the performance for half the price" predictions, and the similar prediction every time a new generation of PowerPC is announced. There are always exceptions that actually do legitimately (as opposed to rigged comparisions using 486 optimized code, Altivec but no SSE, etc.) run twice as fast on PPC compared to x86, but most comparisons show a 25-30% advantage for PPC against an x86 running at the same clock. More likely the 1.8G 970 will be equivalent to a 2.3G Pentium 4.
I read the Power4 has over 200 in flight through all 8 cores at any given time..
"Evil will always triumph because good is dumb." -- Dark Helmet
And IBM said no one needed the power of the 80386. Then Compaq released their 386 monster and IBM stopped mattering in the PC world.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
so, are you talking about the power4 or the powerpc 970? Comparing the power4 to the pentium is not even fair...
I agree with you, but I hope you're not confusing instructions per cycle with length of the pipeline.
The P4 processes instructions in a pipeline. The pipeline can contain 20 instructions at any one time, but each instruction is only finished once it exits the pipeline.
Same goes for the 970, I'd imagine.
To truly increase instructions per cycle, you have to add extra pipelines (and a lot of extra circuits to prevent instructions from stepping on each other)
If pipelines were always full, and all instructions were equivalent, the P4 would beat the pants off of the 970. But the pipeline is not always full because instructions often depend on the results of other instructions, and not all operations are equal in their requirements.
So shorter pipelines often handle instruction dependancies better resulting in better performance, while (for other reasons) longer pipelines are easier to design for higher Ghz.
Well, not whack, but I just wanted to point out that there *is* this article at the NYTimes and I'm imagining /.'ers other than me have submitted the story, but still nothing on the front page.
Maybe the editors are waiting for the story that strikes the perfect balance between slavish sycophancy and neutral observation.
In that case, PICK MY ARTICLE!!!
:)
msq
...those charts Apple put out projecting PowerPC "risc" performance increaes into the future compared to Intel "cisc" performance? They are hilarious now, kind of like the book "Dow 25,000." I wonder if anyone has a copy? I totally bought the claim back then that the PPC would eventually cream the crappy but backwardly compatible Intel architecture, but not only has Intel kept up it has exceeded the PPC.
Syntax error: loose != lose, affect != effect, then!=than
Just to throw some math out there to help screw up the difference between clock speed and processor speed.
These equations give a performance ratio n...
Performance(a)/Performance(b) = n
Execution Time(b)/Execution Time(a) = n
CPU execution time for a program = (CPU clock cycles)(Clock cycle time for a program)
-or-
CPU Ex. Time for a program = (CPU clock cycles for a program)/(clock rate)
Where (CPU clock cycles for a program) = (Instructions for a program)(Average clock cycles per instruction)
Now we are dependant on the chips architecture as stated in the above response by Slashdotess. Are we running CISC (Complex Instruction Set Computer [IE. Intel]) or RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer [IE. SPARC, MIPS]). I'm not sure what Mac's are running.
When in doubt break out the math.
Chris
since intel has about another 100million to pay intergraph, before the judge releases the injunction against selling itaniums. the REAL innovation (in stealing anyway) is at intel now. too much scrutiny at m$ to steal right now. give em a week or two.
By the way, I read lots of complaints about the noise emitted by Apple PowerMacs today, so don't be talkin' about the heat produced by Pentium4s.
People don't have that processing need! / it's not anymore in computing speed / but when they have *2.8 Ghz IDE* / that compiles will be fast in the KDE tree
hehe -jamesr.
Site for the Truly Geeky Makes a Few BucksA S.html )
2 /10/14/technology/14SL AS.html)
By JOHN SCHWARTZ
( http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/14/technology/14SL
The front door to the office of Slashdot bears a nerdy little joke. A computer key is glued to the door: "Enter." The other side of the door has an old "Return" key.
That's the geeky essence of Slashdot.org, an online publication with a fanatical community of millions of readers that combines a rich view of technology with quick, off-kilter wit.
Could it be that this is the 21st-century model for Internet publishing?
The highest-flying print publications of the dot-com bubble burbled about technology and the businesses that it fertilized. But now they and their glossy paper have fallen to earth. Just last week, Forbes ASAP and Upside joined the once-fat Industry Standard in the glossies' graveyard. "There is no market for a dedicated new-economy publication," said Monie Begley, a spokeswoman for Forbes.
But far away from the buzz and the glamour, Slashdot survives and thrives. Run out of a basement office in a suburb of Ann Arbor, Mich., Slashdot has remained true to the slogan: "News for nerds. Stuff that matters."
The secret to the online publication's moderate success? "They didn't buy a Super Bowl ad," joked Sean Bergeron, a fan from Virginia.
It's a little more complicated than that, but not much. The company keeps its expenses low. Its creators write about what interests them. And -- here's where the business model may not be everyone's cup of Bawls Guarana energy drink -- they don't seem to care if the operation actually makes any money.
Publishing without paper is cheap and cheap is good, said Richard Seltzer, an Internet entrepreneur and author of "Web Business Boot Camp: Hands-on Internet Lessons for Managers, Entrepreneurs and Professionals" (Wiley, 2002). He said online publications like Slashdot could flourish "in a down market, and especially when the market for online advertising is in disastrous shape."
Slashdot persists as a must-read publication for the wizardly set, and especially those within the community of developers and fans of "open source" software like Linux, which is created and improved by legions of volunteers. The Web site provides the technically inclined a place to keep up with news, submit articles on their own, and discuss it all at length that can make a neophyte's head throb. The 25-year-old creators of the site, Rob Malda and Jeff Bates, estimate that in their five years online they have published 30,000 articles, served 500 million pages and amassed an audience estimated at 2 million people -- including some 50,000 who regularly enter the continuing conversation at least once a month.
"Slashdot is the best site in the world for techies that want to know," said Daniel Hedblom, a reader in Sweden.
The site's editors look for news and interesting sites, and cull hundreds of daily free submissions from readers and then edit and post a dozen or so articles each day. Those pieces are short, rarely more than 200 words, and offer links to other Web sites or news reports. The discussions then can go on for hundreds and even thousands of postings by readers, offering comment, argument and further research. Those who want to post without using their names are allowed to, but the system automatically gives them the user name "anonymous coward."
And, of course, there is the goofy stuff. Along with arcane discussions of software technology and licensing schemes, the editors post gleeful critiques of Microsoft and its wares, and approving commentary on pop/nerd culture, including Natalie Portman, Aibo robot dogs, Lego projects and fun science projects.
The creators also let pictures substitute for a thousand words. Small icons are attached to each item, including a much-used image of Bill Gates made up to look like a Star Trek Borg -- a race of half-man, half-machine beings that spreads across the universe and whose members drone: "Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated." It conveys everything that the geekerati think about the software mogul Mr. Gates.
"They have this fun combination of total geek cred and a good editor's eye for the weird and interesting and compelling," said Michael Hirschorn, senior vice president of news and production at the cable channel VH1, and co-founder of the late Inside.com, which was an online report on the world of media.
Continued...
(http://www.nytimes.com/200
Skip to the happy ending where a 1.3Ghz Power4 beats a 2.2Ghz Pentium 4.:)4 /
http://www.digit-life.com/articles/ibmpower
I have "Troll" moderations coming up +5 automatically. In my eyes, you have been modded up. Don't die! nooo!
IIRC, Apple's been shipping non-PowerPC chips for a while. They've been shipping chips that 'implement the PowerPC instruction set', or something like that. Something to do with copyright, trademarks, and terms of the AIM alliance.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
By "in flight" I'm assuming you mean "in some stage of the processing pipeline at any given moment" - I believe the P4 has something like a 20stage pipeline, the G3/G4 I believe is more along the lines of an 8 stage pipeline, if memory serves.
..
Part of what's at stake here is how many instructions are decoded/dispatched each clock cycle and then other factors like branch-prediction and such muddy the waters a bit more. In the end, the 'instructions per cycle' is really more of an average than anything else, as not every instruction will be a candidate for sending through the parallel functional units, etc. Taking into account the efficiency of the branch-prediction unit is important, too, since you could take a wrong turn and have to clear out all your functional units, at every stage of the pipeline and start over again, in certain circumstances. The fewer times this happens, the more effective your CPU will be at pushing the bits around.
Bottom line: modern processor mechanics are far more sophisticated than can be easily summarized by any one number or neat phrase. Just ask AMD about that one
as i've understood it, the "G" is an Apple monikor and the PowerPC chips over the last 9 years have been made by either motorola or IBM. the only thing they've had in common is they are from the same PowerPC bloodline and are backwards compatible. The 601 was the "G1", the 603/604 were the "G2"s, then they started calling the next one G3, then they added altivec and called it G4.
So yes, this chip could be called the G5. It seems like it should be to me.
There is a big difference between OSFMach [the part of XNU that is Mach] and GNUMach [the Mach part of GNU/Hurd].
Yes... they are both Mach but not quite the same.
I wouldn't call the Mach that Tru64 is based on the same kernel as the other two either [its Mach 2.5 I think]
Sorry, I will go now
IBM's Press release says it will have a bus running at 900 mhz, this could reflect on what Apple plans to do with their boards. Although undoubtably slower.
No, you haven't lost it altogether. The first generation of G4 processors had a 4 stage pipeline. The move to 7 stages came later, because MOTO couldn't get the chip past the ~500 MHz hump with the 4 stage pipe.
-- Still waiting for the Nike endorsement
You make some insult about undergraduate architecture courses, then you go on to regurgitate what they teach... interesting. All that aside, I was speaking from a usage point of view, not hardware. So a chip picks up an extra .5 GHz, does the user notice that? Honestly? Does OpenOffice, Office, or Lotus even, start up THAT much faster? No, they don't.
Granted, I am unsure as of yet if Darwin runs 64 bit natively, but when it does, imagine a dual processor of these (with of course, quartz extreme pushing all of the video over to the Graphics processor).
OK, what is wrong here? You the mod are going to mod me down to minus -1 and this numnut gets a 4? I don't care.
IMAGINE A F&CKING BEOWULF CLUSTER OF THESE!!!!!!!!
ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!!!!!
But the really big difference is number of registers. In short, the more registers you have, the more instructions you'll be able to run in parallel, in general. The PowerPC architecture, like many RISC architectures, specifies 32 general-purpose registers, whereas the P4 specifies only 8. With 32, there's a lot more room for recognizing parallelism by singling out which operations depend on the result of which other operations. Such dependencies force you to run operations sequentially, whereas the lack of such dependencies allows you to run them in parallel.
The chip with more registers, therefore, will take better advantage of its parallel execution units. It's also a good reason for Intel to pump up the clock speed (although doing it at the expense of pipeline depth can be counterproductive) while IBM pumps up the parallelism.
http://www.spec.org/osg/cpu2000/results/w ww.spec.org/osg/cpu2000/results/res2002q3/ q 4/
http://
http://www.spec.org/osg/cpu2000/results/res2002
It's interesting to see how well the x86 chips do compared to the rest.
You can see the details too - e.g. gcc, gzip, bzip etc. P4s seem to be better at the gcc benchmark than Athlons.
On top of that, I think you should add about 30% for 64-bit processing. I don't know what the numbers would really be, especially since they are so dependent on recompiling to take advantage of 64 bits. But assuming the OS at least is recompiled, I'd venture there would be a significant speedup from moving those extra bits through the CPU faster. Total: 1.3 x 1.3 = 1.69. 69% speedup? I really have no idea without benchmarks, though :)
Redundant? Where was the first beowolf post? Flamebait? WTF? Can't wait for metamoderation to kick in on these...
Just because a PowerPC instruction is "complex" and "does more per instruction" does not mean that it executes any faster than one instruction per cycle per functional unit. It just means that it makes the pipeline longer and possibly introduces more pipeline stalls.
:)
That's not how it works... otherwise the pipeline of a PPC would be longer than a Pentium4... the opposite is in fact true.
http://www.apple.com/g4/myth/
Fewer stages means "less bubbles" when cache misses and branch prediction fails. G4's have shorter pipelines.
And IBM didn't see a world-wide demand for more than a dozen mainframes.
By the time you factor in biometric security, voice recognition and Christ's own gaming engines, VR generation, desk-top video editing and so on, 64 bits gets chewed up pretty fast even if you offload some processing to custom chips (and anyway who wants to build boxen with more ASICs that cost more money?)
64-=bitrs on the desktop? In five years it may be the majority of new box builds are 64-bits and 32-bit will be for poor for folks stuck on Windows without a migration path.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
>"Average code" is 20% branch instructions,
Well, as wanted to indicate "Average" is very vague. SPECInt has 14-16% conditional branches. SPECFloat has 3-12%.
>On the first run [...] 50% prediction rate
Not really. Statistical prediction and profiling can be applied. 85% of back branches are taken (loops), and 60% forward branches are taken. With predict taken you get roughly a miss prediciton rate (MPR) of 35%. With profiling you can get a MPR of 10%-20%.
>[...] and a good branch prediction unit can give 90% correct predictions.
Let's say an average one. (At best)
A two-level adaptive scheme (T. Yeh, Y. Patt) delivers a MPR of 3%. Hybrid Branch Predictors deliver even better results.
>We then need to add the pipeline length
The penalty is not always the whole pipepline length.
For the P4 the pipeline has 28 stages. But only 19 have to be flushed (8 are needed for the trace cache).
So lets review your calculation:
>So this leads us to need a pipeline flush every 45 instructions (on average)
20% branches 10% MPR means to me 2% pipeline flushes. How do you come on every 45 instructions?
I'd say something more like this:
Conditional branch instructions: 20% (your guess is as good as mine).
MPR 10% = 2E-2 Pipline flush probability
MPR 5% = 1E-2
MPR 3% = 6E-3
Some Guesses:
MPR: P3 5%, P4 3%, PPC970 3%
Pipeline penalty: P3 10, P4 19, PPC970 10
Overhead: P3: 10%, P4: 12%, PPC970 6%
So, at least according to my estimation the P4 has actually not 18% penalty towards the PPC970 but only one of 6%.
> multi-tasking
Umm, you are running with something 1GHz for something like 10ms. So you'll have 10MI. So most probably, the penalty for a cold BTB is probably neglectable. Otherwise, you're probably IO-bound anyway, and the CPU will be you're least problems.
The reason for better (or worse) performance may probably lie somewhere else. Actually, the increase of other pipeline hazards may be one of them. How long instructions take another one. (Well, for RISC processor an (non-fp) instruction takes 1 cycle, but for x86...) Not to mention caches and memory.
"Between strong and weak, between rich and poor [...], it is freedom which oppresses and the law which sets free"
On top of that, I think you should add about 30% for 64-bit processing
Not really. A few specialized apps will benefit from 64-bit, just as a few specialized apps benefit more from Altivec than SSE. But in general 64-bits is irrlevant to typical apps and tools.
64-bit may help indirectly in that the processor will need to fetch instructions and data more quickly, so more transistors will probably be dedicated to this. However these improvements could have been made in a 32-bit CPU as well. It's just that with 64-bit it becomes more of a necessity.
All just speculation, looking forward to seeing what Apple eventually comes up with. That said I'm a bit skeptical since we've had so many PowerPC advancements that were finally supposed to let PowerPC catch up to Intel, and of course nothing really changed.
Do you really know what 64-bit gives you? It doesn't give you performance. It gives you extra precision and larger addressable memory size. Performance in this case is more a matter of how well IBM's compilers work and the inner workings of the instruction decode stages and execution stages work.
So, when's lunch?
http://www-3.ibm.com/chips/news/2002/1014_powerpc. html
Start Running Better Polls
Yeah, right. Next thing you'll be telling me about Sega games on the Nintendo.
I imagine the Power4 team has some decent compilers. Their customers care about performance not MHz
" Despite the fact that the PPC 970 will be introduced at 1.8 GHz while the P4 is expected to be around 3GHz, the 970 will execute 8 instructions per cycle."
The IBM processors are RISC processors. The Intel ones are CISC. RISC do less per instruction, therefore, it is stupid compare the way you do.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
How can Apple be a "buyer" of a product that doesn't exist? This chip won't be in production until late next year. I'm growing tired of all these unnamed "sources" and "insiders" telling us that Apple is using this processor in its future Macs. Nobody ever says where they got this information.
The only clearly detailed story I've heard came from somebody who attended an IBM tech briefing, and he said the IBM rep flat-out declared that they pitched this processor to Apple, and Apple shrugged it off. So until one of these "sources" or "insiders" comes clean with his identity and some details as to how he acquired his "insider" knowledge, I think this is all a bunch of speculative hype meant to generate hits at news websites.
It's ironic that if one posts the most simple opinion on a site like Slashdot without his identity, he is labelled an "anonymous coward," but if he submits unfounded rumors to a news site to help generate pie-in-the-sky hype, everyone hangs on every word he says...without reason.
Filesystems and a lot of other software have been hacked up in recent years to circumvent the 2^32 barrier with 64-bit fields that have to be processed one 32-bit integer at a time. Nasty!
The Commodore 64 programmer inside of me cringes at the thought of having to use an 8-byte address as the target of a long jump, but I think this has to happen. Unfortunately, I suspect the industry is going to let segmentation and other hacks come back into style rather than fixing the real problem. Sigh.
Of the handful of articles I read about it, somebody said that the 970 would effectivly compete with a 4-6 GHz P4 as a result of the instructions per cycle efficiency of the chip.
Somebody? Oh that makes this all believeable. I haven't seen any quake3 benchmarks... wake me up when you've seen some.
Running at a speed of up to 900 megahertz, the bus can deliver information to the processor at up to 6.4 gigabytes per second.
With today's CPUs getting faster and faster we need a fast system bus to really see big performance gains and that's exactly what this chip gives us. Gimme a 1.8 GHz PPC 970 with a 900 MHz system bus and that will kill all competition. The bus is running at half the processor speed, that's lightning! This thing is gonna scream!infested with jello like fishes no melotron wishes
Intel based chips typically have deep pipelines and fewer execution units and registers. Chips designed like this lose speed every time a pipeline flush is necessary (bad branch prediction, for instance), or during pipeline stalls (caused during some "exclusive" instructions and some synchronization tasks, notably when you need to stall out the pipeline). Intel makes up for this with higher clock speeds and larger high speed caches.
Number of parallel units and parallel execution is a very important factor in some performance tests - the original Pentium could either do int/float or MMX and required a context switch to flip between them, while Altivec could run at the same time as Int and Float operations (and multiple - I think 3 - could be processed at the same time). Alas, Motorola was slow out the gate, delaying the G4 multiple times, and Intel released the parallel-able SIMD around the same time (if not first) and had kicked performance well above the Motorola chips shortly afterward, which mostly made up for the aformentioned flaws.
Also, I believe some of the extra non-general purpose registers are used for context switching by the processor in PPC systems, where Intel's chips grab this information from L1 cache. I don't know if this is true for newer chips, though (even circa Pentium 2)
One has to wonder what kind of SEC fun Slashdot would get if the SEC were to pay attention.
Slashdot, owned by a publicly-held company, frequently posting highly inaccurate stories about other publicly-held companies to a technology industry audience, that could potentially damage a company's reputation and/or profit.
"Ahem. 128MB L3 cache (on the POWER4 in the benchmark)? Daaaamn. I'm not saying that a fat L3 cache has anything to do with SPEC benchmarks (I'm guessing it doesn't), I'm just making an observation: that's a lot of cache!"
In fact, it absolutely does have an effect on the SPEC benchmarks. You'll note that IBM's world beating POWER4 SPEC scores were recorded on a *dual core* module -- in other words, they cut the number of active cores in half, but the shared cache architecture meant that the L3 for each active core was thus doubled. Coincidentally, the SPEC working set will fit within the 64mb of cache per processor.
It's still hellaciously fast, but that monster cache IS there for a reason.
'jfb
To spur "enterprise Linux," Big Bang, the distributed two-phase commit.
All modern Intel processors have been RISC at heart.
Do you think that the one instruction that the P4 executes per clock is one IA-32 instruction? It isn't. It's one instruction in the internal RISC instruction set.
Actually, in this case, it would be an Appleseed cluster.
Imagine clustering for anybody.
Presumably, Linux will run on the PPC 970 just as MacOSX will by the time it is released. I wonder if IBM will release systems based around the chip running Linux to fill out their product line. I also wonder if MacOSX and Linux will end-up more directly competing in the "creative professional" market space as a result...
'Drivers are what let windows work with your hardware.'
/. What a shame.
I hate to say this, but I have never been asked for a damn driver disc in Linux. Given a random piece of hardware I would bet on Linux compatibility over M$ any day.
"UNIX technology" is what makes my network possible. It is how any of my thin clients can run apps with staggering ram requirements. I would literally rather use a closed-source unix than an open-source dos.
On a side-note to make this post relevent:
Why is everyone making a big deal about Apple buying 64-bit chips. My iBook has a 64-bit chip. Apple's computers have been 64-bit for a long time. Wintel propoganda has even penetrated
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Wouldn't there be a rather large overlap between the applications that run no faster on 64 bits and the applications that do not benefit from faster chips period? How fast do you need your word processor to run?
I'm betting that most of the apps that really could take advantage of more speed (graphics, video, intense mathematical calculations, large database manipulations) will also be the ones that will benefit from 64 bit goodness.
Apple laptops are effectively unusable for unix users.
I am a long-time Unix user. That means I need to have the Ctrl key to the left of the A key. This is a genuine need, not merely a want; it is based upon ergonomics. The Ctrl key is heavily used in unix, and it must be easily accessable. It cannot be off in the lower left corner of the keyboard where it is difficult to get at, and where it distorts the position of your left hand such that you can't easily type other keys while holding the Ctrl key down.
Apple desktop keyboards are now all USB. They are all OK. The CapsLock key can be re-mapped into a Ctrl key.
Unfortunately, even in this modern age, all Apple laptops have built-in ADB keyboards. The ADB keyboard is broken-by-design. It is, in general, not possible to remap the CapsLock key into a Ctrl key.
There are some exceptions, but they are horrible kludges. They are horrible kludges because the original design of the ADB keyboard was a horrible kludge. The correct solution would be for Apple to re-design their laptop motherboards to use built-in USB keyboards. This hasn't happened yet. If you run Linux, use Debian's solution. For Mac OS X users, uControl works. There are no solutions (that I know of) for either NetBSD or OpenBSD. Please note once again that the "solutions" above are in fact kludges, because of the original bad design of the ADB keyboard.
Apple is (currently) ignoring Unix users! This is not merely speculation on my part. In an on-going email exchange I am having with an Apple employee (whom I won't name) in their marketing department, the Apple marketing person directly stated to me that Apple was catering to their historic Mac customers, and is purposely ignoring the Unix market. He also claimed that Apple would soon start paying more attention to the Unix market. I won't hold my breath. Apple has been ignoring Unix users for more than 12 years. I expect that trend to continue. (Also note that my Apple contact indicated that Macs would never ship with a 3-button mouse, even though Apple intended to port almost all X-window software and deliver it either on a CD/DVD or installed directly on each Mac's hard drive. How Unix friendly is a 1-button mouse with X programs that often require 3 buttons?)
Apple has now lost two opportunities to sell me hardware. I really wanted an Apple laptop for their superior battery life, and for the PowerPC with Altivec CPU. (The Altivec is vastly superior to the x86 line for DSP.) Because I can't live with the broken-by-design built-in ADB keyboard in all Apple laptops, Sony and IBM sold me laptops instead. If Apple fixes this problem, they will sell me a PowerBook next year; if they don't, I'll still be running OpenBSD on x86 hardware, and wishing I could use a Mac.
Apple laptops are effectively unusable for unix users.
I am a long-time Unix user. That means I need to have the Ctrl key to the left of the A key. This is a genuine need, not merely a want; it is based upon ergonomics. The Ctrl key is heavily used in unix, and it must be easily accessable. It cannot be off in the lower left corner of the keyboard where it is difficult to get at, and where it distorts the position of your left hand such that you can't easily type other keys while holding the Ctrl key down.
Apple desktop keyboards are now all USB. They are all OK. The CapsLock key can be re-mapped into a Ctrl key.
Unfortunately, even in this modern age, all Apple laptops have built-in ADB keyboards. The ADB keyboard is broken-by-design. It is, in general, not possible to remap the CapsLock key into a Ctrl key.
There are some exceptions, but they are horrible kludges. They are horrible kludges because the original design of the ADB keyboard was a horrible kludge. The correct solution would be for Apple to re-design their laptop motherboards to use built-in USB keyboards. This hasn't happened yet. If you run Linux, use Debian's solution. For Mac OS X users, uControl works. There are no solutions (that I know of) for either NetBSD or OpenBSD. Please note once again that the "solutions" above are in fact kludges, because of the original bad design of the ADB keyboard.
Apple is (currently) ignoring Unix users! This is not merely speculation on my part. In an on-going email exchange I am having with an Apple employee (whom I won't name) in their marketing department, the Apple marketing person directly stated to me that Apple was catering to their historic Mac customers, and is purposely ignoring the Unix market. He also claimed that Apple would soon start paying more attention to the Unix market. I won't hold my breath. Apple has been ignoring Unix users for more than 12 years. I expect that trend to continue. (Also note that my Apple contact indicated that Macs would never ship with a 3-button mouse, even though Apple intended to port almost all X-window software and deliver it either on a CD/DVD or installed directly on each Mac's hard drive. How Unix friendly is a 1-button mouse with X programs that often require 3 buttons?)
Apple has now lost two opportunities to sell me hardware. I really wanted an Apple laptop for their superior battery life, and for the PowerPC with Altivec CPU. (The Altivec is vastly superior to the x86 line for DSP.) Because I can't live with the broken-by-design built-in ADB keyboard in all Apple laptops, Sony and IBM sold me laptops instead. If Apple fixes this problem, they will sell me a PowerBook next year; if they don't, I'll still be running OpenBSD on x86 hardware, and wishing I could use a Mac.
Now here's a case of when life hands you lemons you make lemonade. The parent was talking about simultaneous execution, i.e. how many instructions per cycle can come out of the end of the pipeline. You're twisting it around to take that number and multiply it by the horribly long pipeline.
Let's go back to basics, every time the processor makes a mistake in guessing what's going to happen next, the pipeline has to be cleared. Every modern CPU faces this problem so you want short pipelines so your penalty is low. Intel has vastly longer pipelines and thus they pay a higher price every time predictive branching screws up.
So having a large number of instructions being simultaneously worked on is a *bad* thing unless they are also being pumped out and executed in large numbers as well. AFAIK, in the P4 they aren't.
According to Ars Technica the P4 in the real world gets 2.5 instructions per cycle done. With the new G5 getting 8 done per cycle with half the pipeline depth, performance should once again favor the Mac side of the PC wars.
IBM unveils new 64-bit PowerPC microprocessor
The new chip, called the IBM PowerPC 970, is derived from IBM's award-winning POWER4 server processor to provide high performance and additional function for users. As the first in a new family of high-end PowerPC processors, the chip is designed for initial speeds of up to 1.8 gigahertz, manipulating data in larger, 64-bit chunks and accelerating compute-intensive workloads like multimedia and graphics through specialized circuitry known as a single instruction multiple data (SIMD) unit.
"IBM's new PowerPC 970 64-bit chip is all about bringing high-end server processing power to the desktop, low-end server and pervasive space," said Michel Mayer, general manager, IBM Microelectronics Division. "IBM is committed to helping more customers put our expertise in advanced chip design and manufacturing technology to work for them."
The chip incorporates an innovative communications link, or "bus," specially developed to speed information between the processor and memory. Running at a speed of up to 900 megahertz, the bus can deliver information to the processor at up to 6.4 gigabytes per second, to help ensure that the high-performance processor is fed data at sufficient speeds.
All currently shipping Intel and AMD desktop microprocessors internally translate x86 instructions to much smaller instructions that are functionally similar to RISC style instructions.
Close but no cigar...
POWER stands for Performance Optimizations With Enhanced Risc, but y'all knew that of course.
---
"Multiple exclamation marks are a sure sign of a sick mind." (Terry Pratchett)
Why compare it with the Pentium 4 at all?
Wouldn't it more useful and accurate to compare it to compare it to Intel's 64bit Itanium 2?
I guess most of us are more familiar with the P4 but for someone try to choose a platform for a future 64bit app, the choice will be I2, G5 or Hammer. To a great extent, how these compare to their 32bit cousins will be moote if your app actually has 64bit precision or memory requirements.
With the new G5 getting 8 done per cycle with half the pipeline depth
Yeah, right.
First, 8 is the number of execution units - not necessarily the number of instructions that can be retired per cycle (it's probably lower).
Second, assuming it can use all execution units in a single cycle, do you really think the chip ON AVERAGE will keep every single execution unit filled?
For a more realistic comparison, remember that the P4 is almost at 3 GHz now, and by the end of next year it will be at about 4 GHz. If the P4 does 2.5 instructions on average per cycle, this means the IBM chip needs to AVERAGE 5.6 instructions per cycle just to be on par with the Pentium.
This highlights another problem for Apple: You might get that kind of execution performance from the excellent IBM compilers, but gcc won't even come close...
Yes, as a Power4 supercomputer user I can confirm that. The IBM AIX xlc and xlf compilers are simply the best in the world.
One problem, of course, is that you won't get these compilers on Apple computers, and gcc is up to a factor 2 slower....
Just being able to address over 4 GB will be a boon to anyone using CAD or high-end video or graphics, or running a mid-level server. Forget any cache loss loading 64-bit, think no more paging memory to try to get over 4 GB.
Then you would lose that bet, sheenmaster@flame.dnsart.com - because hardware makers write drivers for windows on release. It isn't until some smelly geek picks up say, a Colorado Jumbo tape drive and thinks "I wonder if I could store 250M of gay porn on this!" that a Linux driver gets written.
Why I got interviewed for a position at IBM about a month ago... They wanted me and a group of 20 other people to write device drivers for "Apples 64bit powerPCs"...
I hope Apple has great plans for this chip...
We're talking about a vapor chip. We can't have real numbers except on real chips. The parent I was responding too had a bunch of purposeful hooey and all I wanted to do was retire it to the jumk opinion pile it deserves to be in.
If we're going to speculate on comparative Ghz numbers, the G5 is supposed to come out sometime next year. That could be June for all we know. Also, Intel might or might not make it to 4Ghz by next December.
It's all a speculative probabalistic cloud with some speculations generating wins for both chips. We'll see in a year but it's very definitely an improvement for the current state of the mac.
Now that
Yes, because we all know IBM dosen't happen to have some of the best compilers in the world. We are also sure that Apple will completly neglect to notice those compilers for "high profile" TPS vendors.
I can almost guarntee nothing will be recompiled!!!
no I'm not talking out of my arse..
Protoplasm. Quiet Protoplasm. I like quiet protoplasm.
SPEC int2000 consists of gcc, gzip, perl, bzip2, crafty (a Free chess engine), and some other stuff. I happen to be interested in building a computer to run crafty fast, so it's very handy to have good benchmark results for it on recent AMD and Intel CPUs. (Athlons kick P4 butt on crafty, probably because of bit shifts and things like that that P4 is slow on.) Many people would find the gcc, perl, and compression benchmarks interesting when buying a *NIX workstation.
SPEC fp2000 includes Mesa, but only doing software rendering. The other programs are mostly scientific computing apps. (Not just synthetic matrix multiplies or things like that.)
#define X(x,y) x##y
Peter Cordes ; e-mail: X(peter@cordes ,