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IBM PowerPC 970 Architecture
riclewis writes "Hannibal from Ars Technica offers an explanation of some of the internals of the new IBM chip. It's certainly more powerful than anything on the desktop now, but by the time it's released a year from now, it looks to be middle-of-the-pack (which could still be a step up for Apple...) This excitement over the early release of hardware specs kinda reminds me of all the hype surrounding the Sony's Emotion Engine when it was introduced a couple years ago. In fact, some are suggesting the PPC 970 chip might be closely related to the PS3's 'Cell' processor..."
Depends....where do you want to go today?
Cheers,
Ian
"In fact, some are suggesting the PPC 970 chip might be closely related to the PS3's 'Cell' processor..."
Even though it's really doubtful, it'd be extremely cool to see a PS3 emulator on the mac if the processors are that closely related.
I remember running Mac OS 6.0.5 on my Atari ST. Because it had the same processor, it didn't need much to make it run.
Oh well, I can at least dream, can't I?
Today is Wednsday, Sun Microsystems is evil today. IBM's days are the second and third tuesdays of every month.
Middle of the Pack is not a step up for Apple... The G4 chips outperform Intel and there microinstruction intuperted to Risc instructions.... alot more goes into a processor than it's MHZ... Take a read of Hennessy and Patterson's book Computer Architecture A Quantitative Approach
Not that hot NOW! They will have a lot of competition in that space with Opteron/Clawhammer, and the new Sparcs.
Still, glad to see something other than incremental progress.
The law is a weapon of the government, not a protection for the likes of you. Surely you understand that.
This could help push Apple back to a respectable market share over a couple of years. A *nix box with a decent processor and lots of commercial software? Of course, Apple has proved to be just as fierce in protecting their proprietary code as Microsoft, so I wouldn't expect the price to drop significantly for every million sold. But still, alternatives (especially of this caliber) are good.
Unlike the P4, the 970 does one more trick after it has cracked the PPC instructions down into iops. The 970 divides up the iop stream into "groups" of five iops a piece. So first it cracks the PPC instructions down into iops, then it collects the iops back together into groups. The iops are placed the group's five slots in program order with the stipulation that all branch instructions must go in slot 4 (the last slot). Furthermore, slot 4 can hold only branch instructions and nothing else. It is these groups of five iops that are dispatched in-order to the issue queues. (I haven't yet seen a functional diagram of the 970's core, so I'm not sure how many issue queues there are.)
computing in chunks... sounds a lot like a Cray. Together with the 900MHz-effective (jesus... that's a lot) FSB, Apple really will be selling supercomputers in the next few years.
But what do I know. I'm just looking for anonymous gay sex.
NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
when the p4 debuted it was sort of average too... the p4's power has come from it's ability to scale to higher mHz ratings pretty quickly. what kind of life are they going to get out of this chip? if it's going to top off at 2gHz then it doesn't really seem worth it, but if they can chip can get up to 3 gHz or so within a year of its release...
I mean... it's great news that Apple won't have to rely on Motorolla's decidedly passive desktop chip development strategy anymore...
But man. First off, this kills any possibility of a big surprise hit. Second, this dooms apple sales for the next year or so... who wants to buy a stagnating desktop model when the next edition has so much promise?
Then again, Apple's desktop offerings have been a little stagnant anyway... most people probably won't want to play the waiting game for as long as it'll take for these to come out.
I just hope that by the time they do, they're worth it.
"...but by the time it's released a year from now, it looks to be middle-of-the-pack (which could still be a step up for Apple...)"
As has been well-documented, Macs perform just as well as Windows machines. The slower clock speed of PowerPC compared to Intel is made up by the lack of code bloat is Mac OS compated to Windows. Also, PowerPC and Intel/AMD are two different types of processing, so they can't really even be compared.
So we won't see these in Macs until 2004. I wonder if my old 600 MHz G3 iMac can hold out that long?
Current desktop machines are already overpowered for word processing, and E-Mail, which is what they are used for at least 90% of the time.
It's certainly more powerful than anything on the desktop now, but by the time it's released a year from now, it looks to be middle-of-the-pack (which could still be a step up for Apple...)
What the hell is the point of designing a computer that you know will not be able to compete performance-wise against the very market you are trying to win over? Why would I want to switch to a less powerful system? If it's the alleged ease-of-use vs. Windows, forget it. People would have already bought Macs in droves.
Here's my first real opportunity to burn some karma:
Any posts claiming Apple computers are slower than PCs shouldn't be labeled as trolls or flamebait.
I hope IBM will make 970-based PPC with price affordable for programmers. And I hope it will be compatible with Linux/PPC kernel. Then we may buy such thing to run Gentoo on it for server-side applications.
I wonder whether IBM will sell it with Linux or AIX pre-installed.
Less is more !
1) Why all the hype over a chip that will be slow when it's released? I'll admit, the specs look damn impressive - a 1.6 Power4 single-core has the SpecFP/INT specs of a P4 2.5 (500mhz Bus), but they're not due out for a year, and the 1.6 is expected to be on the high end
2) Why only a single-core?
3) Where's the G5? It looked similarly impressive, a year ago. It still does, according to the Register's leaked spec numbers
4) What's the advantage again of a 64 bit processor? Sure, more RAM. Is it faster? Does it do more? Anyone?
4)
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
It has to be incredibly fast! How could a chip called '970' not be really quick and powerful?
Expect to see a slightly cheaper version called the 940, and a low-end chip called the 880. Well in fact there won't be any real difference between those two chips, but you pay for the extra prestige the extra 60 gives you.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
" In fact, some are suggesting the PPC 970 chip might be closely related to the PS3's 'Cell' processor...""
Ah, so it runs on vapor instead of smoke?
*wonders if anybody'll get that.*
ok, so it's SPEC INT and SPEC FP numbers are 937 and 1051 respectively. From www.spec.org, 2002 q3: dell Precision WorkStation 340 (2.8 GHz P4), specint base is 970, peak 1010; specfp base is 938, peak 947. When it's actually released, if they make 2003 Q2, it won't be particularly impressive. But the current apple G4 specmarks are about 35% of the 970, so it'll look good compared to that.
That really depends if you're doing a cost-per-performance comparison though. Mac is still often expensive.
A lot of windows people I know build gaming machines though, so I suppose if there were a comparison there (if Mac could run all my games) then the cost of expensive video accelerators, etc could be factored in. While I suppose Mac would factor in such costs as well, most of the Mac people I know didn't buy their systems to run Doom3 and the newest UT.
Apple starts shipping these in January. Hey, I can hope damn you! ;-)
At least IBM is pretty good at manufacturing microprocessors, while Moto is certainly not. IBM already has a 0.10 micron (not 0.09) fab in testing, so perhaps the 970 will get to >2GHz "soon."
In a related story: Moto is supposedly selling their chip business. I guess they finally realized they have no idea what they are doing.
... so could somebody who understands this processor tell me this:
Would a 3D rendering app such as Lightwave potentially see a huge benefit to this processor? I understand that it's up to the developer to tune it, yadda yadda yadda, I'm concerned with potential not real world numbers.
I'm trying to get an image in my mind about how the various processor descriptions (32-bit, 64-bit, Altivec, SimD, etc...) can radically change how an app like that would work.
Us vertex pushers have a substantial interest in machines that excel at that type of work...
Since I won't be buying a pc from Apple with this chip on it, I hope some third party such as Tyan decides to make an ATX format MB for us pc builders. There WILL be Linux ports for this chip, and existing PPC ports would probably work with it in 32 bit mode at first. Even IBM might offer an ATX evaluation board, though it would probably cost too much.
First, you don't separate the poster's own comments from fact.
What makes you accept, at face value, that the Power 970, which hasn't been produced for the market--let alone incorporated into a real, living, breathing product--will be "middle-of-the-pack" come 2003 when it's actually available?
As for your underpants gnome analogy, there are plenty of processors available in systems today that are not the most powerful (even correcting for price) that don't produce profitable products. And not all such profitable products are made by Apple . . .
"In fact, some are suggesting the PPC 970
chip might be closely related to the PS3's 'Cell' processor..."
I heard a month or so ago that IBM was working on developing the PS3's processor w/Sony. So, it wouldn't be a surprise if the PPC 970 shared some common ground with the PS3's chip.
Your lack of references and examples force me to believe you have a bias believing that Ars has a bias!
/. readers have built from nothing. (Or would that comment require me to post examples?)
Please, let's keep up the trolling standard that
"Hannibal" also has an incredible knack for making the workings of microprocessors understandable to those with no hardware engineering backgrounds.
// I will show you fear in a handful of jellybeans.
For those interested in how other processors did with these benchmarks. look here and here.
Back in the "good-old-days", a primary benefit of the "newer", larger "bit" processors were the larger instructions. An 8-bit processor had small 8-bit instructions, with maybe some double-"word" instructions that were much slower to execute, along with an 8-bit integer math unit. Floating point, when you had it, was also constrained by the 8-bit size, though a bit less tightly. Thus, moving up in size, meant increases in performance on many fronts, but instruction width, integer math width, and addressing were the big ones.
I am wondering how this applies to these latest 64-bit processors. In the days of RISC, one would think that a reduced instruction set would easily fit in 32-bit instructions (those are rather huge and comfy compared to the old 8-bit days), though I would guess that a 64-bit instruction can include an opcode, register specification AND 32-bits of memory address, which would mean fewer multi-word instructions, which by old measures means faster execution. A 64-bit integer unit would have some real benefit. I find more and more cases where 32-bit integers are not sufficiently large to cover the range of values needed for problems, and that is without addressing over 32-bits of data.
I am curious if someone can compare these attributes of the current Pentium 4/Athlon XP processors with this PowerPC 970, the current SPARC from Sun (Ultra is it?), and the current HP/PA processor (though isn't that being dropped in favor of Itanium?)?
The G4 chips outperform Intel and...
Are there any benchmarks to prove this claim? It would be interesting to see a comparison - especially if made by an independent party.
Tor
No Apple systems are listed in the SpecCPU95 or CPU2000 results at www.spec.org
Where did you get your specmarks?
(Methinks Apple has something to hide...)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
supposedly the issue with Apple's chips over the last few years was Moto's manufacturing process. rumors say that IBM was always able to make more chips of higher speeds than Moto. the story is that because of the contract between the 3, IBM chips did not go in Apple boxes (upgrades and whatnot), and they could not outclock Moto.
yes, that's from the rumor mill, but everyone knows Moto has been going through a lot of corporate restructuring and who knows where they will be focusing in the next 5 years. IBM is going to make these chips (where ever they are going to be used) at a brand new plant in NY state. they have a great rep for quality control.
i kind of creepy thing is that the articles say they will probably debut 2nd half of next year (Macworld NYC? one last hurah! before MW moves back to Boston?) or not till January 2004. the articles also inply that they will debut at 1.4GHz. Apple is now selling 2 x 1.25 GHz G4 chips.
will Apple stall at or below 1.4 GHz till these new chips come out? the general upgrade of Apple machines is 5 or 6 months right now. that leave 2 possible revisions to the G4 towers before these babies are set. now i know that these chips will come with a super motherboard and 64 bit vs 32 and bla bla bla but Apple fights the megahertx myth even to somewhat educated comsumers. how will they be able to spin it when they have to explain it in terms of Apples vs Apples?
i guess it's a minor problem if these chips are as zippy as they say... a few benchmark tests and bar graphs should convey some message? maybe instead of having a 12 y.o. kid set up his iMac and go online in 5 minutes, they will have a 12 y.o. kid clone his dog or something. i would be impressed.
No. Linux only runs on the x86 architecture.
....actually for some tasks, such as multimedia, RISC is a lot faster than x86. I am a linux x86 person but have done music on Macs. The macs can usually handle many more soft synths and tracks than a comparable pc.
two advantages to this processor are the bus--900mhz with 6.2 gb/sec--and the power usage.
"At 1.8GHz, the PowerPC 970 will consume 1.3-volts and dissipate 42-Watts. At 1.2 GHz, the PowerPC 970 will consume 1.1-volts and dissipate only 19-Watts. For comparison, a 1GHz G4 consumes 1.6-volts and dissipates 21.3-Watts."
it seems that the powerbook potential is there. and in apple's market data throughput counts heavily, maybe more than absolute processor speed. look at sgi. the ibm proprietary memory is a bit confusing however.
Gene Simmons never had a personal computer when he was a kid!
This public service announcement brought to by by Bannana Computer.
Once you move beyond a 4.5billion, into the realm of 18.5 (two orders of magnitude past trillion), you can address anything for the forseable future (since you can count each year until the heatdeath of the universe this way, for example).
For vector operations, 64bit words make for some fast math operations, since you can pack more 32-bit integer components into each bus transfer.
For floating point, it means you have greater precision in hardware (allowing things like real physics and shapes to be modelled without noticable issues caused by subtle number creep). Since most systems use IEE-784 (64bit double precision floating point), it means a speedup to that software since you're not working with it as 2 32-bit operations.
In terms of storage space, it means you can address more than 2,199,023,255,552 bytes (~2 terabytes) of disk space (assuming a 512-byte sector). This is important for people with big RAID arrays today, and people with ludicrously big Maxtor drives 3-4 years from now.
For RAM, it means you don't have to worry about your server topping out at 4 gigabytes of RAM. It also means that your VM space has no effective limitation for the forseable future (very useful for people working on large projects, trying memory-intensive algorithmic approachs to traditionally NP-hard problems, or distributed computing problems).
I'm sure I missed a lot of the benefits even with this list. As you can see, 64-bit is not just a number game. It is 32 orders of magnitude larger than 2^32, meaning our grandchildren will probably still be using 64bit machines with no limitions being apparent (unlike 16-bit to 32-bit, which only moved from 65k to 4.5 billion in terms of addressable amounts of something).
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The 7.2 GB/sec of bandwidth is just not much more than double that of existing P4s (P4 = 4.2 GB/sec) and since Hammer will have 6.4 GB/sec in early 2003, should be essentially the same as competing x86 chips.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
it all sounds good, but until we get more info from the big blue, it's hard to tell. There are too many other factors to consider. One being is that many applications just don't run on the PPC. Since they are x86 only. So it doesn't matter how much potential speedup it may get if nobody writes for it.
The good things about this chip from the press release IMO are
A. Higher clock speeds.
B. More bandwidth.
The 5 issue superscaler stuff is neat from an engineer's point of view, but for most people, even the programmers, they should ignore it and assume that it's just really fast.
Compared to the Workstation PPCs out there right now, this has much more memory bandwidth. Which is good because it means that you should be able to process larger models in LW or Maya faster. (Assuming you have the RAM, DUH)
Faster clocks with the potential for even faster clocks is always good as it means that they will be able to hopefully make the processor incremently faster without having to redesign the whole thing. Which is what Intel did with the P3->P4.
Basically the processor is trying to compensate for crappy software and this is the newest idea for compensation. They're just changing the bottlenecks for the system again. Nothing new really.
Is is better then a x86 chip? Maybe. Wait till it comes out.
Go ahead, try to say something disparaging about Sony's Emotion Engine. But preface it with the statement that Sony has sold 40,000,000 PSX2 game consoles which feature the Emotion Engine, and also mention that Sony is selling about 2 million more every month. I've got two of these which my kids and their friends use, and they NEVER crash. What is your standard for success, by the way?
You're thinking of Windows.
The idea that this will be a strictly middle-of-the-road processor is to ignore some important facts. AMD's and Intel's 64-bit options are primarily geared towards servers and workstations. Meanwhile IBM claims that their GPUL was engineered primarily for personal computers NOT servers. Thus Apple could become the first computer manufaturer who puts 64-bit processing power in the hands of the general population. If the average Joe relizes that the wave of the future (64-bit) is inevitable, he'll probably want to get on early. Plus, don't forget the Altivec support built into the chips as well as the new super-bus that they are working on with nVidia. Not only will Apple get a powerful processor, but they'll also get a pipeline capable of feeding it.
The only way to get data in or out of the PPC970 processor is via one-way 32 bit paths: one 32 bit input path, and one 32 bit output path. It also requires a separate MMU chip. This is not a highly integrated processor, and it does not provide a true 64 bit path to memory because of the 32 bit bottleneck. We'll have to wait and see if these design "features" can be overcome in real systems.
Well, a bit off topic, but...
:-) /zugedneb
I think that we should be thinking more and more on the power consumption of things in
general... On the environment, you know...
I wonder for how long "The_American_Way" will
hold...
It would be interesting if some law turned up,(I am from Europe, Sweden), that would make
some serious "restrictions" on the
power/performance phenomenon...
It would be the rebirth of elegant
engeneering...
There is never a good time to buy a computer, and nobody in their right mind will ever buy one at all. There is always something faster coming up.
Once you get over how ludicrous that is, I say buy a computer whenever the hell you want one. And yes, your machine will be obsolete, according to all the charts and graphs and tables of benchmark numbers, almost immediately. It doesn't matter if you buy a G4 in 2003, or a 970 in 2004. It will still happen. Get over it.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Indeed, it's the old arguement.
My new Mac has a super-XXX ultrafast processor.
Does it run my software
Er, most of it. Those expensive custom apps won't run but I'm sure there's a Mac alternative. But enough about that, notice the fancy chrome design
Can I play my games on it?
Ummm, no, probably not. But hey, check the battery life on thi...
I think I'm just going to buy a cheaper windows box and play my games, thanks anyways
doh!
If we had a Mac which could run all that nice windows software, or a win machine that ran more like a Mac, yes, I would be happy.
For now, I'll be content with periodic crashes and weird errors. I can run my software and with a little tweaking 95% of it works fine.
and my mouse has 3 buttons, I like that - phorm
I may have missed a comment here, but I'm not that familiar with this subject. Apple uses multiprocessor schemes in all of its pro desktops now - I know that it's mainly to make up for other speed deficiencies - but is it possible (probable) that we will see dual processor versions of desktops with this chip as well?
-- If an artist saw things as they truly are, they would cease to be an artist.
A question about SPECfp and SPECint, do they test the performance only of the integer and floating point ALUs or take in account Single Instruction Multiple Data execution units? I mean if the SPEC benchmarks ignore the performance brought by 1/3 of the overall chip real estate, then they are poor overall judges of what can be done with either the G4 or upcomming ppc 970. On a desktop you are unlikely to run apps that all cater to one type of performance criteria such as integer performance. Specialized markets seem to be the targets of benchmarks in the first place. So far as a consumer it is all about how it feels, and that is just so subjective!
I mean centuries.
I don't see how you, on a desktop, could reach the limit of 2^64.
2^64 is 18,446,744,073,709,551,616
It is 4,294,967,296 times bigger than 2^32 (4,294,967,296).
That's 2 , places past where I know the highest decimal prefix number (trillion). It's 18.5 exabytes, where an exabyte is 1024 petabytes (each of with is 1024 terabytes, each of which is 1024 gigabytes).
It's really, really, really big.
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every single post that hints at 'megahertz myth' gets modded +5 insightful
and y'all worry about microsoft starting astroturf campains, geez . . .
How do you make a CPU go faster without jacking up the clock? You can create a new design, but that would be a lot more expensive than jacking up the clock. It takes years to develop a new CPU design and IPC increases are usually minimal. Most new CPUs seem to be designed to run at higher frequencies to achieve better performance. The P4 actually has a lower IPC than the P3 but can operate at much higher frequencies.
Many companies are planning to use parallelism to improve performance. IBM has a CPU with two logical cores, and Intel will introduce CPUs with two virtual processors in the very near future. But parallelism is not likely to get you a doubling of performance, especially on a desktop machine that is often running only one intensive process at a time.
Decodes/breaks down the native ISA, repackages them in bundles, then issues them to the execution units... A point-to-point FSB... Will have higher IPC than Athlon, but has all the same scalability limits. Hammer has the integrated memory controller and multiple hypertransport interfaces for fast IO and glueless MP. In short, PPC is similar to 7th generation x86 along with P4 and Athlon. Hammer is much more like Power4, but more highly integrated/cost-reduced. fpg
You mean, like all the OS X reviews in which they directly criticize problems of speed, performance, file metadata, and other issues?
Ars Technica is clearly interested in Apple's technology, but there's no fanboy drooling. Their assertions are nearly always backed up with some good technical logic and/or testing. Bias is not their problem.
Libertarianism is rich wolves and poor sheep playing gambler's ruin for dinner.
Note that your new IBM chip is doing exactly that.
Intel and AMD have repeatedly shown that they can do whatever they like to implement top-notch internal architectures, and lopping on a translation unit only adds 10-20% die area and typically a very small performance hit over a traditional sequential RISC architecture. And they're free to change the internal architecture between revisions. And both Intel and AMD sell enough chips that they can spend a lot of money on designs and make them very good and still turn a profit.
-- Erich
Slashdot reader since 1997
Contrary to some of the opinions presented recently it is just fine for Apple to use the 970 and be behind the curve with respect to typical performance. Sure there are specialized apps that can leverage a RISC architecture to outperform x86 or leverage Altivec to outperform SSE, but that is a small minority. Typical performance lags behind PC a little but we are in a situation where PCs and Macs have more performance than most people actually use. Most folks out there in the real world will get along very nicely with a 1GHz PC or a 800MHz Mac. Very few people need 2.xGHz machines, and only a few more have enough disposable income to buy those machines for Quake FPS pissing contests :).
The real Apple problem is that the gap between typical PC and typical Mac performance is starting to grow beyond the range that has historically shown to be viable. Not a problem today, standard dual CPUs counter this to a degree, but it's likely to be a problem in a year or two. While the 970 may only perform like a 3GHz P4 (SPEC), lag whatever Intel/AMD has in a year or two, it will be close enough. Apple will be back to a point where the typical performance gap is small enough. Apple has sold tens of millions of Macs that lagged PC counterparts in performance. They know that their customers are more interested in ease of use. Performance wise close-enough is all they need.
This whole story reminds me of 2000 when news of the G5 was circulating. So what happened? Now IBM is suddenly taking over desktop PPC development? WTF? Why doesnt Apple just use commodity X86 hardware? Its faster and is leading the industry in innovation. By the time this IBM chip comes out Intel and AMD will be crushing it with their high end chips. Apple is so lame.
http://www.heise.de/ct/english/02/05/182/
j pg)
. ht ml
SPEC benchmarks for the G4 processors. (Not a synthetic benchmark issued by Apple, but by an unbiased third party, SPEC)
G4 1 GHz SPECs at 306 integer 187 floating-point
Interestingly, the 1 GHz G4 was almost neck-and-neck with a 1 GHz PIII (http://www.heise.de/ct/english/02/05/182/qpic02.
http://www.spec.org/osg/cpu2000/results/cpu2000
A large archive of SPEC results for many CPUs, including x86.
A few choice results:
1.2 GHz Athlon (Ancient by today's standards) - 443 integer, 387 FP
Athlon XP 1700+ on an Epox EP-8KHA (Happens to be my mobo - Slowst Athlon XP listed for this mobo):
633 integer, 561 FP
Dell Precision Workstation 330, 1.3 GHz P4 - 474 integer, 502 FP (The P4 doesn't seem to be taking too much of a branch misprediction hit here)
So in the case of G4s, while they may be a bit more efficient MHz for MHz (And the P3 vs. G4 benchmarks so that this isn't even necessarily the case), the fact that they're so far behind on the clock speed curve hurts them badly.
If you want to see a good example of MHz not being everything, check out the benchmarks of Alpha systems - The 750 MHz ones chew even 1.2 GHz Athlons for lunch. But don't look at Apple...
Also interesting in the case of the SPEC benchmarks run by Heise - MS C pays a 10-15% performance hit over GCC in the SPEC benchmarks.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
For floating point, it means you have greater
precision in hardware (allowing things like real physics and shapes to be modelled without noticable issues caused by subtle number creep). Since most systems use IEE-784 (64bit double precision floating point), it means a speedup to that software since you're not working with it as 2 32-bit operations.
Actually, most CPUs today (including G4 and P4) do double-precision in hardware. The G4 does 64-bit FP multiply-add with a throughput of one operation per cycle (I'm pretty sure the P4 does too). Even the loads and stores are operating on 64-bit chunks. Going to a 64-bit processor won't change any of that. The only thing different for FP operations will be (1) you can hold a heck of a lot more numbers in memory! and (2) it might be possible for extended precision (128-bit) to be done easily in hardware.
All is Number -Pythagoras.
"Selling hardware at a loss is typical of the console market."
No, actually it's not. Only Microsoft loses money on it's boxes. No matter what Sony is selling their boxes for, they make a profit on every one. It's the difference between a profit oriented, well thought out plan, and a slapped together Microsoft 1.0.
"Politicians find new names for institutions which under old names have become odious to the people."
It's been a while since I worked so directly with the processor that I'd know that :) Another bonus of 64-bit is that a 100Mhz 64-bit bus will do the memory related work for those operands as quickly as a 200Mhz 32-bit bus.
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I believe you're mistaken on this point. While it is true that Sony NOW makes a profit on the PS2 consoles it sells, that was not the initial case. All major console vendors sell their initial units at a loss, in order to build market presence. The price to produce each console eventually goes down once the development costs are recovered and as the production is optomized. During the products life cycle the consoles slowlyy begin to become profitable. The PS2 reached this point a while ago, while MS will get there eventually. The key advantage that MS has is that it has massive cash reserves ($45 billion or something sick like that) which it can dip into, and never really has to worry about making a profit on the consoles. A company like Sega doesn't have this option, and is forced to withdraw its console offering if it doesn't begin to turn a profit, as happened with the Dreamcast. So MS's advantage comes in their ability to stick around longer than most companies in this market.
Seriously look at the low spec benches for the Sparcs no serious science user believes this is true. intel can manipulate the benchmarks and comparing the spec benches using GCC is crazy because PPC is not very optimized in gcc. The throughput and architecture of these new IBM processors will give them a shot at the crown next year. Spec is an unrealistic benchmark because it does not test how the computer is actually used, because it has tests that are easily loadable in the processors cache not the truely complex scientific tasks. None of you would be foolish enough to claim that a 1.5ghz P4 can take on a 1ghz sparc.
you are definitely not trained in computer engineering at all. PPC is a pure risc ISA if you knew about the differences between RISC and CISC yes they are in fact different but mainly in the instruction sets not the actual processor features. Risc inherently by design does not compile as fast because compilation requires more operations on RISC.
I can't find the link anymore, but last night I saw an article by Frank Soltis, the cheif scientist over the AS/400 unit. He basically laid out the evolution of the POWER achitecture (not the PowerPC) architecture and how it relates to the new 970 CPU. The first POWER cpu used by IBM was derived from their work with Moto and Apple, but it couldn't be used in the AS/400 line becuase of limitations in the chip. So IBM came up with Power2 (PowerPC AS). This exteneded the functionality of the chip to where it could be used in an AS/400 environment, but was no longer compatible with the PowerPC that Apple and Moto were selling. Then they added the POWER64 instruction set which made the chip faster for business and HPC applications, but drove it further away from the PowerPC platform. The POWER4 chip actuall includes 4 seperate instruction setts. POWER64, POWER32, PowerPC64 and PowerPC32. Adding Altivec and cutting out the second CPU core is what the 970 is. He didn't mention that there was really any overlap between it and the PS3 chip. POWER4 design was started in 96 so there may be some shared philosophy, but probably no real instruction matching between the two. He aslo said that the POWER5 (late next year) and POWER6 architectures would have some OS dependent accelerations put in them. He specifically mentioned that the chip would have an instruction for handling TCP streams instead of having to send several instructions to the CPU at once. And that these will be fully documented so that Linux/OSS can use them. POWER6 will extend that to specific DB2 and Domino calls to accelerate those apps.
Apple will announce their 970-powered Power Macs this January at MWSF 2003. Mac lovers drool over the Photoshop benchmarks, Mac haters whine about how it's not Windows/linux/DOS, everyone else wonders what the big deal is...
;)
The actual computers, of course, will ship around August 2004.
Hey, if anything, Apple's known for big announcements and even bigger delays.
I'd have to agree with the 'Hannibal knows jack' theory.
:( :(
Last I heard he was at college studying systems architecture but if his course doesn't hold up all members of the x86 architecture as a triumph of sheer bloody mindedness over decent design then he's wasting his money. If it does and he chooses to ignore the fact then he knows jack.
4004 x 2 = 30 years of pain
Such a waste of so much talent at Intel
but is it possible (probable) that we will see dual processor versions of desktops with this chip as well
Probable, no. Going entirely MP across the pro line is something that Apple only seems to do when the perceived performance gap is getting too wide. Last time they went entirely MP, Summer 2000?, when the next generation PowerPC CPUs came out and narrowed the gap to an acceptible level Apple reversed course and MP was once again an expensive option. Expect the same. Entirely MP cuts into Apple profit margins since the entry level and mid level machines are somewhat fixed.
Slashdot quoting Ars Technica, as if it were a source, is like third graders quoting comic book heros.
Except that third graders are expected to be at that level of maturity, while slashdot purports to be a society of engineers.
The average slashdot reader who's job is watching over a bunch of linux boxes to make sure they are doing their job, and who has no design responsibilities, can only program with scripting languages and doesn't understand basic processor architecture is not who we should turn to for analysis of the new IBM chip.
But that person would STILL Be more qualified than the average Ars Technica writer.
Ars Technica- The technical education of a 13 year old girl, the attitude of a 16 year old boy and the FUD orientation of Microsoft.
Let the FUD begin.
Yeah, and you guys panned the ipod too: http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23
I hope the SPEC suite gets run on OS X 10.2. It uses a newer compiler that has optimizations for PPC processors. gcc 2.x did not (earlier versions of OS X). Also, other parts of the OS have been 'tuned' in 10.2, so the SPEC numbers _should_ be better.
Does anyone have a grasp on the clock speed limitation facing 970 or the G4 part?
I know specmarks aren't perfect (another benchmark ran by Byte magizine in the mid 90s, which was equally well engineered, happened to be PowerPC biased), BUT with this much lead time surely IBM could have come up with a processor that would be competitive by next year. Whats the limitations here? Why aren't they planning on delivering a 4GHz part, since their competitors are?
Its a myth. Do some fact checking. Some consoles sold at a loss, most did/do not.
I cannot understand why this post would be called flamebait. I had an 030 based Amiga and emulated a mac with it occasionally and it certainly worked quite well. It certainly was faster than many of the Macs of the day.
Get yourself an Alpha. For the desktop try the 1U sized DS10L, or the 3U sized DS10. It'll run Tru64 Unix, OpenVMS, Linux, or one (or more) of the *BSDs. If you are really a masochist you might be able to run Windows NT 4. Prices start at around US$2000 and quantity discounts are available (see the blades in the large rack: can you say render farm?).
Repeat after me: "Slower processors give Apple a higher profit margin." Say this to yurself a few times and it will sink in why apple is in no rush to get faster and faster processors. They don't need them, most of the applications on their machines run good enough, and they certainly don't run on pcs so there is no big rush to compare the two architectures. Mac users are happy because their applications run how they are used to having them run and Apple doesn't have to increase the performance much to push people into buying new machines. All Apple has to do is make another lampshade computer and people will come running.
[ducks to avoid flames]
There's a specific talent to buying a Mac at the right time, as performance increases happen in large steps in a few distinct instances in the year.
PCs just keep getting gradually better and better. But with a Mac you can buy a single processor machine one day only to find you could have had a dual for the same price on the next day.
As I see it, there are really only three measurements that have any relevance at all in the real world: the performance/$, the performance/W, and possibly the absolute maximum available performance, in case you have a Wallet of Unlimited Depth.
Performace/Clock may be of interest to chip designers and processor architecture students, but anyone who would buy a system that delivers less actual performance per $YOUR_LOCAL_CURRENCY just because its "faster per clock cycle" or "a better/purer/more beautiful CPU-architecture" is suffering from either a bad case of geekitis or devoutness to the Church of $BRAND.
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Death to the sarcasm-impaired!
You may end up with a slightly faster processor or DDR vs. SDR RAM, or maybe ATA 133 vs. ATA 100, or video, etc.
With Mac, one day you buy a single 800 and the next day it's a dual 800 with a DVD writer and a faster system bus (example only, but Mac followers see this type of thing all the time). The value leaps are huge compared to the PC, making it necessary to be smart in your purchases.
There was, it appeared, a mysterious rite of initiation through which,
in one way or another, almost every member of the team passed. The term
that the old hands used for this rite -- West invented the term, not the
practice -- was `signing up.' By signing up for the project you agreed
to do whatever was necessary for success. You agreed to forsake, if
necessary, family, hobbies, and friends -- if you had any of these left
(and you might not, if you had signed up too many times before).
-- Tracy Kidder, "The Soul of a New Machine"
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