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PowerPC 970 Running at 2.5 GHz
kuwan writes "IBM has just released a press release that indicates they have the new PowerPC 970 running at 1.8 to 2.5 GHz making it 'the fastest PowerPC so far.' IBM's original estimates were to have the chip running at 1.4 to 1.8 GHz at introduction, so this is very good news for those of us hoping Apple will use this as their next-generation chip."
Who cares how fast IBM has this running in the lab--let's see how fast those fab lines are running before we get too excited.
I wonder how they managed to up the clock so dramatically? Is it just SOI and other techniques, or did they lengthen the pipeline significantly.
If it's just a pipeline lengthening scheme, well, meh, but if they kept the same execution pipeline and are now at 2.5ghz operating range, they're going to kick some ass.
I just hope Apple has their motherboards ready for 2.5GHz. The original spec of 1.8GHz with 6+GB bus was a little heady compared to Apple's current technology (no thanks to Motorola). I'm hoping they know how to build motherboards with the best of them to take advantage of IBM's new 970 chip. Pushing the envelope from 1.8GHz to 2.5GHz just makes the whole motherboard engineering issue more challenging. Let's hope Apple hardware design it up to the task (and then some).
OSX is great, and with the posibility of Apple using comparable processors to PCs, it may be time soon to Switch.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
I'm betting we won't see any new 970 Mac desktops til January, then 970 PowerBooks 6 months after that, but I'm hoping I'm wrong.
Kip Hawley is an idiot.
Ok, this is great news. I hope Apple decides to use this chip. I could just see dual ppc 970 Power Macs running at 2.5Ghz x 2 :) Why stop there maybe they'll go quad, and that would be awesome :)
I just hope apple doesnt go back to using single chip on their high end systems...its ok if they do use one chip for say the iMac, *book line but the Power Macs should stay with dual if they end up using this chip.
Oh and the obligatory, karma whoring
"Imagine a Beowulf of these!!!!"
.... ... }
int main (void) {
Does this chip match the power consumption and low heat dissipation that we have all come to know and love from the PPC arch? Does anyone know?
Fnord.sig
that the IBM press release states that it includes "Altivec"? I don't seem to remember them actually using the trademarked name before now...
Here you can find a more technical details than just press release.
Here is the actual spec about the PowerPC 970.
Ars Technica articles. Apparently, PPC 970 just last year's news. The real news is just the cranked-up speed...
--
Error 500: Internal sig error
Can you imagine a Beow---
Oh, nevermind.
IBM had PL/1, with syntax worse than JOSS,
And everywhere the language went, it was a total loss...
Mmmm. Tasty!
"It is ideal for very computing intensive applications, for example in the area of simulation like meterology or geological calculations."
Along with the rollout of the 970 chip, Apple will introduce two new insanely great iLife Apps: iWeather and iEarth. Now you can calculate weather patterns in your neighborhood and export the results to iMovie! Also, use iEarth's predictive powers in landscaping your front yard, planning your garden, and preventing cracks in your house's foundation.
Perfect for your digital lifestyle.
Eat that Miscrosoft!
The Rise and Fall of Online Community
2.5GHz now is interesting. 2.5GHz in 12-18 months if/when Apple gets them into actual production hardware will not be that interesting. By that time we'll probably see >= 4GHz Intel and AMD chips. Apple needs 2.5GHz machines *now*.
~Perhaps this will lead to some sort of debate regarding the virtues of Macs compared with PCs, something so rarely discussed on SlashDot.
Your mac is busted. Whatever the problem is, it has nothing to do with its macness.
Seriously.
Dude, Macs have a new operating system now. Your post sound like it's from 1996.
how many people have been holding off (or switching to other platforms) on a new Apple computer purchase for these new chips. I'm sure Apple is chomping at the bit waiting for these chips to be mass produced so that they can get them into Powermacs (and hopefully Powerbooks too), like, yesterday.
The POWERLite series (which is basically what the 970 is) is a great alternative to x86 for Apple for quite a few years ahead. Not only does IBM have an incentive to keep producing these chips at ever-greater clock speeds (something that Motorola with the G4 doesn't seem to have a great deal of interest in doing) because IBM actually uses these in their Blade servers, but it sets up a nice roadmap for successive generations of chips (the POWER5 is just around the corner, with a Power5Lite a la PowerPC 980 coming shortly thereafter? Such a chip is probably only a year and a half off and, running MacOSX, would rocksock).
Yum.
sig my booty, check my website
if (PC == "Personal Computer")
printf("Why do we say Mac vs PC?\n");
else if (PC == "Wintel architecture")
printf("Why confuse people with something called 'PowerPC'?\n");
else
printf("WTF?");
I wonder how they managed to up the clock so dramatically?
Xeon + hobby paint.
I bet the PPC will outperform a comparable x86 chip, and very likely it will use less power (at least if current PPC chips are any indication). I'm not too sure about cheaper though - probably depends if you're comparing to Intel or AMD. Keep in mind these will be 64 bit chips running at 2.5GHz - that my friend is news.
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The cool thing is the predicted 6.4 GB/second I/O throughput on the system bus...wow!
Interesting: this PR release seems to confirm the planned extensions are in fact, Altivec. I haven't followed it too closely, but I thought this wasn't confirmed yet.
Guess that makes it clear this is Apple's next chip.
My argument this last year for using a Macintosh on my desk over a UNIX workstation or a Windows box has been mostly security (where Apple is very strong), but it has been looking a bit pale in view of the speed difference. There's a chance now to catch up, especially given Intel's current dalliance with 64-bit chips and hardware DRM. I'm glad to see this.
"First of all, what is the processor that Apple using now? Isn't it some sort of PowerPC already? I see this one supports Altivec and I know that G3 and G4 Apple computers have the same instruction sets. Is this just another implementation, or is G3 and G4 relatives of this new processor?"
Apple does currently use a PowerPC processor in their computers. They have for the past eight years or so. Currently they're using the "750" edition, a'la G3 and G4, which are supplied by both IBM and Motorola.
"Second: what operating system does the IBM PowerPC run?"
The IBM machines with these series of microprocessors are things like the later generation AS/400s and RS/6000's. There are also some workstation machines (both badged as such and badged differently) with IBM PowerPCs in them. AS/400s use OS/400. RS/6000s can run many different OSes, including Linux and AIX.
"I suspect that the article is just confusing and processor itself is not made by IBM. Right??"
Wrong, at least on who makes the microprocessor. Motorola hasn't been doing so well lately, and even early on they had to deal with IBM to meet quota. IBM's hand in the PowerPC line is visible in Macintosh 5200's, which were common schoolroom computers that are starting to be end-of-lifed. They're dating back to August 1996 or so.
IBM had PL/1, with syntax worse than JOSS,
And everywhere the language went, it was a total loss...
Here's some:
- The new chip has a 54 stage pipeline, thus making it as effective as a current 700 MHz G4.
- The chip tested eliminated all ability for cache, thus allowing the speedup in clock but making it slower than all current G4s available in Apple computers.
- It is being developed as PowerPC but will be transitioned into x86.
- It will not support multiprocessing and MP applications will have to be done through a hackneyed clustering.
- This chip will help to propel Apple to 20% market share. (I'm a shareholder.)
- When worked hard, the chip gives off an odor vaguely reminiscent of shrimp flavored chips.
- The 970 is slightly faster than a Porsche 944.
Please feel free to add your own misinformation because there's not all that much real information to be discussed, anyway.
The 970 has the same instruction set (99%) as the G4, but it also has a very, very different internal architecture that should make it quite a bit faster than the G4 at the same clock rate. It's actually a scaled-down version of the Power4 chip, the CPU in a lot of IBM's much larger systems. The Power family is the root of the PowerPC chip, which was actually created by IBM/Apple/Motorola to simply use the same instruction set.
The IBM Power4 runs many of IBM's OS's.
...from the article:
Onchip 512 KB L2 Cache
Altivec (TM) Vector/SIMD unit
6,4 GB/s I/O system bus throughput
I'm not sure about this. IBM is stating that this chip is targeted towards their PPC eServers. I'm not going to get my hopes up that this will be the next gen chip for the Mac.
. . . I think hell just froze over.
Looks like Apple may have a shot at getting a Power Mac that lives up to their moniker!
Although an 8600/300 speed comparison might be
interesting from a historical perspective, it's not
that relevant these days as a benchmark point.
A dual G4 running OS X is a whole 'nuther animal.
There is always the possibility that these processors are not even going to BE in the Apple boxen. I know everyone is thinking that way - but no one knows for sure *yet*.
One of these puppys running at 2.5Ghz will be *fast*. I would bet - depending on if Apple/IBM put together good motherboards and components - that machines based on this processor will skunk 4+ Ghz P4 boxes. The "megahertz myth" is even greater in the 970 than it EVER was in the G3/G4. Just look at the Power4 performance - and the 970 is essentially a "mass market" Power4.
Of course, there is the possibility that I am just plain wrong, and these will skunk along slowly forcing Apple to put 9 of them per machine to keep up... Naw, that couldn't happen...
IF Apple happens to be a consumer of these chips, what is IBM likely to charge for them? It really seems that most consumers complaint about Apple computers is the price, given consumers even consider them an option. I can't imagine Apple would take a hit on these to keep PowerMacs at their current prices. And I don't imagine most switchers will really want to pay for speed when they get it for a commodity price in the PC world.
dude! IBM uses PowerPC chips in a huge percentage of their servers. You do not know what you are talking about....
-BrentDude, go to IBM's website and look at thier products (not thier chessy little windows workstations) and look. They use them on thier UNIX workstations and servers.
First of all, what is the processor that Apple using now? Isn't it some sort of PowerPC already? I see this one supports Altivec and I know that G3 and G4 Apple computers have the same instruction sets. Is this just another implementation, or is G3 and G4 relatives of this new processor?
Apple currently uses the G4 and G3 family. The G4 has AltiVec, G3 does not. G4/G3 are product names, whereas 970 are more like model numbers. There all related in that they implement the PowerPC ISA (Instruction Set Archetecture).
Second: what operating system does the IBM PowerPC run?
Depends on who is selling the machine the chip is in. Apple sells OS9 and OSX. IBM has AIX. And of course there's Linux and BSD. These are the most common.
I suspect that the article is just confusing and processor itself is not made by IBM. Right??
Nope, IBM does manufacture the 970. IBM also makes G3's. AFAIK Motorola is the only one making G4's right now (could be wrong here, could be that IBM is cranking some G4's as well). Also note that both Motorola and IBM sell other variations of the PowerPC (most well known is the PPC that powers the Nintendo GameCube).
You can see that the article is from germany,eg:
Prototype from the IBM Development Lab in Böblingen, Germany
The translator missed a word:
"Power und Intel Blades can be mixed in a BladeCenter in any order depending on the software applications."
Arent I the csi^2 ??
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Help my mini cause: My journal
Well, there's the PowerPC Alliance, of which IBM and Motorola are the major players. Altivec is Motorola's little toy for the G4, of which they are the primary supplier; however, the G3 (which doesn't have Altivec) is supplied mostly by IBM, which does in fact manufacture the chip. The new PowerPC 970 is related to IBM's Power4 processor (though seriously stripped down), and is another of the PowerPC type processors. As for operating systems, any PowerPC can run OSX (though it's tied strictly to Apple hardware, to promote sales of said hardware), as well as numerous versions of Linux and Unix (though don't quote me on that; I just assume that the Power4 and variants run on IBM's *nix operating systems, as they make the hardware.) There, I think that covers all the questions. Hope it helps!
Whodathunk that one day we'd be reading a story titled "Apple: ..." with an IBM icon? Maybe I'm getting old, but I think it's kinda cool.
.
Honestly, as someone who'll probably buy a new mac between July and January... a 2.0GHz mac, then, with 5GHz intel chips, would get my cash. Speed isn't everything, and even at 1.5GHz G5 at the end of the year, Apple would be close enough that the downside of speed would not outweigh the other advantages of the architecture.
I've had this sig for three days.
I'm just wondering about a few things.
How much does IBM use PowerPC in its own servers, whether they by AIX or Linux, or do they mostly install them on Intel servers?
Is PowerPC going to implement Palladium and DRM, or will it remain free of those "technologies"? Apple took the position that it was not going to implement DRM in its products. Does this mean the PowerPC will remain a "free" chip?
If so, then this is good. If all computers become hard-wired with DRM as well as Windows, then I could conceivably still assemble my own system with commodity hardware, a PowerPC chip, and run a Linux PowerPC distro on it.
Any thoughts on this?
This space left intentionally blank.
We will see 4GHz Intel and AMD chips soon, but a jump from just under 1.5GHz to something around 50% faster seems like good news to me.
Plus, the 970 offers more than just raw clock speed increases. It'll be interesting to see how it stacks up in real-world performance to the Intel and AMD chips.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Two things struck me as odd. First, there's an inconsistent use of a comma as a decimal seperator:
6,4 GB/s I/O system bus throughput
Second, they direct you to a German IBM site for more info:
Further information in the Internet: www.ibm.com/de/entwicklung
Which leads me to think this was originaly a German IBM press release, which was quickly translated.
What does this mean? I have no idea. Is IBM's PowerPC development done in Germany?
One man's -1 Flamebait is another man's +5 Funny.
assuming apple is currently planning on implementing OS X on these chips, how long will it be until we see some 2.5 ghz machines being sold by apple? will laptops be feasible, and if so, will they take any longer to appear?
would they be available by august? (asks the soon to be college student)
PowerPC is an open architecture; several companies make different CPUs based on the design. IBM's historically made them for servers (the 970 was originally intended to be a server chip) while Motorola made them for desktops (Apple). Only problem is, Motorola sucks -- and their growth in the wireless business has gotten them to the point where they don't need Apple's business any more, so they have no real reason to improve their CPU line.
The G3 and G4 are also PowerPC chips -- they just are specific models made by Motorola. It's half new implementation, half relative.
Finally, a CPU doesn't run any specific OS -- OSes just have to be written for that CPU (and more generally, for the system architecture that CPU uses). Linux has supported the PPC for a long time; there's a distro called Yellow Dog that specifically targets Macs, and does a good job of it. Mac OS X's kernel, Darwin, has been backported to Intel IA-32. Windows used to be available for Alpha processors. It's just a matter of coding and hardware knowledge.
You have to have the patience of Job to be a graphic designer. That's Job, not Jobs.
First Question:
Apple is using the G3 and G4 processors in its computers. The G3 is made by IBM. The G4 is essentially a G3 with the addition of the AltiVec extentions.
Second Question:
NFI - The blade server line pages claim that it will run unix or windows server (and most likely linux), but this particular prototype, I don't know. I would suspect AIX.
Suspicion:
Wrong, the processor is actually made by IBM.
Theres a HUGE discussion about this CPU on arstechnica - link but its pretty technical.
This chip was not just for mac, its supposedly to make IBM more competitive in the mid-level server market.
How does this effect the rumor status for the old story about Apple possibly using that new fangled Power-4 chip by this summer? Is this the same chip in question?
Does anybody know if this is a 64-bit or 32 bit-processor?
From reading the specs it says:
9 Fetch, Decode Stages
5-13 OoO Execute Stages
2-3 Dispatch, Commit
So at total of 16-25 pipelined stages. I also notice that the longest(25) is for the Alti-Vec engine. This is very comparable to Pentium 4 which has 26 pipelined stages, although Pentium 4 does not have a vector engine.
Where the Music Matters
First of all, what is the processor that Apple using now? Isn't it some sort of PowerPC already?
G3 and G4 are Apple marketing terms for current PPC chips, made by IBM or Motorola (the G3s in the iBooks are made by IBM). The only real difference between the two is that the ones with a G4 sticker on it supports AltiVec and SMP (I'm simplifying here for the sake of brevity, before I get flamed). Both are 32-bit chips.
The 970 will probably be called a G5 by Apple (although they may drop the G_ naming convention and call it a PPC64 or something) and is a 64-bit PPC chip based on IBM's Power4 series, with AlriVec tacked on. Power4 is a PPC-derived architecture, specifically designed to run in high-end UNIX servers, where x86 just doesn't cut it. With the 970 IBM are trying to move this technology to the desktop.
Second: what operating system does the IBM PowerPC run?
It will run any OS that runs on current PPC chips (PPC Linux and OS X, for example), although it will probably require OS modifications to take advantage of the 64-bit features of this chip.
I suspect that the article is just confusing and processor itself is not made by IBM. Right??
The chip indeed is made by IBM, as are the G3s in the current iBook range (as I recall Motorola G3s top out at <600MHz, while IBM make them up to 1GHz). Apple is expected to be one of the largest customers for these chips, hence their mention.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
It remains to be seen how systems designed around this chip will perform. Most /. readers are well aware that clock speed is just one variable in the final product. How much work the CPU can do in a clock cycle, how fast you can feed it from memory, and I/O performance all play their part. Then there's the responsiveness of the software that you put on the platform...
It may be that Apple won't take bragging rights for the highest clock frequency, but that in itself won't leave them out of the performance game.
The following is a simplistic view of things, but we are talking about a 64bit processor. Remember the Itaniums Intel is selling are running at around 1GHz - 1.5GHz I believe and they run circles around the 3Ghz P4.
IIRC. this is the new-fangled Power4 stripped down for use in desktops. It is a 32bit chip with full backward compatibility with 32-bit applications.
Typically Apple would release a machine with this kind of new technology at a big tradeshow like Seybold or something since it is aimed at the more professional user. So, labor day weekend might be when we'll see this baby hit the market. Maybe even Macworld Boston, but that would more likely produce speed-bumped iMacs and iBooks, possibly a Powerbook speedbump too.
Pooty tweet
"2.5 GHz PPC sure would close the gap with x86."
:(
Yeah!! I can't wait to see my Quake 3 scores then! Damn I want a new game.
I don't know what story you're refering to but the 970 is derived from the Power4.
64-bit
Not really. Intel intends to speed up the P4 by increasing the length of the pipeline. This offsets quite a bit of the performance benefit of the higher clockspeed. The 4Gz P4 will however be better for building toasters and blast furnaces.
Now that Centrino is out, how will Intel keep up the facade that clock speed matters for than MFLOPS or other (imperfect, but far better that clock speed alone) benchmarks ?
Dean G.
D'oh! 64-bit chip with 32-bit compatibility I mean.
Pooty tweet
Ince the currnt laptoshes are so swank, i was wondering how well these chips'll do in powerbooks compared to the G4. Will it be as battery-heat friendly or will Apple stick w/ G4s on the laptops for a while.
Didn't you post this to the last article that mentioned Apple? If you hate your Mac so much, why is it still on your desk? And why do you keep copying this 19MB file around anyway? Your disk must be getting pretty full of copies of the same file by now...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
As a dedicated PowerBook TiBook user, I hope this CPU can still provides great battery life, as in the G3 and G4. I love my PowerBook, and even a G4 is a pleasure in OS X. Go Stebe!
I don't think that there was ever a serious rumour about Apple using Power4, the chip is just too expensive and power hungry to use. That and it does not fully implement the PPC instruction set (though getting your OS to deal with it would not be a HUGE deal). The rumour all along has been about this 970 chip. It is 64bit btw.
The PowerPC is basically, as far as I can tell, something of a joint project between IBM and Motorola. Apple buys most of their chips from Motorola, but they buy some from IBM as well.
/. karma whore
First of all, what is the processor that Apple using now? Isn't it some sort of PowerPC already? I see this one supports Altivec and I know that G3 and G4 Apple computers have the same instruction sets. Is this just another implementation, or is G3 and G4 relatives of this new processor?
Apple currently uses the PowerPC G3 and G4 processors. (G3 and G4 are Apple marketing-speak; the G3 line actually consists of the MPC 740-755 processors, while the G4 line is the MPC 7xxx series of processors.) The G4 processors have support for Altivec, a specialized vector processing unit.
This is another implementation of the basic PowerPC ISA shared by the G3 and G4; this, like the G4, has tacked on Altivec support. So the G3 and G4 are close relatives of this processor.
Second: what operating system does the IBM PowerPC run?
One of the biggest purchasers of PowerPC processors is, of course, Apple. All of their computers currently use the G3 and G4, and run Mac OS X by default. However, there are also versions of Linux and other operating systems that run on PowerPC processors, and there are other PowerPC processors designed to work with other OS's. One example is IBM's Power4 processor, widely considered to be the best processor in existence today. It is designed to work with either IBM's Unix-based AIX operating system or, more recently, PowerPC Linux.
I suspect that the article is just confusing and processor itself is not made by IBM. Right??
No, the processor itself is made by IBM. This is IBM's page for the PowerPC 970.
I hope that clears up your questions.
-- shayborg, the
It's called the AIM Alliance. Apple, IBM, Motorola have been involved from the very beginning. The PowerPC family is a large and successful family of RISC processors (mostly embedded, other devices like the GameCube, etc..) Motorola has focused on the embedded markets although they develoepd AltiVec whihc IBM refused to license. IBM focused on the high end with the Power Series. Apple, Motorola, and IBM all contribute design elemnts to the PowerPC spec. Certain parts of that family have been successful to various extents at various times, but it looks like the best is yet to come.
Apple doesn't own the trademark and doesn't slap the name on whatver chip it's shipping. Currently, most G3s come from IBM, Motorola is currently the sole supplier of Apple G4s, but it was rumored that IBM helped with production at a time when Moto couldn't meet demand. Now IBM has licensed AltiVec and is pushing into the desktop by scaling down the POWER series.
I have an old DEC Alpha chip that I've successfully overclocked to 120GHZ using only a 486 CPU fan. I plan to release these to the public in Q4 2003.
I am willing to bet that a very small percentage of people actually utilized the full capabilities of their current processors. Apple only needs 2.5GHz "now" as an "appearance" of being able to deliver cutting edge performance. Wintel tries to make the average consumer think that s/he needs the latest and greatest processor, when their P3 is good enough to surf the web with.
And they will continue to be over and done with for several more decades, while still turning out incredible computers.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
For comparison's sake, the P4 Xeon @ 1.8ghz pulls 703/717 (int/fp) on SPEC CPU2000.
Assuming a linear scaling in SPEC performance, we can look forward to a 2.5ghz 970 scoring about 1294/1460, which is pretty respectable. Not a world beater (especially for 2H03), but a far cry from the abominable performance of the current G4.
'jfb
To spur "enterprise Linux," Big Bang, the distributed two-phase commit.
Back in 1997 Apple and IBM both used the Power PC 604 chip. IBM still uses it in low end AIX servers. Then Apple started shipping units based on the G3, made by Motorola. Motorola added Altivec (SIMD instructions) to the G3, changed the caches and Apple badged it as G4. Later, IBM began to fab G3s for the newer iBooks, as Motorola focused on the G4 as a cheap embeded chip for routers etc. IBM's Power 4 (a high end server chip which the 970 is based on) is a 64 bit CPU with a similar instruction set to the 32 bit 604.
I guess IBM has the new chip running either AIX, or Linux, both of which work fine on the Power 4.
8600??? Pentium Pro??? Where do you work, a museum?
Lost: Sig, white with black letters. No collar. Reward if found!
It seems pretty clear that this will be the direction in which Apple will move. Does anyone have an idea on whether a 64-bit MacOS could theoretically run today's 32-bit apps natively on this processor? If so, Apple's in a good position to lead the 64-bit desktop revolution.
You think they suck because they base their computer and OS designs on what their customers want, unlike MS which designs its own ideas and forces them on its customers (HTML email, VBS, ASP and now the new IE5, with it's different rendering of web pages and 96dpi images) because, being the market leader (due to great marketing, not great design), people have no choice.
You think Apple hardware sucks because it uses parts compatible with PC's, despite the fact that Apple hardware components have (for the most part) always been designed by other manufacturers, merely this time they have selected less unique hardware, because this is what their customers wanted and Apple customers are willing to spend extra for this.
You all think Apple sucks because they build computers up to a quality, not down to a price. They suck especially because they took the bold step of designing harware that simple, straightforward and attractive to alot of people (iMac), and in great defiance of the PC market, sells very well. More insulting are the PC owners who discovered their friends' iMacs ran faster.
Oh, and you think Apple sucks most of all because it forces PC owners to realise that they are MS and Intel lemmings - in no control of the chipset's and OS'es they use, as what they do is controlled by both these companies. If it weren't for Apple, AMD and others, everyone, with the exception of companies that can afford expensive un*x workstations, would be complete slaves to MS and Intel.
This is like saying Mercedes Benz sucks because they design innovative cars who's designs influenced car designs for many decades.
Maybe Apple should apologise for shattering people's ideas of what a computer should be.
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Background: 28/M/Bi-Sexual; Owner of a Linux company; MBA Harvard 2003; B.S. Comp Sci MIT 2000
Yeah, Apple is so beleaguered.
Isn't Apple going to suffer the same problem that the industry has where people's systems are good enough for the apps they are using? Consider that Apple seems to be targetting the end-user arena, are users gonna care if they can run Itunes in 1 second instead of 4?
How many people are choosing PC over MAC based on top-end speed?
I would suspect that price is the biggest determining factor for most users. The addition of $x,000 for that big of a speed jump will not intice many new "switchers".
Not that I am predicting the end of Apple but this news should be taken in context.
Well, that's the RISC you run...
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Watching the glacial screen redraws ... made me think that if there ever was a task that would clearly benefit from multiples of more CPU horsepower it was Illustrator drawing complex images.
I have a first-gen PowerBook G4 (500 MHz), and with each OS update, it just gets faster and faster.
I think Adobe just needs to spend a little more time optimizing Illustrator. Even with no filters and few objects, it's one of the slowest applications I have.
I'm a developer, too. When you take the time to profile and optimize some code, well, 500 MHz really is a lot of power. I think Illustrator could be really snappy if they work on it just a little more.
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That's funny, we had a 9600/300 working as a professional non-linear edit suite, producing programs for TV and video handling multi-gigabyte files and full frame video with no problems.
Your Mac is broken.
That's quite a lingering death, giving Apple half-a-decade to die. Wow! I have two Monet paintings that don't match my sofa. What the hell? Seriously, people buy Apples because they like them, same reason people buy BMW, Audi, etc. However, Apple's machines are not much more than similar Dells or Gateways, do the research, and they use a great OS. Also, is the graphic design comment based on some real information? I know of several graphic design houses that continue to buy new Macs. As for OSX implementation, look at how long it's taken people to move from Win 98 and 2k to XP. Many people, including my own company refuse to upgrade to XP. However, our OS X machines work great. Thanks for the usual Apple is dying comment, its very unique.
Anyone who whines about being modded down should be.
By that time we'll probably see >= 4GHz Intel and AMD chips
.. less important to me than my video card. I have a PC at home pretty much just for gaming, and that's the only upgrade I've done since DDR memory and motherboards were available - a long time ago. I don't think Apple is in any trouble, so long as this chip makes it out the door by this time next year.
You know what, a year ago I would have agreed with you but now I'm not so sure. The prices for the top end chips are very high. I'm not so sure that AMD and Intel are currently going to continue their breakneck R&D budgets into the next year. I suspect you will see a dip or a flat spot in the new PC tech for the next 12 months to let them recoup some of the bazillions that have been invested into fabs and development. In that time frame prices will drop on the higher speeds - but the introduction of even faster chips will slow until new architectures become viable/microsoft gets their head out of their ass. Wouldn't it be ironic if Intel got screwed because Microsoft couldn't get Windows XP stable on a new architecture? The reverse situtation happening to apple, now?
PC speed has become less important
*shrug* I have a Apple Powerbook 1Ghz that I use for everything except games. It's fine, zippy, etc. Games I use my PC for. I don't know of any hardcore apple gamers. Apple's focus on notebooks is partially because of this - their powermacs are suffering, but there isn't anything they can do about that right now. In much the same vein, I have a openBSD box, two linux boxes, and a QNX box all running 3-4 year old motherboards and processors fine.
I don't think Apple needs to get involved. The extra time spent making their software better NOW will make it even faster when the new machines come out.
Pick the right tool for the job, duh. Mac isn't the right tool for a FPS or flight sim game monster. It kicks some serious ass as a unixy workstation-to-go, though. Their developer tools are excellent, and free. etcetcetc.
..don't panic
On the press release, they actually call it Altivec(TM), which is interesting in its own right. Assuming that it didn't just slip by (you assume that someone meticulously checks press releases, but then again they refer to Power und Intel) you have to assume they have now licensed the name.
Protoplasm. Quiet Protoplasm. I like quiet protoplasm.
Yet another brainless comment by someone who the advertising `gurus` have managed to blindly influence.
The 2.5GHz number isn't the same as Intel talking about 5GHz P4s. IBM means that they're going to sell 2.5GHz Blade servers. The reason that Intel talks about their insane GHz processors is to impress consumers into buying Intel. People in the market for mid-range Blade servers couldn't care less about what IBM can do in one in a million chips, and they would likely be annoyed if IBM misrepresented it in that way. If IBM can't manufacture the chips in quantity (I'm not aware if they're manufacturing any 970's in mass yet), they will be able to shortly, certanly before the release of the chip.
Not just Alpha. Windows NT 3.51 ran on x86, Alpha, MIPS, and PPC. (And the i860, which never made it past being a CPU prototype.)
Copyright Violation:"theft, piracy"::Anti-Trust Violation:"thermonuclear price terrorism"<-Overly dramatic language.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
To my half thought-through way of seeing things, this is a strong argument for coming up with a product roadmap, even if such things are half-truths in the end. Apple is so secretive about everything that it's impossible to know if something like this -- or something else entirely! -- is going to come out in a month or a year or ever, and consumers like me are perfectly willing to wait. And wait. And apparently, wait indefinitely. Clearing up some of that uncertainty would certainly make me more eager to buy new gear...
</wibbling>
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
I was drooling so much, my g4 cube got upset and wont talk to me. This just proves my point that computers are definately female. I mean, its not like i was going to replace it... just add a second one...
I've taken 4 386 chips, fused them together with my 'Fusetronic" (patent pending) technology. Added 128MB of L1 cache, 512MB of L2 Cache, and a full 1GB of L3 cache. Clocked the chip to 500GHZ without the need for a fan.
This product will be released to the public Q3 2003
You do realize that a Quadro4 700XGL video card (not for regular consumers) is around $400 and the GeForce4 MX is under $100?
You are comparing a workstation for professionals (Dell: note the ECC ram, Zeon chip, etc.) with a mac for consumers that just so happens to feature dual cpus.
Apples and oranges you say?
"If anyone needs me, I'm in the angry dome."
Hammer also runs 32-bit code at full speed.
The trouble is that at one time the internal divisions of IBM spent most of their time bayoneting each other rather than competing with the outside world. The result? the "IBM PC" is defined as a machine that runs a Microsoft OS!
Protoplasm. Quiet Protoplasm. I like quiet protoplasm.
From what I have read (mostly at macspeedzone.com), I would think that Apple will NOT be ready to show a 970-based computer at the July Macworld. Notice that I said "show", as opposed to "ship".
I hope I'm wrong though.
So this is my question: what do they do as a stopgap? Ship a G4 with four processors? Punt and simply lower prices until the 970 is ready?
Steve Jobs has been dealing with Motorola since, when.. 1983 or so? Might be high time for a divorce.
The G3 (PPC750) is a development of the PowerPC 603. It's got superb integer performance, decent FP, no Altivec and extremely low power draw.
The G4 (PPC74x0) is a development of the PowerPC601 and 604. Integer Performance is about the same as the 750, but it has a much faster FPU and Altivec. Moderate power draw and a much more powerful CPU overall.
There are more differences between the PPC750 family and the PPC74x0 Family than just Altivec, although that's the most notable difference.
All of these CPU's are descendants of the Power CPU line. Theoretically Mac OS X could run on teh Power4 with some minor work. Now that would make a killer system, at the expense of cost (A single Power4 CPU package, with multiple cores, costs as much as a PowerMac.)
"You've got an invalid haircut" -Warren Zevon - Life'll Kill Ya
Let's not forget BeOS, which began life on multi-PPC systems.
irb(main):001:0>
Memory management under all the Mac OS'es previous to X was absolutely horrid, if not criminal. You could manually configure the amount of RAM a program used, if you really wanted to, but the idea of automatically managing memory on one of those machines was a joke. Up until the later versions (8-9) AFAIK the MacOS did have the advantage (over Windows anyhow) of not crashing as hard, as often, largely due to this memory management scheme they used. Hell, in System 7, the damn machines couldn't even format a drive and browse another folder at the same time. Drive I/O hung the whole system. That's one of the reasons OS X is such an adjustment to a lot of longtime Mac users, the whole "feel" of it changed. And 10.0 was so damn slow, it probably did more harm than good to release it.
10.1 was when OS X finally reached a truly usable state. 10.2 is just -nice-.
My own pointless vanity vintage computing page
Of course, AMD's Hammer is supposed to debut at about the same clock rate, at about the same time. Sledgehammer will have a dual-channel memory bus and support 2-8 way SMP; Clawhammer will have a single-channel memory bus (though if you have two CPUs you can use one channel on each) and support 2 way SMP. Don't worry about itanic, this processor is not in the same price class; If anything from intel, think about Yamhill. It looks like the best competition for the new PPC will be Hammer.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Wow guy take it easy!
He has a valid point. It would be fair to compair it to the best chips out now. I don't care what AMD + rating it has or what MHZ Intel has it running, just the best chips out. It would also be good to see how the best sparc chip, Xeon, (whatever SGI uses), etc compared.
I realize that this is just ONE benchmark and a lot goes in to a system, but it would still be interesting to see.
The more I learn about science, the more my faith in God increases.
Average performance per clock is a stupid measurement - used only by people who have no other measurement that they can win by. That's what benchmarks are for... compare the best cpu when released to the best cpu from the other families. That's all that matters (other than comparisons of $$$ in some cases and W/FLOPS in others or by comparing cpu/machine of the same cost - a $1000 machineA vs a $1000 machineB could make sense in some situations).
Otherwise, we should compare this new cpu with the 6502 or the 80286 or the 68040 or some other completely meaningless measurement as well.
Compare on availability. I buy my machines based on how long they will take to get my task done, not on how many IPC it gets. Otherwise, you might as well buy nothing but Athlon 850s instead of a P4-3.06 because, hey... it has higher IPC so it *must* be better and help me get my job done faster.
Exactly how do PowerPC processors compare to regular x86 processors?
I am a filthy pirate.
With 3GHz CPUs on the horizon, i am kinda confused as to how these cpus can function. I mean, assuming electricity travels in copper/semiconductor (or whatever they use in ICs these days) as fast as light in vaccum (in fact it travels at a fraction of 'c'):
in one 3GHz cycle, a signal in the the CPU can only travel less than 10cm (~4 inches for those still stuck with the imperial units). With CPU dies sizes of a similar magnitude (~4cm), and with all the routing inside the CPU, why dont we get some very serious race conditions? are the intel engineers actually going in and laying out the chip keeping this speed in mind? as the speed will vary with the CPU temperature, its even more difficult.
And doesnt that impose a HARD LIMIT on how many MHz can be squeezed out? I mean, a comment below mentions intel demoing 5GHz CPU (this is the first time i'v heard about this, so i dunno how true this is), and that means the signal only travels 6cm, which means it cant even traverse the whole die in one cycle.
Is there something i am forgetting here? Can someone in the know please shed some light?
Ghoul2
Sigura Non Grata
A g4 to a dual-xeon isn't a fair comparison!
dimension 8250 - 3.06ghz HT, 512 1066 RDRAM, 120GB ATA/100, floppy, 48x/24x/40x CD-RW/DVD combo drive, 17" ultrasharp flatpanel, 64mb geforce4 mx totals:
$2526 (after "mail-in rebate")
and this is with a 4-year warranty.
The bus is 450Mhz and it is dual-pumped. How difficult is it to produce a chipset that can maintain a 900Mhz data channel? That is faster than anything else I have heard of. Apple may not be able to produce an economical chipset for this CPU. That would explain why IBM is positioning this as a server solution.
The i860 was a cpu prototype? That's news to me and probably all the users of those Paragons, iPSC860s, Mercury, CSPI, Sky, and a host of other vendors who sold i860 based computers (just to name a few vendors/products I worked with).
I'm hoping you are meaning that a version of Windows NT 3.51, which never made it beyond being a prototype version, existed on the i860.
That's mostly right, but not entirely. CPUs do target specific classes of operating systems.
Earlier CPUs like the 8086 don't support memory protection, or paging. These are required for a multitasking, multi-user OS, and were added when CPUs began to target this sort of OS. Linux, for example, basically won't work without a MMU.
Also, the target OS (or class of OS) also affects optimization choices. For example, a microkernel OS is likely to have many more user-kernel mode transitions than a monolithic OS, so if you were targeting microkernels you'd want to optimize that somehow.
Fair enough. Right now, the fastest processor in the world is the Pentium 4 3.06ghz: 1130/1103 (int/fp). For pure floating-point horses, it's the Itanic 2 743/1427 (int/fp).
So a 2.5ghz 970 would be close in performance to both of today's fastest shipping processors. It's likely that the P4 and Itanic will be 15-20% faster in six months, so IBM will still be lagging in the performance hunt. However, it's striking how much closer to the peak performers this chip will move IBM -- and, by extension, Apple.
'jfb
To spur "enterprise Linux," Big Bang, the distributed two-phase commit.
It's not really a syntax error but a logic error.
Don't forget that Apple are a long way ahead of the wintel crowd in multi-processor department, all their medium and top spec tower machines have been dual processor for years, and OSX is designed to take advantage of that.
That 4Ghz AMD machine will be up against a dual, or quite possibly quad 2.5 Ghz Mac.
Convincing Joe Public about the 'megahertz myth' didn't go too well, but demonstrating that 2.5 + 2.5 > 4 shouldn't be too tough.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
The increased length of the pipeline is often not as important on floating point code. Often, in 3D graphics, for example, it's a matter of just streaming as many FP values through the vector units (hence the name streaming SIMD) as memory bandwidth allows.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
or build it yourself...
$200 dual Athlon MP mobo
$400 2 Athlon MP 2400s
$500 2Gb PC3200 DDR
$200 WD 180Gb HD
$300 Radeon 9700 Pro
$400 17" flat panel
$100 case+power supply
$330 Sony DVD+/-R
$ 50 52x24x52 CD-RW
$ 20 keyboard & mouse
$ 0 Linux
Total- $2500
They shrunk the size of the gates on the transistors, basically trading reliability for performance. Considering that one of the main selling points of Apples is their longevity and ability to hold value due to it, I can't help but wondering if this is the right move.
Apparently, in order to increase the reliability of the Power4 for the high-end server market, IBM used much thicker gate oxides on the chip's transistors. The trade-off for this decreased failure rate and improved reliability was that the Power4's transistors have slower switching speeds, so even with process shrinks it's harder to push the design to higher clock speeds. Since the 970 is made for the desktop market, there's no need for such measures and therefore the new chip's clock speed will scale much higher than the Power4's. In sum, the 970 is made to be faster, cheaper, and significantly less reliable than the Power4. (Of course, when I say "significantly less reliable than the Power4," you have to understand that this puts the 970's product life and failure rate on par with other mainstream CPUs, since the Power4's increased gate oxide thickness makes it significantly more reliable than most mainstream CPUs.)
ArsTechnica overview
It's a given that Apple enthusiasts will be happy as can be once they fire up a brand new powerfull box, the question is how they will feel when they find out it has the lifespan of a typical Intel or AMD CPU.
Did you read the press release? I doubt it. You saw "Apple" as the subject of the headline and just half-hazardly clicked the reply button and started a schpiel about how Apple really needed this, etc. If you go and check the press release out, you'll see that only the Blade server architectures are even mentioned.
For anyone who has been paying attention to Apple and IBM and the PowerPC 970 the article didn't NEED to mention Apple. It has been an open and obvoius secret that this chip was developed by IBM specifically for Apple - The presense of Altivec (which is largely useless on a server) is proof enough of that even without the coy public statements (and a few explicit slip-ups despite the standard policy of "we never comment on unannounced products" ).
Yeah, Apple hopes to use this some day, but it'll be a long time coming.
They will be using it the moment IBM can produce them in sufficient quantites.
Someone resection this to strictly IBM rather than an Apple > IBM article.
Despite the article itself having nothing to do with Apple it IS of interest to Apple users because it reveals that the chip everyone knows will replace the G4 is reaching speeds up to 2.5 GHz when it had previously been reported to be between 1.4 - 1.8 GHz.
Actually they do make PPC servers and mainframes, but I don't think they consumer products with PPC.
Understand that IBM is running these 2.5GHz chips *now*. They are unexpectedly fast. It is not completely unreasonable to guess that they might figure out a way to increase that speed within the next 12-18 months for a release. Just because they are currently at 2.5GHz doesn't mean they have to stop improving that number until they release it.
Lack of eloquence does not denote lack of intelligence, though they often coincide.
Mind, they DID make a version of Linux that ran on CPUs without MMUs (the most notable being the Motorola Dragonball, used in Palms up until recently) called ucLinux.
I would argue that operating systems target a class of architecture -- not just the CPU, but the underlying system as well. We've been relatively lucky with IA-32 in that despite all the changes in leading architectures over the years (DRAM/SDRAM/DDR/Rambus, ISA/VLBus/CardBus/EISA/PCI/AGP, etc.) the general scheme of things has been very consistent. I mean, to this day, look how many northbridges emulate the ancient PIC chips.
It's certainly true that some chips are faster at certain OS-related things (context switches, etc) than others, and some have better MMU designs than others (don't get me started on PE-mode and V86 on the 386), but that seems more a nod to usability than a nod to any specific design of OS.
(That, and hardware MMU/paging isn't necesarily required for multitasking, it just makes it far more efficient, and it provides you a level of protection from poorly written third party apps. The Z80 and 8086 are still the dominant processors in embedded applications because you don't have to worry about it if you're writing all the apps along with the OS and know as fact that they behave well.)
The Mac also happens to be used by professionals. That is the professional configuration. A consumer could easily get away with spending $500 less for his use.
Lack of eloquence does not denote lack of intelligence, though they often coincide.
http://www.intel.com/home/desktop/pentium4/faq.
Q: What is Streaming SIMD Extensions 2?
A: Streaming SIMD Extensions 2 extends Intel® MMX(TM) Media-enhanced technology and the Streaming SIMD Extensions. Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) allows a single instruction, such as addition or subtraction, to operate on more than one data set concurrently. The 144 new cache and memory management instructions enhance performance to accelerate the most-demanding Internet and computing applications. SIMD double-precision floating point accelerates demanding content creation, 3D rendering, financial calculations and scientific applications. In addition, 64-bit MMX technology (SIMD integer) instructions have been enhanced and extended to 128-bits, accelerating video, speech, encryption, imaging and photo processing.
Need I say more?
I believe and they run circles around the 3Ghz P4.
Not that I'd heard - if the Itanic ran circles around anything, Intel wouldn't be saying nobody needs 64-bit yet. They'd just double the clock speed (with no performance change) for marketing reasons. No, Itanic is slow and has been doomed to fail for some time now - thus the name.
Anyone know who came up with that name first?
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Your comparison only goes to show how much both of those above companies are gouging their customers. You can build a faster system for a lot less that will probably have higher quality components. Let's see:
Pentium 4 2.4GHz CPU: $160
Asus P4S533 mainboard: $100
512MB memory: $70
Enlight case: $47
nVidia GeForce 4 4600: $220
120GB Western Digital HD: $128
Plextor CD RW/DVD combo drive: $100
NEC / Mitsubishi 17" LCD flat panel: $450
Microsoft OS Tax: $200
Mouse & keyboard & floppy & network card: $100.
$1575 total.
The only problem is that you have to supply an afternoon's worth of assembly with a screwdriver and have a little knowledge about what you're doing. And I could save $2000 over your estimate, more if I installed Linux (or my prefered OS, FreeBSD - and it would scream on such a machine).
You'd end up with a fully-functional system that will blow both your above specced machines out of the water. If you don't believe me, go price up the components yourself on NewEgg.com. Sure, the components I've picked above aren't top-of-the-line, but just off the top of the price/performance curve.
You can't really do-it-yourself with Apple machines - too much is proprietary and there's certainly not a choice of components. This is a real turn off for those who have knowledge and are comfortable building their own system.
These seem to be big factors in the success of modern processors.
Plenty of products shipped with the i860 in them. I remember a compute server from Torque Systems, for example...
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
Fantastic news for Apple, and trouble for Intel and HP.
For all your Wintel idiots out there who know nothing other than GHz, PPC 970 is a super efficient 64 bit server grade RISC processor with the G4 style Altivec engine, and will blow away your P4, Xeon and Itanium. I home Apple will make a PowerBook with one of these.
According to benchmarks by Intel and HP, the floating point performance of Itanium 2 @ 1 GHz is about 50% faster than P4 @ 3.06 GHz, so clock rate clearly doesn't equal to performance.
In other news, out of 4.5 million servers shipped in 2002, only 3500 were Itanium. In contrast, Apple apparently had already sold approximately 8000 Xserves 6 or 7 months after it was launched in May 2002 - not too shaby for a new product.
Gaming aside, both at work and at home, any processor faster than around, say, 500Mhz is fast enough for most anything I need it to do. HOWEVER, at work we are having problems with modern chips because they are too power hungry and produce too much heat. (Adding bigger fans isn't a good solution, since our systems get used in front of audiences and thus need to be very quiet... plus, fans are moving parts that will eventually fail, leading to a cooked CPU)
Hopefully in the future we will see more chips like Centrino, that are only "fast enough" but also feature low heat generation, low power consumption, and high reliability.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
I hardly think that using the system print spoolers of different OS's constitutes a fair compairson of hardware. Not to mention that Photoshop and Photostyler probably use very different routines for printing. Did Photostyler even do color matching using a profile for you printer?
please don't feed the monkey
At the same clock speed, and for short sequences of instructions, a Z80 can beat a P4. The problem is... they don't make them at the same clock speed.
It's irrelevant how many times per second the chips clock says "tic-tac", what matters is how fast real chips can get real jobs done. For real-world purposes, you can compare the best (ie, the fastest chips) or the most valuable (ie, the ones with the best speed/price ratio).
So you see, Mr. Anonymous Coward, comparing the performance "per clock cycle" is irrelevant. It's like comparing the performance "per instruction length", or "per transistor count". It might be interesting from a theoretical point of view, but if a chip that does a lot of work per cycle cannot do more than a couple of cycles per second, it's still a terribly slow chip. The P4 was designed to do less work per cycle, but work at higher frequencies. The Athlon, on the other hand, does more work per cycle but cannot reach such high frequencies. In the end, they're more or less matched. So, in that situation, which one do you buy? Perhaps you buy the one with better "performance per clock cycle". I buy the one that's cheaper (funnily enough, in this case they would be the same).
I thought Macs were competitive with PCs. Or are you saying that anyone who buys a Mac is totally clueless? It all depends on the market you're talking about. When this chip is finally released, PC processors will be twice as fast than they are now, and will probably cost half what they cost now. Anyone buying a Mac for raw number-crunching is an idiot, just as anyone using Windows for a firewall or a quad Xeon for an office machine is an idiot. It doesn't matter is something is faster or slower, as long as it's fast enough.
To use a car metaphor (that most people seem to understand), not everyone needs or wants to drive a Lamborghini. It's expensive, it's hard to park, it's hard to drive, it's cramped and it drinks like a fish. Most people are better off with a "normal" car, that's fast enough and powerful enough for them, is easy to drive, and has room for the kids and the dog.
Having said that, if you spot someone selling a metallic-gray Lamborghini Diablo Roadster (convertible) for less than 15K, let me know, will you?
RMN
~~~
Hear hear. Why are new chip speeds ALWAYS compared to P(insert number here) speeds? Fair enough they are the PC industry standard, but why not do a comparison to some of the higher end chips? Then we could see where our new processors fit into the bigger picture of things and find new markets for them, rather than focusing on the Desktop market every single time. Case study: Transmeta. Good chips for laptops coz of heat issues, but just couldn't cut it on the desktop. (Not trying to be flamebait, but it's a damn good example)
In Soviet Russia, the monkey spanks you!
Don't forget about $200 in shipping for the Dell computer. I think Apple figures in shipping, or they did for my iBook anyway.
Smeghead every day of the week.
It doesn't matter how many bits the processor is. The benefit of a 64-bit processor is that it handles bigger stuff, not that it does anything faster. If you took all the transistors used to extend the data word size from 32 bits to 64 and used them for speed optimizations, you'd probably have a much faster processor. You want to go 64-bit when you are handling huge numbers or need huge memory (more then 4 GB).
Bah. I miss the days when the fastest Mac around was an Amiga running a Mac emulator.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
It's a T-R-O-L-L. 'Tard.
Let's not forget BeOS, which began life on multi-PPC systems.
Well I was referring to "current" or near current OS's (too bad about Be, I actually have my BeBox still, nice machine). You can also throw in Windows NT (3.1 - 4.0), OS/2, NeXTStep if we want to include "older" OSs.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
You believe wrong. The Itanium 2 has 3 GB of cache. The P4 has 512 KB. And, even so, they are more or less matched. Give the P4 more cache, and it leaves the Itanium eating dust in 32 bit code. Give it 64-bit extensions, and the Itanium is pretty much history. Which is why Intel cannot afford to release a direct competitor to the Athlon 64 - it would kill its own Itanium sales.
All other things being equal, a 64-bit CPU is actually slower than a 32-bit CPU (due to increased cache misses caused by longer addresses). The main advantage to moving to 64-bit registers is being able to address more memory. Current CPUs can already process 64- and even 128-bit values (using their "multimedia extensions", most of which have 128-bit registers).
AMD's Athlon 64 doesn't just increase the register size, however; it also adds more registers. That's (part of) what makes it more efficient than the Athlon XP, even when running 32-bit code (and / or working with less than 4GB of memory).
RMN
~~~
I'ts not a new computer you need, it's an education... I suggest you speak to someone who understands what microprocessors actually and how they work are before making sad (although amusing!) comments.
If you can't get the prices right, and can't even spell "Xeon" (not "Zenon"), how reliable is the rest of your "comparison"...? Well, let's see:
- Comparing DDR RAM to RAMBUS
- Comparing a GF4 with a (professional) Quadro workstation card
- Considering 1.8 GHz P4 Xeons as "top" CPUs
Well... need I say more...?
Yes. This trait is referred to as the scalability of the OS. A more scalable design is usually a good thing.
some chips are faster at certain OS-related things [...], but that seems more a nod to usability than a nod to any specific design of OS.
The 80386 is a really good example of what I'm talking about. Following closely after the 80286, it introduced a new, incompatible protected mode, as well as paging (paged segmentation, to be precise). These are non-trivial features, and cater specifically to the post MS-DOS market, enabling the rise of workstation class OSes like Windows NT and Linux. Obviously, the more OS designs you can readily support the better.
The virtual 8086 mode, on the other hand, seems to suggest a vision of a multi-tasking OS running multiple sessions of MS-DOS. It certainly doesn't point in the Unix direction.
hardware MMU/paging isn't necesarily required for multitasking, it just makes it far more efficient, and it provides you a level of protection
I was being loose on the word "required", referring mostly to marketing and customer requirements, rather than strict technical ones. Sorry for the confusion.
>Don't forget that Apple are a long way ahead of the wintel crowd in
>multi-processor department, all their medium and top spec tower machines have
>been dual processor for years, and OSX is designed to take advantage of that.
Intel has done SMP since 1989, with the 486. AMD had an SMP capable chip in 1995, with the K5 (though no chipset available for it), and their latest MP spec has been available sine 2000.
Linux has done SMP for years. Windows has done SMP for years.
>That 4Ghz AMD machine will be up against a dual, or quite possibly quad 2.5 Ghz
>Mac.
And that Mac in turn will up against the dual Athlon64, or quad Opteron. And with the Opteron, three seperate 6.4GB/sec buses instead of a single one.
I'm sorry, did you have a point you were trying to make?
I don't know what you mean by 50% (like, compared to what?), but some applications definitely benefit from SMP. 2 1GHz chips will perform almost as well as 1 2GHz chip for some of these things. In that case, I would say the (unacheivable ideal) for 2-way SMP is 50% speed-up. Time goes from 2 minutes to (just over) 1 minute, for example. Of course, going from 1Ghz to 2Ghz chip for the same application will probably give you somewhat less than a 50% speed up. Hence my confustion at your comment.
I find desktop SMP systems nice not only for the parallel apps I run, but also because the general responsiveness of the system seems to be better on average under load.
I haven't done rendering in a while, but SMP systems seem like they would help there. They definitely help in compiling, in my experience. Don't know about games.
YMMV
XML causes global warming.
No actually I was stuck back in the old days when there actually was a difference between the POWER and PowerPC (this changed around POWER2/3 time frame?). I know the Power4 supports the 64bit PowerPC ISA, but does it implement all of the 32bit PowerPC ISA in silicon, or does it still use traps for some of the instructions?
I was reading about the Itanium 2, and it sounds like another P3-P4 thing where they boost other things to artifically make the processor go faster. Now dont get me wrong, 6mb of L2 cache isnt necessary a bad thing, but when you use it to mask slow performance of the processor, its certainly a dodge.
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
Technically speaking, they are comparing a type of apple with a brand of orange. Thats like comparing... well, you know.
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
Their is no profit incentive to give apple their best processor for a discount.
Since when is the 970 their "best" processor? The PowerPC chips have always been on the low end of the totem pole as far as IBM is concerned. The 970 is more like a watered down Power4 anyway. Plus, other than their embedded chips, Apple pushes more PowerPC chips than any other customer they have, so I assume that they'd be happy to have a high volume though lower margin processor to even further establish the PowerPC in the market (since Motorola is too busy making phones).
Basic G4 tower systems, single CPU 1.25GHz start at $1500. iMacs are even cheaper and they feature a G4 as well, although at a slower clock, plus it comes with a screen. And yes, I've seen a few pro studios with flat-panel iMacs as workstations, especially for working with audio.
Consumers can spend a hell of alot less than $2500 and get quite a decent machine.
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
Unfortunately, shortly thereafter, Earth blue-screened
Arrgh! The dreaded Blue Sky Of Death! Microsoft has already hit!
"We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!" - Vroomfondel, H2G2
50% speedup means just that. If you've got a single CPU system, adding a second CPU can make things 50 percent faster. If a render takes 3 minutes, speeding things up by 50% will make the render take only 2 minutes. This is about in line with what is shown for 3D rendering. Games have less of a speed up, around 30% (for Quake, pretty much the only SMP game). In most cases, SMP has much less of a speedup. Specifically, it is widely acknolwedged that having 2 x GHz CPUs is nowhere near as good as 1 2x GHz CPU, because the base case speedup is the same, while the average case speedup is much lower (due to most code not having enough parallelism).
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Assuming the same bus speed (which is impossible, so take these numbers to be within, say, one hundred points of reality) and linear performance progression, the 2.5GHz chip should have:
;)
SPECint2000 =
937 / 1.8 = 520.5 points/GHz * 2.5
Estimated Score ~= 1300
Average P4@3.0GHz score ~= 1080 (the 970 = 20% faster)
SPECfp2000 =
1051 / 1.8 = 583.9 points/GHz * 2.5
Estimated Score ~= 1460
Average P4@3.0GHz score ~= 1100 (the 970 = 33% faster)
RC5 =
18 / 1.8 = 10 * 2.5
Estimated Score ~= 25M keys/sec
Average P4@3.0GHz score ~= 4.3M keys/sec (the 970 = 581% faster)
Take these numbers with a grain of salt, but they're somewhat interesting. I like the RC5 score, especially.
Let's face it. OS/X, with all its Unix underpinnings and a darned clever GUI, all running on top of a fairly smoking 64 bit chip.
Build this thing Apple, and I'll get a home equity loan for the thing if I have to.
I've not lusted for a computer this much since I first saw an Amiga 1000 running the Deluxe Paint demo at Macy's, way back when.
This is my sig.
Uh...
Okay, I'll assume you're serious...
1) two pieces here - first, electrons, having mass, travel signifigantly slower than the speed of light.
and 2) electric charge, though, and thus 'current' travels at the speed of light.
Remember your relativity - no matter/energy/information (including charge) can travel faster than the speed of light. Brick-wall limitation.
-T
Actually BeOS began its life running on 5 AT&T Hobbit processors.
25Watts at 1.2GHz
.13 process because they'll use far less power.
40Watts at 1.8GHz..
The new powerbooks will probably use the new Motorola G4 that is based on a
I'm truly surprised that 3d rendering (non video card assisted) doesn't do better with SMP systems. It's frequently trivially parallelizable for sequences of renders/movies, and I would even thing single image rendering could be parallelized to a great extent.
XML causes global warming.
you are correct. I have been told that the individual electrons in a wire carrying 115 V ac @ 60 Hz move at a rate as slow as 4 cm/second. In contrast, I have also been told that the molecules in air are moving at around 65,000 km/h. The reason the energy wave does not even move at the speed of light is because of friction (as a result of electrons colliding with - and attracting to - the positive nuclei of the atoms in the wire).
What kind of a Mac can you get for $200?
-MSE
"Beware of foreign entanglements." - G Washington (or equiv)
Fiat Lux.
In this case, it would be an Appleseed cluster surely.
> The following is a simplistic view of things, but we are talking
> about a 64bit processor. Remember the Itaniums Intel is selling
> are running at around 1GHz - 1.5GHz I believe and they run
> circles around the 3Ghz P4.
That's overgeneralized. The 3GHz P4 is very much faster at most tasks than the 1.0GHz Itanium II, which is the fastest instance of the chip that has been given entries at spec.org. The reason why the Itanium II appears much faster is that you only see benchmarks that relate to its very narrow field of marketing. It's a server processor. You won't see it tested in areas more suited to general purpose computing (games, office suites, etcetera). And, hell, the Itanium sucks in specint, one half of the single processor version of the most prolific server benchmark suite in the world. The 900MHz (fastest speed submitted -- for some reason, they only gave specfp scores for 1000MHz, unless I missed an entry or few) Itanium II gets 674, compared to scores above 1100 for the 3.06GHz P4. That's a whopping 63% difference! The fastest Itanium II is almost 40% slower than the top of the line non-Xeon Pentium 4!
The Itanium II does fantastically in specfp -- bested, I believe, only by the DEC Alpha, which is sadly being pushed under the carpet for reasons more political than I'd like (Alpha IP is owned by HP and Intel, the companies that created the Itanium's core architecture) -- and many other benchmarks. But you can't simply ascribe a single, simple feature to the performance advantages of the processor. Yeah, the processor can address a 64-bit memory space and, yeah, the processor has 64-bit GP registers. But you're ignoring many other features piled on top. Itanium II is a server processor, so it can afford to have some extra doodads added to it, doodads that would be considered financially unfeasible on mainstream processors.
Hmmm, I did a quick google search, so I apologize if I pulled incorrect info on the following:
The Itanium II has a more than a megabyte and a half of cache memory on the die of the processor. It seems to optionally go up to 3MB on-die L3 cache. In comparison, the Pentium 4 has 512KB cache (there's some more cache, the L1, but that's inclusive), and the Athlon XP has either 384KB or 640KB cache (depending on whether you're counting the older Thoroughbred or the newer Barton). So the Itanium gets about three times as much cache memory on the processor die!
Itanium II has a 400MHz, 128-bit data path to the chipset. Pentium 4 is 533MHz, 64-bit. So the P4 gets a chipset that can send it 4.27 GB per second while the Itanium II gets a chipset sending it data at 6.4GB/s.
The Itanium II has more functional/execution units. The Itanium II gets predication, which is a very expensive (in terms of how much bulk it adds to the die) feature that effectively gets rid of a lot of the penalty associated with branch misprediction (a problem which is rather huge with the trillion-stage netburst microarchitecture of the Pentium 4, though I'm told that the multithreading implementation of the P4 can help alleviate some of that).
The number of bits in the processor don't matter *that* much, not after the 32-bit level. Yeah, it helps, but you have to take the whole package into account. A 64-bit scalar one-stage processor with a ten-byte, off-die cache would get its ass kicked mercilessly by an 80486DX-50.
To take another tack: I'm somewhat interested in possibly purchasing an Athlon 64 late this year or early next year. But if the Athlon 64 was just an Athlon with 64-bit extensions, I wouldn't give it the time of day. I'm interested because the Athlon 64 will have an on-die memory controller. I'm interested because the Athlon 64 will support twice as many registers as a typical x86 chip (which may decrease the need for cache accesses, which could increase performance on my recompiled linux apps). Either of these two advantages promise a far greater advantage for me than the simple increase in register size and memory addressability.
-JC
You do realize thats like comparing an Escort with a BMW.
Yet BMW still sells.
"However," replied the universe, "The fact has not created in me A sense of obligation."
all the 68K CPUs were 32-bit, the memory address lines were only 24-bit on some macs, limiting the addressable virtual memory to 16MB. The Macintosh hasn't seen a 'bit shift' ever in its life.
:-)
endothermic = eats heat
exothermic = generates heat
Sorry, I feel like being a jerk tonight.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
The PPC 970 is a 64 bit processor. Wake me up when Intel makes a 64bit processor that cracks 2Ghz. Their current 'speed king' in 64 bits runs at 1Ghz. Look it up at Intel's website.
Consider that Apple seems to be targetting the end-user arena, are users gonna care if they can run Itunes in 1 second instead of 4?
In short, YES! When startup times for your apps are at least a 2 seconds or so for every app, having apps pop up as fast as they typically do on a high end PC is a major plus... My 500MHz iBook + OS X 10.2 is awesome and I'm hoping to go to a 12" Powerbook (or dare I dream 15") in the next few months... But waiting a few seconds for IE, Safari, Word, Excel, Terminal, iTunes, X11... gets old real fast. I click the Winamp icon from the quicklaunch bar on my XP 2000+, 512MB DDR, WinXP Pro system and it's already waiting on me to tell it what I want it to do next. I want that kind of response from my Mac too! And further, waiting for iTunes to determine the volume of a bunch of files I drop on it and doing other things before it starts to play annoys me to no end... that's why I use VLC now.
Summary of the above: ya seconds matter!
Apple is way behind in terms of performance. That doesn't matter for desktop use. But don't buy a 1GHz G4 (or a dual 1GHz G4) and expect to get a lot of bang for the buck.
I really wish manufacturers would cut the crap and just give a FLOP rating off of some standard test that could be performed cross-platform. Then they can stop worrying about turning processors into microwave ovens and focus on more efficent silicon techniques. They are starting to run into problems in these high frequencies because on a motherboard, because by the time the signal reaches another side of the board, it has already switched from a 1 back to a 0 or whatever. That's fast.
Actually what will turn Apple around will be things like offering servers that are cheaper than Windows and easier to operate (Xserve), creating a platform that runs more software than the competition, and provides more bang for your buck.
A simple chip speed up won't do it but these other things will.
Moar fastaaaaar!
-ted
According to the stock market IBM has a larger market cap than Intel. IBM often wins the title of most patents filed in the past year. Is this a worry for Intel? I think so, especially if IBM can make the claim that the press should be comparing clock speeds to the 1Ghz Itanium and not the 3 Ghz P4.
Hm. That's pretty sad. I actually don't believe you, unless you had about 18 MB HD space free at the time, but I'll see if Macs today have that problem. I'm sitting at a Mac right now, albeit a bit newer one (eMac 700). Let's see if I can reproduce your "Macs are inferior" problem.
I'll keep this browser in the foreground, and copy around a 154 MB file that I happen to have sitting around, from one folder to another.
Hmmm.... 17 seconds...
Try again.
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
It used to be that when people were going to make a dumb joke that had been made a thousand times before, they would just make it. And they got modded down, but they deserved it.
Now, it seems that people are making half a dumb joke which his been done to death, or slightly more than half, thinking that this is somehow ironical or something.
It's not. The horse is dead. Quit beating it.
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
Hmm. I'm on a 400 mhz G4.
How about, to make it interesting, I'll copy a file from one ENCRYPTED virtual filesystem to another ENCRYPTED virtual filesystem, on the same disk. Which actually takes longer, since you have to seek back and forth between the two areas of the disk.
Plus I've got a dozen or so apps open, one of which is MS Word, and I'm browsing the actually useful and interesting articles on slashdot in a DIFFERENT window.
Ah, that would be... a 100 meg file... in 44 seconds.
Not bad, when you're reading a chunk from a disk, decrypting it, seeking over to the other side of the disk, encrypting it, writing it, seeking back over to the first part of the disk again, reading another chunk... etc.
-fred
Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.
...came originally from The Register,
2 9. html
www.theregister.co.uk
Last line of this story:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/archive/75
Apparently someone named Andrew N wrote a letter with that, and the moniker stuck.
-fred
Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.
Man, I'm glad ibm is taking over chip prodution for apple. Now we'll see some speedy machines!
Choose yer poison: Prophets or Profits
Not to mention SGI's Reality Engine graphics accelerator. i860's were used in several companies' graphics accelerators / image generators in the early 90s.
What an IDIOT! Not only are you wrong, but you have to plagarize other people's work. I would post a link to the story this guy ripped off but it just went down (it was posted about a week ago.)
-You may license this sig for only $6.99.
Macworld is still in New York this summer.
-You may license this sig for only $6.99.
But what kind of server processor is the Itanium? Given the unimpressive specint scores, it doesn't look like a processor for those mass volume servers (web, mail, file and print etc). Does it even look like a cpu for larger RDBMS servers?
;) ). The PowerPC looks just about as attractive as the Itanium - for practical purposes they're both incompatible with x86.
;).
To me it doesn't look like a processor for corporate servers, maybe scientific clusters?
If I currently have x86 servers, and I'm looking at the next step, the Opteron would be the most attractive option (IF AMD doesn't screw up
Would be interesting to know what's happening in Dell internally. The Opteron really looks like a better match for them than the Itanium
While Microsoft could be kingmaker/decider for the Athlon64, Linux will be enough for Opteron.
Sometimes 2.5 + 2.5 is > 4. Have you played Giants: Citizen Kabuto on a Mac? I played it on my dual 450, watching top on my iBook after ssh'ing in. Giants used every last clock cycle (0.0% idle CPU time). Indeed, occasionally the game would appear to stop using one of them, and it slowed to a crawl. When OmniGroup ported it, they said it was the only version of the game to support multiple processors. I suppose this is also an answer to the other poster who said that PC's have "done SMP for years".
I can't wait to put one of these in my powerPC Amiga
I see this one supports Altivec and I know that G3 and G4 Apple computers have the same instruction sets
Actually G3s do not have altivec instruction set.
blah
You're expecting a 500MHz G3 laptop to perform as well as an XP 2000+ desktop? Think about that for a moment. Besides, you only need to open an app once, then you can just leave it running. Memory management is quite nice under OS X, as is multitasking, so there's no real harm in having a few extra apps open. Unless you're really, really low on RAM. In which case, it's even more unreasonable to complain about the iBook being less responsive. It should have 384MB bare minimum, preferably 640MB. As for the things iTunes does, you can turn off the volume checking (which it only does the first time you import a file anyway). There isn't anything else it should start doing when you drop something in. Maybe you should be more specific, if you're having a genuine problem.
Total- $2500
Assuming your time is worth nothing. Granted, it probably won't take $600 worth of your time to buy all the parts, assemble them, and troubleshoot the machine, but the cost of your time will still be a significant addition to the price.
A legparnasom tele van angolnaval.
Yes, as your examples show, I do have a point.
If you buy anything but the cheapest tower Mac, it will BY DEFAULT have dual processors, an OS that works with those processors, and software that works with those processors.
As you rightly point out, although the wintel camp have dabbled with half-hearted attempts at SMP (not even bothering to make a chipset for the K5!), they are not shipping SMP systems to a large portion of their customers.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
When you respond to a post, respond to the questions directly. You have no basis in your arguement, except for the OS is Nice comment.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
TO BUY A NEW CAR WOULD MAKE YOU SEXUALLY ATTRACTIVE.
>If you buy anything but the cheapest tower Mac, it will BY DEFAULT have dual
>processors, an OS that works with those processors, and software that works
>with those processors.
One of the big reasons why this is the case is because Apple NEEDS dual processor to keep even somewhat competitive with the intel world.
If you buy a dual processor PC, it will by default have dual processors and an OS that works with those processors, and software that works with those processors. The only catch is most people don't need anything more than the $800 single CPU machine they bought instead of shelling out a few grand.
>As you rightly point out, although the wintel camp have dabbled with
>half-hearted attempts at SMP (not even bothering to make a chipset for the
>K5!), they are not shipping SMP systems to a large portion of their customers.
What, precisely, is half-hearted about Intel's SMP support?
Yes, AMD never got chipset manufacturers onboard for OpenPIC. It's hardly suprising, given they had a tiny marketshare at the time and weren't seen as a "high performance" chip manufacturer. When they did manage to get a high performance chip on the market, with a signifigant marketshare, that changed, and now there are a myriad of options for the MP chips, including quad processor systems.
Given the difference in marketshare between MacOS and Windows, I'd be willing to bet there are MORE dual processor Intel/AMD workstations being shipped than dual processor Apple machines.
If you include the server market, there's no question about it.
ROTFL! Copy-pasting from an article linked by Slashdot (see excerpt here) that was so stupid that it got pulled by the publisher. Is that all you got? :)
Donate free food here
:^) Much as I adore my iBook, I know it's going to get toasted performance-wise by any gigahertz level desktop at 95% of tasks.
to you that the ibook is the low end. No one claims that an 500mhz g3 is as fast as an XP. This whole topic is getting really old. It's like the arguement "Well my dad can beat up your dad!". I switched because I like what Apple had to offer. I wanted to run Linux on my PC but I guess I wasn't bright enough, or I did not have the time to devote to it. OS X gives me the ability to do some of these things. I have bought 3 macs since nov 01. My first was a g3 iMac to test the waters. Then I bought the 17" FP iMac with the superdrive and was able to sell the g3 iMac for a very reasonable price since is was a year old to a friend who wanted to try switching. I now also own a iBook so I can be portable. I can go to my local Borders Books, connect to the wireless network at the CompUSA next door and download, etc and enjoy my coffee. I guess my point is I have no problem with the performance of any of my macs. I have noticed that compared to my Windows experience, OS X has been a dream come true as far as problems. I don't have any. I think this fact is worth the trade of having a "faster" pc. Also, the only app I did purchased was Office. Either I was able to do everything I wanted with what came with my mac or there was an open source alternative that was ported to OS X. Use what makes YOU happy. Isn't that what really matters?
One thing you overlook is the performance improvement that vector-ops can provide. To start with, Intel eviscerated the vector-processing (MMX/SSE/SSE2) capabilities of the P4 compared to the P3; limiting the number of execution units it can run on and various other things. The G4 (and presumable the PPC970) has the Altivec unit which provides significantly more vector registers, operates on vectors double the size, and is capable of running vector operatons on multiple execution units.
The end result is that the PPC chip is capable of doing heavy number crunching (think photoshop & scientific apps, rather than updating spreadsheets & getting higher framerates in games) more effectively when it counts. How much the increased efficiency would help is highly dependant on the specific application (and the effort the developer puts into optimization).
Combine this with the lower power consumption and you could see blade systems packing the new PPC become a viable choice for compute clusters.
IE -
Imagine a Beowulf of these things...
my sig's at the bottom of the page.
The G4 (and presumable the PPC970) has the Altivec unit which provides significantly more vector registers, operates on vectors double the size, and is capable of running vector operatons on multiple execution units.
No - the IBM PPC chips don't have the Altivec unit. They are only on the Motorola chips. That is why Apple currently doesn't the the faster IBM chips.
I have great faith in fools - self confidence my friends call it. - Edgar Allan Poe
Yes, Itanic sucked, but the second generation Itanium 2 chips, even at the slower clock rates, turn out some of the best floating-point benchmarks of ANY other single chip on the market, by a significant margin.
my sig's at the bottom of the page.
...Robert Thomson's half-assed article mentioned in this previous slashdot post
The only reason Apple could pull off the very small, very quiet LCD iMac styling is because power consumption and cooling are not issues with their current generation of chips. The "wind tunnel" sound of more recent Power Macs showed that cooling problems can really hurt a system. If these new chips require more extreme cooling systems, then they're outside the scope of traditional Apple products. Fast is good, but fast at all costs is not.
... so this is very good news for those of us hoping Apple will use this as their next-generation chip ... and very bad news for those who would like to see it on an x86.
--"faster processors" and floating ram on the river of cpu denial! Bah! Why back in the day, REAL men had manual underwood typewriters we would mod with parts made on pedal driven milling machines, we'd make actuating arms and cams that hooked to the keys to run our sliderules! When we wanted faster processing we would go OUTSIDE in the snow, do ONE pushup-that was BOTH ways up AND down, get MUCH stronger, come back inside and TYPE FASTER. And we LIKED IT!
ugly as shit and expensive beyond reason.
macz suckz big time
die apple die
An excellent specimen. Succinct, to the point. If I may, allow me to draw attention to some of the more prominent features.
You see, your typical Apple Homo Trollus has a sloped brow, approximately 20% shallower than normal. Also, the knuckles are large and calloused from dragging on the ground. These two factors both work in tandem to create the keyboarding style of said troll: the lack of caps, the atrocious spelling, etc.
But more than that, the rage plays into consideration. Studies are inconclusive at this point; the theory currently in vogue points to a severe inferority complex, possibly misplaced feelings of abandonment by Homo Trollus' platform of choice.
The question as to the source of the Trollus' rage remains a mystery, however. While one would logically assume that a typical Homo Sapiens would simply ignore a computer choice that he/she deemed unsuitable, the Trollus is angred, and somehow threatened by the very existance of another choice).
In the end, we may never know what drives these poor stupid brutes to such outbursts. The only recourse is what we've always done... sedatation, and an absolute lack of 'feeding' are critical.
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
By the looks of the first thread, if you post in the Apple group, you're trolling.
I don't do this for karma, I do it for cash. It's much better.
When you are playing a 3D game do you really want your FPU stalled for vector calculations?
I develop for Mac and PC, occasionally I need to dip into assembly language and AlticVec/MMX/SSE. I agree that Altivec is better, that PowerPC in general is better, but your last line is pretty much FUD, a contrived case. The FP/MMX switch is not an issue, you simply don't interleave FP and MMX operations. You perform the MMX operations in a batch, the switch becomes insignifcant. Batching the MMX operations is also an extremely natural way to do things in high performance 3D code.
Apple shipped 7484 servers (presumably mainly Xserve) in Q3 2002. In contrast, there were only 3500 Itanium 2 based servers sold in the whole of 2002.
The future looks even better for Apple in the server space, following the recent release of the new Xserve and the Xserve RAID. I can't wait to see an Apple 64 bit PPC 970 blade server to blow the crappy Dell out of the water.
Quoting numbers attributed to Internet World, MacInTouch (Saturday, Jan 12) reports that Apple's share of the server market has more than trebled from 0.2 percent to 0.7 percent (Q3 '01 vs Q3 '02). An equally telling statistic is the fact that approximately 40 percent of growth had taken place by the end of Q2 '02 (ie before Apple's Xserve was released).
In terms of unit sales, Internet World quotes the following for Apple:
? Q3 '01 2,049
? Q2 '02 3,937
? Q3 '02 7,484
There's very little relation between what apple pays for this chip and what I will end up paying for the new laptop when i skip down to tottenham court road in november and fisticuff my way to the front of the queue. The component and assembly cost of the machine creates a floor beneath which the price cannot easily go, but that's it. what we pay depends on three factors. Surprise, fear and, oh wait:
1. apple's long-term strategy for amortising its development costs, which are considerably higher than any other pc manufacturer. Dell has none of apple's software development and R&D costs, to name but two. Those costs are an investment that underpins the entire product line, and apple will recoup them wherever it thinks it can get away with it.
2. the perceived value of the item and the brand. Apple excels at the intangibles: out of box experience, the appearance of exclusivity, the strange idea that this product of corporate america is rebellious. And some not so intangible qualities: the coherence of software and hardware, the emphasis on luxury finish and spec (the wide screens, the sheer fuck-you of all that white and sheer). That's what I buy them for, and they sure do make me pay for it. But i am vain and like pretty things and always come back for more.
3. What the market will bear. As long as apple is content to occupy its small but solid bit of aesthetic high ground, quite a lot is how much the market will bear. They're flourishing in a dustbowl at the moment. When they try and compete in the cut-price sector, they always crash. Even the original imac just hovered near the moshpit like a pretty uptown flower. But Steve seems to know this well, and anyway he doesn't like all those nasty grabby people, so they're cosy for now.
Pardon my going on. It always strikes me as odd when people in this silly but delightful toyshop start acting like it's a logical place. The modern pc world is a child of Jobs, not Woz.
Oh well, tried to turn off the karma bonus, turned on anonymous posting instead. This is just to confirm that wasn't an impostor.
RMN
~~~
> But what kind of server processor is the Itanium? Given the
;) ). The PowerPC looks just about as attractive as
;).
> unimpressive specint scores, it doesn't look like a processor
> for those mass volume servers (web, mail, file and print etc).
> Does it even look like a cpu for larger RDBMS servers?
Well, specint isn't necessarily representative of all those types of servers. A lot of these servers are data transfer intensive and essentially best on cpus with insane amounts of cache and a really high bandwidth cpu to chipset data path. Itanium II seems to have this.
Of course, that doesn't mean that there aren't better options. I could probably put together a multiple machine array of cheapish x86 Linux or BSD servers (that is, if I had a little more experience with clustering and similar methodologies) for the same price, and I'd be ending up with a more reliable setup (more machines mean better redundancy, and overall performance probably would be faster due to greater parallelism in every component, not just the cpu -- for example, the faster Itanium chip might be able to write to two memory modules at once, but it probably can't write to and read from as many hard drives as a multiple setup of slower processors could).
> To me it doesn't look like a processor for corporate servers,
> maybe scientific clusters?
That is a toughie. Itanium in scientific applications goes in three categories:
A. Really shitty (if it's an x86 app)
B. Kinda slowish to kinda fastish (if you just compile it straight)
C. Faster than a drug dealer who accidentally walked into a DEA New Year's Bash carrying a wad of dimebags (if you very very carefully rewrite the code and apply smart compiler options over several test builds).
Obviously, the software-optimization requirements of the Itanium family (remember, the nature of the chip's architecture means that it's an in-order processor; out of order processors, which started appearing in x86 with the Pentium Pro and earlier in other architectures, optimize and rearrange code on the fly, so you can get reasonably optimal performance even with only basically competent code) will turn off many people. But those who are willing to do the work will see the benefit they're looking for.
> If I currently have x86 servers, and I'm looking at the next step,
> the Opteron would be the most attractive option (IF AMD doesn't
> screw up
> the Itanium - for practical purposes they're both incompatible
> with x86.
Yeah, x86-64 is really neat for the more mainstream server market. You get excellent performance in already existing apps, and recompilation for higher performance is trivial (well, comparatively).
> Would be interesting to know what's happening in Dell internally.
> The Opteron really looks like a better match for them than the
> Itanium
Don't delude yourself. Dell uses AMD as a bargaining chip against Intel. If Mike Dell every says something like "We are evaluating AMD products", he means "Hey, Intel, I need you to give me a better discount on your new chips". Dell/AMD rumours tend to pop up lik clockwork every three months. But I guess you never know....
> While Microsoft could be kingmaker/decider for the Athlon64,
> Linux will be enough for Opteron.
Well, Athlon 64 should be okay either way. I mean, the 64-bit mode isn't even the best feature, as I've noted before. It's the low latency, on-die memory controller and possibly the HyperTransport connections that interest me, and you'd get benefits from those even in conventional 32-bit Windows systems.
-JC
PS: I apologize if my comments about Itanium II are exaggerated. I haven't seen recent scores outside of stuff like spec, and I was disappointed particularly with Merced/Itanium, so the situation may be not as intense nowadays.
That's because the G4 in its current state cannot support a faster bus (hence the abstraction of the DDR memory from the system bus). The 970 will fix this problem (and so would the G4 7457-RM, but that's still vapor at this point).
Conglom-O: We Own You (TM).
Well the G4 is pretty good about low power usage and is better than 500mhz.
.net.
Anyway I disagree. Apple is moving more and more in the direction of a fully 3D desktop. They also want to move towards HDTV video editing. Both of those apps won't work with Apple's current CPUs. Now start combining that with the move towards emulation like java, parrot and
Finally even for compliled apps compile on demand is getting more popular. 5 years ago you didn't have Fink source and Gentoo being mainstream distributions... people in practice didn't compile gigs of software semi-regularly (which is a great way to distribute software BTW).
I'd say for regular users 2.5 + 2.5 > 5 :-). I absolutely agree that most single apps are multi threaded enough to double performance with 2 CPUs and thus 50% is more likely for benchmarks.
But in real life that's a plus not a minus. You are working and have something computational intensive to so, so one of the CPUs goes off into la-la land while the other CPU remains available. The result is a machine that feels very fast. Dual processor machines feel much faster than single processor machines. Your examples like rendering or compiling are exactly where duals are so much more pleasant for the user.
Games probably do better with a single fast CPU.
Brett720? Is dat you, baby?
MacAddict and others are reporting that the press release has been removed from IBM's site; clicking the link to it in this story now takes one to a listing of IBM's German press releases. The pr on the 2.5 GHz 970 seems to have been completely removed. Might the announcement have been premature?
Size matters in that Intel can bring more money to bear on a problem than most of their competitors. That isn't really true for IBM who have massive fab operations building all sorts of chips, thus giving them an economy of scale that other Intel competitors simply don't have. They also maintain larger capacity by renting out some of their fab lines to people like AMD as well as true fabless chip design houses.
IBM is a huge, widely diversified company whose large chip fabricating facilities are arguably the best in the industry and certainly spend at least an appreciable percentage of the time with the best fab tech crown. They also have a reputation for quick and efficient execution, something that has been a problem for companies like AMD and Motorola in the past.
Furthermore, as a services company with a huge presence in major businesses and with govt. accounts all over the world they have the ear of purchasing managers everywhere. There's likely to be a major marketing catfight between Intel arguing that the P4 is the appropriate comparison and trying to maintain the effectiveness of Mhz=speed campaign against Apple and IBM who will gleefully set up comparisons puncturing that idea.
Intel doesn't have too many fools in its higher echelons. I'm sure they've got an appropriate pucker factor going.
You left out firewire (or is that on Dell MB's these days?) and gigabit ethernet. Mind you these machines are apples and oranges, since they're aimed at different users. Don't forget the time involved in setup: plug in your DV camera, and compare techtime vs production time; or even just open the box, turn it on, and time to being productive. But I guess that gets into TCO and ROE, another thread...
The Power4 should be interesting when it comes to render times, a crucial issue with the mac high-end market (and one of the bleeding factors).
Damn those pesky terrorists
No shit. I get to babysit the staff graphics guy in addition to running video and multimedia in my division. He's using a G4/500 with a gig of ram. Since we already had licenses for the apps, I threw everything onto a spare machine with a similar configuration and took it for a test run.
:-) Laptops are NOT speed demons for big honking graphics files- swap disk and speed of the hard drive is the biggest limiting factor. NOT the OS. Application design is the second biggest factor, as I blame Adobe bloatware for forcing me into swap faster and faster with each applicaiton revision.
On the same hardware, Photoshop 7 and Illustrator 10 are glacial pieces of SHIT in OS 9 OR OS X. The prior revisions (6 and 9 running under 9) are lightning fast by comparison. I blame this squarely on Adobe- more "Features", more bloat, both apps suck a lot more RAM just to run and do a lot less with the same amount of memory as older versions.
When you have 512 ram, your OS takes 256 running idle, your application takes 128 just to open, and you're working on a couple of 200 meg files with multiple levels of undoes.... you're going to thrash the SHIT out of laptop swap space. Same mhz, same OS revision, same application on a 7200rpm desktop drive will be faster.... even faster if you're using 10krpm SCSI for swap, but not many of us have that luxury.
We have licenses for Photoshop 5 and up and Illustrator 7 and up floating around, as well as MacOS 8.6 on up. My coworker uses Photoshop 6 and Illustrator 9 because they work best for him in OS 9, and I'm running After Effects and DVD Studio Pro on OS X, much smoother than they ever ran on OS 9.
Adobe's optimizations for OS X are shitty, to put it mildly- After Effects is the only app I don't really have problems with- its rendering engine went from zippy to a tranquilized slug between 4 and 5, and 5.5 was the OS X revision, running along at the same speed (and still lacking even simple clip editing functions, but that's another story).
And for what it's worth, Illustrator has been a dog since version 7- a friend of mine refuses to go above 6 for print design, and my coworker uses 9 for features that aren't there in lower versions.
Yay commercial software.
Here it is.