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More on the PowerPC 970
functor writes "Ars Technica's Jon Stokes has a treatise up covering the microarchitecture of the high-performance 64-bit PowerPC 970 microprocessor, due to be released by the end of the year, that goes over in detail how this chip is put together, and how we can expect it to perform. This is the follow-up to Stokes' article detailing the PPC 970's design philosophy. 'It appears to hold quite a bit of promise in bolstering Apple's currently almost obsolescent product line, and it appears to have been designed explictly to fulfil Apple's requirements. To say the least, the second half of this year looks to be pretty interesting as Apple's product line promises to become competitive performance-wise with IA-32 and x86-64-based PCs again.''
This implies that the decision of how much bus bandwidth to give the G4e was up to Apple - which it was not. Motorola designed the processor (for Cisco, depending on who you believe), and Apple made do with the anemic MaxBus at 133mhz that they got from Motorola.
Apple'd be putting DDR400 on the G4 right now if they could. None of this (well, except the decision to go Moto) was their fault.
The PPC 970 will not really make the Macintosh competitive with modern PC's. It will make it competitive with PC's from the beginning of this year, which are not the fastest available any more, and will be even slower when compared to the machines that are available when the PPC 970 ships, which is the very earliest that Apple machines based on it can ship. It will however go a long way to catching up, and take off a lot of the pressure caused by the abominable performance of today's dual processor G4 machines when compared to even inexpensive PC's.
The other unkown in this is the price. PPC 970 based Apple computers may be significantly more expensive. Motorola loses hundreds of millions of dollars each year on their semiconductor business, and IBM does as well. Still, IBM may want to look at Apple and the PPC 970 as a PROFIT center, rather than a LOSS center, like Motorola does with Apple and the G4.
The PPC 970 is great news for Apple, but it is still a bone thrown to them while the x86 PC is feasting on the meat of the Intel and AMD processors.
Yeah, yeah, they are hog-tied because you can't easily re-compile the entire windows platform to use new instruction sets. Linux users, of course, don't have this problem (muhahahah).
Did anyone else catch the bit on the twin FPU's? I'm just imagining what this thing is going to do with vector operations and frequency transforms.
For most of you non-engineers:
Most 3d vector operations are affine tranformations. Using a 4x4 array of floating point numbers you can translate, rotate, and scale. Works beautifully, but it's a lot of calculations.
The Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) is used a lot in signal processing. It's a floating point monster.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Sorry, that's bullshit. Apple has whatever choice apple wants to make, and they've had talks with other chipmakers including AMD. If the 970 fell through, they'd go with something else. If they had to, they could switch to an x86 architecture without batting an eye. It worked pretty well for SGI.
Not that it would necessarily be in their best interest. Apple, as a company, represents an ALTERNATIVE, and therefore they try to maintain alternative hardware choices: SCSI over IDE, ATI over NVIDIA, USB over PCI, the one button & metakey paradigm, Flat Panel over CRT -- and the big one, RISC over CISC. Some of these choices have panned out great. Some have flopped miserably...yet despite the doomsayers, Apple is still afloat after 30 years of "forcing" people to buy "crazy" proprietary gear. With "only" 3% of the market, but it's a huge freakin' market, and their margins are gigantic. Part of the reason for this huge margin is that they are the only hardware player, and are therefore able to name their own prices.
As for Apple users having no choices, that's also crap. We always have choices: buy Apple, or buy something else. Keep the current machine and upgrade it, or buy a new one. And Apple will still make the old chips for a long time after the 970 has started smokin' competitors...at least, that's what they did every other time they made a generation jump in processors.
Apple users vote with their dollars and so it's in Apple's interest to do whatever people are most receptive to, which is what they as a company seem to be best at anyway. After all, they got me to spend $538.72 on an mp3 player. This whole "no choice" thing is BS -- you choose the platform, not the hardware. That's the Apple way.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
No. And I still don't think that's the reason. How can you make a word processor better using 64 bit code instead of 32 bit code? A spreadsheet? A web browser? An email client? A terminal emulator? A shell? A pdf viewer? I stand by my original point that most consumer apps don't need 64 bit operations.
I anticipated your short sighted response as soon as I hit the submit button. I should have realized that you would think I was talking about optimizing existing applications rather than designing new ones for new problems and I should have said all the rest of this stuff the first time... I even had a horrific vision of the word processor analogy. It was scary. Anyway:
I'm not talking about optimizing existing applications, I'm talking about new applications; programs that do things that we don't use our PCs for now. When we had 8-bit PCs nobody did photo editing or full color page layout on a PC. When we had 16-bit machines nobody used a PC for CAD. Now we have 32-bit machines and are moving to 64-bit. There will be some major tasks that will become possible with 64-bit PCs, but the software isn't there yet because the customers don't have the processors.
Also, I can think of two applications that every single computer user runs that can benefit dramatically from 64-bits, and Microsoft is waiting with the code already written for widespread 64-bit processor deployment to release them: Operating systems and filesystems. Having a 64-bit virtual address space can make your OS much more elegant and efficient since every possible I/O operation can be memory-mapped at once. Similarly, it has already been demonstrated that large relational databases benefit from 64-bit addressing even without taking advantage of the additional memory capacity, and many next generation filesystems will be relational databases.
Sure current consumer apps don't really need 64-bits. If they did we wouldn't have them. It's the PC apps of tomorrow that will benefit. If you don't care to do more with your PC then essentially what you can do today, just more quickly then keep buying 32-bit CPUs. They'll continue to be available for decades...