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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.
Why this had to be posted the morning before my presentation to my supervizor is a clear indication that the universe is against me.
Time to hide my network cable until the end of the day.
___
Cogito cogito, ergo cogito sum.
I sold my G4 tower some time ago becuase it was not fast enough to compete with my winders boxes. I'll jump back on the Apple platform when the 970 ships, assuming it's all that. Lets just hope the entry level unit is ( for Apple ) somewhat affordable.
The current pro line of G4 is a joke. They cant come out with 970 computers fast enough.
Who knows whether it will still be competitive in several months when they actually want to offer it.
On the other hand Apple users won't have much of a choice, and neither has Apple.
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
This is still a PPC chip. No changes to programs are necessary for them to run on it. The only change that will have to be made is if a software vendor decides to run in 64-bit mode which many don't have to do. Performance of the new chip is not dependent on whether the program runs at 32 or 64 bits. This is not a migration like moving from the 680x0 line of processors to the PPC which was an overall change in architecture.
According to some rumor sites, Apple may already have ordered several thousand of these chips for new machines to debute in middle of June.
I'm not buying into it 100% myself, but as I don't plan on buying a new Powermac until next year (and turning my current one into either a Yellow Dog or OS X Server), I'm in no big rush.
My expectations is that the Powerbook/iBook line won't be updated until next year, when IBM can get the power requirements down for the 970 or its successor.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
The vast majority of applications ought to run without modifications, since the instruction set is backward compatible (i.e. there are instructions for 64-bit addressing and with 64-bit-wide operands, but as far as I can tell, that's all). CPU-intensive applications would benefit from a recompile using a compiler that is aware of the PPC 970's unique pipelining and queueing, and can order instructions in the instruction stream that will allow for maximum execution unit utilization.
;)
Some applications, e.g. large databases and applications that deal with very large integers, will benefit from being rebuilt with 64-bit addressing and 64-bit instructions, but for the vast majority of (desktop) applications that run on OS X, all 64-bit binaries will do is to increase the utilization of CPU instruction cache (and often data cache), and hence reduce performance as the cache miss rates go up.
So, in the end, don't worry; your OS X applications will run fine (for the most part) on a PowerPC 970-equipped Macintosh.
Most users of Macs are in the graphics industry. Having BEEN there, I can tell you the 68k to PPC transition was a non-issue. The PPC ran the 68k code as fast as the old machines. The real transition was in restructuring applications, since they no longer needed to work around the brain-deadedness of the 68k series. Again, old apps were not affected.
The other point I would like to make is that they HAVE taken a page out of the GNU/Linux BSD page. MacOSX is an alternative window manager sitting on top of BSD!
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Target multiple architectures. Let the users decide!
Y'know, I don't know why this keeps coming up. Apple's bottom line has always depended on keeping tight control over the hardware to allow maximum integration with their own software. And it works.
Keep in mind that Linux and BSD aren't targetted towards consumers who want to just "rip, mix, burn" or have plug-and-play that's actually exactly that. Even Windows can't deliver consistently on its promise of universal ease-of-use because so many vendors have so much hardware that may or may not work with the system and its existing drivers.
Whatever else you think about Apple's computers, they are without a doubt the easiest PCs on the planet if you're a neophyte. Take it from me, I've got two young women in my home who are all but completely computer-illiterate, and if I didn't have Mac OS X running they'd be constantly lost at sea. I'd love to try hooking up a Linux box for either or both of them, but there's no way I could expect them to use it. Macs are easy, and their users like them that way.
Yeah, I know it's a profit issue for Apple as well, because without business software sales like Microsoft relies on they'd be bankrupt without hardware profits. But I like to think it's more than just money. Apple cares about making a good and easy-to-use product, or else they'd just be chasing Windows like (sorry, not trolling here, but it's true) GNOME and KDE are instead of constantly innovating their own hardware and interface designs.
Targetting multiple architectures means that Apple's got to deal with unpredictable hardware configurations, cards, motherboards, drivers, all sorts of things that could cause inconvenient kernel panics, drive failures, or worse. Users are used to that with Windows, and they pretty much expect it with Linux. With Macs, they expect things to just work. Controlling the hardware is the best way for Apple to do that.
Lately many things have happened to apple, and if you take a brief look at thir lineup of both computers and gadgets you'll find that they are not dependent on anyone the same way they depended on motorola.
The music industry for iMS, AMD for the chips in the airport base station (and the iPod(?) don't know), Motorola for the non-pro lineup (iMacG4, iBook and the portables until they get 970), etc. etc.
I think Apple will go a long way to make sure they don't get stuck with one provider.
Also I think they are trying to be more competitive pricewise. By having a steady stream of income from selling iPods and songs via iMS, they get more money to develop hardware and software, and we just might get Powermacs970 below the $3k mark.
Be like the twenty-second elephant with heated value in space-Bark!
An interesting troll. An enjoyably subtle introductory paragraph, with only a hint of flamebaiting with the 'XP/Unix' comment. This trend is continued with the C/C++/C# evolution stanza, with its clean upfront palate, but lingering pleasant aftertaste. However, the trollish aromas start to become overpowering a little too soon with the sudden transition to assembly advocacy. A mature, well rounded troll will usually lead the reader through a gentler, more meandering path before delivering the closing fruity punch. Perhaps with a few years of cellaring, this troll may rank with such classics as the 1999 'BSD is dying' and the memorable 2000 'VB Programmer for a Fortune 500 company'.
All in all, not a bad effort for a beginner. 7/10.
I think most people use the term PC on computers that are made of parts that are cheap(something powerpc processors aren't) and parts that are easily changed to different ones. Though the new macs can nowadays be extended with pci cards and so on, so you could maybe say it's a PC.
telax - Just another vim and c hacker.
If by PC you mean personal computer, a phrase in common currency some time before the arrival of IBM's PC, then the answer is - Yes, many. If you mean a personal computer capable of running a Microsoft operating system natively, then (discounting early PPC NT ports) the anser is - No. But so what?
--- Yx3 = Delilah ---
it still seems weird to see IBM (creator of the PC) making chips for Apple
It's not that weird right now - their cooperation on PowerPC started almost 20 years ago. But it was weird ineed back then. I heard that on their first date, pardon, meeting, engineers of both companies wore the other company's dress code. The IBM guys came in jeans and t-shirts, the Apple guys came in suits and ties. How desperate both sides were to show each other that they have no hard feelings about past!
Interesting, if you look at the pipeline design of the PowerPC it is much closer to Intel than AMD. The PowerPC pipeline has sixteen stages, the Pentium 4 twenty, and the Athlon ten.
Presumably the P4 can reach higher clock speeds than the Athlon because there is less work to do at each pipeline stage. On the other hand a longer pipeline increases the probability of a stall, so the work done per clock cycle goes down.
I'd speculate that the PowerPC ought, therefore, to be able to achieve clock rates approaching but not equalling the P4, since they are both comparatively "over-pipelined". At the same time, the PowerPC ought to deliver slightly more throughput per clock cycle because the pipeline is slightly shorter.
Meanwhile, the Athlon will be running at a significantly lower clock rate, but delivering comparable throughput.
Let's see....
You've got Job(s) in both.
History of being a persecuted minority.
Use of an Apple to gain more knowledge in both.
Christianity? Isaac. Apple? Imac.
Christianity? Prophets. Apple? Profits.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
How much will this help out apps like PhotoShop and AfterEffects, once they are re-compiled for the architecture?
I've heard conflicting answers, one is that 64-bit will really shine with 3D apps but do little to help the performance of 2D number-crunching.
Does this mean we'll see only nominal gains with Adobe's apps? Someone enlighten me.
Kip Hawley is an idiot.
It's not just AMD clocking lower either. The Itanium 2 isn't clocked that fast. Given that 32 POWER 4 1.7GHz processors smoked the 64 Itanium2 1.3GHz processors configuration in the latest TPCC non-clustered benchmark, the POWER and PPC architecture is capable of putting a lot more work through in the same number of clock cycles. There are a lot of nay-sayers trotting out the GHz-is-god line and it is particularly misleading for 64 bit architectures.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
P.S. Disclaimer - I work in SOFTWARE for IBM, not hardware.
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
I'm sorry, but I don't see anything even approaching obsolete in Apple's product line.
NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
Y'know, I have no idea why this keeps coming up. Assuming you buy from a reputable vendor, the only time you have hardware problems with a PC is if you do upgrades manually, or if something breaks (rare). The fact that Macs have a reputation for good integration is mostly marketing - if you go down to your local PC World and walk out with a new box, that'll work just fine too. If you then try and plug in ancient or super new hardware in an attempt to recycle stuff for instance, then yeah, you might get breakage. But that happens with Macs too, the only reason you don't see it is because there is practically no upgrade path outside of buying a new machine.
Whatever else you think about Apple's computers, they are without a doubt the easiest PCs on the planet if you're a neophyte.
No they aren't. Everybody I've seen who has been sat down in front of a Mac found it hopelessly confusing and non-intuitive. The only people I know who stuck with them, are those who bought them personally (they would, wouldn't they). I know I had to have the owner of said Mac sit next to me and guide me when I was trying to use his machine, and I'm far from being a neophyte. Stupid differences from Windows and idiotic conventions that had seemingly no basis in actual usability just pissed me off. Perhaps for people who have never used a computer before in their life it's easier than Windows (but I doubt it) - for people who have (the majority) it's just a pain in the ass.
Apple cares about making a good and easy-to-use product, or else they'd just be chasing Windows like (sorry, not trolling here, but it's true) GNOME and KDE are instead of constantly innovating their own hardware and interface designs.
Sorry, but you are trolling here. Apple aren't chasing Windows because regardless of what the majority of users want, their existance is justified in their customers eyes by the fact that they are different. People just take it as read that different equals better, despite a lack of compelling (objective) evidence to the contrary. Go read some usability reviews of MacOS X by long time users of the platform.
If you think it's about "more than just money" you need to wake up and smell the roses. Quite how a publically owned company, with a shrinking market share can be allowed to be motivated by anything other than money is beyond me. They're a business, their legal obligation is to their shareholders first and foremost. Wishy washy ideas about design purity might have had some merit back when it was just Jobs and Woz in their garage, but that Apple died years ago.
Anyway, if you want something that isn't motivated by money and is about building a quality product, Linux is about the only thing that qualifies. At the end of the day, the product and the ability for people to use it (in both a usability and a licensing sense) is everything. Go read and take part in the desktop discussion lists if you don't believe me. You might not like what it is today, but that's an entirely separate issue. Money isn't, cannot be, a serious motivation for these guys as the vast majority are not paid for it.
Targetting multiple architectures means that Apple's got to deal with unpredictable hardware configurations, cards, motherboards, drivers, all sorts of things that could cause inconvenient kernel panics, drive failures, or worse. Users are used to that with Windows, and they pretty much expect it with Linux. With Macs, they expect things to just work. Controlling the hardware is the best way for Apple to do that.
CPU architectures have nothing to do with driver instability, nor mixing hardware. That would only be an issue if Apple tried to write a PC version (as opposed to an x86 version) of MacOS, but hey, you know what? The world is a messy place. People don
Yahoo! Launch and Windows Update are definitely 'killer apps.' There's no way in hell I'll buy a Mac until they run Windows Update. Photoshop, Colorsync, etc are just toys, and so are computers that don't look like cardboard boxes!
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
Unfortunately, Apple FUD'd, claiming that shorter pipelines were inherently faster.
Nothing to see here; Move along.
The ARSTechnica article specifically mentions the possiblity that IBM will use PPC970 in poweruser targeted Linux desktops, and no comments here about that yet, which surprises me.
I ran "my first linux" on a DEC Alpha 512mhz 64 bit box that I got fed up running NT 4.0 on. I instantly became addicted, and eventually forced my company to switch to Linux on every computer (causing mass protest in the beginning, then mass praise over the years as we have grown and have no MS Tax on the books).
I now have a Powerbook G4 and love it, except it is a little lagging in punch speed sometimes. And, although I love OS X, now that my company is used to zero license and upgrade costs thanks to GNU/GPL/BSD software, there is no hope of mass migration to OS X and Apple hardware in the company. It just does not make sense after seeing the dollar savings of running Linux on all the desktops.
There is, however, always a need for powerful workstations that run Linux, and IBM might be pulling a rabbit out of its hat with this one. Will be very interesting.
At minimum, I would buy one for that "64 bit memorabilia" value, to bring me sweet memories of my first Linux love, the Alpha that rid me of winbloze forever.........
Real men don't need signitures!!!
And yet here we have the last man standing in the "RISC turned hopelessly complex" generation, the Power970. When you look at this things design they threw everything and the kitchen sink in there! Most interesting is that batch parallelism where an instruction for every type of execution unit is queued up and when they're all ready to go they're executed in parallel. It will be interesting to see if that can scale given the latency it introduces, and the likelyhood that you won't always be able to fill every unit.
But.. but.. you have the same command line interfaces. You have fink to install all those other apps. You have X11R6. You have Office et al. I fyou don't wanna deal /w the gui, you can use cli or vice versa.
So.. what are you looking for in terms of productivity?
Speed would be an issue for long compiles, multimedia operations or games, but that's as far as I would go.
-
ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
This argument is pointless, and one oft-repeated unfortunately. Different people find different things work for them. Whereas you and other people may not find OS X a particularily productive enviroment, other people (including myself) find it to be, and moreso find Windows and Linux (especially Linux, IMHO) provide them with a mediocre enviroment to work in.
I'm not posting this to beat up on the parent but it's something that tends to come up often.
mrg
While I agree with you if we're talking about established brands (Dell et. al), there is a signifcant chunk of sales that goes to the smaller shops who cobble the things together themselves, and problems are very common in this regard still. As usual, of course the experts need no help. People buy Dells - and Apples - partially because there's an 800 number to call when you're confused.
No they aren't. Everybody I've seen who has been sat down in front of a Mac found it hopelessly confusing and non-intuitive. The only people I know who stuck with them, are those who bought them personally (they would, wouldn't they). I know I had to have the owner of said Mac sit next to me and guide me when I was trying to use his machine, and I'm far from being a neophyte. Stupid differences from Windows and idiotic conventions that had seemingly no basis in actual usability just pissed me off.
Yes, they are. And it's not just a matter of opinion. There are tangible, measurable advantages in usability with Mac OS vs Windows. Check any TCO study on the matter, or any actual usability study (lost my Carnegie Mellon bookmarks for this but its there). Too numerous to list here.
You give yourself away with that last line - Mac OS can be frustrating if you are coming from Windows. Any transition is painful, from anything different. In fact the level of pain is often overlooked.
Trust me, put someone with little-to-no computer experience in front of the Mac and they will have a much, much easier time of it. I mean, c'mon, honestly, do you think that Windows conventions - still having to click Start to Shut Down comes to mind - are better? Things like that make no fucking sense to a newbie, because they make no fucking sense whatsoever - but we're used to that.
Blaming Apple for the majority of people having a lousy experience at their usual computers is nonsensical. Adjusting habits can be painful, but productivity is a highly personal thing. I use Windows XP all day and when I come home to my Mac.. it's like comfy slippers. WinXP is like a hard hat. I have no inherent reason to prefer one or the other frankly; I wish I could buy a cheap PC and be happy with how it works. But I can't. They aren't the same.
People don't upgrade their hardware because they like screwing about with drivers, they do it because they want to play Doom 3 but they don't want to buy a whole new machine when 80% of it is still just fine. If they don't know what they're doing the end result is mess and instability, but pretending people don't want to do that is the reason PCs dominated in the first place.
Ah, but you answered your own question. People playing Doom 3 might want to upgrade their CPU, but that's a vanishing percentage of the whole... I asked my dad if he ever used his PCI slots in his IBM machine and he really had to think about what I was talking about for a few seconds. Don't think that these silly upgrades are what drives the PC market, they are a sideline business. (Video cards possibly being the sole exception.) PCs are entirely commodity parts, that's all.
Frankly I think we need more Apples. More vertically-integrated computer companies who adhere to standards would be a good thing. Imagine such a company pumping out fantastic case designs for PPC970-based Linux boxen. That would rock.
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
Sooooooo....
How long until the others have to worry about the Inquisition? Or are we skipping that since we've already seen the Second Coming of Steve?
(How many thought I was going to go with that math that showed B.G. = The Beast from Revelations?)
R: That voice. Where have I heard that voice before? B: In about 365 other episodes. But I don't know who it is either.
And Apple/Mac has got exactly how far by being sane? They take chances. Big ones. Sometimes they fail. (Lisa, Newton) Sometimes they don't. (The orginial Mac, iPod, iMac, (actually, most of the i* stuff...)) The one sure thing is that if Apple stopped taking chances Apple would fail.
'Sensible' is a curse word.
I manage labs of macs, totaling over 300 of them. The users of my labs have no complaints about performance. (They usually only start to whine when the find out the processor speed, but then they are conditioned to think that MHz is MHz; and when asked if their work is slowed, compared to what they do on a PC, they answer "no" it is not slower.)
:-)
What is this every non-mac user keeps saying that their performace is out of line with PC's? I have on my desk a hepped up dual P4 and a hepped up dual G4. XP on the dual P4 does not "feel," in day-to-day operations with standard apps like Office or Photoshop, much different from the dual G4. Comparing the MHz does not tell me anything. Using both side-by-side tells me a more "real" story about things. Now, perhaps XP is significantly slowing things down?
I only notice a difference with some high-end 3D apps like Maya or Lightwave, *maybe* also with some high-ed vid apps like Avid's.
I am looking forward to the 970 though. Actually, I am very curious about any 64bit CPU. Hopefully the "growing pains" for anyone to move to 64bit is negligible.
SCSI over IDE
Apple went pretty much all IDE about five years ago.
USB over PCI
Mac's have had PCI slots since the first PowerPC based units became available. In fact, back in those days many PC's still had VLB, and only Pentiums had PCI slots. Further, since they were 100% PCI there was no bottleneck due to legacy support (ISA) Also, USB's importance was such that it replaced SCSI for external, high speed devices...
I don't read or respond to AC posts
I guess I don't quite follow.... As someone else already asked, what exactly are you trying to accomplish with your machine(s)?
I've been using strictly PCs for 5 years or so now, after a brief stint with a "Performa" Mac mini-tower that didn't turn out too well.
My "high end" PC system is a Pentium 4, 1.8Ghz tower with Promise EIDE RAID and a GeForce 4 video board.
I'm pretty happy with it, but I really wanted a good system to run OS X and some of Apple's incredibly well-done video editing packages (Final Cut, iDVD, etc.). I just broke down and bought a dual-processor G4 1.42Ghz tower. I certainly don't feel it's "slow" at all! I'd say it performs at least on par with my P4 system, if not a little faster at certain tasks. It boots into OS X a lot more quickly than the P4 boots into Windows XP, for one thing.
Sure, the 970 processor will be great -- but the people complaining that the current PowerMacs are "horribly underpowered" must be "benchmark junkies", worried about having the best stats for the sake of stats (bragging rights?).
Like I say, I consider myself very much a "power user", and for a long time, I didn't think Apple really had the "price vs. performance" in the right place on the curve. But with their recent price drops, plus "speed bumps" to their G4 offerings - I think they still have a very competitive setup to tide them over until the 970 is done.
At the end of the day, you don't plunk down $2000-3400 for a "pro" Mac G4 or PowerBook because you're worried about having the "most Ghz". You do so because it offers an OS and specialized applications you can't get in the PC world. (These days, you might also do so to avoid the Microsoft licensing nightmares. A "family pack" of OS X lets you load it on any 5 systems of your choice for a price not much more than 1 single copy of Windows XP Pro, for example.)
As Hannibal (Jon Stokes) notes in the article in question:
"The fact that the Altivec unit was slapped onto the design, leaving some room for improvement in future iterations, leaves no doubt that the 970 achieved its present form under pressure from Apple and that Apple will be rolling out systems based on the new processor. This is the most plausible and reasonable explanation for the way the vector unit looks. If the 970 were solely intended as a Linux desktop platform for IBM, they would've preferred to reduce the 970's die size, power consumption, time-to-market, etc. by just leaving out the Altivec unit altogether, instead of shoehorning it into the design the way they did."
Most Linux variants and apps aren't Altivec-optimized, so there wouldn't be very much incentive for IBM to include the functionality in a Linux-only box given the engineering work involved in doing so. It makes much more sense to do it when you know that you could easily sell hundreds of thousands of these CPUs to another company whose customers are desperately eager for that level of performance, i.e. Apple.
Well, Linux and its apps don't have much AltiVec optimization because AltiVec wasn't in many Linux chips. But if IBM or licensees start making 970 based Linux workstations, it seems this would be likely to change.
And this would be a good thing for Apple, since there would be a lot more *NIX codec that could compile and run a LOT faster on their boxes, and there would be a larger pool of AltiVec and PPC coding talent for them and their ISVs to draw from.
My video compression blog