Inside the PowerPC 970

daveschroeder writes "Jon "Hannibal" Stokes has posted a long-awaited, very detailed analysis of the IBM PowerPC 970 at Ars Technica. Notable quote: 'The 970 was made for Apple'."

Comments

Re:nope.

[jovlinger]

ya.

But there's like three people in the world who actually use altivec. Hardly optimizing for the common case... (that said, I do run mplayer which I think relies on similar SIMD instructions on the x86 to provide realtime img post-processing).

Wouldn't it be cheaper for all concerned for apple to seriously subsidize a PCI photoshop accelerator (basically a card full of DSPs and RAM with a wide bus)?

I'm thinking back to the days when I would read BYTE and to drool over this black (really cool, in those days) 486/Pentium box filled to the brim with i960 cards. By a company called... erm.. Microway? With their compiler, it could reach a peak of 1 gigaflop. Back in the early ninety's. Do some reverse Moore's law extrapolation to see how impressive those numbers were.

Now if you're going to cater to heavy number crunching, it seems that's the way to go. Just admit that the CPU is there to deal with the UI, and let the DSPs do the effects.

Has anyone used one of those machines?

Too little too late!

[bravado2112]

Honestly, I think the new PowerPC chip is just too little too late for Apple. If Apple is going to even remotely compete they'll have to move into the i386 market. Intel's latest chipset, the 875P, is living proof that a new chip isn't going to save Apple's desktops. With support for a 800 mhz FSB with dual-channel DDR400 configurations and P4's starting at 3Ghz, it's bound to mean trouble for Apple if they don't start using Intel chipsets. Besides that, moving to a 64-bit platform is a heavy proposal at best. How would you like to explain to Mac users that they'll be forced to buy all new software on their next Mac desktop upgrade? Sure, the benefits are huge...but I doubt even a new 64-bit PowerPC chip will bring that much more for the money. Again...I'll stick with Intel...more bang for the buck if you ask me!