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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'."
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Fast forward a few months....hmm...a few options:
Sun: Nice hardware, very expensive, CDE.
AMD: Commodity hardware, cheap, WinXP.
HP: Intel hardware, very expensive, CDE or WinXP.
I think I know what I'd buy.
Of course, the Athlon64/Opteron would get quite a bit of consideration due to my hobbies.
But I think it'd end up being the Mac.
Reading through the article, its nice to see some real design going into a processor. Looking through Intel's last few chips, they've been upping ther clock speed and packing in more cache.
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.
You'd be surprised how much stuff in Mac OS X is AltiVec optimized. Even memcpy gets a boost from it. It's a lot more than just a "gimmick".
Free Hans!