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

nope.

[netsrek]

Try doing audio signal processing or heavy graphics/video work.

You're pretty thankful for your Altivec then...

I saw such an insane improvement in Reaktor when it got Altivec enhanced...

Re:drop AltiVec

[Daleks]

But the reality of regular high-end computing is that people don't have the time to optimize their software for the latest oddball hardware platform. And even something like a hand-coded vectorized BLAS library doesn't help because most scientific software still doesn't use such libraries.

ATLAS is a BLAS implementation that is tuned for each system that it runs on. The people at Mathworks use this as the underlying BLAS system in Matlab. Mathematica Maple, etc. use this as well. There is even a G4/AltiVec optimized version available here. This is the whole point of layered software.

Re:drop AltiVec

[Wyatt Earp]

AltiVec is nice for somethings.

My iTunes ripping of mp3s nearly tripled when I went from a 466 MHz G3 to a 400 MHz G4 due to iTunes being optimized for AltiVec.

Some Photoshop actions and filters see up to 800% improvments.

Running iMovie exports on a 600 MHz G3 iMac take 2-300% longer than on a 400 or 500 MHz G4

Re:drop AltiVec

[GlassHeart]

AltiVec is important for Apple marketing because it lets them claim impressive performance figures without actually needing to push the state of the art in terms of processor design

Don't confuse "new" with "state of the art". The former is just something that hasn't been done before. The latter is something that yields "impressive performance figures". If Altivec is competitive with Intel, then it is state of the art, by definition, even if it's 20 years old. The CPU cache is a decades old concept, yet CPUs with caches are still state of the art.

Imagine how much better it would be if Apple could ship systems based on the 970 today, rather than after a few months additional delay due to AltiVec.

Don't underestimate the cost of software. Your idea is expensive, because it requires software vendors to maintain two different versions of their code. This can lead to buggier or more expensive products, or it can lead to the "abandonment" of the G4 installed base. That could easily be worth the few months for Apple.

Re:In the market for a 64-bit workstation?

[Mooncaller]

I did not have much trouble getting GNOME working on a HP B180 with HP-UX 10.20 ( compiled with acc, HP-UXs standard compiler). BTW that is a 180MHz PA-RISC machine. It kicked a 1GHz Pentium based workstations butt, even after I put Gentoo on the Intel box ( it original had only Windows NT, shudder). Fast clock rates can't compensate for a moronic architecture in the hands of heavily multitasking users like me.

Up to marketing, not technology

[mariox19]

For me, the most interesting part of the article concerns the pricing of the new machines as the real question. According to the author, the chip will make Apple machines technologically competitive. The question is, will Apple price them to gain market share, or continue to sell to a disappearing niche of luxury computer buyers.

Maybe Apple's concentration on developing software, and selling that software (rather than giving it away), along with its new business ventures, such as .Mac and the new iTunes online music store, point to a new business model that can afford to cut the margins on hardware.

If they don't lower the price of their machines -- the top ones, namely -- they will suffer, long-term. I don't think they need to be on par with PC's; I just think they cannot be too much more expensive than the PC's.