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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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It's a simple cost/benefit analysis. I can spend a week shoe-horning something into the BLAS interface and possibly create obscure bugs in the process, or I can just write a reasonably efficient high-level loop and live with whatever the compiler gives me.
I would expect that most scientists DO care enough to use the fastest libraries at hand,
Scientists get paid to do science, not to hand-optimize inner loops or link to cumbersome libraries. If a regular compiler can't compile regular loops into efficient code for a processor, then that's a problem with the processor, not with the scientists using the compiler. The scientists may still decide to eat the dogfood, but that doesn't make it any better.
In any case, in this case, people can have their cake and eat it, too. For the price of a single 1GHz PPC Macintosh ($1500) or dual 1.25GHz PPC Macintosh ($2000), people can get two 2.4GHz Pentium4 machines, which gives them more compute power even using plain gcc than hand-optimized AltiVec code on the Macintosh. And, frankly, the 970 doesn't look like it's going to change that ratio whenever it may actually come out.
A quick google for SPEC(int|fp)2000 values for Intel P4 (http://www.aceshardware.com/SPECmine/) shows the P4 3000's SPEC numbers are around 1200. So. What's so cool about this?
Computers are like air conditioners.
- They stop working when you open Windows.
Let's say you own a home worth $500000. Would you pay another $500000 to own a vacation home in Aspen that you use two weeks out of the year? Aspen is a really nice place to stay, after all, and it's so much more pleasant to stay at a place one owns. Or would it make more sense just to rent a place for the two weeks, and maybe even go to different places to vacation every year?
Just because something is nice and just because it is high quality doesn't mean that it is worth paying a premium for it.
If s/w developer spent the same amount of time on clustering as they do on AltiVec or MMX hacks, you wouldn't even notice. And it would be a hell of a lot easier to upgrade--just plug in another box when you need more power.