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Motorola to Boost 0.13-micron PowerPCs
Anonymous Cow writes "From The Register: 'Speculation that Motorola may soon cease to be a supplier of processors to Apple may be premature. The chip maker yesterday said it had successfully implemented low-k dielectric materials in its 0.18 micron silicon-on-insulator (SOI) processors, bringing an estimated 20 per cent speed bump to the PowerPC line. Motorola expects to roll out the process on its 0.13 micron chips this month...'"
Low-k? Welcome to the ballgame. IBM rolled out low-k, SOI, and Cu three years ago ... on 0.13 micron. See here and here. So did Intel.
And as has been said many many times before, apple wil not make the switch until the absolutly have to - if they did that then every single application out there would have to be recompiled to run on x86, they wouldn't be able to write an emulator for the PPC chip on x86 because the chip instruction sets make it almost impossible to write a fast one.
Not only that, but at the moment the PPC family is looking rather rosey... I mean we have G4s comming up to 2GHz (woopdey doo) but more importantly we have the PPC970 comming out which even the SPEC tests say is a stonking chip, and then of course IBM are also developing the PPC980 (the power 5 based version of the PPC970).
Bob
OLPC Australia
Its just the OS I want, I'll buy my own monitor etc.
It's the "monitor etc." that Apple wants to sell, not "just the OS".
That's funny. Pulling the heatsink off my dual 1.25ghz powermac shows the chips marked as 1.25ghz parts.
Just because Motorola has developed a faster PowerPC, it does not automatically mean that Apple will be using it. PowerPCs are used in other systems, particuarly embedded applications where a majority of PPCs end up.
Sorry, that is just rubbish. The 970 is not the best processor ever evented. Check out this link:
970 news at Ace's
It's SPEC figures are good. But they are below the P4 and Opteron which you can easily go out and buy right now of course.
It is also a lot lower the real big machine like the Alpha, Itanium 2 and IBM's own Power4. I think IBM would be very silly if they produced a desktop processor that was a lot faster than their top end server processor!
Clockspeed doesn't matter. The G4 currently has a sub-par bus interface which is the real limiter for its performance. These processors will simply be even more starved for data.
mbbac
As any Linux user who uses Konqueror must admit, Apple's contribution is more than OpenDarwin - the Safari project has been feeding back into Konqueror/KHTML for some time now...
Actually, the PPC970 is quite a bit faster than the Power4 by design. The PPC970 is faster, but they traded the speed for decreased reliability. The Power4 is meant for true enterprise applications, so IBM made sure that the chip has decent performance, but basically never fails.
Apple is getting more and more behind speed-wise compared to PC's. This results in Apple hardware being more expensive and performing less than PC hardware.
Not true (it appears Apple is finally starting to reverse the trend, although they remain woefully behind to this point), and a non sequitur. Speed differences are not directly correlated to cost, and would probably be inversely proportional if they were, not directly proportional as you suggest.
Intel also has much more differentiation
Irrelevent -- Apple's strategy doesn't require a multitude of chip options. In fact, as long as there is sufficient range, Apple would prefer to have a limited number of hardware configurations.
Apple has almost no other choice than start using Intel-compatible cpu's in the future in order to stay competitive.
Again, a non sequitur, and one that is ridiculous and entirely unsupported. IBM will produce CPUs for Apple that are entirely more suitable than anything Intel makes or will make.
Find an old mac tower someplace for cheap. Put in one of the G3 or G4 upgrade cards,also make sure the ram is maxed out, and look for aftermarket generic ram that is compatible and cheaper. Install OSX. There ya go, it will work. If you want exact recommendations as to best possible deals and which make/model of older used machine to look for, perhaps try a post at mac central. Your current PC monitor will work with it, with a very inexpensive adapter ` 10$ or so. I've always used just generic monitors. I am just guessing, but I imagine you can pull this off for as low as 300$, plus the OS disk. Last I looked they had upgrade cards for about 200$, maybe not the top of the line upgrade cards, but something that will be fast enough. As has been pointed out, it's more a RAM deal than the cpu deal, same as generic PCs running any other OS.
I just looked on ebay, cheapest tower was some AV model that is upgradeable to a G3 and is 45$ buy it now. Lots of under 200$ G3s that can be upgraded to G4's. I imagine if you looked at the mac specific used for sale places on the web you can find even better deals. Probably some more advanced mac guys here can steer you to some of them,I'm sort of out of the loop for a long time now. I do remember though that their old PPC server towers, the 9500 or 9600 series, I forget now, one of those, were really nice, plenty of expansion bays and lots of ram slots and card slots. Big guys. That would probably be my first choice on finding a used one, pay a bit more for a manly machine that you can play around with.
What was that? A lead in? Yeah, ok, now let me see if I can shed some light on these rumors (well ok.... I'm going to shamelessly quote the article in an attempt at karma whoring):
Interestingly, Motorola said it had been delivering low-k dielectric 0.18 micron SOI processors for a full quarter. The 7455 is just such a chip - Motorola's claim may explain why Apple has had such success overclocking the 1GHz 0.18 micron MPC7455 to 1.42GHz in its Power Mac models.
So for those of you mentioning that a 1.42GHz G4 already exists, this is being referred to as an overclocked 1GHz G4.
The implication in his comment is that since Motorola can use the technology in its 0.13 micron chips, it will be able to really run with it when it makes the transition to 90nm.
The other claim being made is that substantially faster G4s than previously expected will be in the pipeline. The G4 was originally expected to top out at 1.3GHz, although may be pushed beyond that now (2GHz+ was rumored).
Assuming a direct correlation (big assumption), with Apple overclocking a 1GHz machine to 1.42GHz, 2.84GHz could be considered possible. The other nice point in the article was that Motorola is supposedly targeting the processor for low power consumption (read: 20W).
This could bring the G4, at least for a time, up to par with the 970. TheRegister made a prediction based on the G4's low power consumption that Apple may choose a mix (like they used to). Placing the 970 in their pro desktop computers, and the G4 in their portables.
I'd prefer to see the 970 across the board, but I guess we'll all know soon enough.
Cheers.
good news: "The PowerPC 970 implements an Elastic I/O processor interface bus, which operates at a speed of up to 900 MHz and can keep the multiple execution units fed by up 6.4 GBps of data." That matches the latest QDR200 3GHz P4 for thouroughput - if latency is better, then it'll outperform the P4 in usable bus bandwidth.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
Well, you're half right. The POWER4 is designed for reliability. However, at 1.7ghz, it handily outperforms the projected numbers for a 970, particularly and unsurprisingly in floating point performance.
SPEC2000
POWER4 @ 1.7ghz: 1113/1699 (int/fp)
PPC970 @ 1.8ghz: 937/1085 (int/fp) *projected
Don't get me wrong: as soon as a Mac with this baby in it is available, I'm upgrading, but let's call a spade a spade. The 970 looks to be decently faster than what we currently have in raw processing power, but with a radical, "holy cow where're my pants" faster memory interface.
'jfb
To spur "enterprise Linux," Big Bang, the distributed two-phase commit.
The big customer is everyone who's buying PowerQuicc's and putting them in embedded spaces. PowerQuicc's with RapidIO connections, PowerQuicc's four-on-a-board, lots and lots of PowerPC chips going in lots and lots of embedded spaces.
I was recently at the Global Signal Processing Expo and it was amazing how many people were doing tasks involving heavy signal processing -- where you would expect DSPs and FPGAs -- on PowerPC chips. The interesting thing was that raw number-crunching power wasn't always the most important thing -- many times it is bandwith (what kind of interconnect you have to your processor makes a huge difference when you are trying to process gigabytes of information a second). Sometimes it is programmability that is the reason (use of familiar tools is a big plus). Sometimes you just want to use the same chip to do your signal processing as your network I/O.
Companies like Sky Computers are selling more PowerPCs than companies like Apple Computers.
-- Erich
Slashdot reader since 1997