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Yet Another G5 Roundup
Lawrence Person writes "This article on Low End Mac talks about why the PowerPC 970 is so fast, covering its superiority to Intel chips in Multiply Accumulate, double precision arithmetic, and Fast Fourier Transforms, among other operations. A short, clear article for those who don't have the time to wade through Parts 1 and 2 of Ars Technica's exceptionally detailed dissection of the 970/G5."
Trollaxor writes "IBM has a neat two-page history of the PowerPC architecture, detailing its evolution from the first RS/6000 chipsets in 1990, through the POWER ISA, and into the processors that we know and use today. A very interesting read."
Yea!
More facts the Wintel trolls are going to try to dispute.
Losers.
The trouble is the cost. But I just remind myself that if I took the time and effort to strip out the floppy drive and 200 Mhz bus from an Intel machine and paint it to be like a Mac, I'd end up spending more than if I just bought the Mac to begin with.
Who likes t3h drunx0r?
Liberate your mind in two clicks or less.
Fast Fourier Transform is bread and butter for the scientific comunity. This is a good news for sys admins at research centers like me.
Maybe I have a chance at getting one or two of these babies for the next year budget.
16,777,216 comments ought to be enough for any forum!
My machine runs Windows, but it is an AMD. No Wintel troll I: only some PCs are Wintel (others have Linux or AMD)
I understand the excitement over these machines, so I won't get all pissy about this, but...
Until these machines are widely available, each and every thread concerning the performance of the PPC 970 will run the risk of degenerating into a heated debate over whether the figures being offered are reliable. In other words, a flamefest.
Don't we already have enough of those around here?
Habit is the ballast that chains the dog to his vomit - Samuel Beckett, "Proust"
You'd save a lot of money getting one of the toy computers from the toy aisle of the department store. Not as much lost when the tot drops it in the bathtub, either.
Also, these tend to come with 10 or so programs that run on them, which is more than you can run on the iMac for sure. You'll also save on tears, because with the iMac the kids will come crying to you because of the bomb icon that appears on the screen.
Seriously, the self-perpetuating circle-jack that is G5 news is really getting sad at this point. Let the rest of us know when you have a processor that's anywhere near as fast as anything from Intel.
Seriously. The G5 PowerMac has like 9 fans in it that are controlled by the OS (Mac OS X). It will be easy to run Linux on it, but will Linux properly control the fans to keep the system from burning up or flying off the desk?
Karma: The shiznight, mostly because I am the Drizzle.
So, this thing generates enough heat to cause the iPod you left on top of it by mistake to look like a Dali watch?
And it has fans to make it fly too? I saw this sort of flying toasting device depicted in a screen saver years ago.
Seriously, the self-perpetuating circle-jack that is trolling is really getting sad at this point. Let the rest of us know when you have a genuine point to make in a discussion. No-one forces you to read Slashdot.
But she brought this one thing with her that looked kind of like an overgrown PS/2, and had a goshawfulbig monitor hooked to it... and was running UNIX. Being a geek even back then, I noticed this and asked what it was and if I could play with it.
'Twas some very early RS/6000 model, quite unstable at that point in time, OS-wise. I have no idea why she was allowed to bring it on campus. Maybe she was trying to convince them to move away from their Ultrix vaxen.
By IBM's timeline, that would have been a POWER (no numbers after it) chip, predating the PowerPC by a chunk of time. I never stopped to think about it before, though.
One thing that irks me in the low-end mac article is that it states that the G5 can do a multiply add in one cycle. While this is true, this is nothing special about the G5, the multiply and add instruction has been in the PowerPC instruction set since the start - my Powermac 7100 (technically à G1) already could do this. This is in fact pointed out in the intersting article by IBM about PowerPC.
Fast Macs, and trollaxor with a story submission. The apocalypse must be near now...
--
$tar -xvf
they get a damn OS that is built specifically for a 64bit processor instead of a 32bit patched. It's kind of like running DOS on a Pentium, pointless.
And of course they're being compared with P4 numbers that are now "mainstream." But when the P4 was first introduced, it was "peaky" and irregular, behaving much different from the well-understood PIII and K7 cores. AFAIK, aside from speed bumps, both internal and frontside, and cache size increases, it's still essentially the same "net-burst" core that received such mixed reviews on introduction. Oh, and quite a bit of compiler work, I'll guess, not to mention the new SysEnter stuff under Linux.
Intel got much-deserved heat on the P4 introduction, though that seems forgotten now. IMHO the early irregular performance seems to have been handled by tweaking compilers and ramping speed until the valleys are mountain glens. For that matter, Merced seems largely forgotten with McKinley and Madison. Adoption has simply happened over time, because it's Intel.
But there seems to be an air about that everyone else's (PPC970, K8) difficult launch is nearly fatal, and we should wait to adopt until these issues are ironed out. Of course many of them are volume-related and won't be fixed by anything but production and experience, same as P4 and I2.
We seem to be a bunch of monopoly-making sheep, more times than just this one.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Wasn't the PowerPC line supposed to be a RISC chip, anyway? Why would they (IBM, not the article) feel the need to proclaim that they support one more instruction, anyway?
I'm sure we can find particular instances where the x86 has an instruction that the PPC doesn't have... after all, the PPC is supposed to gain its speed from having fewer instructions, right?
ahhh head is spinning from too little sleep... beat with cluestick as necessary.
comparison table the Athlon XP has 3 full FPUs, the P4 has a full and a partial (I believe it only can do memory operations, not arithmatic).
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Hardware/ Developer_Notes/Macintosh_CPUs-G5/PowerMacG5/Power MacG5.pdf
See page 22. It's full duplex, but it's only 32 bits.
the point is, RISC does not implies there are less instructions for you to use on the processor. What RISC actually means is that most instructions can be finished in one clock cycle (LOAD and STORE may be an exception) and all instructions are register based (as pointed out in sibling comment). Since all of its instructions are register-based, it can finish in one cycle (memory fetching takes definitely more than one cycle, compare your CPU clock to (effective) memory clock) and more importantly, it does not need to have messy instruction set which allows you to have four different type of source/destination combination (register -> register, memory -> register, register -> memory and memory -> memory).
You can use fans with integral speed sensors. This allows the system software to detect failing or dead fans. I don't know if Apple uses them, but they have been available for many years.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
68k Macs are just that, 68k Macs.
601 based processor PowerMacs are G1
603/604 base processor PowerMacs are G2.
750 variants - G3
74xx variants - G4
970 - G5