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Ars Technica Interviews 970 Designers
11223 writes "John "Hannibal" Stokes has interviewed Pete Sandon, the PowerPC 970's main designer, and David Edelsohn, a compiler writer from IBM, and clarified several points about the 970 regarding group formation, vector issue queues and performance, and more. The interview is a very interesting read for anyone who has been following his earlier articles on the processor that Apple calls the G5."
Another deal with Microsoft. Heck the NT Kernel is portable and is currently being ported to itanium2 and amd64 why not ppc 970?
It is already ported to PPC (maybe not 970, but PPC) and has been since 3.51. Even with that, I _highly_ doubt that Microsoft will venture down that road again. Back in the late 80's/early 90's when RISC was the "NEXT BIG THING", M$ was hedging their bets by making sure that NT was available for all manner of RISC flavours. Now that RISC is "NOT THE NEXT BIG THING", I really don't think M$ cares anymore, to them it's just another platform they'd have to support and probably wouldn't make any money off of.
Now having it run Linux is a no brainer. IBM is obviously in Linux in a big way, so having some 970 based boxen are obvious. Now having "generic" white box 970's designed to run Linux is a different story. I don't know if this would make sense from a market perspective. Perhaps cheaper commodity based servers? Perhaps giving Dell a run for their money in the Linux market for higher end workstations? Hard to say, esp the latter since IBM is notorious for not wanting to cannibalize their higher end sales by having lower end box's with better price/performance ratios.
BTW, you can kiss off the Apple clone notion. Makes absolutely no sense for Apple unless they can assure themselves of at least doubling Mac market share by such a move. Anything less would mean a repeat of their previous foray, which Stever would never allow to happen.
Apple doesn't want you to buy OS X, they want you to buy a Mac.
I repeat, Apple is a hardware company.
People hacking OS X to run on their non-apple machines is not a real threat to Apples.
COMPANIES selling non-Apple machines running OS X are a real threat to Apple.
The legal issues won't stop the first crowd (but then again, Apple won't have lost a great deal), but the people who actually buy computers and work with them as well as Joe home user will not go to any lengths to save a few bucks just to run OS X on a non-Apple box.
That's where Apple gets its money -- and it's pretty well protected.
Apple does make the entire computer, which is much more than a sum of its parts.
I'm not sure how many of the components that go into a car (I'm not a car nut) are actually made by the car company themselves, but let's for the sake of argument say that the car company doesn't make any of the components in the car. But the design of the car and putting the car together is still something the car company does, and that is the value they add.
This is basically what Apple does, to make a product you don't neccecarilly have to make your components yourself.
I repeat, Apple is a hardware company.
Really? What hardware do they make? Last I checked they have gone the commodity PC hardware route for their hardware, and IBM for their CPU's. Apple ties software they make to other companies hardware, and charge for the combination. Apple may be a hardware marketing company, but they are not a hardware company like say Sun microsystems.
A computer is hardware. Hardware is made by hardware companies. Apple makes computers. Ergo, Apple is a hardware company!
A computer is more than the sum of its parts. You wouldn't say a car company wasn't a car company merely because it used commodity parts?
This is redundant of course, since I posted the exact same argument in this thread in this post.
Does that mean Dell isn't a hardware company either?
Yes, it is great. Unfortunately in the next couple questions he goes on to say that the underlying engine GCC uses is completely unable to deal with the complexities of the 970 and other deep and wide architectures.
It has been stated that GCC is attempting to be a 'good' solution for all architectres rather than the 'best' for any one. It's not incapable of adapting to be the best for the P970, but that would require a permanent fork from the general GCC code.
So either GCC needs a serious reworking on a fundamental level, or more likely since it already exists, they will just release a separate compiler that doesn't suck.
The advantage of using GCC is that developers can write with reasonable confidence for any platform with GCC available. I have done some heavy porting work between code written for TC/TCC and code written for GCC and it's no fun at all. By comparison code for GCC for PPC and x86 isn't that bad to chop and change.
Given the nature of Apple (who seem to like being able to use open source apps written for GCC) and IBM (who want Linux - developed for GCC - to compile on their boxes) I think they will prefer to optimise GCC as far as possible for the P970.
Given the competence of IBM and Apple programmers (especially the former) I suspect that they will do a pretty good job.
Beep beep.
Ignore my previous post, I didn't grok the "hardware marketing company" vs. "hardware company" difference you were making, though I don't agree with that distinction either.
One thing to note is that Apple has always designed their own motherboards, including the chip sets. They still do. That would seem to make them a hardware company even as you've defined it.
Also consider that the PPC architecture is designed by the AIM (Apple-IBM-Motorola) alliance. Thus Apple has had some input in the CPU design as well (how much, I don't know).