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."

Comments

Windows based 970?

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

I think if you read the end of the article where they are talking about the possibility of straight non apple boxes with 970 inside, you'll notice that they can not reply. Why not? It would be obvious to have linux based servers on top of the platform, so to have no responce to that makes me wonder if they aren't talking to soemone else about something nonobvious. What is the most non obvious step that would really get it in trouble with apple? Another deal with Microsoft. Heck the NT Kernel is portable and is currently being ported to itanium2 and amd64 why not ppc 970? I don't know how closely apple has tied panther to Their chipset, but if it isn't too tight this could mean cheap apple clones( they wouldn't ship with osx, but it could be installed). Now that would kill apple, and as a guy who had advance knowledge of it, I would simply say "No Comment" when asked about non apple based ppc 970 platforms.

Re:Windows based 970?

[pv2b]

Not legally.

You still need a licence to run Mac OS X, and I think it would be trivial for Apple to add a clause (if it's not already there) that would forbid installing the software on non-apple hardware.

There is also a port of Mac OS X for Intel processors being maintained in parallell, mainly because it CAN be done very easilly with minimal effort. Covering all bases...

Remember, Apple is a hardware company, and will protect their core business, which currently is and always has been hardware.

Re:Windows based 970?

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

Yeah, thats what I'm saying. What would stop people from doing it ( if its technically possible some people will do it regardless of leagality)? Here's a riddle for everyone to think about: If apple's a hardware company what unique piece of hardware does it actually make? The motherboard?
I think apple is really a software company that has managed to force people to buy hardware from it( at high margins) so their software can be run. As obvious as that statement is, I think many people forget it.

Improvements to GCC?

[Realistic_Dragon]

At one point in the interview it looks like IBM and Apple are working together on GCC improvements and donating the code back to the FSF.

This is a fairly big deal as people have pointed out before that GCC on PPC isn't as hot as it should be, but with that kind of muscle and money behind it it should go forwards by leaps and bounds.

With the new GCC improvements it looks like Linux on those new, remarkably cheap, P970 IBM boxes is going to be a real winner. And AFAIK Gentoo already runs on PPC fine - no one is going to be bitching about compile times with 4 1gig+ CPUs crunching away at it!

Re:Improvements to GCC?

[cactopus]

This box -- i.e. even future inexpensive ones are really designed to be Itanium and Xeon killers in addition to Sparc killers. They're basically going to be priced in the 3G-10G range for quite a lot of 64 bit computing muscle and the ability to run AIX. When you outgrow them you can move to POWER4+ on pSeries quite smoothly. A trusted and proven architecture.

These are basically this generation's Alphas... but with a better market positioning and without Digital/Compaq/HP at the helm. (we all know their pilot is dead at the wheel)

Re:Improvements to GCC?

[Duncan3]

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.

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.

I just hope they release the proprietary compiler for OS X sometime before the G5 hits. The 2-3x performance hit of GCC is really starting to hurt Apple, and piss off all the developers. If IBM only releases the good compiler for their OSs and Linux, they are effectively telling people that OS X is not welcome on the 970.

Noone seriously considers using gcc on x86 now that the Intel compiler is free (root beer). And frankly that alone makes AMD chips totally unattractive for a computation farm (that and the nuclear plant you need to power the things).

IBM needs to step up and do the same.

Re:IBM in the apple.slashdot.org section ?

[valkraider]

Why is Apple+IBM such a new thing?

How about October, 1991?

More info about the PowerPC alliance.

Apple never said that IBMs *technology* was no good. They said that IBM made boring corporate Personal Computers that didn't foster individuality and creativity amongst it's users. I would say that is still correct.