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

Anybody else

[Pxtl]

misenterpret this to mean "ars interviews nine-hundred and seventy different people"?

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]

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.

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:Altivec execution

[Jon Abbott]

The following was snipped from this message:

"The AltiVec subunits are more independant than in the 7400, i.e. there isn't just a single vector ALU, instead the vector FPU, vector simple IU, and the vector complex IU can now accept AltiVec instructions concurrently (up to two vector instructions per clock); this means technically, the G4e does have 4 AltiVec units, while the MPC7400 has only two, but in practice the G4e merely relaxes some instruction scheduling restrictions that the 7400 has to adhere to."