Slashdot Mirror
90nm 3GHz PPC 970FX by Summer
dmdimon sent in linkage to a Forbes story on the upcoming PPC chips and notes "IBM is said to be ready to deliver a new version of its PowerPC processor to Apple by the end of this year in from sizes of 130 nanometers to 90 nanometers...
Apple CEO Steve Jobs has already gone on the record saying that the G5 computer will contain PowerPC chips that run at 3 GHz by the summer of 2004. A mid-step between the current systems, which top out with two chips running at 2 GHz, and systems with chips as fast as 2.6 GHz would be a logical move come January..."
where smaller is better.
wow... with this Apple will be dying much faster !
getSexySig();
Does anyone even care about the leetness of their speed with Apple stuff?
Why my friend converted: Final Cut Pro, he's in the movie/TV biz.
You can't take the sky from me...
This will also mean they can fit a G5 in a powerbook. Time to start saving up.
It's a boon for consumers. Now we have a real choice in architecture (ppc vs. x86) as well as brand (amd, intel, ibm) without sacraficing performance.
Perhaps this will force Intel to to up the ante.
Most of the people editing the audio and video you're encoding on your x86 are using macs. Well, maybe not most, but a hell of a lot of 'em.
"If you're thinking what I'm thinking, you're right." -
Most of the people encoding audio and video
Macs have been the native platform of artists and designers doing serious image creation/manipulation, video editing, and music composition for a long time. OS X just continues that tradition, but makes it simple for the end-user to also get into how powerful a multimedia machine the Mac is with tools such as iMovie, etc. And of course, on the other end, you've got these two.
So, to answer your question, ramping up speed on the G5 chips is not only good for the whole marketing "Mine is bigger" approach, but there is also real value to Mac users, from casual to hard core.
El riesgo vive siempre!
I agree with the wisdom of letting others find the flaws in a first generation laptop--It's too easy to get burned with a brand new laptop design, pun intended.
That said, Apple puts more effort into laptop design than just about any other manufacturer I can think of. I seriously doubt they'd slap a G5 processor into a G4 design and call it done.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
You missed the part about the G5 running cooler than G4 and also, the switch from .13 to .09 processes should help as well. The net effect may be an overall cooler machine which does not sacrifice MHz.
Pinball, arcade video, tech and more: www.micsaund.com
One thing that caught my eye is that the term "open-source" is used without any explanation, presumably because readers are expected to know what it means. It's a relatively technical article for Forbes, but they did provide a definition for "compiler".
Is there a name for this IBM compiler? Is there any word as to Apple's long-term plans for it versus gcc?
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
This guy trolls for these types of posts, hoping to get modded up. His sig is the most disgusting thing ever, please mod down.
The new G5 chips will require 1.21 jiggawatts of power to operate effectively.
3D Printing Tips and Tricks at Zheng3.com
-_-
Does anyone even care about the leetness of their speed with Apple stuff? I always thought the sort of people who used "the other computer" were more interested in doing normal everyday things that don't require much cpu power: word processing, email, web etc. Most of the people encoding audio and video and playing games are running x86.
Well, a huge number of design people use Macs, and image processing can be very processor intensive. Everyone knows Apple always quotes Photoshop benchmarks when trying to say that their computers are faster (with this version of photoshop! with these patches! with this filter! On Tuesdays! In March!)
That being said, there's one interesting point here - there are a lot of people who, after OS X, are switching to Apple because it's a Unix derivative that, for desktop use, is more polished than Linux. The scientific project I work on has just ported all of the analysis tools to OS X, because they like the Mac desktop better than the Linux one, so I think in addition to image processing/design tasks, developers may slowly switch to Mac as well.
One other interesting point now is that the reasons for sticking with x86 are quickly dwindling. It used to be a joke that Macs were faster. Macs, in many things, were three to four (yes, 3 to 4!) times slower at general-purpose tasks. Ever since the G5 was introduced, maybe it's still a joke because of Jobs's overzealous description of Apple's prowess, but it's not that much of a joke anymore. A dual 2GHz G5 is not a slow machine. Not by any stretch of the imagination.
At this point, the only things that can seriously keep people on x86 are software and price, and considering people still pay more than $1K for computers, I think it's safe to say that people are perfectly happy to spend way too much money on computers if they look nice and are well supported.
I think Apple is quite healthy: I'd be really surprised if Apple's market share doesn't continue to grow. If you're willing to shell out the money to shift to a Mac for the ease-of-use of OS X, then I don't think you're likely to shift back to x86.
Yeah, I'm willing to bet that the people who make 80 million dollar movies with them do. Your friends who encode Simpsons episodes into DivX don't count, sorry.
My understanding is that applications are free to use 64 bit instructions if they wish.
Am I mistaken? Does the system, stack organization or memeory management some how preculde the use of 64 bit instructions?
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
It takes a lot of R&D whenever you move from one feature size to a smaller one and since chip fabrication R&D costs $$$ that's why unless AMD have some kind of technology sharing agreement I doubt they would just "give away" something they've put a lot of money into.
ready to deliver a new version of its PowerPC processor to Apple by the end of this year
So, within the next week? (:
I'm not really sure what you mean by this comment. How do you invest a little more in managing your current products?
Do you mean that Apple doesn't market their products aggressively enough? Maybe you haven't seen their ads everywhere. Remember that Apple is one company marketing an entire platform, while Dell, et. al. only have to market their products, not the OS.
Dell owns a huge chunk of the market because of their assembly and distribution mechanism. Dell started out with no retail mechanism to support, which allowed them to beat other Wintel OEMs on price. When a price war heats up, Dell can take a smaller margin on each unit sold without going under.
Apple is not "promising". It has led the personal computer industry for a quarter of a century. The fact that you're saying, "I would be very happy if they would gain a larger chunk of the market, so that more people would use Apple computers, so that more software would be released for them, so that more hardware options would become available for them..." reveals that you haven't used a Mac lately.
There are over 17,000 software titles available for the Mac. There are zillions of Open Source packages you can use with OS X. Besides that, how many crappy "me too" Windows programs do you really need? There are great software choices in every category for the Mac, and a lot fewer shovelware products than in the Windows world. Mac users just don't tolerate that sort of sloppiness for long.
As for hardware options, Apple is able to make computers that are relatively problem-free specifically because they control the hardware and the OS. Apple has tried the hardware licensing thing in the past, and it only cannibalized their own sales. The Mac will never dominate computing, but then again, Apple's desire to grow and profit has never been predicated on wanting to rule the world.
For that, look north to Redmond. ;-)
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
That's a completely bogus post. Every chip manufacturer does die shrinks periodically. And Intel also makes a line of optimized compilers specialized for its chips. Apple and IBM are nothing special in this regard!
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
See MacRumors.com for Forbes' "sources".
I'd answer, but I'm busy working on a documentary in Final Cut.
Mod point free since 2001
Macs will run at 3 ghz? WOOHOO! That means AMD and Intel will have 6gig chips!
Realistically speaking, though, performance increases have slowed down in the x86 camp. The jump from 2.8GHz to 3.0GHz came with a much larger increase in power than than the 7% increase in raw clockrate. Ditto for the 3.2GHz P4. Now Intel is apparently having a lot of trouble just getting bumped up to 3.4GHz, a CPU that dissipates over 100 watts. I'm not saying Intel won't break past this barrier--of course they will--but diminishing returns have kicked in hard. A 4GHz P4 is going to dissipate 150W at this rate. How long can it keep up? These are not the kind of CPUs you can easily put in a desktop, let alone a small-form-factor PC or notebook.
IBM is going to have the same troubles with the PPC970, but at least they're ahead of the game. The cleaner design of the PPC line has suddenly become a powerful advantage.
You supply 3% of the computer market with chips, you can hand pick your chips and speed bin the rest.
Right... How does the *size* of the market relate to the yield? If a certain fraction of the chips you produce are exceptionally good, Intel/AMD can "hand pick" just as much, or as little as Apple. Their chips aren't 3% hand picked from 100%, they produce 3%, and a fraction of those again could be "hand picked".
The rest are just unsubstantiated rumors, following up a good troll. And the moderators are falling for it hook, line and sinker.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
The two things you quote are very mundane and ordinary ways to get more performance from a CPU. Barring redesign, miniaturization and voltage drops are the ways to make hardware faster, and compiler optimizations are the way to make software faster. These are the bread and butter of performance improvement, and you give Apple/IBM entirely too much credit for doing these things. (And this is coming from someone who works on an IBM compiler.)
Having said that, the PPC compiler team's work has been amazing, and congratulations are due for the sheer magnitude of the performance boost. In a field where a 2% improvement is an achievement, 50% is incredible.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
You don't need a "fully 64 bit OS" to get the speed improvements (although there still are memory limitations. see below). It would break a LOT of things, and really wouldn't be any improvement over the current offering. Unlike x86, PPC was designed for the 64bit transition from the start (even though it remained unused in Apple's product line for almost a decade), and so there is no speed penalty, whatsoever for running 32bit PPC code on a PPC970.
Specifically, the article states:
So far Apple's machines can see all the memory, they can't yet do 64-bit calculations. Present it with a 64-bit calculation, and a Mac with a G5 chip still breaks it into two 32-bit pieces. That's because, Glaskowsky says, Apple doesn't have a 64-bit operating system
Among it's other inaccuracies, it claims that a 32bit machine can only address 2GB.
They fault Apple for only allowing 8 GB of RAM in a desktop enclosure, even though this is still a significant improvement. This limit is still physical, there are 8 slots, and the largest capacity chips are 1024MB right now. They will work when 2048MB chips are released, increasing the max capacity of the existing line to 16GB.
As for the 64bit calculation bit, that's also incorrect. If the binary is compiled for the g5, then 64bit calculations will not be split as they are on 32bit architectures. The downside is that this binary will no longer work on 32 bit machines, for the obvious reasons. For best performance/compatability, two binaries, one 32bit, one 64bit, can be compiled and placed in the same Application bundle, making the difference between the two irrelevant to the user (only a single icon to click on, works on both systems, full 64bit calculation on the g5)
The biggest limit of the G5s at the moment is (and it's quite severe), to my knowledge, a single processes can still only address 4gb, because the size of void* is still 4bytes. Apple will need to duplicate all the libraries in 64bit form to make this work seamlessly, which will probably have to wait until 10.4.I wonder how many software errors will be caused by neutrons hitting the processor and upseting logic gates? I have not seen any test results from Los Alamos for 90nm processors using EIA JESD 57, (1996) JEDEC Standard - Test procedures for the measurement of Single Event effects in Semiconductor Devices from Heavy Ion Irradiation. Unfortunately the Radhard server at NASA is down right now so I can't check the server for the latest test results.
Some people think Failures in Time (FIT) rates will get better at 90nm than 130nm. Some think the opposite. Xilinx and Actel are arguing over it. Caches are epecially vulnerable. In a critical software application, this is unacceptable, and sometimes the cache needs to be disabled altogether.
One method of addressing this is built in checksumming on the cache, and triple redundancy on certain registers like program counter, etc... This does induce a performance hit.
Holland
Well, I for one am doing robotics & AI simulation on a mac.
In fact, it wasn't until I *left* x86 (linux) that I got a platform where opengl worked well enough that I could write a proper display layer on top of my system, not to mention that my PB g4 was actually cheaper than the pIII thinkpad it replaced and in my tests was significantly ( e.g. more than 3x) faster.
Now, I don't do any audio, and I don't do any video; but my simulation is pretty f*cking heavy on the cycles -- and it rips. I have no complaints.
People who gripe about mac performance just haven't actually *used* one. And they certainly haven't written any code for one.
lorem ipsum, dolor sit amet
These days, when people say video editing they mean video editing, compositing, sound sweetening, re-recording and a bunch of other fun stuff.
In my end of the market, mid-low end, nobody hires a second person to do the extra jobs. Once you get the raw goodness, that's it. You get to do it all, and then do it over when the producer changes his mind.
That being said, horsepower is very important in video editing. It seems that everybody wants multi-layer titles, stuff flying around the screen, translucent layers, and then we get into color correcting. Tonight for instance, I will probably give my Dual 500mhz G4 two or three hours of tendering to do, and this is just for a couple of dozen titles on two half hour programs! I could very easily keep two computers busy with work.
Graspee Leemoor was talking about the home user, not the pro, but the difference is narrowing. The full version of Final Cut Pro is not that expensive, and Final Cut Express is only $300! With signifigant editing goodness being that cheap, people are starting to do more than just chopping together their clips. Once they get a tast of all the fancy crap that these programs can do, they start loading up their video with all kinds of stuff, and that's what will perk up their appetite for computing power.
I'm not saying that this is a good thing, by the way. Most people would be better served by getting a decent tripod, spending some bucks on microphones and recording equipment, and spending time thinking about whether they really need that fourth shot of little Jim-Bob playing in the mud. Quality production is never easy or cheap, and people think post can fix anything, damn it.
Basically, the DV video format has broken the prosumer market wide open. This will introduce people to decent video editing that wouldn't have had a chance before. Some of those people will start playing around and feel the need for more power.
When a post production facility is paying editors big bucks per hour, ten grand for a machine that saves just a little time per day is nothing. This is good for everybody downstream. Sadly I don't get paid much so the bosses don't see the need for anything faster than what we have..
Need some video help?
Why do I have this? I don't smoke.
The Power4 is not the same chip as the PowerPC 970. IBM will probably begin selling PPC 970 machines eventually, but they haven't begun to ship them yet.
We're a 100% Apple shop running Final Cut Pro 4 and DVD Studio Pro 1.5 and I assure you we need that power.
We upgraded from a DP 450 G4 box (which was no slouch itself) to a DP 2.0GHz G5 recently and we've more than quadrupled our productivity when it comes to big renders, mpeg2 encodes and multiplexing.
I don't know of anyone in our business using x86 for video editing. None seriously anyway.
I know a couple of shops who use x86 boxes as cheap horsepower in render farms - but ultimately controlled by a Mac at the nose end.
We use our DP G4 as a Quake III server for company LAN matches when it's not encoding mpeg2 on a job. I know Q3A isn't exactly a taxing game on today's graphics cards (none of our client machines even break sweat) but you can't beat it for gameplay.
I am still thinking of replacing this iBook eventually with another iBook but only when they come up with the model that's at least twice as fast as the 600MHz iBook (actually CPU speed is the only reason I want to upgrade it).
Now, while I would rather recommend holding all iBook/powerbook purchases (I think that major speed progress is intevitable in 2004), you would actually notice huge difference between your iBook and a contemporary one, sometimes even surpassing the "at least twice as fast" condition. Your old iBook uses ATI RAGE 128 with mediocre 8 megabytes of video RAM, the new one is a RADEON 7500 with 32 MB VRAM. If you play games, the difference is huge. But even if you don't, MacOS X GUI heavily relies on the GPU support, so your CPU has to sweat a lot just on calculating all those pretty widgets. And finally, many applications actually take the full advantage of the G4 architecture and they also could have a ~2x boost on a new iBook (a megahertz of G4 is not the same as a megahertz of G3).