A History of PowerPC

A reader writes: "There's a article about chipmaking at IBM up at DeveloperWorks. While IBM-centric, it talks a lot about the PowerPC, but really dwells on the common ancestory of IBM 801" Interesting article, especially for people interested in chips and chip design.

Comments

Re:IBM also says Screw you to intel

[Anonymous Coward]

Sony?

Does this mean that ALL next-generation consoles (next Gamebuce, PS3 and Xbox2) will use a IBM chip?

Yeah, I remember

[Anonymous Coward]

back in 94 or so, when the AIM were predicting that they were going to completely obliterate the x86 in a few years. Anyone still have those neat graphs that showed exactly where Intel would hopelessly fall behind while PPC would accellerate exponentially into the atmosphere?

Sounds fishy to me...

[geoswan]

...Even x86 chip manufacturers, which continued for quite a time to produce CISC chips, have based their 5th- and 6th-generation chips on RISC architectures and translate x86 opcodes into RISC operations to make them backwards-compatible...

Maybe this is a sign that it has been too long since I learned about computer architecture, but is it really fair to call a CPU that has a deep pipeline, a crypto-RISC CPU?

When my buddy first told me about this exciting new RISC idea one of the design goals was each instruction was to take a single instruction cycle to execute. Isn't this completely contrary to a deep pipeline? The Pentium 4 has a 20-stage pipeline IIRC.

Was I wrong to laugh when I heard hardware manufacturers claim, "sure, we make a CISC, but it has RISC-like elements .

What I am reminded of is the change in how musicians are classified. When I grew up rock music was just about all that young people listened to. Rap and punk music had never been heard of. And country music was considered incredibly uncool. Now country music's coolness factor has grown considerably. And a strange thing has happened. Lots of artists who were unquestionably considered in the Rock camp back then, like Neil Young, or Credence Clearwater, are now classified as Country music, as if they had never been anything else.

It has been a long time, but I remember learning in my computer architecture course about wide microcode instruction words, and narrow microcode instruction words. Wide microcode instruction words allowed the CPU to do more operations in parallel. Ie. the opposite of a RISC. So, I ask in perfect ignorance -- how wide are the Pentium 4 and Athlon microcode?

If I am not mistaken the Transmeta was a very wide instruction word. And if I am not mistaken, doesn't that make it the opposite of a RISC?

Re:Motorola

[Gizzmonic]

I've seen this myth repeated again and again, usually in conjunction with conspiracy theories like "Motorola quit developing the G4 to hurt Apple".

1) 80% of all G4s sold have gone to Apple. So targetting the larger embedded market is a marketing excuse, a failure, or both.

2)Motorola's fabrication facilities have been in horrendous shape for at least 4 years. High failure rates, In one location, they even quit running the fans to "save energy."

3)Motorola has failed to advance in the embedded world as well. TiVO and many others are switching from PPC to MIPS because Motorola's stuff is not moving forward.

4)Brain-drain and 'Dilbert syndrome' have plagued Motorola's CPU division since Apple killed the clones in 1997. They are spinning off that part of their business, but there's no indication that the situation has improved.