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IBM Officially Unveils Dual-core PowerPC Chips
PM4RK5 writes "Today at the Power Everywhere Forum in Japan, IBM officially unveiled its rumored dual-core PowerPC line of chips, the 970MP. Code-named Antares, these chips have been rumored to be under development since 2004. It is believed that Apple has been working with prototypes and is likely to use them in forthcoming updates to the PowerMac G5 line. The press release is in Japanese; as of this writing, IBM has not released an English version. Some of the slides from the presentation given by IBM are available.
The processors pack some impressive specs, ranging from 1.4 to 2.5 GHz and including 1MB L2 cache per core; the chips also include the ability to power down the extra core when it is not needed. Alongside the 970MP, IBM also announced its low-power 970FX chips, ranging from 1.2 to 1.6 GHz, with power consumption ranging from 13 to 16 Watts, respectively."
IBMs own server products and embedded processors. IBM's blue gene used the core from earlier PowerPC series.
Because they are most likely going to use Intel chips to replace the old G4 chips long before they replace the G5s. And they are not going to totally over to Intel till 2007. So, their needs to be updates between now and then.
the world has plenty of PPC chip uses besides filling Macs, from network appliances to video games to Unix & Linux servers and mainframes and supercomputers. Still, Apple chips are almost 1% of IBM's $99 billion revenue, that's a big chunk of money.
From the notes:
The dual 64-bit core PowerPC970MP(TM) (970MP) is the next evolutionary step in the PowerPC 970 family of microprocessors. The higher frequency grade versions of the 970MP consume higher amounts of power than earlier IBM microprocessors do, and that can cause temperature issues. Each 970MP processor core contains a thermal diode used to monitor its operating temperature. The thermal diode must be monitored to ensure that the maximum operating temperature of the 970MP is not exceeded.
Yes, most individual programs don't fully take advantage of multiple processors. However, if you have multiple applications open at a given time and each is actively doing something, that's when you're glad you have processor #2 available.
Foreground app has the first processor, some busy app in the background (file copy, MP3 encoding, DeCSS, photoshop filter, etc) gets the second. You're much happier because your system isn't taking a few seconds to respond to each mouse click.
"Speaking of Roadmaps... Why not would Apple not switch to AMD? AMD's chips run with less power consumption and way less number of transistors. When comparing the Dual core chips from AMD and Intel, AMD wins on power consumption. But I thought Jobs said Intel had the best Performance per watt? ADA4800DAA6CD (AMD Dual core 64-bit): 110W Intel® Pentium® Processor Extreme Edition: 130W These are the latest and greatest from Intel and AMD right?"
This has been discussed about a million times on any site that posted any news about the switch.
You're wrong in two ways. First, you don't understand what Apple cares about. Second, you don't understand the situation in the area that Apple cares about.
Apple cares more about laptops. Intel wins easily in this area. They beat every current or planned PowerPC laptop chip, and they beat every AMD laptop chip. There's basically no serious competition at this point (AMD is trying but they're not yet serious competition).
AMD wins on power consumption on the desktop right now, but Apple cares more about laptops and also Intel is going to be moving their laptop chips into the desktop because the P4s have dead-ended. In the 2006-2007 timeframe, Intel is going to have very powerful multi-core low power chips on laptops and desktops.
Intel supplies chipsets as well, and their chipsets are pretty nice. They're not always the best, but they're usually close and they're almost always better in laptops. Having the chipset provided by Intel cuts down on engineering costs as well, which is important for Apple. Their volumes are small by most OEM and motherboard maker standards.
I rarely criticize things I don't care about.
I think you meant to say the Pentium D + LaGrande (DRM in silicon), not Pentium M. The Pentium D (with not-yet-released updates and fixes), does exactly what Apple is after - controlled access to media with an architecture that provides lower-power (iPod-like devices and battery-powered Powerbooks).
The 3GHz promise is completely irrelevant to the Intel switch. In the last two years, IBM has gone from 2.0 to 2.7GHz, which a proportionally larger increase than Intel going from 3.0 to 3.8. Everybody ran into the same problems at 90nm; it's not a case of IBM dropping the ball. The real motivation is laptop chips, where the Pentium-M trounces the G4 today, and Yonah will easily beat a 970FX at 1.6GHz.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
I think you meant to say the Pentium D + LaGrande (DRM in silicon), not Pentium M. The Pentium D (with not-yet-released updates and fixes), does exactly what Apple is after - controlled access to media with an architecture that provides lower-power (iPod-like devices and battery-powered Powerbooks).
Not sure. I'm basing that off of this article from The Register. I don't know if they plan on keeping hte Pentium D in the lineup (or even moving to the Pentium E if it ever comes about), but it still (as another poster has mentioned) consumes too much power. Apple wants lower power processors, probably under 50W per core (just a guess).
Here is a link on the Pentium M roadmap.
As listed below (and speculated for the Macs):
4Q 06-1Q 07:
Merom: A dual-core Pentium M (Banias) successor
Conroe: A 64-bit desktop version of Merom (see comments above about Conroe).
A 64-Bit dual core Merom is just what apple needs to be the successor to the 64-bit dual core G5s. And, surprise suprise, it is due out just when Jobs said the transition would occur/finish. It is also more than likely going to be fairly low power as it is in the Pentium M lineup. We won't know till it comes out if it is as low power as these G5s, but it should be lower power than the current high end P4s. The guy also speculates on why Intel over AMD on the next page of the article.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
Newsflash: AMD's fab is... Wait for it... IBM!
Been there, evaluated that.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
IBM has since released an English press release, available here.
This should be significantly more informative than the earlier available Japanese documents.
It's the older Banias core that draws 27W. The newer 765, based on the Dothan core, draws 21W at 2.1GHz - a 33% increase in clock speed at 24% more power when compared to the 1.6GHz 970FX. Or if you're most interesting in power, how about the 758? That draws 10W at 1.5GHz - 37% power savings over the 1.6GHz 970FX with only a 6% drop in clock speed.
On top of that, the Pentium M outperforms the 970FX core clock for clock by most metrics.
You're 100% right.
:)
One of the things we do at the company I work for is tell people the G4 is better
than the G5. The G4 is wonderfully more generic in performance - random memory
access is a good one to benchmark. The G5 is very good at streaming huge
contiguous blocks, but the high RAM access latencies and cache latency/line width
problems kill random access or impact code such as array lookups (best Vector
Permute trick on the planet, also hampered by a weak Permute unit).
But that's not to say the G5 doesn't have merits; it just has some VERY specific
applications that it's very good at. Perhaps too specific for Apple. Companies
like Mercury (www.mc.com) would probably have gone for the G5 if they hadn't
found an even more specific processor for their needs (Cell, in this case).
With lower power chips the G5 could actually start to replace the G4 in places
where performance in high memory and streaming data are paramount.
For laptops, desktops, and places where we don't need 16GB of memory, the G4 is
going to rock for years to come though. I actually wonder why there couldn't be
a special "pseudo-64bit" version of Linux for the G4, which used the 36-bit
addressing modes to implement high memory support. Maybe it's because IBM practically own ppc64 Linux and don't want to overshadow their own chips?
-- Neko
AMD operates their own CPU fab in Dresden, Germany. AFAIK IBM has no direct role in the fabrication of K8-based processors.
AMD and IBM do work together on developing fabrication technology. But AMD is not fabless nor totally dependent on IBM for manufacturing.
g5 is to g4 as p4 was to p3 better overall IPC, less picky about memory latency, less power, basically a great thing to quad core if you're looking for perf/watt
I refuse to believe that the 28- and 31-stage Pentium 4 pipelines are a better thing than the 10-stage pipeline in the Pentium III, particularly when we're talking about IPC. Do you remember the fuss made about P4 being slower at the same clock speed than the PIII? That's proof it has worse IPC rate.
Neither the P4 or the G5 are lower-power than their predecessors and they fail to provide better performance/watt, in any configuration. This is why the P3 architecture has been adopted into the Pentium M line for low power use and the G4 processors remain the chips used at the core of Apple's iBooks and PowerBooks.
The great thing to do with the Pentium 4 architecture would be to put in on good Strained Silicon and SoI processes to push it above the 4.0GHz clockrate at which it is believed to be a very strong chip.
The differences between the G4 and G5 chips are what happens when you move from a desktop computer chip to a cut-down Big Iron chip (IBM's POWER4, IIRC). The G5's are inherently 64-bit capable in a way that the first three generations (Willamette, Northwood and Prescott) of the Pentium 4 are not, although there exist Prescott-based Pentium 4 processors with Intel's EM64T implementation.
BTW: http://arstechnica.com/ is your friend. Hannibal has done a good job of talking through the history of the Pentium chip family (1 & 2) and the PowerPC family (1 & 2, part 3 hasn't yet arrived) up to the G4's. There's discussion of the IBM POWER5 architecture too, and some commentary on pipelines in processor design (1 & 2). I learned a lot from these, and value their information. But I'm going to stop telling Granny to suck eggs now.