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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."
Why would Apple want to waste any more time with PowerPC? I thought Intel had the most appealing "roadmap".
I wonder if Apple will reconsider the decision regarding the migration. I don't think it will feasible for them to support products with both the processors. According to the rumors on the web, Apple wasn't happy about the low power processor option from IBM. I wonder if this is it ?
It would be nice if Apple would offer a machine with one (two would be even better). I know they are going to be using PowerPC for a while longer. Maybe when Apple stops using PowerPC, another company will come along and start putting these chips in desktop machines (are there any already?) In all honesty, I use a 1.25 GHz G4 Mac Mini with Debian Linux, which compiles my source fast enough with GCC, same with my x86 desktop machines. This is probably more for a server. With IBM getting away from hardware manufacturer, who will offer this CPU in their servers? Disclaimer: Right now my server is a 300 MHz x86 PC tower with FreeBSD.
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It sounds like that apple would most likely use the PowerPC for Power Macs and Power Books and xServes... while reserving Intels for the consumer line of products, iMac and iBook and Mac Mini.
As for the dual core, I believe, it may be exciting to many Apple PowerPC fans and may provide a reason to some to buy Apple machine in this transition period.
IBMs own server products and embedded processors. IBM's blue gene used the core from earlier PowerPC series.
I personally think that this means IBM and Apple were working on dual cores for awhile, and Apple seriously wanted dual cores, and Apple had IBM keep it secret. But, now that Apple's switched to Intel, nothing's keeping IBM from announcing their dual core chips.
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.
Still and all, Apple has been harping on about the superiority of PowerPC for so long that I'm even more surprised to see them switch when IBM has these things, which look like the answers to a couple of Apple's problems, coming up.
I'd be interested in seeing what Steve Jobs saw on Intel's roadmap for the next few years that convinced him...
Whoever corrects a mocker invites insult;
whoever rebukes a wicked man incurs abuse.
--Proverbs 9:7
Why use a 13-16 Watt PowerPC chip when you can use a 27-watt Pentium M?
"Scientists don't change their minds, they just die." -- Max Planck
This is definately not the same chip. For starters the Freescale chip is a 32-bit processor and the IBM chip is 64-bit.
Lasers Controlled Games!
Apple (Steve-boy) already mentioned that there were moreproc. updates coming, and even said there were some good updates coming down the pipeline. His big concern was not just "now" but the future road map.
We'll see. IBM promised Steve 3 GHz in one year and didn't deliver. They've announced these chips, but give no indication as to when they'll be shipping in quantity. Could be the same as before.
Also, we don't know how compelling the roadmap looks in the future. Apple will get to use these chips in the short term and then switch to Intel by the time these chips have completed their "lives." Steve may be getting what he wants now, but he knows as well as you and I that it is not necessarily an indication of things to come.
Per Square Mile, a blog about density
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.
The press release is in Japanese; as of this writing, IBM has not released an English version.
Assembly is bad enough. I can't imagine assembly in Kanji.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
IBM had their chance.
Seriously, you don't think they gave Steve this news at least 6-12 months ago?
A new product announcment does not a deep roadmap make.
I think Steve saw this among a number of other bits in a meeting with Big Blue, saw it was a very weak pipeline, didn't get what he wanted in terms of pricing and development cost sharing, and was still pissed off over the 3ghz fiasco. IBM also probably wasn't terribly forthcoming, thinking they had Apple as a captive customer, probably not noticing the writing on the wall that was obvious as soon as Darwin x86 was compiled, linked, and booted. So IBM's trying to save a little face, but the horse has already won the Kentucky Derby and they're just now closing the barn door?
They boned it. The interesting question is, do they really care? I doubt it.
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?
From the roadmaps and rumor mill, even the Pentium EE 130 W(clocked at what, 3.8ghz?) and the AMD Athlon 110 W and too high power and not good enough on performance.
It appears Intel plans on dropping the P4 line and going to enhancing the Pentium M edition. It is expected that Apple will be going with the Pentium Ms (which apparently have dual core slated in their lineup) instead of with the Pentium EE.
In summary, Apple won't touch the Pentium EE due to high power consumption. However, they do like the Pentium M with has much better performance per watt/clock cycle and much lower power consumption.
From that I would guess that either AMD could not give Apple the same deal as Intel could. Either that or Apple expects Intel to have much better performance than AMD by that time. Also, as far as I know the Pentium Ms are much better than AMDs mobiles in power and performance.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
Low power g5 in a ws ibook, that would be so nice.
Also-ran, anyone?
Seriously, not an anti-Apple troll, but this strikes me as just a wee bit sad...
With both Intel and AMD having decent dual-core offerings now (with AMD's absolutely dominating anything else on the market for both performance and low power), not to mention the impending dual core Pentium-Ms... Combined with Apple choosing to go with x86 (most likely, the same aforementioned dual-Ms)...
Does IBM even have a market for these anymore? This strikes me as nothing but wasted effort on their part. Even their embedded market won't care about this, when a few watts means far more than a second core...
Best performance per watt != Lowest power usage of highest-performing part.
The Pentium M family is much lower power than the Pentium 4, and has reasonably good performance. I don't think AMD really has a chip that competes with the Pentium M, even though AMD's chips are generally less power-hungry than a Pentium 4.
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.
If these had been around a year ago we could be talking about Apple innovation etc, but the fact is the x86 market is ahead and Motorola/IBM have their eyes on high end servers and the embedded market.
:)).
But still, the power use of these chips is very impressive. Always liked Motorola but AMD64 is where I'm at now (it's close in name to CBM64 too
Now that would make a good shirt for a lass. Check out my dual processors!
And that, my liege, is how we know the Earth to be bannana-shaped.
In other news, nobody really cares because Apple is switching to x86 based hardware sooner than these will make it into the hardware stream.
Part of what makes the Mac experience what it is is that Apple doesn't try to cram legacy support into every product they make. With Apple it's out with the old and in with the new; PPC will be a dead end like 68k.
this is my sig
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.
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.
This sounds exactly like what Apple needed for a G5 powerbook. Did Steve just get a little too impatient? Had he waited another month maybe he would have found the answer for a G5 powerbook? Did Apple threaten IBM that they would go to Intel if something didn't change soon? (and now IBM has delivered, but perhaps a bit too late)
I don't understand how some people are saying "OMG Apple switched at the wrong time oh noes!@#!!"
Does everything HONESTLY think Apple didn't know the exact release date of the 970MP BEFORE they announced their switch?
Apple knew when and where this was going to be released, and they know when and where Intel will release their next series. They switched because they wanted to, this isn't a surprise to them.
"I wonder if Apple will reconsider the decision regarding the migration."
After the WWDC and the trauma it inflicted on some devs, I find it highly unlikely that Apple is going to suddenly decide tomorrow that they've made a bad move and are going to stick with the PPC path in the future. Apple knew this G5 development was coming, hence the comment that has been repeated numerous times that the next 2 years are going to produce some interesting developments in the PPC platform, but by 2007, things will be at a point where Intel will overtake them and that the PPC roadmap does not offer anything that can keep up with the pace of Intel. Jumping hardware platforms is hard enough as it is, jumping back would work to obliterate the confidence that Steve Jobs has tried to instill in those who support the Mac. He and his fellow execs are trying very, very hard to appear as if this is really worth it and that they have a solid plan that will not leave 3rd parties burned.
Nobody wants to have another Amiga situation, where every week there is a new roadmap to follow, dramatically different than the one before. That is the perfect way to scare off the community that keeps a platform going.
Looks like Steve Jobs is getting all the things he said he couldn't have. ... a year late (*). That's why he's switching.
It's "put a lot of effort and money in to be a year or more late" vs. "get crazy R&D for free and be guaranteed to be current". Tough choice.
(*) Ignoring for a moment that he was also promised 3GHz by mid-2004!
because they have two boobs. funny.
Glad to see someone else still kicking on the other side of the silicon curtain. MIPS, Alpha, HP-UX, Ultrasparc, m68k, Itanium are all more or less dead. The only players in the 32-bit/64-bit arena are x86(x64), PPC and ARM. ARM just isnt aiming for the same market, which really leaves PPC and x86/x64 for the Desktop AND the server market. Its amazing so many architectures are now powered by the same chips (mac, AS400, RS6000, game consoles, industrial VME cards) by PPC and everything else by x86/x64.
Personally I'd be glad to see x64-only chips with the 32-baggage dropped, and a BIOS standard that allows booting straight into 64-bit. That will really split the x64 from the x86, and give us cheaper and lighter chips. As for the PPC, I'm glad its still there. The price/performance ratio may be bad (relative to the Athlon64), but for one the base architecture is good, and diversity, which pushed semiconductors in general so far during the 90s is good for the industry.
Software for which source code is available (free or otherwise) is the only thing that can diversify the CPU market. People are stuck with a single CPU and operating system, both ill-designed, simply because their closed-source software will only run on that combination. Some awesome technologies like the Alpha chip, the Ultrasparc, the IRIX OS etc have died simply for that reason.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
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.
AMD has approximately 20% of the PC Processor market.
Apple has 3% of the PC Market.
3% of the PC market is 15% of AMD's market.
AMD's market is normally capped not by distribution but rather by production. If AMD won the Apple contract, they would EITHER need to increase their production by 15% (not historically AMD's strong suit), or increase prices to the PC market...
If AMD picks up the Apple contract and CANNOT increase production...
Then AMD has to reduce their PC market-share by 15% of their production, which means increasing prices.
Either way, Apple would be a HUGE account for AMD, and would require a substantial portion of AMD's manufacturing resources.
Alex
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
It's a shame that the 970MP's two 1MB caches are not shared like the power4+'s cache is. A shared cache is great for single threaded performance and for sharing variables between threads (threads running on different cores).
Is shared cache a premium feature, maybe similar to power4+'s external L3 cache?
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.