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2005 Good Year for Power Architecture
An anonymous reader wrote to mention an IBM article looking back on what the piece calls the best year ever for the Power Architecture. From the article: "While IBM is considered by many to be an 800lb. gorilla, in the microelectronics space, it is actually very small -- last year IBM was way down at number 21 on the iSuppli list of the top 25 semiconductor suppliers worldwide. Now, that isn't necessarily a bad thing: for instance, it means that IBM Semiconductor solutions is small and nimble and competitive -- and this agility (coupled with the fact that we do get to share Research and some other resources with the parts of IBM that are 800lb. gorillas) has led some to predict that the IBM chips division will be named the fastest growing semiconductor supplier of 2005. In fact, there is a very good chance that IBM may regain the coveted #18 spot on iSuppli's list this year!"
I hope they're being sarcastic :) Last year they lost their biggest customer Apple, so it takes a fair bit of marketing spin to make it the best ever year! Whenever the G6 comes out, with low power consumption (if it does of course), that'll be a great year for the Power architecture.
What was really great was the article posted on the IBM intranet when Apple made that announcement; you could tell they were substantially trying to downplay the effect, saying stuff like 'Apple's PowerPC purchases made up point-so-and-so percent of IBM's revenue', and adding that IBM chips would be used in all three next-gen consoles.
the only interesting thing about the Power architecture is that it runs PowerLinux?
http://tinyurl.com/4ny52
A lot of printers use Power architecture (there's one near me, with a 600MHz processor, right now, and the speed with which it renders a full color A4 PDF is quite impressive.) Power is very good wherever there isn't a load of dead weight to keep supporting, which is why it seems to do so well in the embedded or non-"PC" market. As for Apple's decision - well, I fortunately don't have any shares in Apple. I'm not convinced that they will be able to make the world's best X86 portables, and that is the task they seem to have set themselves. I have an attic full of old Macs, and I now have no reason at all to acquire another one.
Pining for the fjords
Right now Apple has the choice of supporting any of three different architectures:
Motorola/Freescale G4
IBM G5
Intel x86
They can choose the best CPU for their needs.
What's so idiotic about that?
GPL Deconstructed
This is about POWER not PowerPC. There is a difference.
/. is good for you.
The consoles will have some catchup to do - in 2005 Apple sold about 4.5 million macintosh computers.
That's just 2005, in 2004 it was something like 3-4 million - and they've been selling PPC computers for a lot longer than two years.
Between the PS3 and the 360 there probably will be ten million chips going out next year, I'm just saying Apples contribution is not as insignificant as you make it sound. And even though Macs are moving to Intel next year they'll still be selling Quad G5's for some time.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Personally I thought it was a particularly good year for Sun's Sparc processors - see this Forrester research article for example. Here are some recent Sun SPECjbb performance benchmarks against IBM's Power P5.
But since Sun isn't a leading Linux advocate, I don't expect them to get Slashdot front page coverage like IBM seems to...
Zen tips: Pay attention. Don't take it personally. Believe nothing.
I think you underestimate the value of Apple for Intel. Intel spent billions of dollars developing the Itanium family of processors, which have been a complete failure in the market. They have also spent more millions developing MMX/SSE/SSE2/SSE3 and so on, and these have been barely used. Intel keeps developing new chip technologies in order to distance themselves from AMD and VIA, but Microsoft refuses to put them into use in their operating systems. Why not? Microsoft may be a software company, but they hate doing the work of developing software. They remind me of a piano student who says he loves playing piano, but hates practicing. Microsoft never bothered to do a decent job of porting Windows or Office to the Itanium, of to fully integrate MMX/SSE into their operating system because it would have been too much work. Compare that to Apple which went from 680x0 to PowerPC, and from PowerPC32 to PowerPC64 as soon as they had working silicon.
I believe that Intel has made big concessions to Apple because it knows that Apple will use every technology that they can to make MacOSX work well on Intel chips, and that that will shame Microsoft into finally getting off of its %@#^ and get developing. Well, and it makes good revenge for Microsoft's ignoring Itanium but releasing for AMD64.