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IBM's New Processors To Exceed 5Ghz
Jordin Normisky writes to mention the news, via ZDNet Asia, that IBM's new Power6 processor will be unveiled next month at a conference in San Francisco. They're also planning to announce a second-generation Cell, both of which are expected to run faster than 5GHz. From the article: "In addition, the [Power6] chip 'consumes under 100 watts in power-sensitive applications,' a power range comparable to mainstream 95-watt AMD Opteron chips and 80-watt Intel Xeon chips. Power6 has 700 million transistors and measures 341 square millimeters, according to the program. The smaller that a chip's surface area is, the more that can be carved out of a single silicon wafer, reducing per-chip manufacturing costs and therefore making a computer more competitive. Power6, like the second-generation Cell, is built with a manufacturing process with 65-nanometer circuitry elements, letting more electronics be squeezed onto a given surface area. "
Usually from the bell-end of Apple. I wonder if IBM's fab plants can cash the check their PR department writes.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
But do they achieve a comparable amount of work per cycle?
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They're also planning to announce a second-generation Cell, both of which are expected to run faster than 5GHz.
Why don't they seem to be making any kind of performance comparisons? Talking about physical size, power consumption as compared to intel & AMD are great, but it seems weird that there's no mention of real-world performance against those same competitors. Even a rough estimate would be interesting.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
With Intel's chips that was becoming increasingly true. But for IBM's power processors more clock does indeed mean faster. The Power line already outperformed Intel per clock. With the increase in clock things may get very interesting.
Boy, Howdy! are you out of the loop. I work on those suckers and believe you me, the chip cost is not trivial.
Do the math: the cost of a 300 mm wafer in a 65 nm process runs well over $5000 (how much is a Deep Dark Secret.) Ignoring geometric yield loss, that's about 70,000 mm of potential dice per. If one chip is 350 square mm, you're getting about 200 per wafer, or $25 per chip fab cost. Yield drops off steeply with size (think in terms of losing ten to twenty dice per wafer, regardless of die size) and that adds into the fab cost too.
That's bare minimum, assuming there aren't any bad lots etc. It adds up fast.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
I would agree with you if these chips were being sold to the common user. As of right now, I'm not familiar with any "e-machines" that run the IBM Cell processor. I don't see what IBM has to gain if their 5Ghz processor isn't an improvement on AMD or Intel because both of those companies already have a substantial amout of the market for home users. I can only assume these chips will be used in high-end products only.
Keep in mind that Power chips are used in high end servers, not commodity PCs. Given the expense of these servers, it's likely that the "OFMG 5GHZ!!!!111" reaction that typifies that commodity PC fanboy market does not apply. I doubt that IBM is sacrificing performance just to market 5GHz speeds (like Intel did with NetBurst).
More importantly, not all programs with two hands know how to use either one of them.
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It was never about performance per se -- there are plenty of faster things out there than the Core 2 Duo. IBM will be happy to sell you some of them, as will Sun or Fujitsu. Or Cray. All for the low price of $600k a machine.
The issue is that IBM makes supercomputers, and Motorola makes cellphones, and they design their chips accordingly. Apple, making neither of these things, couldn't persuade either of them to make a low-power, fast, cheap CPU useful for a laptop and continue updating it with such a small market. Intel, on the other hand, spends most of their engineering effort trying to solve exactly this problem, and so has its business interests aligned with Apple's, as opposed to IBM or Motorola, who didn't really care about them at all, and would happily spend their R&D money on designing things like this chip instead of making a G5 that would fit in a laptop.
This is IBM. They were the first people to do dual core. Now everyone is doing it, it's no longer worth talking about. Everyone else, however, is having problems getting past 3GHz, so this definitely is worth shouting about.
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