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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. "
I thought we had finally advanced past the "higher clockspeed = more better" stage...
- Toby
Any EE care to chime in with how IBM might have gone about solving their power consumption issues?
It's seemed that IBM, Intel, and AMD have all had issues dealing with leakage moving to the 65nm process, but Intel and IBM have now apparently solved the issue. As a mere hobbyist, I don't even approach the knowledge level necessary to speculate on such things, but I STILL WANT TO KNOW.
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.
If I owned an as/400, i/z series server, maybe this would be exciting news as a future upgrade.
But do they achieve a comparable amount of work per cycle?
--
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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.
The cost of making chips, by far, is the R&D cost. The "first" chip costs hundreds of millions to make. Once the "first chip" is made the margin cost is VERY low. Beyond recovering R&D costs....the rest is just distribution channel costs....then....PROFIT!They would get bragging rights with 45nm. 65nm is so old that even AMD has 65nm chips now.
Heck philips/motorola I believe have been producing 65nm microcontrollers, and samsung is producing 50nm flash chips.
And 5GHz should not be difficult considering it doesnt have the x86 overhead, is more RISC and that generally PPC has a simpler core. I'll be interested if it comes with quad cores or more.
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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.
Maybe the BogoMIPS value for it is too large for linux_logo to process (16-bit number if i am right)
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Why would apple move back to these processors over intel?
\
Just because IBM made a new family of processors?
This does not mean they are better then intels or amds processors.
There should be some really interesting stuff this year on how they kept the power down.
Of course, a chip nearly 2 cm on a side is going to be a beast no matter what. This is going to be fun!
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
In your face, Steve Jobs!
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,
It would be ludicrous, but Kutaragi's talked before about never reducing the price of the PS3 but instead upgrading it with more memory, bigger hard drives, etc. It would be pretty damned amusing if, a year and a half after PS3 launch, instead of cutting prices with a new easier to produce Cell and Blu-ray they upgraded the PS3 with the Cell2(and hosed everyone who'd already bought one). This would be so stupid and arrogant that it's only plausible because it's Sony.
Move back? They were never on them. POWER6 != powerpc (though they are similar in more ways than not).
I think Apple is perfectly happy with the Intel move at this point. One of the reasons for the migration (if you can get past Jobs' reality distortion field of blah blah per watt or whatever) was that IBM wasn't able to keep up with demand, either with getting the speeds up, or with delivering the slow crappy ones they already had.
/* oops I accidentally made a comment, sorry */
First of all, switch to a Power6 based architecture is not something you simple do. It takes a LOT of effort in writing the OS to function on the new architecture, not to mention all the work by developers to make their programs function on it as well. Second, Apple didn't choose Intel because they were the "best at the moment" uP supplier. They chose Intel because Apples felt they had a better future than the PowerPC line. So, even if someone, like Power6, does poke their head above Intel/x86 in performance, Apple is content that Intel will surpass them and continue producing good CPU's. Apple did not switch to x86 based processors lightly.
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So what if IBM's new chips run at 5GHz or more? What about gigaflops?
I had hoped the majority of slashdotters would be able to see past the megahertz myth by now.
Apparently not.
"NOW you tell us?"
-Steve Jobs
Well, no, Apple never used POWER6 specifically, but they did use PPC, and IBM's current marketing literature says that PowerPC is POWER. They used to say POWER was PowerPC, but anyhow, according to:
http://www-03.ibm.com/chips/power/aboutpower/
"Power Architecture encompasses PowerPC®, POWER4(TM) and POWER5(TM) processors."
So, Apple won't use POWER6. Apple never used the earlier "POWER" branded chips because they never built any systems that would use them. Macs just aren't that big. Also, Apple has switched completely to X86, and hasn't bothered to really keep alive any hope of a mixed platform for the Mac. But, if Apple did move to POWER6, it would count as going back to the old architecture, rather than moving to a brand new one.
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From the an Applications point of view moving from the PPC to the POWER line would be a none issue. Just recompile if that.
For the OS it may be a bit of a challenge but far less than moving from the PPC to Intel.
It is often used in mid-range systems and work stations. It is big, fast, and usually expensive. This is a step to keep the power line above the X86 not really to catch up.
Apple didn't use the Power line it used the PPC line of CPUs.
I do agree that this will not make any difference to Apple which is too bad. I would love to be free of the nasty mess that is the X86.
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Power5+ cpus have been king of the tpc hill since they were first introduced. Power6 will only increase that lead i suspect.
pSeries, iSeries, and zSeries, are still hard at work doing same they have always done, running banks, distribution centers, and the like. The difference is that mini's and mainframes don't need glossy magazines so that people know they get work done, they just do it.
If you look at the direction AMD is going you will see the archietecture so common in the mini/mainframe areana is coming down to the home.
It was always hilarious to hear the network guys brag about their 4-way network tower with its 8gb plus of ram, they loved to lord those numbers over the iseries folks, too bad that the 512mb uniprocessor iseries box served more people. It took a while to educate the pc-nuts (and I am a pc nut as much as an i/p/zseries nut) that processor and memory do not make a computer. It is design and integration that makes a computer.
plus having a real OS doesn't hurt either.
Besides IBM never needed Apple's marketshare, they conquered the world of home entertainment without ever exposing themselves to much risk
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
The entire point of having a console over a computer is that any game that is released for the console is guaranteed to run on it, and run well, whether it's released 6 months or years after the console's release. General purpose computers don't tend to work that way. Therefore, if Sony were to do that, all the newer, better games would be unplayable on the old consoles, thus the early adopters get screwed out of all newer games. Typical Sony.
As a game developer, I can say with some confidence that Apple's decisions are NOT influenced by difficulty incurred by developers to get their software to run properly on any number of different versions floating around, which are in many ways incompatible with each other
I think manufacturing capability was the main concern for Apple making the switch, IBM couldnt provide enough chips and wasnt motivated to go the extra mile. Switching to Intel meant they could get the future whiz-bang tech and have enough supply to significantly increase sales on H/W.
In the world of technology a promise of more/better performance counts as much as a drunken "I love you." One reason why Apple jumped from PPC is that IBM failed to deliver a 3.0 Ghz chip within a reasonable time frame (in the PPC970 series) and completely failed on delivering a laptop chip. Believe it when you actually see shipping servers.
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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.
Anyone have an answer?
I think you are a bit closer to the truth than I was. Apple has a much more stable supply and future feature increase with Intel than it ever did with the PPC architecture.
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This also puts Apple in a good situation, AT NO POINT do they have computers that are inferior to their competition. Before, if Motorola or IBM outmatched Intel, Apple had bragging rights, if Intel beat them, then they were at a disadvantage. Now, if there is a supply issue in x86 land, then Dell, HP, and Apple are all in the same boat. Apple now competes on its software, not on Motorola/IBM's interest in beating Intel.
At PPC was often a disadvantage and only occasionally an advantage for Apple, they get chips out of the equation all together, and now fight on software, a much better boat to be in for them. They have the same suppliers as HP and Dell, a decent size economies of scale situation (they are the 4th or 5th biggest hardware manufacturer, so while Dell and HP are bigger, they are still a HUGELY lucrative account), and have their software advantage over other PC makers. The different CPU issue just confused the matter...
They'd have had a BIG edge if they went with x86-64 off the bat, and never had any legacy x86-32 code to deal with, giving a performance edge over windows, but I just don't understand migrating to x86 when x86-32 only had 6 months of life left in it instead of waiting for x86-64 and having a performance edge for 5-10 years, but that's just me.
I always end up explaining this when POWER chips come up on slashdot.
"PowerPC" is a family of processors implementing the PowerPC instruction set. IBM's 970MP processor (also known as a G5) is PowerPC. So are IBM's POWER3, POWER4, POWER5, and POWER6. So is Motorola/Freescale's G4. So is the Cell.
So if Apple made the incredibly unlikely move of using POWER6's in their PowerMac line, they would indeed be returning to the PowerPC architecture.
After all, I am strangely colored.
There are clock speeds and there are operations. I know what an operation is, but how are cpu clockspeeds rated? Is it just something as silly as their clock source? By defination it is "cycles per second", but what exactly is cycling? I've always been confused by this and I think I just don't understand how digital processors work enough.
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This is exactly right.
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I did a search with my threshold turned down to 1, and no one asked the most important question yet. But does it run Linux?
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Also the one area that IBM and AMD do not do well yet is mobile chips. Here Intel had a clear advantage. Coupled with Intel being able to deliver promised speed and quantities, Apple made a good decision.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
The biggest effect the Intel switch has had is to put a stake in the heart of the horrid old OS 9 vampire. I'm more than half convinced that the reason Jobs timed the switch when he did was because he'd just - about six or so months earlier - been able to pull the last G4 Powermac that could boot into OS 9 off the Apple store without the usual storm of protests. With the Intel switch, the new Macs don't include Classic and won't even run the old OS 9 software.
Even if IBM had a 5 GHz quad-core Power PC that was plug-compatible with the G5 *right now*, Apple wouldn't ship it. The last thing he wants is to have some beggar pull that stake out of Classic's ribcage and have it come lurching back to life.
Apple "Switched" not because Intel was faster or better or had a "better roadmap" as they claim. It's because IBM couldnt get the heat down on the chips. They had no G5 PowerBook and the towers had to be made like giant wind tunnles.
IBM just couldnt make a cool + powerful chip like Intel could.. but.. that looks like thats in the past now..
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It was never about performance per se -- there are plenty of faster things out there than the Core 2 Duo.
For scientific and database apps, sure. But for integer and multimedia code, there's nothing faster than the Core. I wonder what kind of code Macs are running...
Nope, it is backwards compatible.
IBM does not give a heck to Desktop market unless you are calling them about 10.000 terminal running Enterprise Big Iron monster and they may even suggest you buy Dell terminals/PCs if it fits their project better. What matters to them is the mainframe, technologies used, software used and the entire consulting to keep such business up.
Motorola/Freescale lives happily in embedded processor market and telecoms market too.
I guess such stories should have "power-not-powerPC department" tag.
Also, yes , our great leader/prophet whatever was right switching to Intel/x86 because of above reasons. Both companies tries to stay away from Desktop market and they won't be bothered by ridiculous 3Ghz PPC G5 (a STRIPPED DOWN POWER4) Apple fanboys. Apple can't effect those decisions by their current market share. If it goes back to great 50% 50% marketshare values, they can demand anything of course.
(Happily written from a 33C/92F running Quad G5)
The chips are already in production, this is the very end of the cycle on these. Keep in mind that while many seem to relate this to PPC, this is really the POWER line targeting servers and IBM has been traditionally pretty accurate with their statements regarding POWER4, POWER5, POWER5+ in the past.
Low power consumption, PPC, fast. Can we have this in a laptop please?
I for one welcome our new 6 Gigahertz masters.
Have Tardis, will travel.
Yup. And your point is ... ?
And the next million wafers cost how much?
Nobody builds stuff like that with a run rate of a few measly thousand. No way to recover the NRE. If the variable costs don't dominate the bugetary numbers, then the project doesn't get authorized.
By the way:
That's just the ante to get in the game.
Unless you're doing some massive reuse, that's not even a pimple on the actual project cost. A major CPU design team runs to the hundreds of engineers. My team, which is doing microcontrollers, is about twenty.
Is way, way out of date. 65 nm mask sets for SOI run well over a million. Last I looked, much closer to two million.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
The original IBM PC clocked at 4.7 MHz.
Now they can go 4.7 GHz.
About frickin' time.
My other car is a 1984 Nark Avenger.
4 core POWER5+ pServer running Linux is $5,500
${YEAR+1} is going to be the year of Linux on the desktop!
The reason why Intel/AMD had to reduce speeds was that they were achieving the greater speeds through very long pipelines - which is fine, but from an instruction point of view, it has to wait through the pipeline before it will get executed. IBM have kept their pipeline at the same length as the previous generation chips and have increased the speed, in part, through a combination of 65nm and 90nm parts - so in this case it is like taking the Core 2 and increasing its clock speed beyond the NetBurst Pentium: The performance is multiplied.
There's a reason IBM supercomputers number the most in the most powerful computers in the world beyond any other manufacturer. Check out top500.org.
I haven't checked the information yet, but here's an abstract on the rest, found through google:
c essor-Trashes-Competition-with-6-GHz-17765.shtml1 606194731
The Power6 processor will run between 4GHz and 5GHz and it has been proven to chew away data at a speed of 6GHz in the lab.
IBM see things a little differently and they decided to raise the frequency in both cores of the processor.
For high-end models, four POWER6 MPUs will be packaged in a single multi-chip module, along with four L3 victim caches, each 32MB.
On the management side, IBM is also improving their virtualization capabilities in the POWER6. In particular products, a single processor may be able to host 2-300 virtual instances, although theoretically up to 1024 VMs are possible. Memory partitioning and migration have been added as well, which reduces system down time for repairs.
IBM is claiming a factor of two performance increase, which would be consistent with the vastly higher clockspeeds and increases in raw system bandwidth.
IBM's roadmaps currently include the POWER6+, which is presumably a 45nm derivative product. Judging by past practices, the POWER6+ will debut in the second half of 2008, probably just in time to dash the hopes of rivals.
The Power and PowerPC lines will grow one step closer together with Power6, which incorporates the AltiVec instruction set that speeds up many multimedia tasks. AltiVec, also known as VMX, increases efficiency by letting a single processing instruction be applied to multiple data elements. That's helpful for video and audio tasks on desktop machines, but servers will benefit as well in, for example, high-performance computing tasks such as genetic data processing, McCredie said
Where Power5 can transfer data on and off the chip at a rate of 150 gigabytes per second, Power6 can do so at 300GBps, McCredie said.
Oh, and it is also good for BCD's (binary coded decimals) which obviously points to the expected customers (high end financial firms, presumably).
Sources:
http://news.softpedia.com/news/New-Power6-IBM-Pro
http://realworldtech.com/page.cfm?ArticleID=RWT10
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9584_22-6124451.html
This is absolutely the right thing. It's all about designing for the task. Apple doesn't care how fast Power6 is. Power6 is well over twice the size of Core 2, and has double the power dissipation at the highest clockspeed. Even in the most cut-down configuration, with one memory controller disabled, the other running at 1/2 width, and the I/O busses running at 1/4 width, it requires a motherboard with the I/O connectivity of an Opteron server board combined with the memory bus of a Xeon server board. Power6 is pushing it even for the PowerMac, much less the rest of Apple's product line.
What Apple needs is high-performance, but geared for its target market. That's what Intel offers: a high-performance chip that achieves that performance with consumer-grade infrastructure.
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Please tell me what processor does better than Core 2 Duo on SPEC CPU?
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Slashdot reader since 1997
In constrast, I couldn't be more pleased. My 5lb Macbook gives my 40lb PowerMac a beating on integer codes, despite the fact that the latter has a 15% clockspeed advantage (2.3 GHz 970MP), 60% more memory bandwidth, and nearly triple the watts to play with.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
You can find it in the "clocking" session from ISSCC two years back. Slick stuff, doesn't use as much power and gets much less clock skew than a clock tree does.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
This Power6 chip the one they were talking about in the movie Hackers? http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113243/
Now that was a movie way ahead of its time!
"It has a killer refresh rate.
P6 chip. Triple the speed of the Pentium.
Yeah. It's not just the chip, it has a PCI bus. But you knew that.
Indeed. RISC architecture is gonna change everything.
Yeah. RISC is good."
I agree. With Intel (and the fallback option of AMD), Apple is set for the long term - or at least until when (and if) Microsoft starts making its own CPUs to execute their CLI natively.
Yeah, they'd have taken a hit for 6 months, especially in the laptop arena. I was still sitting on a 1 Ghz G4 Powerbook, because replacing the machine for a 1.42 Ghz G4 Powerbook seemed like a pointless upgrade. It didn't look like a low power G5 (or 2 Ghz G4) was in the works, and Apple would have had an AWFUL 1H2006. However, there was an expectation of a week 1H2006 because of the transition.
I think that the long term edge of having ALL software running on x86-64 instead of x86-32 would have given them a performance edge over Windows for 3-5 years, and should have been considered. Supporting 32 and 64 bit PPC is different, they don't. They support PPC-32, with some libraries for mathematical software in PPC-64. The core OS is PPC-32, and that will never change.
I think that making the OS, and all apps x86-64 would be nice.
I think the RFD is overstated in this case. Steve knew that laptops would be the big market and performance per watt is v important there. Also don't forget it made possible the bootcamp bridge to entice switchers.
spoonerize "magic trackpad"
Could it complete "sleep 1" any sooner? no? sigh.
I'm still personally waiting for the day when we judge processors by how many instructions per cycle they can process. Hey, a 1Hz processor that does 5,000,000 instructions per cycle *SHOULD* be on the equivalent of a 10Hz processor that does 500,000 instructions per cycle, right? (I'm hoping I got the basic math down, here.)
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Perhaps IBM is trying to win back Apple with this announcement? I'm half-joking. Somethign tells me that this is rather well-timed to compete with Intel. "Look! You switched just as we put out something new! Look at the power in high-end servers! You could have THIS in your desktop or laptop!" Of course, I'm probably dreaming.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Which was pretty much the GP's point - Apple want chips that are appropriate for the use to which their customers put them. Motorola and IBM don't really target those uses; Intel does.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Here's your answer: yes
:-)
Insert
Better on FP, somewhat, but only ~1/2 the score on INT.
-- Erich
Slashdot reader since 1997
Motorola hasn't made ANY chips since 2004 when they spun off their semiconductor products group and it became Freescale Semiconductor.
Only one poster (poopdeville) in this whole thread seems to have gotten this correct.
If you're talking about chips, and you think of Motorola, you should really be thinking of Freescale now.
5 Ghz is enough speed for everyone.
My understanding is that the current-generation "CISC" chips have a preprocessor (on the die) that turns some of the more complex instructions into several less complex ones, which are what the processor's logic pipelines work on. Thus while the compiler might still produce CISC microcode, it's really being cross-compiled one further time before it's actually executed. So you can sort of argue it either way. The processor as a unit does execute more instructions than RISC chips; but in a way they're not executing them natively.
The main reason I've heard why CISC+preprocessor designs won out over pure RISC is because the die area required for the CISC-to-RISC pre-processor shrunk steadily as new manufacturing processes were developed. The logic required to translate CISC to RISC is basically fixed, and as you go to smaller and smaller processes, it represents a smaller and smaller portion of the total processor die area. Thus, every year the advantage of RISC over CISC shrinks. It's sort of an unintended consequence of Moore's law: the ability to pack more transistors onto a die has also made radical changes to the architecture's less attractive, since it makes preprocessor logic "cheaper" in terms of die space.
The x86 instruction set has become the lingua franca of processors, even though most of them immediately break those x86 instructions down into RISC-ish sub-instructions for actual processing. Whether you can still call this hybrid architecture CISC or RISC is mostly semantics; it's a little of both.
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