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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. "
In your face, Steve Jobs!
ssshhh...I'm currently working on a way to glue a 10ghz crystal on a 8086 chip and (truthfully) sell them as "an x86 processor with a 10ghz clock".
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.
More importantly, not all programs with two hands know how to use either one of them.
My little site.
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.
And even those that do sometimes shoot themselves in the foot
CPU GHz specint2000 specint/Ghz specfp2000 specfp/Ghz
Opteron 3.0 2119 706.3 2365 788.3
Intel P4 3.8 1834 483.4 2091 550.2
Intel Core2 2.66 2848 1070.6 2673 1004.8
IBM Power5 2.1 1747 831.9 3324 1582.8
I gave myself a headache trying to read your table, I hope you don't mind. I also apparently missed the 3GHz Opteron launch in '06...but things still don't look good for AMD.
I may make you feel, but I can't make you think.