4.7GHz IBM Power6 Spotted

Ilgaz notes that The Register has posted benchmark results from Oracle 11i running on four 4.7GHz Power6 chips. Quoting: "The speedy chips confirm IBM's boasting that Power6 would arrive near 5GHz. They also show that IBM's customers have a lot to look forward to in terms of raw performance." Rumor has it that the Power6 chips will be announced on Tuesday.

Comments

Power isn't PPC

[Sycraft-fu]

Despite the similar name, and somewhat related architecture, IBM's Power line are not PPC chips and aren't suited for desktop use. That's not to say that some technologies from them can't go in to other chips, but drooling over what is essentially a minicomputer/mainframe chip is silly.

The reason Apple switched is because, despite all the hype, Intel continues to make really fast chips for a good price. When Apple was on PPC I saw never ending arguments as to how much faster the chips were. All those never seemed to pan out in actual operation. Why that's the case isn't important from Apple's standpoint, they just want fast chips for low cost.

I suppose if you want to long for the days of Altivec and talking about tech stuff you don't fully understand, that's great, however Apple has to be a bit more pragmatic and realise that while Altivec might sound cooler than SSE3, SSE3 is an API for a damn fast vector unit and that's all that really matters. Most people don't care about contrived benchmarks, they care about the wall clock benchmark, meaning how fast does the system do what they want, and further how cheap can they get that system for.

Re:Did Apple make a mistake?

[stevesliva]

How long is the pipeline? Is it insanely long a la NetBurst?

* Well, I'd rather wait until that guy at Ars Technica does one of his in-depth analyses on the POWER6 architecture.

IBM has confirmed that POWER6 has the same pipeline depth and roughly the same execution unit configuration as the POWER5.

Not that it's the usual 27-page article, but still...

Re:Did Apple make a mistake?

[Anonymous Coward]

The stock price is more related to the iPhone and phenomenal iPod sales.

Re:Did Apple make a mistake?

[jcr]

why you should work twice more

Building universal isn't twice the work. Most apps don't have any intrinsic byte-order dependencies, and very few people ever wrote CPU-specific code that depended on Alitvec (for example).

-jcr

Re:Did Apple make a mistake?

[c_forq]

The only Thinkpad in my requirements and price-range is $250 more than a Macbook, with a slower processor, smaller hard drive, and doesn't include bluetooth. (The X60 is $1,251.75 at sale price, and the Macbook is $1,000 after student discount).

Re:Did Apple make a mistake?

[PipsqueakOnAP133]

Dude, all work's been done.

Either, you're doing a mac specific app and use the Accelerate.framework which handles conversion to SSE3 or Altivec depending on the platform... ...or, you'll just pull in all the SSE work you did from the Windows Flash runtime since it's the same chip and these are all not OS dependent.

Same thing for Photoshop. The plugin architecture makes it hella easy since they should have started with plugins for all the heavy stuff anyways. Recycling! It's not just for cans.

Re:Did Apple make a mistake?

[fritsd]

It's tricky but not as hard as you make it sound. Look at Debian if you don't believe me: this picture shows what percentage of the programs is compiled for each architecture: stats.png it's usually over 95%. This includes little- and big-endian (mips, mipsel), 32-bit and 64-bit (x86_64), and weirder (s390). Also note the x-axis on the picture runs from the year 2001 :-) And yes, I know, compiled doesn't mean it actually also works :-)

As to why Adobe can't be bothered to create a working flash player for (at least) 64-bit AMD64: I have no idea; we can't see the source so we can't see how difficult it would be to port it.