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4.7GHz IBM Power6 Spotted

Posted by kdawson on from the more-power-to-ya dept.

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.

3 of 296 comments (clear)

  1. Power isn't PPC by Sycraft-fu · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  2. Re:Did Apple make a mistake? by stevesliva · · Score: 4, Informative

    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...

    --
    Who do you get to be an expert to tell you something's not obvious? The least insightful person you can find? -J Roberts
  3. Re:Did Apple make a mistake? by jcr · · Score: 5, Informative

    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

    --
    The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."