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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.
Nope.
If Apple had been waiting until now for a 64-bit chip they could put into a portable, they'd be in Very Big Trouble.
The PPC has a lot going for it, but Apple made the right choice.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Huge increase in mac sales since the intel switch? Massive profits? Stock well over $100? Yeah they made a mistake. Look, sometimes business decisions are just that: business, regardless of whether they're the most exciting decision from a technical or geek standpoint.
"Did Apple make a mistake?"
No. Not at all.
The Power series was the high end server class, meant for big iron.
The PowerPC series was the vastly scaled down little brother intended for the desktop class.
IBM wasn't all the interested in making chips for Apple.
And who can blame them? Lower profit margins and less units sold.
Intel is a much better match for Apple, which is a consumer grade CPU manufacturer. And since the switch, Apple has not had the embarrasment of lower performing CPUs and long waits on CPU upgrades that IBM and Freescale saddled Apple with.
If Apple had stayed with IBM, they would have been pushed to the Cell processor. And that would be a bad PR move, running on the same CPU as your game consol runs on. And there would of course be no gaurantee switching to that processor family would result in better product cycles from IBM.
Apple made the right choice, The relationship with IBM was no longer viable.
I'll wait until the specs come out Tuesday* before I decide if the Power6 is interesting. Sure, it's got GHz. But how many ALUs does that cover? FPUs? What about its SIMD instruction capabilities? How long is the pipeline? Is it insanely long a la NetBurst?
Not to mention that IBM didn't seem to be putting any resources at all into a low-power verion of the POWER5; What makes you think they would for the POWER6? Without a low-power chip, Apple would have a hard time making laptops with a decent battery life.
* Well, I'd rather wait until that guy at Ars Technica does one of his in-depth analyses on the POWER6 architecture. His essays on Intel, AMD and Mac-basis CPUs were awesome, and his essays on hardware in general are how I learned that stuff. When I found their Technopaedia, I spent days soaking it in. Pity they didn't carry it over with their site redesign a couple years back.
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Unfortunately true. The new Power series could work in a desktop or workstation but it will be expensive. I am sure that with enough money IBM could make a Power6 that was better than the Core 2... Except they wouldn't make a profit on it. As much as I hate loosing yet another better then the X86 ISA from the desktop Apple did the right thing.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
why Apple doesn't just permanently keep its lineup as a mix of PPC and x86, picking whichever chip suits the particular machine they're designing at the time? Power6 Xserves along side Core 2 laptops... it sounds good to me!
As a software developer why you should work twice more (OSX intel / OSX ppc) to produce a piece of software that will work on roughly 2-3 % of the desktop computers out there?
If Apple would keep randomly altering their hardware and require compatibility with a range of completely different architectures, in the end it'll completely alienate the developers. As Microsoft knows very well, developers, developers, developers are you best asset in this fight.
Furthermore, no, being Universal binary is not a requirement, and I know few companies which release only Intel versions of their Mac software (example: Adobe's Soundbooth)
How much software is "optimized" for a specific architecture, beyond what the compiler does? How much "unnecessary work" is there, beyond what has already been done in the creation of universal binaries? It's extra work for Apple, but essentially none for the vast majority of application developers.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
I know that was just a joke, but I would like to point out that Moore's law is still continuing just fine at the moment. Most consumer processor designers have decided that instead of using the extra transistor density to increase speed, to use it for all these multi core chips that have been produced the past couple years.
Because most of us who have desktop pcs and stuff aren't running weather simulations or fragging at the highest possible FPS. My desktop runs at a little under 3ghz and it's just fine for me thank you. Most other people I know don't need that much power either.
But Apple didn't have to switch
Remember the Sun 386i? Nobody believed it had a future, and that was a self-fulfilling prophecy. If Apple hadn't committed to a switch, then a lot of developers wouldn't have bothered to build their apps for Intel, since they could just run under Rosetta.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
How much software is "optimized" for a specific architecture, beyond what the compiler does?
Very little of it, outside of the libraries that Apple provides.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
By "work twice more" you mean "check an option box in XCode," right?
Yeah, just like how the wide range of different architectures most UNIX software runs on alienates developers...
...oh, wait.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
I think that you basically mentioned the only real place where there's a market for PPC: on servers. Although I've always been a big fan of the Power architecture (I have a dual-G5 spaceheater sitting under my desk that I'm writing this on, right now), I don't think that offering G5 PowerMacs along side Intel PowerMacs would really do anything besides confuse customers and potentially make the platform less appealing for developers who don't realize how easy Universal code is to produce. So I think that's a non-starter.
However, keeping OS X Server (which under the hood really isn't that different from regular old OS X, but it's marketed as a totally different product) Universal, and producing PPC XServes in addition to Intel boxes, might not be a bad idea. PPC XServes have always had a fair bit of popularity in the HPC and scientific-computing segments over x86, and for servers, a lot of the software in use is OSS anyway and is architecture-agnostic by design. So they wouldn't really be confusing any developers there -- most of the software that runs on OS X Server is either supplied by Apple, or is OSS, or (in the case of custom HPC code) may have been written/optimized specifically for Power/Altivec in the past already, so they'd be saving their customers work by offering a PPC product.
I think there could be a lot to gain by keeping a PPC model around. They might not even have to do too much hardware design; if they didn't burn too many bridges with IBM on the way out, they could probably use one of IBM's Power-based blade-server boards in a 1U case...particularly with the way Cell hasn't been selling, IBM would probably be happy for the microprocessor sales.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Because one of Apple's new selling points is the ability for all new Macs to run Windows as well as OS X. Can you imagine the nightmare Apple would have if they mixed processors?
--They say only a fool looks at the finger pointing to the sky...
I've got Intel graphics on my X60, and I'm in the middle of installing a bunch of 3D games in Linux (Tremulous, FlightGear, Scorched3D, Neverball...); I anticipate that it'll run them just fine. It also works really well with Compiz/Beryl. Personally, I think it's a lot better than having an Nvidia or ATI chip, and not having 3D support at all.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
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.
The argument was about keeping PPC or not. So how do you pull that from SSE on Windows Flash?
Furthermore, if you're a startup, who writes version 1 of a software, where do you "pull" this from?
The accelerate framework is a toy, for serious work, you need to code it manually.
What do you need that Accelerate.framework doesn't provide?
Have you filed a feature request? http://developer.apple.com/bugreporter/
You can use a free developer connection account to do so. If it's a feature that could be useful to multiple developers, there's a decent chance it will be added.