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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.
Power6 sounds like it's going to be pretty damn cool - Perhaps Apple made a mistake jumping to intel so soon...
*sighs* I for one yearn for the days of smugly ending any performance argument with some PC user with "Well, we've got Altivec & Altivec is magic."
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
...does it run Vista?
Sig? What sig? Do I have to have a sig!?!?
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.
Because we can do no Moore at the moment.
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.
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