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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.

5 of 296 comments (clear)

  1. Did Apple make a mistake? by Whiney+Mac+Fanboy · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.
    1. Re:Did Apple make a mistake? by mrchaotica · · Score: 5, Interesting

      What I don't understand is, since Mac software has to be Universal nowadays anyway, 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!

      --

      "[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz

    2. 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."
  2. Re:Yeah, but... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    > ...does it run Vista?

    Barely.

  3. 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.