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IBM Ships Fastest CPU on Earth
HockeyPuck writes "The 5-billion-instructions-per second Power6 processor from IBM would beat such rivals as the 3.73 gigahertz Pentium Extreme and the 2.4 gigahertz UltraSparc T2 from Sun. 'It's hard to make the average person understand just how fast this is,' said IBM Chief Technology Officer Bernard Meyerson, offering an example meant to explain his company's baby that still leaves the listener awed with the speediness of the two laggards. 'Hold your index finger out in front of your face,' Meyerson said in a telephone interview from IBM headquarters in New York. 'In less time than it would take a beam of light to travel from your knuckle to your fingertip, the new IBM chip would complete one task and start looking for the next, he said.'"
The switch from PPC to Intel wasn't really about performance or pricing. It was about supply and logistics. Both the Motorola and IBM PPC chips were custom chips from their Power architecture as neither company sold CPUs for general consumer computers. IBM made chips mostly for workstations and servers (which were considerably more powerful and expensive).
Like most manufacturers, Apple, IBM, and Motorola do not want to keep a large inventory of anything. So Apple would only order and project as much as they thought they needed. IBM and Motorola would allocate enough resources for Apple's forecasts. But the problem was Apple was selling Macs faster than they anticipated. So they would order more. Neither IBM or Motorola could keep up with the increased supply.
Even if they ordered millions of chips a year, Apple was never going to be IBM's or Motorola's largest customer. They could not dedicate large amounts of resources for one custom product line of one customer when they had much larger customers (for IBM, their own workstation/server division. for Motorola, their electronics division). At most, Apple was their highest profile customer.
From Apple's standpoint, they were tired of not getting enough CPUs. So if they switched to a stock Intel chip, their supply problems because more manageable. Because for Intel it wouldn't be a small customer ordering more of a specialized part; it would be a small customer order more of the stock part.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
It's very useful to remember that the speed of light is about a billion feet per second, or a foot in a billionth of a second. He was just looking for a measure that is 1/5 of a foot long.