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IBM's Eight-Core, 4-GHz Power7 Chip
pacopico writes "The first details on IBM's upcoming Power7 chip have emerged. The Register is reporting that IBM will ship an eight-core chip running at 4.0 GHz. The chip will support four threads per core and fit into some huge systems. For example, University of Illinois is going to house a 300,000-core machine that can hit 10 petaflops. It'll have 620 TB of memory and support 5 PB/s of memory bandwidth. Optical interconnects anyone?"
I'd be a lot more excited about these PPC lines if Ubuntu 8.04 would install and run properly on the PS3, whose PPC+6xDSP architecture would be a great entry level platform for coming up with parallel techniques for the bigger and more parallel PPC chips.
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make install -not war
The applications that are going to be run on this type of machine are designed to be run on this kind of machine.
It's not that simple. While one single task generally is not coded to take advantage of the entire system (single threaded on a dual system, dual thread on a quad system, whatever), you are able to actually use your computer while said task is underway. Ever encoded a DVD on a single core machine? Not so fun - half the time, you can't even use your mouse. Slap the same task on a dual-core box, and suddenly you can continue to work (or play) while that goes on in the background. Alternately, you can encode two DVDs simultaneously and be done in the speed it would normally take to finish one. Parallelism in its most literal sense.
Of course, many video-related apps these days are multi-threaded, but you get the general idea.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
Look at the heatsink in a PS3 and you have your answer.
Yes, thank you, I'm well aware. DNF on Vista is an old joke about how Duke Nukem is taking so long, it will require Vista. Now that Vista is out and there have been games that require it, the joke is outdated. So go whoosh yourself.
You've got a guy on Blogspot going up against the large number of researchers at Intel who actually designed the chips, as well as researchers who can design and assemble supercomputers and are doing so with the belief that these chips are suitable. I wonder who wins.
Actually, it was the other way around.
Intel chips outperform the PowerPC cpus without a doubt. PowerPC cpus were horrible. The first MacBook pros with Intel chips were 2-3 times faster than the ones before with PowerPC chips. If anything, it was a good move for Apple to start using Intel. I'm not a huge Mac Fan. I own one Apple product, a Nano with RockBox currently on it. However, I do hate when people don't do their fact checking and simply want to troll about a company they hate without justification.
I remember something from that time that suggested it was simply a supply issue - AMD weren't big enough to guarantee supply. I remember looking at the figures and being surprised (about the capacity of AMD).
I also remember Jobs saying Intel had shown him _very_ exciting things, hint hint. And they were too.
lemonade was a popular drink and it still is
Yet another clueless idiot babbling about stuff real scientists have devoted their lives to investigating.
There's a difference between scientists and the mainstream media's coverage of that science. And I don't speak for jmorris here, but that just might be what he's satirizing.
blog & fiction: jd87
I think the people that complain about Global Warming hype are not complaining about the science but the dumbed down and politically motivated 'summary of what the vast majority of respectable scientists believe' from people who are activists not scientists.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
A couple things:
x86 chips today are 99% RISC-like (the term RISC is rarely uses today, since basically no modern CPUs are "pure RISC" in design (reduced as in not even having a multiply instruction, like older SPARCs). Sure the exposed architecture is ugly x86, but that's the compiler's job to worry about, not yours. It doesn't really affect the chip performance. Don't forget x86 chips are still the fastest out there, despite the weird interface)
Also, for Joe Sixpack, 64-bit is pointless - especially when the 32-bit version works on the same OS! If you recompile a program as 64-bit (and often that is all there is to it; a recompile), you'll notice that the binaries are larger. In fact, most pointers (memory addresses) now takes up twice the space, so your program also uses more memory. The benefit? Unless your app uses more than around 3GB of RAM, basically zero (On x86 there is a sometimes a slight performance benefit, not because 64-bits is "faster" or anything, but because AMD added some more registers to the x86-64 spec).
Anyhow, i generally view 64-bits as a waste of address space, UNLESS you're accessing large amounts of memory (>3GB per program!). This will be more of a concern in the next few years, but there isn't any rush. I use 64-bit Vista for development (Because I have 4GB of RAM) but otherwise probably wouldn't care. Even Visual Studio (the dev platform for 64-bit code) is mostly a 32-bit app, nor should they change it.
Jeremy
History is absolutely full of people who don't follow the mainstream theory or have financial backing and end up creating the next mainstream theory which receives all of the financial backing.
History is also full of people such yourself, AC, who poor scorn on non-conformist ways of looking at things and end up looking like fools.
Maybe he has a point, maybe he hasn't, but whether or not he is in the mainstream has little or no bearing on the validity of his thought.
I don't therefore I'm not.
The reason people troll is that Apple fanboys were telling us PPC was much faster than Intel right up to the switch, at which point they started telling us they were much slower.
It's like Big Brother fanboys telling you that they have always been at war with Eurasia one day and the very next day that Eurasia has always been their ally. This sort of thing invites trolling and/or rocket bombs.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Take a deep breath, the scientists won the science argument years ago and apart from quoting the economic 'alarmist' solution there is nothing technically wrong in his sarcastic generalizations. I have been posting on slashdot for ~8yrs defending the scientific strength of the IPCC's reports but I can still manage to appreciate well thought out sarcasm.
BTW: If you think a post is clueless then put some information in your reply, AC ad-homs won't convince anyone of anything except perhaps that your a witless arsehole.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
True. The entire purpose of new versions of Windows is to make people buy new computers.
The PowerPC cpu's were not horrible. I've seen benchmarks over the years showing them outperforming intel cpu's (of the same generation) for some tasks (not all, some). The new architecture for Intel is definately impressive and Apple absolutely made the correct choice.
IBM continues to be the king of the hill at server processors like POWER5,6 and probably 7, but these are targeted at a different market than Apple's customers, and are not the same as the PowerPC cpu's.
Hey, try not to get him too riled up. He might start talking about how flu shots are really designed by big government for the true purpose of mind control.
Having argued with someone who quite literally believed in this tripe, I can safely tell you that you're wasting your time. Though I do admire the fact you are posting the information for the rest of us to read as well. It is very fascinating!
No-one's successfully conveyed to them yet that the Kyoto Treaty means they have to either give up their Lear jets and Mercedes or get to like Nuclear power.