PowerPC Processor Roadmap

ezavada writes "Motorola has posted their PowerPC Processor Roadmap. Looks like they expect the G4 to go to 1 GHz, and the G5 to 2+ GHz. There is also a story about this in MacWeek. " The current road map goes out until 2009, while another interesting tidbit is that Motorola expects to continuing making G4s even with the introduction of the G5 and G6-embedded chips perhaps?

Comments

The attempt to exploit Parallelism is desperate

[Madwand]

Teasing parallelism out of computer programs is a desperation move when you can't speed up the basic logic of the chip.

A 2X increase in clock speed (and associated I/O channels) really does mean a 2X increase in performance for all programs, but adding parallelism (extra execution units, VLIW, Vector Processors, etc) only wins for those programs which can be made parallel, and only a fraction of the computing world works that way.

Everything else is serial, and requires those clock rate increases to get more performance.

As for Intel "keeping up" with the PowerPC, a friend of mine who used to work for NASA is fond of quoting this aphorism:

With enough thrust, anything will fly.

With tens of billions in sales, and a 26% profit margin (see Yahoo's financial profile of Intel), they've got a whole lot of thrust to put under the obsolete, bloated IA-32 architecture.

Ah, if it were only as simple as the technical merits...

Re:Microwave processor emissions

[Jordy]

From what I understand, prolonged exposure to low wattage microwaves can be damanging to exposed soft tissues in your body (such as eyes), but the output of a CPU probably won't do it.

There are studies on metabolic, reproductive, and neurological changes associated with low intensity EMR.

Anyway, here are a few facts from the WTO study on EMF:

• RF Fields above 10 GHz are absorbed at the skin surface, with very little of the energy penetrating into the underlying tissues.
• For adverse health effects, such as eye cataracts and skin burns, to occur from exposure to RF fields above 10 GHz, power densities above 1000 W/m2 are needed. Such densities are not found in everyday life. They do exist in very close proximity to powerful radars. Current exposure standards preclude human presence in this areas.
• RF fields between 1 MHz and 10 GHz penetrate exposed tissues and produce heating due to energy absorption in these tissues. The depth of pentration of the RF field into the tissue depends on the frequency of the field and is greater for lower frequencies.
• An SAR of at least 4 W/kg is needed to produce adverse health effects in people exposed to RF fields in this frequency range. Such energies are found tens of meters away from powerful FM antennas at the top of high towers, which makes these areas inaccessible.
• Most adverse health effects that could occur from exposure to RF fields between 1 MHz and 10 GHz are consistent with responses to induced heating, resulting in rises in tissue or body temperatures higher than 1C.

Anyhow, for more information visit the WTO EMF web site.

It might also be noteworthy to know that a lot of cases today probably won't shield well against frequencies above 1 GHz so you might start having problems with phones, radios and the like.

--

Re:More Mhz? What else is new.

[Macdude]

I don't care much about increased cruft in the instruction set (e.g., MMX, AltiVec). So what.

So What? AltiVec is going to make have huge impact on the graphic, video, audio, scientific, voice recognition and gaming world (and probably others). AltiVec is NOT MMX. Here is a quote from MacOSRumors' report for Sept 15th comparing a G3 using OS 8.6 and a G4 using OS 9 (which has an AltiVec optimized version of Open-GL).

OpenGL-based games and rendering applications simply screamed with even a single 450MHz G4, between 4 and 10 times faster than the same apps running on a 450MHz G3.

Note that there was NO difference in the applications being run (i.e. the applications aren't AltiVec optimized), the G4 was using a Yosemite motherboard (i.e. the same slow memory system as the G3), the only difference was that Open-GL in OS-9 is AltiVec enhanced.

The real bottleneck in PCs (a blanket term including Macs) is the bus. No one except SGI and Sun are doing anything interesting about the bus bottleneck problem.

The Sawtooth motherboards (using MaxBus) TRIPLE the memory speed and DOUBLE the PCI speeds of the Yosemite boards. I would classify doubling and tripling speeds as interesting. According to reports Apple and AIM are on track to fully support PC266 RAM once it's availabale.

Re:Somebody buy those nice people at Motorola a be

[chip guy]

The PowerPC family hasn't been maintained as a general purpose desktop and server RISC ever since the Somerset joint design center blew it keeping the 604 on the performance curve and wiffed on the 620. The PPC 750 (G3, or Arthur) is a glorified 603e tweaked to run Mac code better. The G4 is nothing more than a G3 with slightly improved FPU and the Altivec extensions. The G4 is a slick chip for high end embedded control and digital signal processing. But PowerPC hasn't kept pace with microarchitecture developments in the x86 world let alone with its RISC brethren. It has ridiculously short pipelines and rather modest out of order execution resources. The roadmap shows the G4 hitting 1 GHz in a 0.15 um copper process. I should bloody well hope so - the Alpha EV68 and AMD K7 will likely exceed 1.5 GHz in a 0.18 um aluminum process The writing is on the wall for Apple. The PowerPC has gone embedded control. Neither Mot nor IBM want to pretend to compete with Intel for the desktop any more (although IBM is doing some interesting 64 bit Power chips such as Northstar and Pulsar that compete against Xeon in the server market). Mot didn't build Altivec into G4 for Steve Jobs ego. It is there to win sockets in future generations of base stations for wireless services. As the differences between the bleeding edge desktop market and where PowerPC is heading become more and more evident Apple either has to start building products that look less like desktop PCs and more like internet appliances and PDAs etc or chose a new processor family.

roadmaps are often changed.

[apocalypse_now]

This is a 10 year prediction map. Given the pace at which new technologies arise and can be implemented, I am sure that much of their plans are strictly tentative. The question is, will they change for the better (faster speeds sooner) or the worse (faster speeds later)?

Also, what does IBM have to say about this map?

All that said and done... Spare a dime to buy a guy a G4?
--
Matt Singerman

Microwave processor emissions

[Fnordulicious]

So when these latest and greatest processors running at GHz speeds start emitting radiation in the microwave spectrum are we all going to have to start wearing lead aprons like your local radiologist? Or are we just going to have to shield the entire box in a faraday cage?

Looks like there won't be any more topless, skeletal machines in the future -- "Removing the cover from this machine may void your warranty AND cause severe radiation burns while the machine is in operation."

fnord

Re: The PowerPC FAQ

[Ignis De Maligne]

OK, since the army of wild ants or whatever won't post news of the PowerPC FAQ, I'll do it here, which seems the most appropriate place to do it.

Visit LinuxPPC.org to take a gander at the latest revision of the PowerPC FAQ.

It's my personal project, and I'm (slowly) trying to make it more accurate and timely (as it was previously maintained by someone else who quit).

Since the industry seems to be interested in having a second affair with the IBM's pseudo-RISC architecture, I hope the FAQ will serve as a good intoduction to the world of PowerPC.

Comments on it to davenport@access-k12.org.

Thanks :)

More Mhz? What else is new.

[jeff.paulsen]

Many several of the Mac rumors sites have mentioned future SMP-on-a-chip G4s and G5s. That would interest me much more than more Mhz.

We've seen PCs go from 4 Mhz to 600 - going up to 1000 Mhz seems like a mere incremental upgrade. The real news about the G4 is the AltiVec unit. The real news about IA-64 is VLIW. (be gentle if I've got that wrong; I don't follow Intel rumors like I ought). I assert that quantitative changes in clock speed are not where the action is right now, and all the interesting performance improvements come with qualitative changes in the way data is moved and operated on.

Re:More Mhz? What else is new.

[jeff.paulsen]

This is the exact argument that RISC advocates used to declare CISC dead. Yet the Pentium has done a remarkable job keeping up with the performance of much cleaner architectures like the PowerPC. The point is that there are all kinds of ways to get performance improvements, and clock speed, VLIW, RISC, AltiVec, MMX, etc.. are all just some of the ways. It's all just going to keep getting faster....

Agreed. It's just that clock speed isn't where the interesting breakthroughs in performance are coming from today.

Alternatively, it could be that clock speed goes up, we're all used to it, we expect it. Like compound interest, it's beneficial, but in any given small period, it's like watching paint dry.

Re:More Mhz? What else is new.

[innerFire]

I don't care much about increased cruft in the instruction set (e.g., MMX, AltiVec). So what. The real bottleneck in PCs (a blanket term including Macs) is the bus. No one except SGI and Sun are doing anything interesting about the bus bottleneck problem.

Support for embedded stuff.

[Doco]

While another interesting tidbit is that Motorola expects to continuing making G4s even with the introduction of the G5 and G6-embedded chips perhaps?

Motorola has been very good to embedded designers in making chips for a very long time. 10+ years.

Heck - where I work still uses a bunch of HC11's.

This is one reason that the 68k line of processors has been so popular in embedded systems. Not to mention the nifty stuff that Motorola tends to glue together with the CPU all into one chip. This is the reason you will probably still be using PowerPC products 10 years from now - even if you don't realize what that CPU is under the cover of your TV.

Linux on PowerPC, PowerPC upgradability

[Jerky McNaughty]

Having used Linux for about six years, it's always been on the Intel platform. For my next computer, I'd like to switch to something non-Intel, perhaps the PowerPC.

Does anyone have a good collection of hardware vendors which actively support (possibly even ship) Linux on PowerPC machines? I wouldn't mind a nice 2 processor SMP PowerPC-based machine, but I don't know where to go to get it.

Also, my Intel machines in the past have been relatively backwards compatible. Do the typical PowerPC architectures typically maintain backwards compatibility?

Thanks for any info.

Re:Linux on PowerPC, PowerPC upgradability

[Ethelred Unraed]

If you're patient (and have a lot of money), you can wait a little for the rumored dual-processor G4 PowerMacs from Apple. You could also get a PowerMac and add a dual-processor G4 card from any of the vendors like PowerLogix, Sonnet or Newer Technology, but that will (obviously) get very expensive--though I *think* they will take trade-ins on ZIF chips.

Other possibility: you could try getting in touch with Groupe Bull or Motorola Computer Group (at http://www.mcg.mot.com/) about that. Both make PowerPC-based boards and computers, though AFAIK they only sell to vendors and not to little saps like us. ;-)

For that matter, if you wait a little, IBM's open hardware specs ought to also generate some interest amoung hardware manufacturers.

Last recommendation: Get in touch with Yellow Dog Linux or LinuxPPC about it. They'd be happy to help you out in finding something, I'm sure. Both are pretty quick in supporting new hardware, as well; though AltiVec is not yet supported (the code has to be "vectorized" first), meaning only that its advantages won't yet make a difference in Linux, that development is already starting to get underway.

Oh, and if you're looking for news and info about Linux for PowerPC Macs, check out my site at http://linux.macnews.de/. :-)

Ethelred

Re: The PowerPC FAQ

[Ignis De Maligne]

Egh. Sorry about the busted link.

Try www.linuxppc.org/powerpcfaq/.

A must-visit companion URL for PPC roadmap info

[John Siracusa]

Check out this older PDF on Moto/IBM's "Book E" architecture.

"Book E" is the "extensible architecture" mentioned in the light purple G5 block of Moto's PPC roadmap.

Ever hear of AIM?

[Valdrax]

AIM Consordium -- Apple, IBM, Motorola.

Apple does have a small role in the design of the PPC. Their main contribution to the project is in compiler writing. The MrC optimized-as-all-hell PPC C compiler had heavy Apple support, and Apple has been working with Motorola on Altivec from the early days when the idea of putting VMX (a proposed but never implemented SIMD archetecture for the POWER family) into the PPC design was discussed. They helped add the Altivec support to the MrC compiler.

As anyone who knows about chip design knows, the compiler writers are just as essential as the people who map out how the silicon's going to look. (Heck in the case of Merced, they're even more important, but I digress.) Altivec has been just as much Apple's baby as Motorola's. That's why there will be so much support for it in the MacOS in the future. It's no marketing gimmick like MMX was; Apple wanted it to be something they could USE everywhere they could.