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

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.

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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.

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.

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.