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Motorola G5 - 2Ghz 64bit

Posted by Hemos on from the yet-more-info dept.

Nerdkiller writes " An article appeared on ZDnet with some information on the G5 chip expected in 2 years. It will be competing with the Intel Merced which is expected out around the same time. A full 64 bit 2 Ghz processor. The Intel Merced will be able to support 64 bit processing, however it must be run under emulation for 32bit code. The G5 requires no change in current code with exception to some low level OS stuff. "

3 of 152 comments (clear)

  1. Re:If only... (BSD already *is* on PPC) by Tet · · Score: 4
    But wouldn't we all like to see FreeBSD [...] on PPC chips?

    No, not really. Despite the recent dabblings with the Alpha, the focus of the FreeBSD group has always been on getting it to work well on Intel hardware. Look to the other BSDs for PowerPC support:

    --
    "The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
  2. The critical resource: Motherboards by Christopher+B.+Brown · · Score: 5
    The critical resource whose availability or lack will most control whether PPC "G5" winds up in widespread use is that of Cheap Motherboards.

    If you look at the various architectures on which Linux runs, there are three varieties, in general:

    • IA-32, where there is a bountiful selection of inexpensive motherboards.

      There are a boatload of IA-32-based Linux systems.

    • Systems where there are a few motherboards available. Alpha and SPARC, mostly.

      There are a fair number of such systems.

    • Systems for which motherboards are virtually unavailable. StrongARM and MIPS are good examples of this.

      ... And this correlates with the tiny quantities of people running these architectures.

    PPC is hard to assess; it is easy to buy a PPC Mac from Apple, but fairly difficult to buy just a motherboard.

    If PPC motherboards were readily available, PPC would be vastly more popular...

    --
    If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
  3. Sure the CPU is fast, but where's the memory by color+of+static · · Score: 4

    I'm not sure how fast a 2 GHz CPU will seem unless we start seeing some really fast RAM and BUSes. Right now the fastest bus I've seen is 133 MHz, and the fastest large scale RAM on the horizon is still RAMBUS. Neither of these will allow a 2 GHz processor to run anywhere near it's full potential. Even with lots of cache you would only approach some upper bound that wouldn't be anywhere as high as 2GHz.

    There needs to be some other advances, other then jacking up the CPU speed, before processors like this become useful. Maybe it'll be a new RAM or BUS design (RF anyone?), or a new way of dealing with code internal to the CPU to make memory more effecient then using it for cache. Which ever it's time to start looking at them.