4.7GHz IBM Power6 Spotted
Posted by
kdawson
on Sun May 20, 2007 10:19 PM
from the more-power-to-ya dept.
from the more-power-to-ya dept.
Ilgaz notes that The Register has posted benchmark results from Oracle 11i running on four 4.7GHz Power6 chips. Quoting: "The speedy chips confirm IBM's boasting that Power6 would arrive near 5GHz. They also show that IBM's customers have a lot to look forward to in terms of raw performance." Rumor has it that the Power6 chips will be announced on Tuesday.
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Did Apple make a mistake? (Score:5, Interesting)
*sighs* I for one yearn for the days of smugly ending any performance argument with some PC user with "Well, we've got Altivec & Altivec is magic."
Re:Did Apple make a mistake? (Score:4, Insightful)
If Apple had been waiting until now for a 64-bit chip they could put into a portable, they'd be in Very Big Trouble.
The PPC has a lot going for it, but Apple made the right choice.
-jcr
Re:Did Apple make a mistake? (Score:5, Interesting)
What I don't understand is, since Mac software has to be Universal nowadays anyway, why Apple doesn't just permanently keep its lineup as a mix of PPC and x86, picking whichever chip suits the particular machine they're designing at the time? Power6 Xserves along side Core 2 laptops... it sounds good to me!
Re:Did Apple make a mistake? (Score:5, Insightful)
As a software developer why you should work twice more (OSX intel / OSX ppc) to produce a piece of software that will work on roughly 2-3 % of the desktop computers out there?
If Apple would keep randomly altering their hardware and require compatibility with a range of completely different architectures, in the end it'll completely alienate the developers. As Microsoft knows very well, developers, developers, developers are you best asset in this fight.
Furthermore, no, being Universal binary is not a requirement, and I know few companies which release only Intel versions of their Mac software (example: Adobe's Soundbooth)
Re:Did Apple make a mistake? (Score:5, Insightful)
By "work twice more" you mean "check an option box in XCode," right?
Yeah, just like how the wide range of different architectures most UNIX software runs on alienates developers...
...oh, wait.
Re:Did Apple make a mistake? (Score:5, Informative)
Building universal isn't twice the work. Most apps don't have any intrinsic byte-order dependencies, and very few people ever wrote CPU-specific code that depended on Alitvec (for example).
-jcr
OS X Server = PPC/Intel, OS X = Intel (Score:5, Insightful)
However, keeping OS X Server (which under the hood really isn't that different from regular old OS X, but it's marketed as a totally different product) Universal, and producing PPC XServes in addition to Intel boxes, might not be a bad idea. PPC XServes have always had a fair bit of popularity in the HPC and scientific-computing segments over x86, and for servers, a lot of the software in use is OSS anyway and is architecture-agnostic by design. So they wouldn't really be confusing any developers there -- most of the software that runs on OS X Server is either supplied by Apple, or is OSS, or (in the case of custom HPC code) may have been written/optimized specifically for Power/Altivec in the past already, so they'd be saving their customers work by offering a PPC product.
I think there could be a lot to gain by keeping a PPC model around. They might not even have to do too much hardware design; if they didn't burn too many bridges with IBM on the way out, they could probably use one of IBM's Power-based blade-server boards in a 1U case...particularly with the way Cell hasn't been selling, IBM would probably be happy for the microprocessor sales.
Re:OS X Server = PPC/Intel, OS X = Intel (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd agree with that assessment. Also, consider that desktop/laptop CPU's have different requirements than server CPU's. One of the reasons Apple dumped PPC was that IBM wasn't earning enough on chips optimized for desktops to invest in the necessary R&D to keep them competitive with x86.
That is not an issue with servers, however, Power6 is already optimized for that purpose. Apple could probably offer a very attractive XServe indeed based on that chip. It would give them an offering that would outperform anything based on x86, making OS X a more attractive and versatile platform in general. I'd like to see them go for it.
Re:Did Apple make a mistake? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Did Apple make a mistake? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Did Apple make a mistake? (Score:4, Informative)
As to why Adobe can't be bothered to create a working flash player for (at least) 64-bit AMD64: I have no idea; we can't see the source so we can't see how difficult it would be to port it.
Re:Did Apple make a mistake? (Score:4, Insightful)
I've got Intel graphics on my X60, and I'm in the middle of installing a bunch of 3D games in Linux (Tremulous, FlightGear, Scorched3D, Neverball...); I anticipate that it'll run them just fine. It also works really well with Compiz/Beryl. Personally, I think it's a lot better than having an Nvidia or ATI chip, and not having 3D support at all.
Re:Did Apple make a mistake? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Did Apple make a mistake? (Score:5, Insightful)
No. Not at all.
The Power series was the high end server class, meant for big iron.
The PowerPC series was the vastly scaled down little brother intended for the desktop class.
IBM wasn't all the interested in making chips for Apple.
And who can blame them? Lower profit margins and less units sold.
Intel is a much better match for Apple, which is a consumer grade CPU manufacturer. And since the switch, Apple has not had the embarrasment of lower performing CPUs and long waits on CPU upgrades that IBM and Freescale saddled Apple with.
If Apple had stayed with IBM, they would have been pushed to the Cell processor. And that would be a bad PR move, running on the same CPU as your game consol runs on. And there would of course be no gaurantee switching to that processor family would result in better product cycles from IBM.
Apple made the right choice, The relationship with IBM was no longer viable.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Did Apple make a mistake? (Score:5, Informative)
Not that it's the usual 27-page article, but still...
Power isn't PPC (Score:5, Informative)
The reason Apple switched is because, despite all the hype, Intel continues to make really fast chips for a good price. When Apple was on PPC I saw never ending arguments as to how much faster the chips were. All those never seemed to pan out in actual operation. Why that's the case isn't important from Apple's standpoint, they just want fast chips for low cost.
I suppose if you want to long for the days of Altivec and talking about tech stuff you don't fully understand, that's great, however Apple has to be a bit more pragmatic and realise that while Altivec might sound cooler than SSE3, SSE3 is an API for a damn fast vector unit and that's all that really matters. Most people don't care about contrived benchmarks, they care about the wall clock benchmark, meaning how fast does the system do what they want, and further how cheap can they get that system for.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, yes they are PPC chips. In terms of core instruction set, they're the same. The PPC970 that Apple used for a short while were derived directly from the Power design, as I recall.
T
watts (Score:3, Informative)
WAAAY too much for a notebook or a mini.
Yeah, but... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Yeah, but... (Score:5, Funny)
Barely.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
That's old school (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Ho hum (Score:5, Funny)