More on the PowerPC 970 386
functor writes "Ars Technica's Jon Stokes has a treatise up covering the microarchitecture of the high-performance 64-bit PowerPC 970 microprocessor, due to be released by the end of the year, that goes over in detail how this chip is put together, and how we can expect it to perform. This is the follow-up to Stokes' article detailing the PPC 970's design philosophy. 'It appears to hold quite a bit of promise in bolstering Apple's currently almost obsolescent product line, and it appears to have been designed explictly to fulfil Apple's requirements. To say the least, the second half of this year looks to be pretty interesting as Apple's product line promises to become competitive performance-wise with IA-32 and x86-64-based PCs again.''
Inaccuracy, Part 1 (Score:5, Interesting)
This implies that the decision of how much bus bandwidth to give the G4e was up to Apple - which it was not. Motorola designed the processor (for Cisco, depending on who you believe), and Apple made do with the anemic MaxBus at 133mhz that they got from Motorola.
Apple'd be putting DDR400 on the G4 right now if they could. None of this (well, except the decision to go Moto) was their fault.
waiting for this to arrive.... (Score:3, Interesting)
The current pro line of G4 is a joke. They cant come out with 970 computers fast enough.
It is competitive ! (Score:5, Interesting)
On the other hand Apple users won't have much of a choice, and neither has Apple.
competitive, sure... (Score:5, Interesting)
The other unkown in this is the price. PPC 970 based Apple computers may be significantly more expensive. Motorola loses hundreds of millions of dollars each year on their semiconductor business, and IBM does as well. Still, IBM may want to look at Apple and the PPC 970 as a PROFIT center, rather than a LOSS center, like Motorola does with Apple and the G4.
The PPC 970 is great news for Apple, but it is still a bone thrown to them while the x86 PC is feasting on the meat of the Intel and AMD processors.
Re:It is competitive ! (Score:2, Interesting)
Each time there was a leap forward so I guess this will give the concurrence some nightmares.
But you are right, until then, Apple took huge risks.
It's just a good think someone did, otherwise the market would still offer prehistoric beeping-XT.
Dual FPUs! (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, yeah, they are hog-tied because you can't easily re-compile the entire windows platform to use new instruction sets. Linux users, of course, don't have this problem (muhahahah).
Did anyone else catch the bit on the twin FPU's? I'm just imagining what this thing is going to do with vector operations and frequency transforms.
For most of you non-engineers:
Most 3d vector operations are affine tranformations. Using a 4x4 array of floating point numbers you can translate, rotate, and scale. Works beautifully, but it's a lot of calculations.
The Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) is used a lot in signal processing. It's a floating point monster.
May be sooner than we think (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm not buying into it 100% myself, but as I don't plan on buying a new Powermac until next year (and turning my current one into either a Yellow Dog or OS X Server), I'm in no big rush.
My expectations is that the Powerbook/iBook line won't be updated until next year, when IBM can get the power requirements down for the 970 or its successor.
Re:waiting for this to arrive.... (Score:1, Interesting)
Compete at what?
Re:Power, PC's, and PowerPC's (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Dual FPUs! (Score:4, Interesting)
Obsolete my a$$ (Score:5, Interesting)
Ha! I have a 867 G4 at home and it still rocks. Apple's line is certainly nowhere near obsolete, they're very different boxes than PCs.
You multi-gigahertz fruitcakes crack me up. 3 GHz is a waste of processor power and energy for at 80% of the people that use computers.
Thank You John (Score:1, Interesting)
64-bit Adobe apps (Score:2, Interesting)
I've heard conflicting answers, one is that 64-bit will really shine with 3D apps but do little to help the performance of 2D number-crunching.
Does this mean we'll see only nominal gains with Adobe's apps? Someone enlighten me.
Power 4/PPC970 vs Intel Architecture 64 (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not just AMD clocking lower either. The Itanium 2 isn't clocked that fast. Given that 32 POWER 4 1.7GHz processors smoked the 64 Itanium2 1.3GHz processors configuration in the latest TPCC non-clustered benchmark, the POWER and PPC architecture is capable of putting a lot more work through in the same number of clock cycles. There are a lot of nay-sayers trotting out the GHz-is-god line and it is particularly misleading for 64 bit architectures.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
P.S. Disclaimer - I work in SOFTWARE for IBM, not hardware.
Re:64-bit Adobe apps (Score:4, Interesting)
The 970 will be faster for most applications not because it is 64 bit, but mainly because it runs at a higher clock speed and has a much wider/faster memory interface. Some other architectural decisions (deep pipeline with aggressive optimization logic) will help somewhat as well, probably.
Re:Yeah. let's depend on IBM for our future (Score:3, Interesting)
Y'know, I have no idea why this keeps coming up. Assuming you buy from a reputable vendor, the only time you have hardware problems with a PC is if you do upgrades manually, or if something breaks (rare). The fact that Macs have a reputation for good integration is mostly marketing - if you go down to your local PC World and walk out with a new box, that'll work just fine too. If you then try and plug in ancient or super new hardware in an attempt to recycle stuff for instance, then yeah, you might get breakage. But that happens with Macs too, the only reason you don't see it is because there is practically no upgrade path outside of buying a new machine.
Whatever else you think about Apple's computers, they are without a doubt the easiest PCs on the planet if you're a neophyte.
No they aren't. Everybody I've seen who has been sat down in front of a Mac found it hopelessly confusing and non-intuitive. The only people I know who stuck with them, are those who bought them personally (they would, wouldn't they). I know I had to have the owner of said Mac sit next to me and guide me when I was trying to use his machine, and I'm far from being a neophyte. Stupid differences from Windows and idiotic conventions that had seemingly no basis in actual usability just pissed me off. Perhaps for people who have never used a computer before in their life it's easier than Windows (but I doubt it) - for people who have (the majority) it's just a pain in the ass.
Apple cares about making a good and easy-to-use product, or else they'd just be chasing Windows like (sorry, not trolling here, but it's true) GNOME and KDE are instead of constantly innovating their own hardware and interface designs.
Sorry, but you are trolling here. Apple aren't chasing Windows because regardless of what the majority of users want, their existance is justified in their customers eyes by the fact that they are different. People just take it as read that different equals better, despite a lack of compelling (objective) evidence to the contrary. Go read some usability reviews of MacOS X by long time users of the platform.
If you think it's about "more than just money" you need to wake up and smell the roses. Quite how a publically owned company, with a shrinking market share can be allowed to be motivated by anything other than money is beyond me. They're a business, their legal obligation is to their shareholders first and foremost. Wishy washy ideas about design purity might have had some merit back when it was just Jobs and Woz in their garage, but that Apple died years ago.
Anyway, if you want something that isn't motivated by money and is about building a quality product, Linux is about the only thing that qualifies. At the end of the day, the product and the ability for people to use it (in both a usability and a licensing sense) is everything. Go read and take part in the desktop discussion lists if you don't believe me. You might not like what it is today, but that's an entirely separate issue. Money isn't, cannot be, a serious motivation for these guys as the vast majority are not paid for it.
Targetting multiple architectures means that Apple's got to deal with unpredictable hardware configurations, cards, motherboards, drivers, all sorts of things that could cause inconvenient kernel panics, drive failures, or worse. Users are used to that with Windows, and they pretty much expect it with Linux. With Macs, they expect things to just work. Controlling the hardware is the best way for Apple to do that.
CPU architectures have nothing to do with driver instability, nor mixing hardware. That would only be an issue if Apple tried to write a PC version (as opposed to an x86 version) of MacOS, but hey, you know what? The world is a messy place. People don
Re:competitive, sure... (Score:2, Interesting)
When you can compile the kernel or compress a movie in 2 mins, who will really care that it can be done in 1?
The only reason for getting the 4 gig over the 2 would be to have the ability to play your games at the cinematic detail level.
PPC970 and Linux (Score:4, Interesting)
I ran "my first linux" on a DEC Alpha 512mhz 64 bit box that I got fed up running NT 4.0 on. I instantly became addicted, and eventually forced my company to switch to Linux on every computer (causing mass protest in the beginning, then mass praise over the years as we have grown and have no MS Tax on the books).
I now have a Powerbook G4 and love it, except it is a little lagging in punch speed sometimes. And, although I love OS X, now that my company is used to zero license and upgrade costs thanks to GNU/GPL/BSD software, there is no hope of mass migration to OS X and Apple hardware in the company. It just does not make sense after seeing the dollar savings of running Linux on all the desktops.
There is, however, always a need for powerful workstations that run Linux, and IBM might be pulling a rabbit out of its hat with this one. Will be very interesting.
At minimum, I would buy one for that "64 bit memorabilia" value, to bring me sweet memories of my first Linux love, the Alpha that rid me of winbloze forever.........
Re:Power 4/PPC970 vs Intel Architecture 64 (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Obsolete my a$$ (Score:3, Interesting)
Besides, I take that to mean that you'll never buy another computer unless your current one breaks? Because, an upgrade would be a waste, wouldn't it?
Systems I use for games (consoles and PC) are likely to get upgraded every couple of years, but that's because games are still pushing them to their limits. Systems I use for work are likely to not be replaced for a lot longer, unless there's a very good reason (I am planning to move to Mac, so that's a replacement). Nothing I do with my work systems, that is CPU limited, takes more than a few seconds, and most tasks don't take any appreciable time, so why would I upgrade.
Everything has its place, I wouldn't actually want to use a Mac as a server, but it makes a great desktop. Equally, having been using a Mac laptop for about 6 months, I'm rapidly beginning to prefer it to code on, despite the smaller screen and keyboard, in place of my existing workstations.
Re:It is competitive ! (Score:5, Interesting)
Not that it would necessarily be in their best interest. Apple, as a company, represents an ALTERNATIVE, and therefore they try to maintain alternative hardware choices: SCSI over IDE, ATI over NVIDIA, USB over PCI, the one button & metakey paradigm, Flat Panel over CRT -- and the big one, RISC over CISC. Some of these choices have panned out great. Some have flopped miserably...yet despite the doomsayers, Apple is still afloat after 30 years of "forcing" people to buy "crazy" proprietary gear. With "only" 3% of the market, but it's a huge freakin' market, and their margins are gigantic. Part of the reason for this huge margin is that they are the only hardware player, and are therefore able to name their own prices.
As for Apple users having no choices, that's also crap. We always have choices: buy Apple, or buy something else. Keep the current machine and upgrade it, or buy a new one. And Apple will still make the old chips for a long time after the 970 has started smokin' competitors...at least, that's what they did every other time they made a generation jump in processors.
Apple users vote with their dollars and so it's in Apple's interest to do whatever people are most receptive to, which is what they as a company seem to be best at anyway. After all, they got me to spend $538.72 on an mp3 player. This whole "no choice" thing is BS -- you choose the platform, not the hardware. That's the Apple way.
Re:waiting for this to arrive.... (Score:4, Interesting)
The 970 looks exciting, but I personally am anticipating the release only for the dramatic price reduction it should bring in the older Macs. At that point, I'll go get that Powerbook -- once I can pick up a decent one for less than $2,000.
Re:competitive, sure... (Score:3, Interesting)
or not (Score:3, Interesting)
While I agree with you if we're talking about established brands (Dell et. al), there is a signifcant chunk of sales that goes to the smaller shops who cobble the things together themselves, and problems are very common in this regard still. As usual, of course the experts need no help. People buy Dells - and Apples - partially because there's an 800 number to call when you're confused.
No they aren't. Everybody I've seen who has been sat down in front of a Mac found it hopelessly confusing and non-intuitive. The only people I know who stuck with them, are those who bought them personally (they would, wouldn't they). I know I had to have the owner of said Mac sit next to me and guide me when I was trying to use his machine, and I'm far from being a neophyte. Stupid differences from Windows and idiotic conventions that had seemingly no basis in actual usability just pissed me off.
Yes, they are. And it's not just a matter of opinion. There are tangible, measurable advantages in usability with Mac OS vs Windows. Check any TCO study on the matter, or any actual usability study (lost my Carnegie Mellon bookmarks for this but its there). Too numerous to list here.
You give yourself away with that last line - Mac OS can be frustrating if you are coming from Windows. Any transition is painful, from anything different. In fact the level of pain is often overlooked.
Trust me, put someone with little-to-no computer experience in front of the Mac and they will have a much, much easier time of it. I mean, c'mon, honestly, do you think that Windows conventions - still having to click Start to Shut Down comes to mind - are better? Things like that make no fucking sense to a newbie, because they make no fucking sense whatsoever - but we're used to that.
Blaming Apple for the majority of people having a lousy experience at their usual computers is nonsensical. Adjusting habits can be painful, but productivity is a highly personal thing. I use Windows XP all day and when I come home to my Mac.. it's like comfy slippers. WinXP is like a hard hat. I have no inherent reason to prefer one or the other frankly; I wish I could buy a cheap PC and be happy with how it works. But I can't. They aren't the same.
People don't upgrade their hardware because they like screwing about with drivers, they do it because they want to play Doom 3 but they don't want to buy a whole new machine when 80% of it is still just fine. If they don't know what they're doing the end result is mess and instability, but pretending people don't want to do that is the reason PCs dominated in the first place.
Ah, but you answered your own question. People playing Doom 3 might want to upgrade their CPU, but that's a vanishing percentage of the whole... I asked my dad if he ever used his PCI slots in his IBM machine and he really had to think about what I was talking about for a few seconds. Don't think that these silly upgrades are what drives the PC market, they are a sideline business. (Video cards possibly being the sole exception.) PCs are entirely commodity parts, that's all.
Frankly I think we need more Apples. More vertically-integrated computer companies who adhere to standards would be a good thing. Imagine such a company pumping out fantastic case designs for PPC970-based Linux boxen. That would rock.
Re:Inaccuracy, Part 1 (Score:5, Interesting)
As far as the low MHz and SDR situation, I've also never been totally convinced that Apple wasn't partially to blame for this either, unless they just have zero clout with Moto SPS.
Re:64-bit Adobe apps (Score:5, Interesting)
I anticipated your short sighted response as soon as I hit the submit button. I should have realized that you would think I was talking about optimizing existing applications rather than designing new ones for new problems and I should have said all the rest of this stuff the first time... I even had a horrific vision of the word processor analogy. It was scary. Anyway:
I'm not talking about optimizing existing applications, I'm talking about new applications; programs that do things that we don't use our PCs for now. When we had 8-bit PCs nobody did photo editing or full color page layout on a PC. When we had 16-bit machines nobody used a PC for CAD. Now we have 32-bit machines and are moving to 64-bit. There will be some major tasks that will become possible with 64-bit PCs, but the software isn't there yet because the customers don't have the processors.
Also, I can think of two applications that every single computer user runs that can benefit dramatically from 64-bits, and Microsoft is waiting with the code already written for widespread 64-bit processor deployment to release them: Operating systems and filesystems. Having a 64-bit virtual address space can make your OS much more elegant and efficient since every possible I/O operation can be memory-mapped at once. Similarly, it has already been demonstrated that large relational databases benefit from 64-bit addressing even without taking advantage of the additional memory capacity, and many next generation filesystems will be relational databases.
Sure current consumer apps don't really need 64-bits. If they did we wouldn't have them. It's the PC apps of tomorrow that will benefit. If you don't care to do more with your PC then essentially what you can do today, just more quickly then keep buying 32-bit CPUs. They'll continue to be available for decades...
Performance is out of line? (Score:4, Interesting)
What is this every non-mac user keeps saying that their performace is out of line with PC's? I have on my desk a hepped up dual P4 and a hepped up dual G4. XP on the dual P4 does not "feel," in day-to-day operations with standard apps like Office or Photoshop, much different from the dual G4. Comparing the MHz does not tell me anything. Using both side-by-side tells me a more "real" story about things. Now, perhaps XP is significantly slowing things down?
I only notice a difference with some high-end 3D apps like Maya or Lightwave, *maybe* also with some high-ed vid apps like Avid's.
I am looking forward to the 970 though. Actually, I am very curious about any 64bit CPU. Hopefully the "growing pains" for anyone to move to 64bit is negligible.
Re:waiting for this to arrive.... (Score:3, Interesting)
One thing to remember about Apple's machines is that while the G4 processor, if the code is really tuned can hold it's own with processors at a much higher clock speed on OSX not very much is very tuned and the overhead associated with running OSX demands a lot more horsepower for the same tasks compared to X86.
Some examples might be compiling- while the compiler in 10.2 made big strides, it's still no speed demon. Apple did move from 2.95 to 3.1 for 10.2, and while that does have better PPC support it's still *cough* really basic, especially compared to how tuned it is for X86. A ton of apps intensive apps either don't support altivec, or don't support dual-processors, or both. Got lots of windows going on a high-res display? QE [apple.com] helps with the compositing, but everything first has to be generated in software in order to be handed off to be composited... on my tibook it's not uncommon to see the windowmanager taking up 30-35%+ of the CPU to do its thing. Have a few apps open and depending on what they've been coded with (cocoa, carbon, etc) and how tuned they are you can easily see CPU cycles just draining away.
iTunes on a 667 G4 machine I have here hovers between 13-35% CPU, on my 733MHz P3 playing an MP3 in winamp is more like 3%... On my 500MHz iBook it hovers between 17-40%... no it doesn't skip, even while I'm doing semi-intensive stuff but the whole machine sure does slow down... even on my G4: with iTunes playing MP3's, something download in the background, and the sorry state of things like dreamweaverX, golive and photoshop I often feel like I'm using a 250MHz machine. It's getting better- Ie, with 10.2 and some updates to some apps I don't type faster than a stupid processor very much anymore but it still happens.
Then there's iCal, iPhoto... these things, while pretty, take more CPU power than you'd think if you're coming in from the x86 world.
The other thing to keep in mind is the gigantic speed-gaps that occur in Apple's product lines due to the processors not scaling up gracefully. IE, Unreal2003 tech demo was just released for OSX. It barely runs on any Apple machine well, you need a top-of-the-line G4 tower with a Geforce Ti (or close) to run it. I swear, why would they want to port any graphics-intensive games when only the multi-thousand dollar machines Apple sells will run them and even at that only the newest breed?
If you have oh, let's say a G4 867 or 1GHz that shipped with a crappier card Apple charges you $400+ to get the OEM Apple card of choice... Apple only sold 500MHz machines for a long time and there are tons and tons of those out there that people bought for $4k+. For iBooks and Powerbooks, Apple basically announced 10.2 and said "oh yeah, and here are new powerbooks and iBooks that will make QE work... sorry about what we just sold you a few weeks/month ago for a few thousand..."
Since they're so expensive and have a decent resale value, it can be easier to just sell it and use the money to get a decent PC plus a bunch of extras. Hell, get one plus a spare. In many cases it's just more cost-effective to get a PC. Not for a lot of what I do per se, but for the things I used to do... I've watched a ton of content professionals leave the mac due to the speed (either of the processor, or the apps they want not being optimized) even as I've watched a bunch of geeks migrate to it...
drunkenbatman [drunkenbatman.com]
Re: current "pro" line of G4 a joke? (Score:4, Interesting)
I've been using strictly PCs for 5 years or so now, after a brief stint with a "Performa" Mac mini-tower that didn't turn out too well.
My "high end" PC system is a Pentium 4, 1.8Ghz tower with Promise EIDE RAID and a GeForce 4 video board.
I'm pretty happy with it, but I really wanted a good system to run OS X and some of Apple's incredibly well-done video editing packages (Final Cut, iDVD, etc.). I just broke down and bought a dual-processor G4 1.42Ghz tower. I certainly don't feel it's "slow" at all! I'd say it performs at least on par with my P4 system, if not a little faster at certain tasks. It boots into OS X a lot more quickly than the P4 boots into Windows XP, for one thing.
Sure, the 970 processor will be great -- but the people complaining that the current PowerMacs are "horribly underpowered" must be "benchmark junkies", worried about having the best stats for the sake of stats (bragging rights?).
Like I say, I consider myself very much a "power user", and for a long time, I didn't think Apple really had the "price vs. performance" in the right place on the curve. But with their recent price drops, plus "speed bumps" to their G4 offerings - I think they still have a very competitive setup to tide them over until the 970 is done.
At the end of the day, you don't plunk down $2000-3400 for a "pro" Mac G4 or PowerBook because you're worried about having the "most Ghz". You do so because it offers an OS and specialized applications you can't get in the PC world. (These days, you might also do so to avoid the Microsoft licensing nightmares. A "family pack" of OS X lets you load it on any 5 systems of your choice for a price not much more than 1 single copy of Windows XP Pro, for example.)
Will Linux apps become AltiVec enabled? (Score:4, Interesting)
And this would be a good thing for Apple, since there would be a lot more *NIX codec that could compile and run a LOT faster on their boxes, and there would be a larger pool of AltiVec and PPC coding talent for them and their ISVs to draw from.