IBM PowerPC 970 Architecture 268
riclewis writes "Hannibal from Ars Technica offers an explanation of some of the internals of the new IBM chip. It's certainly more powerful than anything on the desktop now, but by the time it's released a year from now, it looks to be middle-of-the-pack (which could still be a step up for Apple...) This excitement over the early release of hardware specs kinda reminds me of all the hype surrounding the Sony's Emotion Engine when it was introduced a couple years ago. In fact, some are suggesting the PPC 970 chip might be closely related to the PS3's 'Cell' processor..."
PS3 apple? (Score:5, Insightful)
Even though it's really doubtful, it'd be extremely cool to see a PS3 emulator on the mac if the processors are that closely related.
I remember running Mac OS 6.0.5 on my Atari ST. Because it had the same processor, it didn't need much to make it run.
Oh well, I can at least dream, can't I?
Just look at the name! (Score:2, Funny)
Expect to see a slightly cheaper version called the 940, and a low-end chip called the 880. Well in fact there won't be any real difference between those two chips, but you pay for the extra prestige the extra 60 gives you.
Re:PS3 apple? (Score:5, Interesting)
We managed to get System 7 running on it and even managed to coax AOL 2.x to run on it via the modem, getting it online! It was slow and it was AOL running on a Mac emulator on an Atari, but hey, it was geeky and it was fun to do.
But back on topic, if they do use the same or similar chip it could possibly work though Sony would DMCA it straight to hell.
Re:PS3 apple? (Score:5, Interesting)
Sony wants to sell less hardware and sell more games with a higher per title margin. Selling hardware at a loss is typical of the console market.
IBM supplies the goods, Sony & Co supplies the reference PS3 platform and games backing.
Apple continues building its brand name computing with the ability to run PS3 games. That gives Apple a MAJOR supplier of video games. People who own an Apple typically will be able to afford the various PS3 games.
-Tim
Re:Selling at a loss? (Score:2, Informative)
No, actually it's not. Only Microsoft loses money on it's boxes. No matter what Sony is selling their boxes for, they make a profit on every one. It's the difference between a profit oriented, well thought out plan, and a slapped together Microsoft 1.0.
Re:Selling at a loss? (Score:2)
Apple Chips (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Apple Chips (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Apple Chips (Score:5, Informative)
This will give it the same issues the P4 has. Namely a large penalty for branch mispredicts, etc. Instructions per clock will decrease.
OTOH, they should be able to crank the speed!
Re:Apple Chips (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, IPC is *increased* from the current G4. It will now fetch 8 instructions per clock, and retire 5 per clock.
The current G4 IIRC fetches either 3 or 4 per clock. I have no idea how many it can retire at once.
This coupled with a quick move to a
Re:Apple Chips (Score:2)
Re:Apple Chips (Score:3, Interesting)
In addition, the PowerPC architecture includes a static branch prediction bit for branching instructions, which allows the compiler to "hint" to the processor the likely branch, the x86 architecture has no equivalent feature.
In short, branch misprediction occurs less often with the POWER4 (and hopefully the 970) for the above reasons. In addition, the "tripling" of the G4 pipeline in the 970 is still shorter than Intel's 20 stage P4.
Spyky
Re:Apple Chips (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Apple Chips (Score:2, Informative)
> and retire 5 per clock.
This for the branch/integer/fp core only. Which is borrowed from the Power4 one. This does not count
altivec, which is a separate unit on the same chip. Further, the two fp units of the core
can work in parallel with the altivec unit, which the P4 cannot do, because its vector unit uses the normal fpu pipelines...
>The current G4 IIRC fetches either 3 or 4 per clock. I have no idea how
> many it can retire at once.
fetche 3, retire 2 (IIRC, recent iterations may also retire 3)
Re:Apple Chips (Score:5, Insightful)
The eetimes story linked at the top says it's an 8-stage pipe. That doesn't mean any more or less than the extreme tech statement that the new pipe is triple the length (which would be 21, the current pipe is 7) since we haven't seen any actual reference docs from IBM.
Can anybody who was at the Microprocessor Forum give us more info?
Re:Apple Chips (Score:2)
Re:Apple Chips (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Apple Chips (Score:2, Interesting)
Perhaps if you said your 800MHz G4 was twice as fast as your 1.2Ghz P4, I would be impressed.
Personally, I think you must have made a typo.
Re:Apple Chips (Score:2)
Testing in popular applications like Photoshop and Illustrator show that the "Mhz doesn't matter" argument just doesn't hold water.
Re:Apple Chips (Score:4, Interesting)
The MHz Myth that Apple talks about is not about trying to say that "Mhz doesn't matter", it's about the fact that MHz cannot be used as a direct comparison between architectures.
Of course MHz (brute force) matters. But what also matters is smart design.
I think showing a 333MHz G3 running faster than a 500MHz Pentium III [ucla.edu], kinda proves the MHz Myth is just that. Bear in mind, that the G3 is not AltiVec equiped! So not getting a huge vectorized benefit here.
If you think that's impressive, look at the G4! I can't wait to see what CPU Apple actually unleashes next.
I'm astonished that there are actually people who think MHz is THE sole number to go by.
Re:Apple Chips (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Apple Chips (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Apple Chips (Score:5, Informative)
It's called positive and negative edge triggering. It's not a new technology either. I was dealing with it in the 80's at the discrete logic level.
AGP 2x uses this and 4x uses positive, negative, high and low triggering. Certain UDMA modes make use of this clocking technique also.
Your argument doesn't hold water.
His arguement DOES hold water. PPC CPU's DO outperform Intel x86 CPU's by a good margin when compared clock for clock (showing the MHz Myth for what it is). Especially the G4 and boy when AltiVec can and is exploited... Wow. There IS more to CPU design than smaller die and deeper piplining for higher MHz.
As far as I can tell, Apple seem to be in a position where they have to make the best of what they can get, due to Motorolla dropping the ball pretty baddly.
I hope IBM comes to their rescue. How ironic.
Re:Apple Chips (Score:3, Informative)
True, but there's still no denying that current Pentium 4's are faster. For the sake of argument, let's say that an 800MHz G4 is roughly equivalent to a 1.4GHz Pentium 4. Well, now a bottom-end $500 Dell is shipping with a 1.8GHz processor, the norm is 2-2.4GHz, and you can buy up to 2.8GHz, if you really want to throw your money way.
Bottom line: Yes, the G4 is faster than most people claim, but it is still measurably slower than what Intel is currently offering.
Re:Apple Chips (Score:3, Insightful)
It doesn't matter how much work a processor does per clock, if you can scale an "inferior" (according to your definition of inferior) to a MUCH higher clock.
This may not even be an architectural flaw as much as the result of an inferior manufacturing process. If Motorola's fabs aren't as good as Intel's (I don't think they are) then the fact that the G4 is a "better" processor on paper is completely irrelevant - for all the consumer cares, the FASTEST G4 available is slower than the fastest P4 (Currently, according to benchmarks not done by apple, it seems that you dont even need the absolute fastest P4s to beat the fastest Macs)
Re:Apple Chips (Score:2)
Agreed and a sad state of affairs.
Seems to me, with the DDR hack and Apples reliance on SMP now, that they are really trying to hold out before some new CPU's with greater performance and memory bandwidth are available.
I shall be avoiding the first lot, in case Apple tries to rush them to market too quickly.
I hope they survive, I rather love OSX and I would HATE to see them move to x86 (which I highly doubt).
Benchmarks? (Score:2)
Are there any benchmarks to prove this claim? It would be interesting to see a comparison - especially if made by an independent party.
Tor
Re:Benchmarks? (Score:2)
Clock for clock, proving that MHz is not an absolute comparable measure, here [ucla.edu] you can see both G4's and G3's of lower MHz beating Intel Pentium III's which are clocked 50% higher than the G3 beating them!
In fact, when the code is RISC optimized, a 450MHz G3 manages to run 74% faster than a 450MHz PII.
Now imagine a program optimized for SMP and AltiVec on Dual 1.25GHz G4's. I know the cheapest Dell can most likely beat the most expensive Apple, but the current situation leaves Apple with little it can do.
Re:Apple Chips (Score:3, Interesting)
First of all, whoever modded this as interesting should be poked in the eye. This statement is full of FUD to the max.
Perhaps a G4 will outperform an x86 of the same caliber, but the high-end P4 CPUs absolutely smoke the high-end G4s. The G4 architecture is so maxed out that Apple had to resort to adding a second CPU, cuz they just couldn't scale the G4 chips any higher.
When the G4 came out, it kicked the arse of all the x86 chips out there. But that was a couple years ago. As things currently stand, the best Apples are barely middle of the pack, performance-wise. Don't worry though, you'll still pay more for a Mac than a fully loaded Dell machine.
Show me the money (Score:4, Informative)
SPEC benchmarks for the G4 processors. (Not a synthetic benchmark issued by Apple, but by an unbiased third party, SPEC)
G4 1 GHz SPECs at 306 integer 187 floating-point
Interestingly, the 1 GHz G4 was almost neck-and-neck with a 1 GHz PIII (http://www.heise.de/ct/english/02/05/182/qpic02.
http://www.spec.org/osg/cpu2000/results/cpu2000
A large archive of SPEC results for many CPUs, including x86.
A few choice results:
1.2 GHz Athlon (Ancient by today's standards) - 443 integer, 387 FP
Athlon XP 1700+ on an Epox EP-8KHA (Happens to be my mobo - Slowst Athlon XP listed for this mobo):
633 integer, 561 FP
Dell Precision Workstation 330, 1.3 GHz P4 - 474 integer, 502 FP (The P4 doesn't seem to be taking too much of a branch misprediction hit here)
So in the case of G4s, while they may be a bit more efficient MHz for MHz (And the P3 vs. G4 benchmarks so that this isn't even necessarily the case), the fact that they're so far behind on the clock speed curve hurts them badly.
If you want to see a good example of MHz not being everything, check out the benchmarks of Alpha systems - The 750 MHz ones chew even 1.2 GHz Athlons for lunch. But don't look at Apple...
Also interesting in the case of the SPEC benchmarks run by Heise - MS C pays a 10-15% performance hit over GCC in the SPEC benchmarks.
SPEC INT and SPEC FP numbers (937 and 1051) (Score:4, Insightful)
Still, glad to see something other than incremental progress.
Re:SPEC INT and SPEC FP numbers (937 and 1051) (Score:4, Interesting)
What you *really* want to do is use the machine, *then* consider whether or not the machine is fast enough for your purposes. Personally, I think that machines with the 970 in them will be quite competitive with the machines that are available at launch.
.
Re:SPEC INT and SPEC FP numbers (937 and 1051) (Score:2, Interesting)
Indeed. SpecFP has almost been reduced to a memory throughput test. What kind of bandwidth will the (hypothetical) Apple chipset deliver? Also, are these numbers base or peak?
Not to mention published Spec numbers must use a production system..
Re:SPEC INT and SPEC FP numbers (937 and 1051) (Score:3, Interesting)
>>>>>>>
Because in this age of 128 bit vector fp units, fp in general is basically a memory throughput thing. And the G4's pathetic 1.3 GB/sec is killing it.
Re:SPEC INT and SPEC FP numbers (937 and 1051) (Score:2, Insightful)
Well, that of course depends on what you're interested in.
Since we use computers to run and compile our own code, this is EXACTLY what we want. The vendor can do anything but touch the code. If they release a compiler that produces twice as fast code they'll get better benchmarks, and that will show up in our performance too.
As has stated many times before, the current G4 machines score in the low 300s in SPEC marks. Does this mean that the G4 is 3 to 5 times slower than the P4? In practice, it isn't.
In some cases it defintely is. Have you compared compile times with gcc on a G4 and an x86? It is horribly slow on the Apple box, and this is reflected perfectly in the gcc benchmark of SPECint.
Of course SPEC benchmarks aren't 100% accurate, but a lot of people seem to believe that they are unfair against Motorola. They aren't - but they don't make any claim whatsoever to measure performance of code that has been handtuned with Altivec or SSE. This means you can get excellent photoshop performance on a G4, but it still sucks on general-purpose compiled code as long as there isn't any compiler that can generate Altivec automatically.
Now, if you only run a small number of Altivec-accelerated applications (as many Mac users do), that perfectly OK. But for scientific stuff that we do SPEC is a very good and impartial indicator of performance.
For the off-the-shelf computer consumer... (Score:5, Interesting)
Chunks of five (Score:5, Interesting)
computing in chunks... sounds a lot like a Cray [cray.com]. Together with the 900MHz-effective (jesus... that's a lot) FSB, Apple really will be selling supercomputers in the next few years.
Re:Chunks of five (Score:2)
This sounds like a trace processor (a processor that groups segments of instructions known to execute in sequence - i.e. containing at most one branch instruction at the end, and having no entry points from other branches [a fragment of a basic block]). Traces are rescheduled, cached in decoded form, etc. The P4 *does* use trace processing, contrary to the poster's original statement, if I understand correctly. Trace processors have been studied for quite a while, and there are many interesting papers about them.
Re:Chunks of five (Score:3, Insightful)
This chunking is described in great detail in the original POWER4 public design documents. It's referred to in passing as a redeeming feature, borrowed from VLIW concepts. The suggestion is that its a part of traditional VLIW that could be leveraged into a non-VLIW design.
C//
Re:Chunks of five (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Chunks of five (Score:2)
Re:Chunks of five (Score:2)
I believe the original poster meant "pretty" in the sense of "efficient". Gcc's optimized code is.. sub-optimal. I've heard varying stories as to why (one says the compiler internals make certain types of optimization difficult, another says that all of the good optimization methods are patented).
However, for an assignment a few years back I had to tune C code by hand, flagging scratch variables and loop indices as "register" and doing unrolling, software pipelining, and memory checkerboarding by hand (writing C statements that mapped 1:1 with assembly).
The results of hand-tuning for a relatively simple operation beat the pants off GCC's version with optimization, on both x86 and Sparc. This surprised the heck out of me.
It's been a couple of years since I tried this. GCC may have improved. But it's dangerous to assume that any compiler is perfect or even near-perfect without testing.
will it scale? (Score:5, Interesting)
if IBM makes it... i would think so (Score:3, Informative)
yes, that's from the rumor mill, but everyone knows Moto has been going through a lot of corporate restructuring and who knows where they will be focusing in the next 5 years. IBM is going to make these chips (where ever they are going to be used) at a brand new plant in NY state. they have a great rep for quality control.
i kind of creepy thing is that the articles say they will probably debut 2nd half of next year (Macworld NYC? one last hurah! before MW moves back to Boston?) or not till January 2004. the articles also inply that they will debut at 1.4GHz. Apple is now selling 2 x 1.25 GHz G4 chips.
will Apple stall at or below 1.4 GHz till these new chips come out? the general upgrade of Apple machines is 5 or 6 months right now. that leave 2 possible revisions to the G4 towers before these babies are set. now i know that these chips will come with a super motherboard and 64 bit vs 32 and bla bla bla but Apple fights the megahertx myth even to somewhat educated comsumers. how will they be able to spin it when they have to explain it in terms of Apples vs Apples?
i guess it's a minor problem if these chips are as zippy as they say... a few benchmark tests and bar graphs should convey some message? maybe instead of having a 12 y.o. kid set up his iMac and go online in 5 minutes, they will have a 12 y.o. kid clone his dog or something. i would be impressed.
Re:if IBM makes it... i would think so (Score:2)
Just tell the truth about the new technology, in marketing speak of course. The truth should be able to confuse 98% of end users into belief and convice the geeky 2% anyway. So finishing up with impressive bar graphs that don't start at zero ought to finish it off. : )
There is no spin on the megahertx myth because what they're saying about an Intel MHz != a PPC MHz for computing power is true.
If they try to say now that their machines are computationally faster than the fastest P4's, then they may be shooting themselves in the foot when all the magazines publish benchmark results that show the opposite. This may cause people to distrust Apple and avoid the new machines that hopefully really will be speed demons.
what other option is there? (Score:3, Insightful)
Many companies are planning to use parallelism to improve performance. IBM has a CPU with two logical cores, and Intel will introduce CPUs with two virtual processors in the very near future. But parallelism is not likely to get you a doubling of performance, especially on a desktop machine that is often running only one intensive process at a time.
It's a shame for apple that IBM announced this. (Score:4, Insightful)
But man. First off, this kills any possibility of a big surprise hit. Second, this dooms apple sales for the next year or so... who wants to buy a stagnating desktop model when the next edition has so much promise?
Then again, Apple's desktop offerings have been a little stagnant anyway... most people probably won't want to play the waiting game for as long as it'll take for these to come out.
I just hope that by the time they do, they're worth it.
Re:It's a shame for apple that IBM announced this. (Score:5, Interesting)
I did at least learn my lesson with the Beige G3 when it comes to jumping onto the latest thing just as it first comes out. While my old Beige G3 Rev A box has been a fairly solid machine for the past 5 years, it does have some serious shortcomings (possible voltage regulator blow out if upgraded to a G4, 66 MHZ bus (ick) and Rev A rom means no IDE slave support!).
I feel fairly confident this possibly last of the line G4 should be fairly solid other than the chips not fully utilizing DDR (at least DMA operations will take advantage of it) and the silly idea of making the second IDE channel only ATA66.
Once the issues of moving to a 64 bit chip and the new Hypertransport bus and such are worked out and my machine starts to look as slow as my Beige G3 is now compared to the latest machines, then I will start itching to move up.
Re:It's a shame for apple that IBM announced this. (Score:2)
Need a server, firewall or router? OpenBSD perhaps?
Couple of questions, though... (Score:3, Interesting)
2) Why only a single-core?
3) Where's the G5? It looked similarly impressive, a year ago. It still does, according to the Register's leaked spec numbers
4) What's the advantage again of a 64 bit processor? Sure, more RAM. Is it faster? Does it do more? Anyone?
4)
Re:Couple of questions, though... (Score:2, Interesting)
2) becasue multi-core is damn expensive and damn power hungry
3)DOA
4)64 bit programing is more efficent, you can crunch more numbers per cycle which will speed up some applications...don't fall into the "consumers don't need 64 bit" crowd.
Re:Couple of questions, though... (Score:2)
>>>>>>>>>>
Err, you can crunch bigger numbers per cycle. If you don't use any integers larger than 2^32, you're just wasting 32 extra bits. Consumers do need 64 bits, but not for the reason you mention.
Re:Couple of questions, though... (Score:2)
Re:Couple of questions, though... (Score:2)
Re:Couple of questions, though... (Score:2)
64-bit processor benefits (Score:2, Informative)
I am wondering how this applies to these latest 64-bit processors. In the days of RISC, one would think that a reduced instruction set would easily fit in 32-bit instructions (those are rather huge and comfy compared to the old 8-bit days), though I would guess that a 64-bit instruction can include an opcode, register specification AND 32-bits of memory address, which would mean fewer multi-word instructions, which by old measures means faster execution. A 64-bit integer unit would have some real benefit. I find more and more cases where 32-bit integers are not sufficiently large to cover the range of values needed for problems, and that is without addressing over 32-bits of data.
I am curious if someone can compare these attributes of the current Pentium 4/Athlon XP processors with this PowerPC 970, the current SPARC from Sun (Ultra is it?), and the current HP/PA processor (though isn't that being dropped in favor of Itanium?)?
Re:64-bit processor benefits (Score:3, Informative)
Basically the only real difference is in the details of some instructions, and the 64bit registers.
Since you're using 64 bit integer registers, you can now use 64 bit addressing (pointers), which means you can calculate addresses for 64bit address spaces, which yes, means more RAM.
Macs are currently limited to below 4GB of ram, which is actually a limit... I think the most significant reason to move to 64bit PPC is to go beyond 4GB of physical ram.
The other benefit will be the ability to handle 64bit integers fast. As used by databases
Another benefit will be 64bit load/stores which can happen in 1 cycle, rather than 2.
Of course, the Altivec unit has allowed 128bit load/stores for a while now (and the fpu allowed 64bit load/stores before)
Anywho, the big points of PPC64 are increased integer size and larger address space.
PPC does not use segment hacks like x86
64-bit provides many advantages. (Score:4, Informative)
For vector operations, 64bit words make for some fast math operations, since you can pack more 32-bit integer components into each bus transfer.
For floating point, it means you have greater precision in hardware (allowing things like real physics and shapes to be modelled without noticable issues caused by subtle number creep). Since most systems use IEE-784 (64bit double precision floating point), it means a speedup to that software since you're not working with it as 2 32-bit operations.
In terms of storage space, it means you can address more than 2,199,023,255,552 bytes (~2 terabytes) of disk space (assuming a 512-byte sector). This is important for people with big RAID arrays today, and people with ludicrously big Maxtor drives 3-4 years from now.
For RAM, it means you don't have to worry about your server topping out at 4 gigabytes of RAM. It also means that your VM space has no effective limitation for the forseable future (very useful for people working on large projects, trying memory-intensive algorithmic approachs to traditionally NP-hard problems, or distributed computing problems).
I'm sure I missed a lot of the benefits even with this list. As you can see, 64-bit is not just a number game. It is 32 orders of magnitude larger than 2^32, meaning our grandchildren will probably still be using 64bit machines with no limitions being apparent (unlike 16-bit to 32-bit, which only moved from 65k to 4.5 billion in terms of addressable amounts of something).
64-bit FP in hardware is already the norm (Score:2, Informative)
precision in hardware (allowing things like real physics and shapes to be modelled without noticable issues caused by subtle number creep). Since most systems use IEE-784 (64bit double precision floating point), it means a speedup to that software since you're not working with it as 2 32-bit operations.
Actually, most CPUs today (including G4 and P4) do double-precision in hardware. The G4 does 64-bit FP multiply-add with a throughput of one operation per cycle (I'm pretty sure the P4 does too). Even the loads and stores are operating on 64-bit chunks. Going to a 64-bit processor won't change any of that. The only thing different for FP operations will be (1) you can hold a heck of a lot more numbers in memory! and (2) it might be possible for extended precision (128-bit) to be done easily in hardware.
I hadn't considered that. (Score:2)
By forseable future (Score:2)
I don't see how you, on a desktop, could reach the limit of 2^64.
2^64 is 18,446,744,073,709,551,616
It is 4,294,967,296 times bigger than 2^32 (4,294,967,296).
That's 2 , places past where I know the highest decimal prefix number (trillion). It's 18.5 exabytes, where an exabyte is 1024 petabytes (each of with is 1024 terabytes, each of which is 1024 gigabytes).
It's really, really, really big.
Re:Couple of questions, though... (Score:2)
Larger memory space, and fewer levels to the page table, which means faster RAM access even for smaller memory spaces.
4-16 gigs may seem like a lot now, but remember when 4 megs was a lavish amount and 16 unheard-of?
Re. calculations, some will speed up, but FP registers are already 64 bits (so FP math won't benefit from 64-bit integer registers), and 64-bit integer calculations are done relatively rarely (they're used for a few things commonly, but 32-bit math is much *more* common on a cycle-per-cycle basis).
The memory data path itself is already 64 bits or wider for all of the recent chips I've heard of, so there's no speedup there.
Re:Couple of questions, though... (Score:2)
Re:Couple of questions, though... (Score:2)
Hmm.
Ok, that was a brainfault on my part. I assumed page sizes would scale in a way that's insane in retrospect. Sorry about that.
This could be the script to a movie (Score:5, Insightful)
I can see the meeting now... (Score:4, Funny)
INT. NIGHTTIME - HIGH ABOVE CITYSCAPE
A small, immaculately dressed Japanese man sits on the floor; a trickle of incense wafts before him. Across the room, an aged, bearded man in a plain blue suit watches him.
SONY MAN
The upstarts think they can trifle with us. Their insolence will not be tolerated.
IBM MAN
What do you propose?
SONY MAN
You have plants. You have research and design. Let us crush them.
IBM MAN
So mote it be.
Vick's Vapo Rub.... (Score:4, Funny)
Ah, so it runs on vapor instead of smoke?
*wonders if anybody'll get that.*
Specmarks similar to Pentium 4 2.8 GHz (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Specmarks similar to Pentium 4 2.8 GHz (Score:2, Insightful)
G4 specmarks??? (Score:2)
Where did you get your specmarks?
(Methinks Apple has something to hide...)
throughput and power consumption (Score:2, Interesting)
"At 1.8GHz, the PowerPC 970 will consume 1.3-volts and dissipate 42-Watts. At 1.2 GHz, the PowerPC 970 will consume 1.1-volts and dissipate only 19-Watts. For comparison, a 1GHz G4 consumes 1.6-volts and dissipates 21.3-Watts."
it seems that the powerbook potential is there. and in apple's market data throughput counts heavily, maybe more than absolute processor speed. look at sgi. the ibm proprietary memory is a bit confusing however.
In a surprise move ... (Score:2, Informative)
At least IBM is pretty good at manufacturing microprocessors, while Moto is certainly not. IBM already has a 0.10 micron (not 0.09) fab in testing, so perhaps the 970 will get to >2GHz "soon."
In a related story: Moto is supposedly selling their chip business. I guess they finally realized they have no idea what they are doing.
This is gobbledegook to me... (Score:4, Interesting)
Would a 3D rendering app such as Lightwave potentially see a huge benefit to this processor? I understand that it's up to the developer to tune it, yadda yadda yadda, I'm concerned with potential not real world numbers.
I'm trying to get an image in my mind about how the various processor descriptions (32-bit, 64-bit, Altivec, SimD, etc...) can radically change how an app like that would work.
Us vertex pushers have a substantial interest in machines that excel at that type of work...
Re:This is gobbledegook to me... (Score:5, Informative)
rendering apps like Lightwave, Maya, etc will benefit from this for several reasons:
The 64bit architecture:
Lightwave [if rewritten to be 64bit] will be able to use bigger numbers, and use more memory. Bigger numbers means that calculations that would involve making a 64bit word out of 2 32bit words [as it currently stands] needn't be done. Being able to address more memory is *always* a good thing.
Really good Floating Point Performance:
3D rendering apps love FP. bigger/faster/more Fp units are a good thing.
Memory Bandwidth:
The 900MHz bus will allow a *huge* amount of memory to be shuttled back and forth from the processor *very* quickly. This means your huge scenes will be rendered faster.
Altivec/Vector Processing unit:
Because the VPU doesn't do double precision FP, it doesn't help in the final rendering [much]. It *will* help in things like realtime previews, where the math is simplified. Imagine *big* previews of scenes in realtime.
Multiprocessing:
This chip is [as implied] MERSI compliant. This means that it is a perfect candidate for multiprocessing, like the current G4.... but the 970 can go many more "ways" than the G4 [the G4 was in an "optimal" multiprocessing stage with 2 procs]. The 970 can go up to 16, IIRC.
This seems like it'll be a winner.
.
Re:This is gobbledegook to me... (Score:2)
Lightwave [if rewritten to be 64bit] will be able to use bigger numbers, and use more memory. Bigger numbers means that calculations that would involve making a 64bit word out of 2 32bit words [as it currently stands] needn't be done. Being able to address more memory is *always* a good thing.
>>>>>>>>
More memory, maybe, but the 64-bit integers are nearly useless. I doubt lightwave is dealing with any integers in performance intensive code, much less 64-bit ones. What's more important is 128-bit floating point SIMD, and everyone already has that.
The 900MHz bus will allow a *huge* amount of memory to be shuttled back and forth from the processor *very* quickly. This means your huge scenes will be rendered faster.
>>>>>>>>>>>
Yep, very much so.
Altivec/Vector Processing unit:
Because the VPU doesn't do double precision FP, it doesn't help in the final rendering [much]. It *will* help in things like realtime previews, where the math is simplified. Imagine *big* previews of scenes in realtime.
>>>>>>>>>>
Hah hah, SSE2 does.
Re:This is gobbledegook to me... (Score:2, Insightful)
My reading is that there are four significant differences between IBM's chip and the G4.
My expectation is that the bus will make the biggest difference for end users, followed by the improvement in instructions per cycle, at least in the short term. Then again, I'm far from an expert, so someone else might have better understanding of the potential performance gains.
Matthew
Friends don't let friends Slashdot.
Re:This is gobbledegook to me... (Score:2)
Minor rant, the limitation is do to address bus size. Address bus side doesn't have to be tied to overall architecture size. Of processors I've known, the MOS6502 was an 8bit processor, but 16 bit address bus. The upgrade, the MOS6581602 was selectable 8/16 bit architecture and had a 24 bit bus, besides a fully compatible 650x mode. The original 68000 has only a 24 bit address line. The original MacOS stored some flags in there and folks played with those (even though Apple told you not to) and that played havoc when real 32 bit address-bus chips came out. The 68000 was almost a hybrid as well, it had 32 bit registers, but IIRC you could only branch with 16 bit signed offsets, and the 68020 had true 32 bit addressing. the original intel 8086s had essentially a 20 bit bus that was accessible with the evil segment/offset addressing.
I'm not a chip designer, but I don't think there's a technological reason why they can't put 64 bit addressing on a 32 bit chip. You'd have to have new addressing modes and opcodes (like the 68000 => 68020, or 8086 => 80286 => 80386)) and you'd probably just say with all that work it may be simpler to go to 64 bit across the board. In a deeply pipelined architecture, you probably wouldn't want it, not having standard sizes (32 bit opcodes and data vs. mized 32 bit and 64 bit chunks) it just makes it harder to see where the instructions boundaries are.
Hoping for third party mb's (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Hoping for third party mb's (Score:2)
MAI currently make reasonably up to date (compared with the old IBM 710 northbridge anyway) G3/G4 chipsets such as the Artica-S. These are used on the bPlan Pegasos (MATX), Eyetech AmigaONE (ATX) and Birdie (ATX server) motherboards.
Hopefully IBM or MAI will make a reasonably priced chipset to go with the PPC970 processor... hence allowing generic motherboards using that processor to be made.
Um, wrong (Score:3, Interesting)
But this isn't middle of the road... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:But this isn't middle of the road... (Score:2)
C//
think about it... (Score:2, Interesting)
I think that we should be thinking more and more on the power consumption of things in
general... On the environment, you know...
I wonder for how long "The_American_Way" will
hold...
It would be interesting if some law turned up,(I am from Europe, Sweden), that would make
some serious "restrictions" on the
power/performance phenomenon...
It would be the rebirth of elegant
engeneering...
Osbourne effect doesn't make sense (Score:3, Insightful)
There is never a good time to buy a computer, and nobody in their right mind will ever buy one at all. There is always something faster coming up.
Once you get over how ludicrous that is, I say buy a computer whenever the hell you want one. And yes, your machine will be obsolete, according to all the charts and graphs and tables of benchmark numbers, almost immediately. It doesn't matter if you buy a G4 in 2003, or a 970 in 2004. It will still happen. Get over it.
It does with Mac (Score:3, Insightful)
PCs just keep getting gradually better and better. But with a Mac you can buy a single processor machine one day only to find you could have had a dual for the same price on the next day.
MP? (Score:2, Insightful)
Sounds kinda like the Athlon... (Score:3, Informative)
To all the x86 haters... (Score:3, Informative)
Note that your new IBM chip is doing exactly that.
Intel and AMD have repeatedly shown that they can do whatever they like to implement top-notch internal architectures, and lopping on a translation unit only adds 10-20% die area and typically a very small performance hit over a traditional sequential RISC architecture. And they're free to change the internal architecture between revisions. And both Intel and AMD sell enough chips that they can spend a lot of money on designs and make them very good and still turn a profit.
Apple is OK, Mac user's aren't performance freaks (Score:5, Insightful)
The real Apple problem is that the gap between typical PC and typical Mac performance is starting to grow beyond the range that has historically shown to be viable. Not a problem today, standard dual CPUs counter this to a degree, but it's likely to be a problem in a year or two. While the 970 may only perform like a 3GHz P4 (SPEC), lag whatever Intel/AMD has in a year or two, it will be close enough. Apple will be back to a point where the typical performance gap is small enough. Apple has sold tens of millions of Macs that lagged PC counterparts in performance. They know that their customers are more interested in ease of use. Performance wise close-enough is all they need.
Power4 is not PowerPC except when it is :) (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:IBM? (Score:5, Funny)
Depends....where do you want to go today?
Cheers,
Ian
Re:IBM? (Score:2, Funny)
Apples and oranges... and dollars (Score:3, Informative)
A lot of windows people I know build gaming machines though, so I suppose if there were a comparison there (if Mac could run all my games) then the cost of expensive video accelerators, etc could be factored in. While I suppose Mac would factor in such costs as well, most of the Mac people I know didn't buy their systems to run Doom3 and the newest UT.
Re:Apples and oranges... and dollars (Score:2, Insightful)
By nutritional value, of course!
I't hard to really come up with a good, fair way to compare two different chip architectures. Even using the same program written for both doesn't indicate a true comparison between them overall.
So it seems to me that the best way to compare is popularity. I realize that's not a terribly fair method either, but since Apple seems to be putting a lot into the next generation of machines, success comes from improving their market share (I know, 'duh'), and that will only happen if the new machines are really up-to-snuff in the public eye.
So you can argue about how macs are better/worse than IBM machines 'till the cows come home. What it really comes down to is if the new machines will let Apple can break out of it's pseudo-nitche market.
=Smidge=
Re:Apples and oranges (Score:4, Insightful)
A couple of points to throw water on this:
Apples are certainly wonderful machines, and Windows certainly is icky most of the time, but be prepared to back up any benchmark statements with actual benchmarks.
Also, PowerPC and Intel/AMD are two different types of processing, so they can't really even be compared.
Um, no.
All general-purpose microprocessors perform certain basic tasks upon which everything else is built - integer and FP math, memory access, and control flow operations. Processors take different approaches in how they implement these functions, but the interfaces presented to programmers - even assembly programmers - are very similar [and yes, I've done assembly on multiple platforms].
You can also completely ignore architecture and take test programs that you think are representative of the kinds of tasks found in different types of application, compile them for both platforms, and measure how long it takes to do the same amount of work on each machine. This is the _foundation_ of benchmarking.
If the machines were completely different, you wouldn't be able to do the same tasks on them!
Re:Is this a joke? (Score:2)
Re:2004? (Score:2, Informative)
Biased how? (Score:5, Interesting)
"Hannibal" also has an incredible knack for making the workings of microprocessors understandable to those with no hardware engineering backgrounds.
Re:Take with a grain of salt (Score:2)
Ars Technica is clearly interested in Apple's technology, but there's no fanboy drooling. Their assertions are nearly always backed up with some good technical logic and/or testing. Bias is not their problem.
Re:Oh look (Score:5, Informative)
I have no idea who you are, Mononoke, but I'd wager $1000 that Hannibal Stokes knows more about chip architecture than you do [google.com]. The PPC 970 will have a hard fight (both in marketing and benchmarks) against the 4+GHz x86 chips also due a year from now.
p.s. How the heck did that get rated as Insightful? I'm as rabid a Mac addict as any of you, but it's just plain wrong to mod someone up for spouting false evangelism.