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IBM Hardware

IBM Plans Collaboration On Power Architecture 198

Posted by simoniker from the go-go-ibm-rangers dept.
TheInternet writes "According to CNET News, IBM has made a series of announcements regarding the opening-up of the Power chip architecture. The story lacks technical details, but apparently, IBM is going to divulge more information about Power/PowerPC, and expects collaboration from the industry on the future of the chip. Nick Donofrio is quoted as saying: 'We will free electronics manufacturers from the limitations of proprietary microprocessor architectures', and Red Hat and Sony are two companies listed as taking part. Power5 was also shown, as was the Blue Gene/L supercomputer, using 32 500MHz processors to achieve 128 gigaflops."
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IBM Plans Collaboration On Power Architecture More

IBM Plans Collaboration On Power Architecture

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  • ATX PowerPC (Score:5, Insightful)

    by niko9 ( 315647 ) * on Wednesday March 31, 2004 @07:06PM (#8731553)
    Another interesting
    link at the Inquirer [theinquirer.net] .
    Seems IBM is courting third party mobo makers to make PowerPC boards.

    Their emracing linux and opening up their hardware platform. Sound Like
    their getting their troops in line for THE desktop battle.

    I, for one, would love to be running Debian Linux on a ATX PowerPC board. Of
    course, they would have to sell enough of them to get the price down.

    Good luck to 'em.
    • "mobo"? Is that slang for motherboarder?

    • Re:ATX PowerPC (Score:3, Interesting)

      by niko9 ( 315647 ) *
      Sorry. Here's the correct link [theinquirer.net]

    • Re:ATX PowerPC (Score:2, Insightful)

      by stephenisu ( 580105 )
      This will be great if it does start a good desktop competition. People might start writing REAL portable code, and we can finally kill x86. Seriously, x86 is going to stop scaling properly.

      • Re:ATX PowerPC (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Phishcast ( 673016 ) on Wednesday March 31, 2004 @07:38PM (#8731794)
        Seriously, x86 is going to stop scaling properly.

        I remember hearing this long before x86 was as fast as it is today.

        There's also no way we'll ever be able to push more than 9600bps through our dialup modems...

      • Re:ATX PowerPC (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 31, 2004 @07:51PM (#8731894)
        GOING to? I'd argue that it already has. We're getting chips with higher and higher clock speeds, which is great for performance, but not so great for the electricity bill. I'd be far happier with the PC market if they'd stop ratcheting up the performance of the systems and focused instead on knocking a few dozen watts off the power needed to run the damn things.

        We've a P4-based system at home, and it doesn't take long for it to make the room nice and warm. Great in winter, but not so good in summer...

        • Re:ATX PowerPC (Score:2, Insightful)

          by drinkypoo ( 153816 )
          The fact is that the competitors to x86 which do not encompass it (as Athlon has done) have not managed to be as fast as x86. Their processors simply do not have the performance any more and when they do manage to bang out a chip faster than an x86 it ends up being insanely expensive.

          There ARE people making low-power computers, such as with transmeta processors. Of course, most of those are laptops. But certainly not all of them! The real issue is that even a PC processor which consumes a lot of power gen

        • This is exactly the path that Intel is taking. The next generation of CPUs will be based on the Pentium-M architecture (which is nothing more than a Pentium-!!! with a few P4 technology bits thrown in). The CPUs run slower (1.7 GHz currently) and a hell of a lot cooler, but perform just as well as a P4 1000 MHz faster.

          There have been at least 2 stories about this on Slashdot and Ars Technica. Check'm out.

        • Re:ATX PowerPC (Score:2, Interesting)

          by Berzelius ( 558040 )
          I totally agree with you. I don't want a 5000 MHz Pentium (!) 4. Get me a 10 Watt computer with decent performance (~ 1GHz P3) and I would happily pay the same ammount of money for it. New uses I have: my one web and file server without the ridiculous energy bill. Currently I find it too expensive to leave my computer online all day.

      • Re:ATX PowerPC (Score:3, Interesting)

        by afidel ( 530433 )
        Uh, why?
        x86 as it has been implemented since the origional Pentium actually works pretty well. You use fat, complex ops which use little space in icache and convert them to svelte, fast micro-ops for fast cores. True x86 is register starved, but that's why x86-64 added a bunch of registers and cleaned up the parts of the architecture which were truely bad. The death of x86 has been predicted for several decades and I just don't see it. People have too much invested in non-open code to just dump the architec

    • Re:ATX PowerPC (Score:5, Insightful)

      by homer_ca ( 144738 ) on Wednesday March 31, 2004 @07:31PM (#8731745)
      The PowerPC ATX motherboard has been one of the longest running vaporware products on slashdotters' wishlists. Well, not exactly vaporware. They did exist, but the problem was that the motherboard itself cost as much as a complete x86 system. It would be nice if they managed to sell them for a decent price this time. Might even be able to run MacOnLinux, but if that ever happened, Apple would definitely complain.

      • Re:ATX PowerPC (Score:3, Informative)

        by Endive4Ever ( 742304 )
        I picked up an IBM RS/6000 PREP box (a model 7248) at auction about a year and a half ago. It was a nice desktop box, with PCI and ISA slots, integrated S3 video and ethernet, and used PS/2 mouse and keyboard, standard VGA, etc. It was essentially a PC with a PowerPC processor. These boxes are fairly common and easily obtained at low cost on eBay (I paid $15 for mine at auction). PREP stands for PowerPC REference Platoform, and yes, it was capable of running NT, AIX, Linux, and NetBSD. I ran all four o
      • Well, not exactly vaporware. They did exist, but the problem was that the motherboard itself cost as much as a complete x86 system.

        Speaking of which, here [970eval.com] is Momentum's 970FX evaluation mobo. Only $4500 for a basic evaluation system. :)

        There's of course the more humanely priced Pegasos II [pegasosppc.com] for 500 Euros, but it's rather underperforming for 2004 and compared to those complete x86 systems you speak of. I've heard Marvell, who supply the northbridge for the PegII, will sell a "Discovery III" northbridge for

      • Pricing Policy of IBM and Motorola (Score:4, Informative)

        by bstadil ( 7110 ) on Wednesday March 31, 2004 @09:20PM (#8732765) Homepage
        The problem is not the Mobo makers and designers. The problem is the pricing policy that IBM and Motorola has/had.

        The Chipset and CPU's were under the Telecom Divisions where they are used to very high margins and close to Zero price-elasticity as the equipments goes into areas where performance and reliability is paramount. (What does an extra $200 / CPU add to a $100K switch.

        The price for an IBM Northbridge in 1K is around $85 compare this to Itnel Chipset that can be had for $9+-. The PowerPC itself was for a long time only available using Bumpchip technology maning you needed a very expensive socket or had to solder the cpu to the board.

        In summary IBM and Moto was not interested in initial low volume low profit market.

        Compare this to TI where you can buy DSP's in small quantities for almost the same as 100K price. TI understand they market needs to be developed and the pricing strategy needs to make the innovators job doable.

    • Another OSS advantage (Score:3, Insightful)

      by gr8_phk ( 621180 )
      You can always recompile for whatever architecture you want. No waiting for some monopolist to decide if/when to do the porting.
      • That no assembly optimisation was used. If it was you have to either hope it's also there for your platform, or that they provided higher level code. If they did provide higher level code, you have to hope that it still performs up to spec.

        While for a great many apps, performance isn't very relivant (the systems are faster than they need to be anyhow) there are still plenty where time is critical and low level optimisation can help. Games would be a good example.

    • Re:ATX PowerPC (Score:3, Insightful)

      by drinkypoo ( 153816 )
      Certainly there are enough geeks to buy them to make them profitable for one or two manufacturers, even selling them at PC-like prices. It would be interesting to find out what the G5 would cost as a commodity part. It would also set the stage for another amiga accelerator :) But seriously folks, linux users would buy the things like crazy. Gentoo on a commodity G5 is my ideal of the ideal computer, assuming I'm not tied to any given ISA like I am now, what with my tendency to do pc gaming.

  • Excellent! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Tyrdium ( 670229 ) on Wednesday March 31, 2004 @07:08PM (#8731569) Homepage
    So, does this mean we might see some good PowerPC emulators coming out? I remember reading that one of the main problems with writing them was the fact that the chip was quite closed, so one essentially had to reverse-engineer the entire instruction set.
    • As the POWER arcitecture is in reverse-ENDIAN order from the x86 arictecture, and to my knowledge, the x86 cannot switch order on the fly, I believe...

      Such an emulator would necessarily be dog-slow compared to the real thing.

      Comments from folks who understand more of the Arstechnica processor guides than I?
      • This article [macworld.com] explains the difficulty of emulating the PowerPC instruction set:

        The 68K processor is a 32-bit processor, but its instructions are 16-bit. This means that there are at most 65,536 items in the instruction matrix that need to be translated to the X86's instruction set. This creates a relatively small loop to run through for emulation. This small number of translations also requires little memory and can even reside in the cache for optimal emulation performance.

        ....

        Emulating the PowerPC is a

      • Re:Excellent! (Score:5, Informative)

        by idiot900 ( 166952 ) on Wednesday March 31, 2004 @07:41PM (#8731824)
        As the POWER arcitecture is in reverse-ENDIAN order from the x86 arictecture, and to my knowledge, the x86 cannot switch order on the fly, I believe...

        Such an emulator would necessarily be dog-slow compared to the real thing.

        Keep in mind that this is only a constant cost, and only for reads and writes to things outside the processor (most commonly RAM). Once a value is in a register, you can leave it in the host endianness. Certainly there is a speed hit for every access, but you take a bigger hit in other things. For example: emulating the MMU, doing the math for every virtual memory access. Maybe you could leverage the host MMU for this in some way, but then good luck writing emulator code portable across architectures.
      • The Power and PowerPC architectures are not big-endian or little-endian, they can run in both modes. All you need for that is a set of instructions that lets you read and write data to and from memory in both endian modes, and these architectures have them.

        That, and the x86 has dedicated instructions for reversing the byte order.

    • No not really (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 31, 2004 @07:21PM (#8731680)
      Umm, the instruction set is documented and everything. There's this PDF you can download.

      The problems with emulators have to do with RISC vs CISC differences and register-rich vs register-poor architectures. I have to go, so I'm not going to go into the details here, but the general idea is this: for the specific case of emulation, it's easier to write an emulator if your host architecture is more RISCy than your emulated architecture, and it's easier to write an emulator if your host architecture has more registers than your emulated architecture.

      The PowerPC has a very cluttered instruction set, but it still basically follows RISC as a philosophy-- you're still in a situation where instructions from other architectures have mostly instructions that can be broken down efficiently into a series of PowerPC instructions. Which means that efficiently assembling series' of PowerPC instructions into single instructions while emulating on more CISCy platforms is kind of hard. The PowerPC also has a whole lot of registers, and they're all general purpose so you can't play neat optimization tricks as easily as you can when emulating the Intel x86. Meanwhile, the architecture you probably want to do this emulation on-- x86-- is shit for registers.

      The PPC emulation problem has to do with unfortunate conflicts between design philosophies and emulation perverse cases more than anything else.

      -- Super Ugly Ultraman
      • The P4's and the 970's fetch and decode pipeline phases are similar in one very important respect: both processors break down instructions in their native ISA's format into a smaller, simpler format for use inside the CPU. The P4 breaks down each x86 CISC instruction into smaller micro-ops (or "uops"), which more or less resemble the instructions on a RISC machine. Most x86 instructions decode into 2 or 3 uops, but some of the longer, more complex and rarely used instructions decode into many more uops. The
  • Perhaps PPC can make a go of the desktop and server market, but it will be hard work to displace x86.

    In mobile space everyone is just going with ARM and PPC lower poser devices don't seem to be going anywhere useful.

    • Perhaps PPC can make a go of the desktop and server market, but it will be hard work to displace x86.

      PPC is already doing well in the desktop and server markets. Macs (desktop) use PowerPC CPUs, and many IBM servers use Power CPUs.

      -Teckla

  • Another Link (Score:5, Informative)

    by anzha ( 138288 ) on Wednesday March 31, 2004 @07:09PM (#8731581) Homepage Journal

    From Tom's Hardware: IBM's processor plans: Build your own microchip [tomshardware.com].

  • OK my first thought - Open CPU (Score:5, Interesting)

    by baryon351 ( 626717 ) on Wednesday March 31, 2004 @07:10PM (#8731585)
    Anyone else think this on the first read?

    Does this sound like a possible good contender for a general purpose replacement for x86 as an "Open CPU" that would work well with F/OSS apps? One that can't be tied down with DRM in such a way that only large megacorps (I won't name them, except to call them "Microsoft" and "Intel". Oh hell I named them whoops) can end up defining what may or may not run?

    I've read the general slashdot crowd clamoring for something like this that's free from central control. Does this look likely to you? Would it be a benefit if it did come about?
    • Last I heard, DRM wasn't going to be implemented on the CPU, but on some kind of coprocessor. In theory if the PowerPC architecture is opened, then Intel can start making them, and they can make PowerPC systems which support DRM.
    • As far as I know x86 chips already work well with F/OSS apps.

      The instruction set is also well documented, you can even get books for free from AMD and Intel. If you had enough money Im sure AMD would make you a custom Athlon 64 but why bother?

      The problem is making chips costs money. You need to design it, test via software, fab it, really test it, and repeat until you get what you want.

      My first though was trying to lure some of the other "RISC" vendors like Sun, SGI, and Fujitsu (sparc), into consideri
    • I can see it now - Gentoo PPC. They ship you a chip fab, and you spend the next few hours doping your CPU. Of course, the system supports prebuilt CPUs, but nobody actually uses them.
    • My first thought is that this is nothing but a bunch of marketing BS, no substance at all.

      Seriously, read the article, just what is IBM opening up? Answer: nothing that everyone else isn't already opening up.

      The instruction set is still controlled by IBM, and while you are free to make your own PPC chips, it's not like that's anything new. Everyone is free to make their own SPARC chips as well, and from the looks of things SPARC has fewer restrictions than what IBM is proposing.

      IBM will still license y
    • OpenCores [opencores.org]

      Open CPUs for all!

  • Apple (Score:2, Interesting)

    by cuban321 ( 644777 )
    Does apple have any say in this at all? What's to stop people from building custom Macs?

    I for one was just thinking about how I wish PowerPC was more open. This will give us an alternate platform to work with in case DRM/MS does kill x86.

    • Re:Apple (Score:3, Informative)

      by \\ ( 118555 )
      The license that comes with OS X (and other Apple software as far as I know) says that you cannot install the software on non-Apple hardware. Probably doesn't worry them at all as far as corporate customers.

    • Re:Apple (Score:2, Informative)

      by tievape ( 697308 )

      Does apple have any say in this at all? What's to stop people from building custom Macs?

      Macs have custom ROM chips on their motherboards. So you would need to track down an Apple motherboard in order to build your own. Hard to do but not impossible

    • Re:Apple (Score:2, Insightful)

      by ScottEllsworth ( 225538 )
      The work in making a clone or custom mac is not in the design of the cpu, but in getting all the rest of the hardware integrated with the OS. Add in the thrill of device drivers, and potentially having to reverse engineer any custom Apple HW, and you get a pretty much clone-free market. Opening up the cpu will not change that.

      It does mean that the architecture might be used in more places than it now is. Next generation video games might move to the Power architecture if they see a benefit. Similarly,
      • Sony's PlayStation 3 will use 3 CPUs based on the POWER/PowerPC architecture. Not PowerPC CPUs directly, but similar.

        Nintendo has also made a few public nods toward IBM's POWER/PowerPC for its next-gen console. However, since there are no real, public plans for their next-gen console, this isn't really worth noting.

        PowerPC is also used quite often in the embedded world due to its low heat output and low power requirements.
    • PowerPC is quite open. The Mac architecture is mostly open. The difference is, for the most part, there are few suppliers of PowerPC/Mac hardware.

      Then again... I think the show-stopper for custom Mac builders will be Apple's patents. (and proprietary I/O controllers)

  • hmm (Score:5, Informative)

    by User 956 ( 568564 ) on Wednesday March 31, 2004 @07:11PM (#8731609) Homepage
    This fits with IBM's vision for spreading the 970. There's two groups: "Pervasive" and "Deep." IBM uses "pervasive" to describe a wide range wired and wireless devices powered by the 970 chips, (i.e. p2p sharing of naked petrified natalie portman pictures). "Deep" computing describes IBM's high performance technical computing products, like Blue Gene.

    Opening the architecture swings the door for pervasive market penetration, indeed.

  • /. tricked you guys (Score:5, Informative)

    by Ignorant Aardvark ( 632408 ) <cydeweys AT gmail DOT com> on Wednesday March 31, 2004 @07:13PM (#8731625) Homepage Journal
    128 Gigaflops? April's Fools!

    (Hey, it's started already, just look at that pigeon story).

  • G5 Hardware Specs (Score:3, Interesting)

    by morcheeba ( 260908 ) * on Wednesday March 31, 2004 @07:14PM (#8731632) Journal
    I'm still waiting on IBM to release it's PowerPC 970 (aka G5) [ibm.com] hardware specs so that I can see what its high-speed bus looks like. The only thing publically available now is some fairly-broad "powerpc family" software arch documents - no electrical specs or 970-specific info.
    • Maybe they'll release the ApplePI docs right after Intel releases the Pentium 4 and Itanium 2 FSB protocol docs...

      • Uhh.. you mean like these Pentium 4 [intel.com] and Itanium 2 [intel.com] docs?

        Intel has top-notch documentation, far and away the best in the industry. The only company that comes close is AMD. IBM's public documentation for their processors is absolutely abysmal in comparison. Maybe they ahve good documentation buried somewhere in the company, but they sure don't like sharing it with anyone.

        As it stands now, PowerPC is no where near as "open" as x86 is, IBM has a LONG way to go.

  • motives? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ArbitraryConstant ( 763964 ) on Wednesday March 31, 2004 @07:14PM (#8731638) Homepage
    There are sound business reasons for all the big-headline stuff IBM's been doing lately, but I think they're doing it because it's the biggest, best, and cheapest PR anyone's ever heard of.

    Sure they're positioning POWER/PowerPC as the only architechture that can challenge x86 in a meaningful way. Sure if they release enough of the firmware and stuff it'll probably be better for some open source stuff than x86 is. Sure they're a services company and this will put them on the back end of even more stuff.

    But honestly. Everyone loves them. That's what they really need if they want to entrench themselves everywhere.

  • Hmmmmmm (Score:4, Insightful)

    by warlockgs ( 593818 ) on Wednesday March 31, 2004 @07:20PM (#8731674)
    I, for one, welcome our OpenPowerPC overlords.

    No, seriously, I think this is a great step. When we get to control the functionality and content of our silicon, and contribute to the specs, I think a LOT of creative people will come forward and throw out some truly awe-inspiring ideas. Look what happened with Linux, *BSD, countless GNU projects. The list goes on, people. I think this could be a stepping stone towards getting some really new chip technology on a roll.

    Lets just hope this is a sincere effort on IBM's behalf.

  • Good for Power5 (Score:5, Interesting)

    by philthedrill ( 690129 ) on Wednesday March 31, 2004 @07:25PM (#8731708)

    This is an important step, at least for the Power5. It's immensely complex, and I think feedback from collaborators such as OS people is important when they (IBM) ask themselves if a design decision makes sense. For example, SMT adds 24% to the die area for each core (see here [hotchips.org]). Compare that with Intel's HyperThreading [hotchips.org], which adds little area but is still complicated to verify. Getting feedback and involving other groups can help determine if design decisions/features are worthwhile.

  • Oh great... (Score:4, Funny)

    by HaeMaker ( 221642 ) on Wednesday March 31, 2004 @07:30PM (#8731740) Homepage
    So when does SCO sue because AIX runs on PowerPC so they must be releasing SCO Intellectual Property...

  • why would you use PowerPC (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 31, 2004 @07:30PM (#8731743)
    x86 and windows are established platforms and people and industry have put lot of time and effort in adopting them. why do you guys are interested in destroying this enormous value created with hardwork over time and replace with totally unproven vaporware system which only the geeks and use?

    Even on April 1st, you don't play such cruel jokes.

    • business is business (Score:4, Interesting)

      by randall_burns ( 108052 ) <randall_burnsNO@SPAMhotmail.com> on Wednesday March 31, 2004 @07:40PM (#8731811)
      The way software engineers make money is continually showing a higher price/performance ratio. Microsoft and Intel are two big monopolies that eat at the pocket of every single software engineer. Replacing the WinTel monopoly with something truly open architecture is the type of thing that will be necessary to jump-start IT--which in the US is starting to become a declining [vdare.com] industry. We need to think about how to produce $50 PC's--and just open sourcing the OS, CPU and memory design is a big step in that direction.
      • Replacing the WinTel monopoly with something truly open architecture is the type of thing that will be necessary to jump-start IT--which in the US is starting to become a declining industry. We need to think about how to produce $50 PC's--and just open sourcing the OS, CPU and memory design is a big step in that direction.

        Agreed. IBM is doing something that has needed to be done for a long time - they are quietly delivering the replacement for the 80's era application platforms. Interesting that this t
        • Well, there are _still_ some bottlenecks here. It looks like IBM isn't really Open Sourcing the chip design-just trying to license it on reasonable terms. I suspect they'll have to go further to make this _really_ take off(i.e. have a design that is available with no royalty charges). If there is a truly open source design that is really cheap, I suspect we'll see this combined with the market Sun is developing at Walmart to imply $100 PC's.

          Now, I think this goes beyond a 80's application delivery platform

    • I'm glad to see that people think that desktops are the only computers that people use...

      I come from the embedded world. I don't know any engineer who would put an x86 in anything. On the other hand, I have put PPC in a lot of places, and there has been a trenendous amount of work to make this a stable, robust platform.

    • Sails and oars are established propulsion methods that shipbuilders since the year dot have put a lot of time and effort in adopting them [sic]. Why are you guys with the damn screw propellors and steam engines interested in destroying this enormous value created with hard work over time and replace it with a totally unproven propulsion system that only the big shipping lines can use?

  • IBM does seem to be trying here-though I doubt the PowerPC architecture is really a huge money maker for them though. Still, simply having a base of acceptence and a reasonably licensed design is only part of the equation here.

    The underlying problem with major chip architectures is that they require a cast of thousands to design and implement. I aware of only one exception to that rule: Chuck Moore's Forth Chips [colorforth.com]. Chuck has acheived a lot in that area working either alone or with a few others.

    The sheer com
    • If you care about performance or power, you need to be using the latest 90nm fab processes. If you are using 90nm, a mask set costs almost $1M. If you are going to spend $1M just on manufacturing set-up costs, you might as well spend a few million designing the chip.
      • Moore has been able to place a _lot_ of cpu's on a single chip because his underlying design is so dang simple-and it is something that one(albeit VERY smart) guy can create/understand.

        In the current state of the art, that may not be that big of a deal, but eventually, we are going to need to go beyond these huge, complicated facilities if we want to keep on delivering a better cost/performance ratio.

        From what I can see(and I don't claim to be a chip design expert) Moore's stuff has potentially huge adva

  • I was there (Score:5, Informative)

    by deadline ( 14171 ) on Wednesday March 31, 2004 @07:41PM (#8731816) Homepage
    I attended the event. It is pretty big news. There was a lot of interesting presentations and it is really an astounding direction for IBM. As one person from IBM put it,

    IBM has seen how well the Open Source/Community model has worked for Linux. Now they believe that it will benefit the deployment of POWER derived technology.

    The details are a little sketchy at this point, but Wladawsky-Berger basically said this is of the same magnitude as the decision to embrace Linux.

    I think I heard the word "community" in almost every other sentence. I truly believe IBM "gets it" and is moving forward in bold direction. The people I talked to afterward were credible and excited.

    There will be a longer story on ClusterWorld [clusterworld.com] tomorrow. (sign up for three free issues of the magazine as well)

    I saw the small "Blue Gene" system. Very cool both performance wise and thermally (32 CPUs in a table top box). I also saw the new Power blade server. Nice.

    • I taught it was an April fool ! is this fo real ?
    • I agree. When I saw this news, it totally blew me away! I can't believe there are not already most posts on this topic. IBM is basically reinventing the hardware industry with this move. This might have the same far reaching long term impact as when RMS started coding his first GNU program. I'm sure back at the time, when GNU was only a few programs, it was probably nothing and not even newsworthy, but look at what happened later. I think this is a key decision of the quivalent magnitude.

    • Re:I was there (Score:3, Interesting)

      by drinkypoo ( 153816 )
      IBM is really not opening their core though in the sense of open software. Also they are only opening the 400 series PowerPC core. The chip that seems like the very best of them is the 440GX, which is a 466-600MHz chip. So this is just IBM licensing their core more widely as if they were MIPS or something. That's great, since their cores are probably better anyway :) Frankly I'm more excited about the prospect of affordable ATX PowerPC boards. It would be nice to see it actually happen :)

  • Only a Partial Blue Gene/L (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Betelgeuse on Ice ( 562714 ) on Wednesday March 31, 2004 @07:41PM (#8731822)
    That Blue Gene/L machine being shown is only a small part of the full machine [ibm.com] they are building for LLNL. When its complete, IBM estimates that it will run at 360 TFLOPS, at a fraction of the size and power consumption of the current #1 supercomputer [jamstec.go.jp]. Even if they miss the mark by 50% it represents a fairly significant leap in processing and power consumption. And hey, since it will only occupy 64 racks, you can just about fit one in your garage! (Nuclear reactor to power it not included...)

  • Horse's mouth (Score:2, Insightful)

    by samoverton ( 253101 )
    straight from the [ibm.com]

  • Comment removed (Score:3, Funny)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Wednesday March 31, 2004 @08:09PM (#8732003)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Very Smart Move by IBM (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Constantin ( 765902 ) on Wednesday March 31, 2004 @08:19PM (#8732080)

    As you all know, the costs of developing new chip architectures is escalating. However, once designed, chips can be replicated at relatively low cost (at least by comptent fabs like IBMs). So, to maximize profits despite the high upfront costs, what is one to do?

    Design a kick-ass chip, sign up a lot of partners to establish street credibility, maintain processor improvement momentum, deliver chips on time, then sell as many chips as possible, of course! AMD performed in some, but certainly not all of these aspects, hence their current standing in the chip industry. Don't even get me started on the slow train wreck called Motorola.

    The power architecture was always meant to be flexible, ranging from the $10,000+ quad-core uber-chip Power5's on down... So it's only logical that we will find stripped-down versions of the Power5 architecture in everything from Apple Desktops to next-gen consoles from Sony and MS.

    As I see it, this is a great PR step by IBM to get some mindshare from the growing Linux camp. When you combine the incredible performance, lower prices, etc. of the 970 architecture, folks like Intel will have to take notice sooner or later, particularly when it hits their most profitable processor lines. However, Apple may not be happy to face competition in a market segment that it has had to itself for now.

    As for MS and their PowerPC line of NT or whatever, who cares. If they need to make the switch, they'll find a way. In the meantime, it's the Linux/Unix folks who'll benefit the most from no longer being squeezed between SPARC and XEON pricing.

    • >So it's only logical that we will find
      >stripped-down versions of the Power5
      >architecture in everything from Apple Desktops
      >to next-gen consoles from Sony and MS.

      For Sony's case in PS3, the Cell architecture is vastly different from PowerPC, though IBM will help it in its production or perhaps in design work with Sony and Toshiba. You should've referred to Next Nintendo console and next MS console as Power5 architecture machine.

  • Sun was here (Score:4, Informative)

    by Mr. Piddle ( 567882 ) on Wednesday March 31, 2004 @08:53PM (#8732501)

    Before people get too excited about this big "development", remember that SPARC was a completely open architecture since something like 1987. Sun and Fujitsu manufacture their chips independently, and there are free SPARC designs downloadable over the WWW. IIRC, the only licensing cost is if you want to use the "SPARC" logo for branding and marketing.

    Check www.sparc.org for the rest.
  • Some with authority please answer a few questions:

    1) will this mean consumer products being developed to compete with x86 products?

    2) who do you think will support this first? Will the major distributers jump on or will it be the little guys?

    3) what will be the price of a open ppc system?

    4) not that i'm interested... but might this allow mac clones?

    5) for the developers, would you support PPC? I use debian so PPC is supported (whether this is a good or bad thing...) but it is usually behind.

    6) what wo

  • SPARC is already open (Score:5, Informative)

    by IGnatius T Foobar ( 4328 ) on Wednesday March 31, 2004 @09:43PM (#8732973) Homepage Journal
    The SPARC is already an open architecture processor [sparc.org]. It's been that way for years. Sun was the big player behind it, and certainly the best known, but the SPARC design is the closest thing there is to an "open source cpu." There's even a non-Sun organization (SPARC International) they spun off to act as a steward for the standard.

    SPARC processors are made by Sun, Texas Instruments, Hitachi, and others. There's a history of all the chips made on their web site.

    Dunno why they're too blind to see that this would be as good an idea for Java.

  • IBM, I love you (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Weaselmancer ( 533834 ) on Wednesday March 31, 2004 @10:26PM (#8733295)

    First open source, now open hardware. I'm...pleasantly stunned. Go Blue!

    Weaselmancer

    PS: At the Risk of -1 Redundant, this is a great move. I'm in embedded design, and I've discovered a few things that wound up in errata sheets later on. If I had been working on an open chip like this, I'd have worked out a fix and contributed it back to the project.

    Sure beats skimming errata sheets endlessly and knowing there's nothing you can do to fix things.

  • good move... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by qtothemax ( 766603 )
    This seems like a smart buisness move by IBM that will end up benefiting everyone. IBM probably believes that they will controll most of the manufacturing, because the only company with the fab capacity to make many is Intel, and i doubt they'd want to jeopardize thier probably higher profit margin pentium market share by making a power chip. At the same time, small fabs will be able to make the chips and keep the price reasonable. Also, i'd have to assume that IBM expects to provide most of the service a
  • You can sum it easily up.
    No early adopters who can build their own PowerPC based PCs. The PowerPC and related boards are no commodity hardware you can get for affordable prices.
    Many early adopters love to build their own computers, they basically are locked out.
    That basically means no early adopters, no long term mass market. What is left is only niche markets like Apple, who is not too unhappy not to have commodity hardware in their machine (high prices)

    PowerPC is strong in many areas but as long as you c
    • Right on. I've tried getting hold of PPC gear, and nobody I've talked to locally will even bother to sell it to me. You can get "development kits" from manufactures for embedded stuff if you're prepared to pay $5000 or so for 6 year old technology. I think there's a couple of $1000 PPC boards targeted at AmigaOS and Linux too, but I've never even seen a 3rd party verify they even work worth a damn.

      There was a northbridge company (MAI?) that held promise to bring boards to the masses but that idea seems to

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