IBM Officially Unveils Dual-core PowerPC Chips 408
PM4RK5 writes "Today at the Power Everywhere Forum in Japan, IBM officially unveiled its rumored dual-core PowerPC line of chips, the 970MP. Code-named Antares, these chips have been rumored to be under development since 2004. It is believed that Apple has been working with prototypes and is likely to use them in forthcoming updates to the PowerMac G5 line. The press release is in Japanese; as of this writing, IBM has not released an English version. Some of the slides from the presentation given by IBM are available.
The processors pack some impressive specs, ranging from 1.4 to 2.5 GHz and including 1MB L2 cache per core; the chips also include the ability to power down the extra core when it is not needed. Alongside the 970MP, IBM also announced its low-power 970FX chips, ranging from 1.2 to 1.6 GHz, with power consumption ranging from 13 to 16 Watts, respectively."
PowerPC (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:PowerPC (Score:5, Informative)
Re:PowerPC (Score:5, Insightful)
From the Rumor Mill (Score:5, Insightful)
From the roadmaps and rumor mill, even the Pentium EE 130 W(clocked at what, 3.8ghz?) and the AMD Athlon 110 W and too high power and not good enough on performance.
It appears Intel plans on dropping the P4 line and going to enhancing the Pentium M edition. It is expected that Apple will be going with the Pentium Ms (which apparently have dual core slated in their lineup) instead of with the Pentium EE.
In summary, Apple won't touch the Pentium EE due to high power consumption. However, they do like the Pentium M with has much better performance per watt/clock cycle and much lower power consumption.
From that I would guess that either AMD could not give Apple the same deal as Intel could. Either that or Apple expects Intel to have much better performance than AMD by that time. Also, as far as I know the Pentium Ms are much better than AMDs mobiles in power and performance.
Re:From the Rumor Mill (Score:5, Informative)
I think you meant to say the Pentium D [intel.com] + LaGrande [intel.com] (DRM in silicon), not Pentium M. The Pentium D (with not-yet-released updates and fixes), does exactly what Apple is after - controlled access to media with an architecture that provides lower-power (iPod-like devices and battery-powered Powerbooks).
Re:From the Rumor Mill (Score:3, Informative)
Re:From the Rumor Mill (Score:5, Informative)
Not sure. I'm basing that off of this article [theregister.co.uk] from The Register. I don't know if they plan on keeping hte Pentium D in the lineup (or even moving to the Pentium E if it ever comes about), but it still (as another poster has mentioned) consumes too much power. Apple wants lower power processors, probably under 50W per core (just a guess).
Here is a link on the Pentium M roadmap. [arstechnica.com]
As listed below (and speculated for the Macs):
4Q 06-1Q 07:
Merom: A dual-core Pentium M (Banias) successor
Conroe: A 64-bit desktop version of Merom (see comments above about Conroe).
A 64-Bit dual core Merom is just what apple needs to be the successor to the 64-bit dual core G5s. And, surprise suprise, it is due out just when Jobs said the transition would occur/finish. It is also more than likely going to be fairly low power as it is in the Pentium M lineup. We won't know till it comes out if it is as low power as these G5s, but it should be lower power than the current high end P4s. The guy also speculates on why Intel over AMD on the next page of the article.
Re:From the Rumor Mill (Score:2)
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
Correction: IBM + AMD Fabrication (Score:5, Informative)
AMD and IBM do work together on developing fabrication technology. But AMD is not fabless nor totally dependent on IBM for manufacturing.
Re:From the Rumor Mill (Score:3, Insightful)
You're forgetting that Apple is a hardware company, they would be foolish to make OS X work on a generic x86 box. Even if they could offset loss in sales with an increase in sales on the OS side of things it would diminish the end user experience. As it stands now Apple has a ton of control over what hardware goes into its systems therefore its
Your Math is flawed (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple has 3% of the PC Market.
3% of the PC market is 15% of AMD's market.
AMD's market is normally capped not by distribution but rather by production. If AMD won the Apple contract, they would EITHER need to increase their production by 15% (not historically AMD's strong suit), or increase prices to the PC market...
If AMD picks up the Apple contract and CANNOT increase production...
Then AMD has to reduce their PC market-share by 15% of their production, which means increasing prices.
Either way, Apple would be a HUGE account for AMD, and would require a substantial portion of AMD's manufacturing resources.
Alex
Intel vs AMD x86 (Score:5, Interesting)
Best performance per watt != Lowest power usage of highest-performing part.
The Pentium M family is much lower power than the Pentium 4, and has reasonably good performance. I don't think AMD really has a chip that competes with the Pentium M, even though AMD's chips are generally less power-hungry than a Pentium 4.
Re:PowerPC (Score:5, Informative)
This has been discussed about a million times on any site that posted any news about the switch.
You're wrong in two ways. First, you don't understand what Apple cares about. Second, you don't understand the situation in the area that Apple cares about.
Apple cares more about laptops. Intel wins easily in this area. They beat every current or planned PowerPC laptop chip, and they beat every AMD laptop chip. There's basically no serious competition at this point (AMD is trying but they're not yet serious competition).
AMD wins on power consumption on the desktop right now, but Apple cares more about laptops and also Intel is going to be moving their laptop chips into the desktop because the P4s have dead-ended. In the 2006-2007 timeframe, Intel is going to have very powerful multi-core low power chips on laptops and desktops.
Intel supplies chipsets as well, and their chipsets are pretty nice. They're not always the best, but they're usually close and they're almost always better in laptops. Having the chipset provided by Intel cuts down on engineering costs as well, which is important for Apple. Their volumes are small by most OEM and motherboard maker standards.
Re:PowerPC (Score:3, Interesting)
No. Intel has a lot up its sleeve. AMD won't be able to change/adapt as fast as Intel IMO. AMD could never handle the production needs of Apple (or any major vendor for that matter). I personally have all AMD systems in my own home, however, AMD just cannot produce what Apple needs, even at only 3% or so of the desktop market.
Apple's only source is Intel. Even though AMD may be leading Intel in some benchmarks, it really makes no differen
Re:PowerPC (Score:5, Funny)
Hey Bill! You owe me $20!!! That's 20 years salary to a working stiff like me, so pay up, bitch!"
Apple? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Apple? (Score:5, Informative)
IBMs own server products and embedded processors. IBM's blue gene used the core from earlier PowerPC series.
Re:Apple? (Score:2)
The same goes for the "real", not HPC servers, which run on Power4+ or Power5, which also has nearly nothing in common with those chips.
Re:Apple? (Score:2, Informative)
IBM Journal of R&D has a special on Blue gene [ibm.com]. From the article which has details about the processing node in Blue Gene.
The BLC ASIC that forms the heart of a BG/L node is a SoC built with the IBM Cu-11 (130-nm CMOS) process. Integratin
Re:Apple? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Apple? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Apple? (Score:2, Insightful)
loss of Apple considering the holiday season for the XBox alone will give them
enough chip sales to cover a couple of years of Apple purchasing.
Apple's PowerPC purchasing was focussed heavily on Freescale, G4 chips, not IBM.
The PowerBook, iBook and eMac outsold high end G5 systems (including the iMac)
4:1 at least by Apple's reckoning. Let's not mention the Mac Mini, I'm sure it
contributed something but not much
-- Neko
Re:Apple? (Score:5, Informative)
One of the things we do at the company I work for is tell people the G4 is better
than the G5. The G4 is wonderfully more generic in performance - random memory
access is a good one to benchmark. The G5 is very good at streaming huge
contiguous blocks, but the high RAM access latencies and cache latency/line width
problems kill random access or impact code such as array lookups (best Vector
Permute trick on the planet, also hampered by a weak Permute unit).
But that's not to say the G5 doesn't have merits; it just has some VERY specific
applications that it's very good at. Perhaps too specific for Apple. Companies
like Mercury (www.mc.com) would probably have gone for the G5 if they hadn't
found an even more specific processor for their needs (Cell, in this case).
With lower power chips the G5 could actually start to replace the G4 in places
where performance in high memory and streaming data are paramount.
For laptops, desktops, and places where we don't need 16GB of memory, the G4 is
going to rock for years to come though. I actually wonder why there couldn't be
a special "pseudo-64bit" version of Linux for the G4, which used the 36-bit
addressing modes to implement high memory support. Maybe it's because IBM practically own ppc64 Linux and don't want to overshadow their own chips?
-- Neko
Sheer factual inaccuracy. (Score:5, Informative)
I refuse to believe that the 28- and 31-stage Pentium 4 pipelines are a better thing than the 10-stage pipeline in the Pentium III, particularly when we're talking about IPC. Do you remember the fuss made about P4 being slower at the same clock speed than the PIII? That's proof it has worse IPC rate.
Neither the P4 or the G5 are lower-power than their predecessors and they fail to provide better performance/watt, in any configuration. This is why the P3 architecture has been adopted into the Pentium M line for low power use and the G4 processors remain the chips used at the core of Apple's iBooks and PowerBooks.
The great thing to do with the Pentium 4 architecture would be to put in on good Strained Silicon and SoI processes to push it above the 4.0GHz clockrate at which it is believed to be a very strong chip.
The differences between the G4 and G5 chips are what happens when you move from a desktop computer chip to a cut-down Big Iron chip (IBM's POWER4, IIRC). The G5's are inherently 64-bit capable in a way that the first three generations (Willamette, Northwood and Prescott) of the Pentium 4 are not, although there exist Prescott-based Pentium 4 processors with Intel's EM64T implementation.
BTW: http://arstechnica.com/ [arstechnica.com] is your friend. Hannibal has done a good job of talking through the history of the Pentium chip family (1 [arstechnica.com] & 2 [arstechnica.com]) and the PowerPC family (1 [arstechnica.com] & 2 [arstechnica.com], part 3 hasn't yet arrived) up to the G4's. There's discussion of the IBM POWER5 architecture too [arstechnica.com], and some commentary on pipelines in processor design (1 [arstechnica.com] & 2 [arstechnica.com]). I learned a lot from these, and value their information. But I'm going to stop telling Granny to suck eggs now.
Re:Apple? (Score:2)
Where's the market....
http://top500.org/sublist/System.php?id=7605 [top500.org]
Re:Apple? (Score:2)
As of right now, the upcoming Intel switch is only relevant to Apple developers; that's why it was announced at WWDC.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Apple? (Score:2)
Re:Apple? (Score:2)
PS3?
IBM has been dual core for quite a few years... (Score:3, Insightful)
Apple got the plain jane 970 version, single core out of this chip from IBM. So the question that stands out is, why did it take so long to offer a 970 version that was dual core?
What I don't understand most about the switch Apple is making is that everyone harped on megahertz yet the AMD64 chips have great performance "ratings" with low megahertz. My curren
Too late for Apple ? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Too late for Apple ? (Score:2, Insightful)
What IBM is announcing today, this year, or even next year is not what drove Apple to go x86. Their decision was based on what's coming many years down the road. While the delay in PowerBook-usable G5 processors was a factor I'm sure, I bet Apple was more worried about what's coming after the G5.
Also, another major factor in the switch is that IBM can't seem to keep up with Apple's demand, especially at the top e
Re:Too late for Apple ? (Score:3)
It will be totally feasible, easy in fact. OS X already runs fine on both processors. Apple will ship a universal binary OS X along with universal binary versions of all their software for several years.
The majority of effort needed to support both processors at once has already been done. Apple wouldn't have announced the switch if it hadn't been. They needed to reassure their customers and investors that this was n
Re:Too late for Apple ? (Score:2)
Re:Universal Binary? (Score:2)
not a chance (Score:3)
IBM is releasing laptop chips that fit into the lower end of the spectrum of current chips while Intel will be releasing the next generation early next year.
Yonah-core Pentium Ms include floating-point improvements (the Pentium M's current weakness), clock speed improvements, power improvements, and there will be dual-core versions in the same power envelope as current chips.
A single 1.6 ghz G5 might be welcome on PowerBooks (particularly since it replaces the archaic bus)
Not if they choose PPC, Intel, AMD & Cell! (Score:3)
Re:Too late for Apple ? (Apple =! Amiga) (Score:4, Insightful)
After the WWDC and the trauma it inflicted on some devs, I find it highly unlikely that Apple is going to suddenly decide tomorrow that they've made a bad move and are going to stick with the PPC path in the future. Apple knew this G5 development was coming, hence the comment that has been repeated numerous times that the next 2 years are going to produce some interesting developments in the PPC platform, but by 2007, things will be at a point where Intel will overtake them and that the PPC roadmap does not offer anything that can keep up with the pace of Intel. Jumping hardware platforms is hard enough as it is, jumping back would work to obliterate the confidence that Steve Jobs has tried to instill in those who support the Mac. He and his fellow execs are trying very, very hard to appear as if this is really worth it and that they have a solid plan that will not leave 3rd parties burned.
Nobody wants to have another Amiga situation, where every week there is a new roadmap to follow, dramatically different than the one before. That is the perfect way to scare off the community that keeps a platform going.
Market? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Market? (Score:3, Insightful)
Seriously, you don't think they gave Steve this news at least 6-12 months ago?
A new product announcment does not a deep roadmap make.
I think Steve saw this among a number of other bits in a meeting with Big Blue, saw it was a very weak pipeline, didn't get what he wanted in terms of pricing and development cost sharing, and was still pissed off over the 3ghz fiasco. IBM also probably wasn't terribly forthcoming, thinking they had Apple as a captive customer, probably not noticing th
Re:Market? (Score:2, Funny)
Any hope for this in Apple machines... (Score:4, Interesting)
Another switch? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Another switch? (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, we don't know how compelling the roadmap looks in the future. Apple will get to use these chips in the short term and then switch to Intel by the time these chips have completed their "lives." Steve may be getting what he wants now, but he knows as well as you and I that it is not necessarily an indication of things to come.
Steve gets everything he wanted? not quite... (Score:2)
Ummmm.... NOWHERE.
Meanwhile Intel is working on dual core as well, and they're banging the door of 4gHz...
Steve switched to Intel for a good reason...
RS
Re:Steve gets everything he wanted? not quite... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Another switch? (Score:2)
Re:Another switch? (Score:4, Insightful)
It's "put a lot of effort and money in to be a year or more late" vs. "get crazy R&D for free and be guaranteed to be current". Tough choice.
(*) Ignoring for a moment that he was also promised 3GHz by mid-2004!
Pro and Consumer (Score:3, Interesting)
I Doubt it (Score:2)
Could you imagine supporting multiple platforms as well?
Didnt work out too well for IBM to do that..
Is this for real? (Score:4, Interesting)
As for the dual core, I believe, it may be exciting to many Apple PowerPC fans and may provide a reason to some to buy Apple machine in this transition period.
Re:Is this for real? (Score:2, Insightful)
Having some life ahead in the current line of CPUs and still switching isn't without precedence either. Apple made the transition from the 68040 to PPC eve
Re:Is this for real? (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, IBM is a customer as will be Apple. The PowerMacs aren't planned to dump PPC for another 18 months, so you should see dual-core PowerMacs for some time here.
This announcement also helps illustrate why Apple jumped - 2.5GHz at the high-end means that Apple remains topped out on performance, and the low-power chips are okay, but really aren't low-power enough, nor fast enough to give Apple a significant gain on laptops.
Re:Is this for real? (Score:5, Insightful)
There's nothing here significantly stronger that what we've had for the last several months. Sure, dual core vs. dual G5 has benefits, but without a clock boost or anything else, it's not much more than packaging.
I would say IBM's offerings are competitive. Steve Jobs and his "wah I wanted a 3GHz chip!" is all bullshit when you look at it; he wanted to compete with the Intel marketing machine, and still hasn't noticed that AMD Opteron chips top out at 2.6GHz - and have done for some time. The G5 is competitive in that it matches or outperforms the AMD Opteron (that frontside bus helps).
Yah, and Apple can have pretty much the same performance with Intel chips. It's not the top end that drove the decision, it's in part the laptop chips. 1.6GHz G5 is good, but the Pentium M looks like the place to be for a while.
Ultimately, I suspect its Intel DRM that drove the decision. If the media giants want DRM, they're going to go with Intels, and anyone else is going to have a uphill fight. Better to be in the game from the start there.
Their dual cores top out at 2.2GHz and also probably will for some time. Apple still have the potential to create a 2.4GHz PowerMac and an XServe with up to 4 processors which competes with AMD's most expensive and little used 400 and 800 processor lines.
Apple has always been able to do 4-way with the G5. Dual dual-core isn't *that* much easier than 4-way. If the market was there for 4-way we'd have it.
I don't see why it "illustrates" anything except that Steve Jobs is a nut job who lied himself through a developer conference. It's a damn shame Apple has gone so low and a damn shame the developers are so loyal that they keep so quiet.
How did he lie? Everybody knew about the MP before the conference. The transition lasts until 2007. The decision surely wasn't made based on any product that will ship between now and then. In fact, the MP is likely the main reason why the PowerMacs will be last to move - the performance is there with PPC in the near term. Will IBM make a 980, though, or is this the end of the line?
There is a lot of dissent in private quarters. All that PowerPC hype Apple pushed down our throats - some of it actually real as it turned out - has left 1000s of developers with a lot of AltiVec code and not a lot of choice. They are mighty
pissed about rewriting their apps again, especially to bridge the gap between now and the 10 years in the future that Steve's Intel Roadmap says they will have better integer performance.
Oh, come on. There aren't 1000s of Altivec apps. There are thousands of apps using Apple's SIMD libraries (which are already ported to SSE3) and using other OS X libraries, but there are *maybe* hundreds of apps using Altivec directly. Apple isn't worried about them being pissed. Developers will chase the money like everyone else and Apple isn't a bad ride right now. They'll suck it up, diddle their code and start selling product again.
The biggest dissent seems to be inside IBM. Not long after the 970 came out IBM merged their semiconductor and server groups. The semiconductor group that was quietly making small profits (due to low pricing to Apple) on 970s was publicly costing the server group big profits by taking a bunch of HPC contracts that could have gone to IBM 970 or POWER systems (IBM execs would of course claim that every Apple HPC sale was a lost IBM server sale since it was the CPU that carried the day).
Once those groups merged, Apple's sweet deals went away and Apple was expected to pay their way. The contract came up, Apple didn't want to pay the enormous development costs of a CPU line, so they saw their opportunity to further commoditize the product line and struck a deal with Intel. In the end, consumers and most developers really won't have a problem, and it *might* (who really knows) portend good things for Apple.
What happened to Freescale? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:What happened to Freescale? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:What happened to Freescale? (Score:3, Informative)
The Freescale chip was deemed to hot to be used in an Apple laptop. Presumably the 970MP would be too hot as well, but the low power ones would be well suited to a laptop.
The obvious application for these newly announced chips will be low-end servers and workstations, particularly high density servers for the low power chips. I say
MOO2 fan somewhere? (Score:2)
Re:MOO2 fan somewhere? (Score:2)
Because without a patch, only hitting return results in winning sooner or later...
Re:MOO2 fan somewhere? (Score:2)
Damn that was depressing wasn't it?
Release Dates? (Score:5, Insightful)
Still and all, Apple has been harping on about the superiority of PowerPC for so long that I'm even more surprised to see them switch when IBM has these things, which look like the answers to a couple of Apple's problems, coming up.
I'd be interested in seeing what Steve Jobs saw on Intel's roadmap for the next few years that convinced him...
Re:Release Dates? (Score:2)
A 14W 970 sounds nice, but its another series... what performance downsides does this sudden energy modesty come with?
And the duals: Not yet available, but promised from 1.6-2.5Ghz.. after marketing bullshit reduction, this means 1.6, 1.8 and maybe 2.0 soon, 2.5 Ghz maybe in a year or so. And how about the termal issues? Its nice to know it can powerdown one core, but this sounds a bit li
Re:Release Dates? (Score:3, Insightful)
Two words: Project LaGrande [extremetech.com].
In short, Apple wants to promote media in all forms; iMovie, iTunes, iLife, iPhoto, GarageBand, etc. In order to do this as broadly as they want (think iPod, ARM-based handhelds, media-on-the-go, etc.), the media conglomerates need to know they're protected. This means STRONG DRM built into the silicon itself. This means Project LaGrande.. and of course lower-po
Re:Release Dates? (Score:3, Insightful)
So the media conglomerates are demanding DRM on user-created content? I don't get it.
Re:Release Dates? (Score:2)
Steve did say in the presentation that the roadmap for compute power per watt was one major driver. I think this consideration is mostly for the notebooks because Apple sells more notebooks than desktops, heat and power are huge issues for notebooks. That said, the G5's in the
Apple knows what they are doing (Score:4, Interesting)
IBM application note on PPC 970 MP (Score:5, Informative)
From the notes:
The dual 64-bit core PowerPC970MP(TM) (970MP) is the next evolutionary step in the PowerPC 970 family of microprocessors. The higher frequency grade versions of the 970MP consume higher amounts of power than earlier IBM microprocessors do, and that can cause temperature issues. Each 970MP processor core contains a thermal diode used to monitor its operating temperature. The thermal diode must be monitored to ensure that the maximum operating temperature of the 970MP is not exceeded.
They're going to be awfully hard to program (Score:5, Funny)
The press release is in Japanese; as of this writing, IBM has not released an English version.
Assembly is bad enough. I can't imagine assembly in Kanji.
Re:They're going to be awfully hard to program (Score:4, Funny)
Re:They're going to be awfully hard to program (Score:2)
Assembly is bad enough. I can't imagine assembly in Kanji.
Trying to stop cracking up. Kanji or any other ideograms.
FalconProbably too late now (Score:5, Insightful)
But still, the power use of these chips is very impressive. Always liked Motorola but AMD64 is where I'm at now (it's close in name to CBM64 too
Re:Probably too late now (Score:2)
Fine Shirt... (Score:4, Funny)
oh, i get it (Score:4, Funny)
Who cares? (Score:4, Insightful)
Part of what makes the Mac experience what it is is that Apple doesn't try to cram legacy support into every product they make. With Apple it's out with the old and in with the new; PPC will be a dead end like 68k.
Re:Who cares? (Score:3, Insightful)
Apple amounts to only 1% or so of PPC sales. The other guys - makers of servers and embedded devices - most certainly do care.
You should watch
G5 Powerbook? (Score:5, Insightful)
This sounds exactly like what Apple needed for a G5 powerbook. Did Steve just get a little too impatient? Had he waited another month maybe he would have found the answer for a G5 powerbook? Did Apple threaten IBM that they would go to Intel if something didn't change soon? (and now IBM has delivered, but perhaps a bit too late)
I don't understand.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Does everything HONESTLY think Apple didn't know the exact release date of the 970MP BEFORE they announced their switch?
Apple knew when and where this was going to be released, and they know when and where Intel will release their next series. They switched because they wanted to, this isn't a surprise to them.
PowerPC the last frontier? (Score:4, Interesting)
Personally I'd be glad to see x64-only chips with the 32-baggage dropped, and a BIOS standard that allows booting straight into 64-bit. That will really split the x64 from the x86, and give us cheaper and lighter chips. As for the PPC, I'm glad its still there. The price/performance ratio may be bad (relative to the Athlon64), but for one the base architecture is good, and diversity, which pushed semiconductors in general so far during the 90s is good for the industry.
Software for which source code is available (free or otherwise) is the only thing that can diversify the CPU market. People are stuck with a single CPU and operating system, both ill-designed, simply because their closed-source software will only run on that combination. Some awesome technologies like the Alpha chip, the Ultrasparc, the IRIX OS etc have died simply for that reason.
English Press Release (Score:5, Informative)
This should be significantly more informative than the earlier available Japanese documents.
Re:English Press Release (Score:3, Funny)
no shared cache (Score:3, Interesting)
Is shared cache a premium feature, maybe similar to power4+'s external L3 cache?
InfoWorld covered this (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Widescreen ibook anyone? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Widescreen ibook anyone? (Score:3, Insightful)
Why use a 13-16 Watt PowerPC chip when you can use a 27-watt [tomshardware.com] Pentium M?
Your batteries will last longer. It'd be nice if your laptop could last the length of long plane flights. This may not matter as much now as it did previously, what with some airlines offering outlets, and wireless.
FalconRe:Widescreen ibook anyone? (Score:3, Informative)
The new FX chips would probably be a welcome replacement for G4s if only to replace the archaic bus (though I doubt Apple will bother), but they're not good enough to replace Intel's current laptop chips, much less the future chips.
Intel is releasing Yonah-core Pentium Ms early next year. They're going to address the Pentium M's floating point weaknesses,
Re:Widescreen ibook anyone? (Score:3, Insightful)
Also, according to the link you posted, the 27-watt Pentium M only goes up to 2.13 GHz. That is not much more than the 970FX chips which use _half_ the power for up to 1.6 GHz. I would rather have a 1.6GHz processor at 16 watts than a 2.13 GHz Pentium M at 27 watts. That is almost _twice_ the power consumption for only 0.53 more GHz. I think I will pass.
Almost half the power consumption, _plus_ the ability to run Mac OS X on sweet
Re:Widescreen ibook anyone? (Score:3, Informative)
Besides, Apple isn't going to use these things. They'd have to redesign PowerBook chipsets and motherboards for a computer that, at best, they'd be selling for less than 2 years. It's much more likely that they'll transition all current G4 computers to Pentium Ms first.
These just-announced FX chips compete with the lower end of Intel laptop chips, while the Yonah-core chips Intel is releasing early next y
Re:Widescreen ibook anyone? (Score:4, Informative)
On top of that, the Pentium M outperforms the 970FX core clock for clock by most metrics.
Re:Widescreen ibook anyone? (Score:4, Interesting)
Also-ran, anyone?
Seriously, not an anti-Apple troll, but this strikes me as just a wee bit sad...
With both Intel and AMD having decent dual-core offerings now (with AMD's absolutely dominating anything else on the market for both performance and low power), not to mention the impending dual core Pentium-Ms... Combined with Apple choosing to go with x86 (most likely, the same aforementioned dual-Ms)...
Does IBM even have a market for these anymore? This strikes me as nothing but wasted effort on their part. Even their embedded market won't care about this, when a few watts means far more than a second core...
Re:Widescreen ibook anyone? (Score:3, Interesting)
No. The M certainly beats even the Venice core for power consumption (though not by much, when a fan alone can draw more than either of them at idle) - No arguing that, Intel wins that battle for now.
But when the dual Athlon 64s trounce Intel's best offerings, and with a power consumption at least in the same ballpark as the Pentium M... Well, that makes for a pretty impressive product, to the point that it amazes me
not for quite a while (Score:2)
Re:Are you serious? "??????????" (Score:2)
It is in Japanese. The "?" means your browser encoding is not set right, or you don't have an appropriate font to display.
Re:Are you serious? "??????????" (Score:2)
Re:Motherboards (Score:2)
A good source will soon be all of the Apple users throwing out their PPC-based Macs. Lotsa cheap G3 and G4 systems to stick more RAM in and install Linux or BSD on :)
Re:Bragging Rights on spec... (Score:4, Informative)
Foreground app has the first processor, some busy app in the background (file copy, MP3 encoding, DeCSS, photoshop filter, etc) gets the second. You're much happier because your system isn't taking a few seconds to respond to each mouse click.
2001 called... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:in 5 years (Score:2, Insightful)
PowerPC is in many places you wouldn't think of. Many blade servers and storage boxes use PPC. Since IBM isn't branding "PowerPC Inside" on with thier customers, it's a little harder to tell who is using it and who isn't.
IBM wont miss Apple too much. Apple really wont grow the PowerPC business much. There's more growth for the PowerPC elsewhere, and that growth is occuring.
Re:Babelfish says ... (Score:3, Funny)
Didn't you intend to say: "...has such A poor command of the English language?
Sheesh! Pot meet kettle.