PPC 970: Apple, Thendic, Eyetech

[asian1]

Hi
Thendic had announced possibillity of using IBM PowerPC 970 in the next generation of Pegasos board (MorphOS-News).
Apple plan to use Motorola G5 (Register).
Any news / announcement about the possible CPU for the future Eyetech / Amiga Inc boards?

From MorphOS-News:

"Concerning the new PowerPC970: today it is not possible to use this CPU with the Pegasos; however in the future it will be. We do not have a sample yet!
We cannot offer it to you until IBM releases the product commercially. We have a close relationship with IBM (and Motorola) and we do get samples of new chips to test them well ahead of product releases, but we do not have samples of this CPU yet. It should not be too much trouble for us to gets this running. The engineering that supports a product like this is at the highest professional level and the documentation is very good making our job much easier."

[Kronos]

Will Apple use them ? Allmost certainly !!

Will bPlan or MAI use them ? Learn to walk or crawl before
you start on the marathon.

[Seehund]

asian1 wrote:

Any news / announcement about the possible CPU for the future Eyetech / Amiga Inc boards?

Eyetech don't design hardware, not anything remotely approaching the complexity of a mobo/computer or related to the Terons/"AmigaOnes" anyway. Amiga Inc. has nothing at all to do with hardware.

AmigaOS will only get whatever Eyetech (or some hypothetical and improbable other new licensee) can redistribute. Even if there were personal computers with PPC970s today (instead of maybe a year from now), they'd be out of reach for AmigaOS until someone could/would license them and redistribute them with AOS and some hardware-license verification mechanism. Then porting AOS to them could start. And after that we'd only be allowed to buy them via this hypothetical licensed distributor.

Bill Buck babbling about using the 970 "with the Pegasos" in the future is nonsense. It would naturally require a completely new board design, or it'd be a waste of a perfectly fine CPU. Maybe he's referring to "Pegasos" as a complete product line.

[olegil]

Forget anything Thendic says about hardware development on a CPU that's not gonna be out for another year.

The chance of the PPC970 being a success in a Pegasos or an A1-XE is about as likely as an IA-64 working in a Pentium 2 motherboard. Oh, that's right. It doesn't.

64 bit CPU with an FSB of 900MHz should really not be used with a northbridge of 133MHz/32 bit.  You would end up putting all your memory and at least the AGP on the CPU card (AGP uses DMA to system memory, and since the memory is on the wrong side of the northbridge... Move it, or end up with chip ram/fast ram all over again.)

This discussion is fruitless. Existing chipsets will handle the G3 and G4 processors quite nicely. If upgraded to the Articia Sa, both these computer series could use 166MHz FSB also (available on the 750FX and the 7450?). But to use any 64 bit daughter cards wouldn't be that useful.

[strobe]

@olegil

Good points but I would also add that the uses of a 64bit CPU are limited especially when dealing with all our legacy titles. If anything it will run 32bit software slower than a comparable 32bit processor.

64bit gives you what, memory addressing over 4Gigabytes? Is this useful? On the other hand AltiVec has a lot of applications especially in multimedia, encryption, networking, encoding, and compressing. None of these things are improved with a 64bit CPU.

[THEONE]

Apple is goign Itanium True 64bit and much faster.What the Hombre was goign to use the Parisc. :-D

[Minion]

strobe wrote:
@olegil

Good points but I would also add that the uses of a 64bit CPU are limited especially when dealing with all our legacy titles. If anything it will run 32bit software slower than a comparable 32bit processor.

64bit gives you what, memory addressing over 4Gigabytes? Is this useful? On the other hand AltiVec has a lot of applications especially in multimedia, encryption, networking, encoding, and compressing. None of these things are improved with a 64bit CPU.

I'd put a lot of money on the fact that the PPC970 will run 32 bit PPC software a lot faster than any PPC CPU today, not because it is 64bit, but because it is a much faster and more powerful CPU.  You will most likely find that it runs 64 bit software SLOWER than 32 bit software, most likely about 5% slower (quoted form some CPU designer guy).

The point is who cares, 64 bit is a nice buzzword that gets people to buy stuff (presumably thinking 64 bit=twice as fast as 32 bit)
A 64 bit CPU has nothing to do with memory = thats the memory interface that deals with that.  Remember the EC020 that came with the A1200?  That was a 32 bit CPU with 24 bit adressing so it could address 2^24 = 167777216bytes or 16 MB of RAM.  If you want to just talk bits, then bare in mind that the Pentium4 has some internal parts that run at 256 Bit and I believe the AthlonXP in parts runs at 512.  A 64 bit CPu in this sense deals with accuracy - it can deal with 2^32 (ie 4 billion) times the number of integers of a 32 bit CPU.

[trgse]

nope they are not,
get your facts straight.

:quickdraw:

Minion traditionally a cpu's 'bittage' has been deemed by its ALU and when they say 'its 64bit' they mean ALU...wich would allow for apps to be allocated more then 2gb of memory.......

[The_Editor]

Poxy 2 gb barrier    :-?

[Argo]

But you only need 640K at most...   :-P

[Rob]

Why worry about PPC 970 now.  First Pegasos or Amigaone has to be a
success for their to be any further developement of either range.

However, I don't see Eyetech at any disadvantage to Thendic/Bplan.
Eyetech have a partnership with Mai Logic to supply Teron range to
industrial clients as well as Amiga users.  If Eyetech's sales are
healthy the then Mai will be prepared to develope newer chipsets and
boards.

You really should read the Article on Mai's site.  It is really is
something positive amongst all the current gloom and doom.

 

[DethKnight]

as far as the "bit-ness" of ppc970 , I'd recommend reading;

http://arstechnica.com/archive/newspro/news-archive-10-2002.html

re: why worry about ppc970......aros maybe, maybe macos X, other things non-amiga..et al

64bits not useful for you....well maybe not *now* but possibly for someone sometime in the near future
(if you build it, they will come....)
Might as well have *more* than necessary instead of less

[ksk]

I would not be too interested in seeing PPC970 (900Mhz front side bus) on a motherboard with 133Mhz memory bus...  

If the CPU card would be build with some 900Mhz onboard memory, then the performance would be decent, but then the price of such a CPU card would be around new PowerMac...

Better just design a completely new motherboard ... in 2005 or so....

[ksk]

@strobe
"If anything it will run 32bit software slower than a comparable 32bit processor."

That might be true with some of the 64 bit variants of future x86 CPUs where there might be no full backwards compatibility. But PowerPC has been designed to be 64bit in the very beginning, so I would not expect any slowdowns with 32bit code.

( Hyperion guys at OS4 list about 64bit PPC.
"64 bit PowerPC architectures *can* run their 32 bit subset code with no
speed penality (as opposed to IA-64), and only marginal changes in the
OS code and no changes in user code needs to be done to achieve this.")