What If It Wasn't PPC

[Hammer]

quarkx wrote:
I haven't been keeping up on PPC, so forgive this if it sounds dumb, but isn't the cell processor multiple PPC cores?

On PS3, it's 1 PPE + 7 SPE. PPE code doesn't run on SPEs.

Xbox 360’s Xenon has 3 PPEs @3.2Ghz, each CPU core issues two instruction per cycle and it’s equipped with VMX/Altivec with MS’s Direct3D dot product instructions. 3 PPEs shares a 1.6Ghz L2 cache.

[Hammer]

AeroMan wrote:

dammy wrote:

Which magic in ia32 and amd64 are you thinking about ?

Does quad core with direct connect architecture for under $200 USD count?

Dammy

Freescale has an 8 core chip running @ 1.5GHz. The QorIQ P4080.
It also has loads of on chip peripherals that ia´s and amd´s doesn´t.

On “many cores” front, AMD’s Radeon HD 4850/4870 (RV770)has 800 scalar processors.

Anyway, each of QorIQ P4080's e500 cores issues two instructions per cycle. A total of 16 instruction issues per cycle.

P4080 use e500mc variant. E500v2 variant includes a double precision floating point. e500's vector units are 64bits wide i.e. 2X 32bit. This is like AMD's 64bit 3DNow SIMD.
 

But the focus for PPC market is not desktop PCs anymore. So we should not expect these beasts in our desktops

Hardly a processing beast i.e. it's like gluing 8 PPC440 with 64bit SIMDs.