IBM tries ARM-style Licensing of PPC Processors

[WolfToTheMoon]

Last time I dug up numbers, the PPC market was estimated at ~500 million a year, comparable to MIPS (and far outstripped by ARM - ARM estimates 3 billion cores/year).  

X86 meanwhile were present in ~350-360 million desktops, servers and laptops last year, and embedded usage of x86 is almost a rounding error, so more than ~400 million total is unlikely.

(As an amusing aside, Western Design Centre also still claims "hundreds of millions" of 6502 instruction set cores per year, though a substantial portion of that is likely embedded in custom ASICs)

In terms of *revenue*, though, Intel makes about *7 times* more from their CPUs that Qualcomm (at second place) makes from their CPUs, as a result of a ridiculously higher average revenue per unit.

x86 outsells PowerPC even in the embedded market. Look it up, if you don't believe me. And the trend now is strongly towards x86 and ARM.

[WolfToTheMoon]

Since 2011, the market has shifted even more in favour of ARM and x86.

By revenue, for 2012





Bottomline, PPC is on it's way out.

[WolfToTheMoon]

I wonder how many  newly built washing machines still have 68k's inside them?

None, probably... Coldfires, yes.

[WolfToTheMoon]

Hmmmmm , yes now I kinda see it ...

Something like Pentium and Pentium M(obile) if Pentium M was made by  third party manufacturer ...

I can see Google going for the servers but I don't understand what NVidia gains by implementing Power unless they aim for the consoles ...

Is GPU somehow useful in a high end server ?

The whole point of project Denver was for nVidia to have a CPU+GPU combo to sell to the HPC market.
Before that, nVidia spent years trying to get a x86 license for the same purpose. And now they'll use IBM's POWER and ARM Denver....