Inside the IBM PowerPC 970

[Argo]

From ArsTechnica:
"IBM's Tuesday, October 15th announcement of the PowerPC 970 was one of the most heavily anticipated processor announcements in recent memory. Mac users, would-be Mac users, Linux enthusiasts, and anyone with a serious interest in desktop computing waited to see just what Big Blue would unveil as the first offensive in its newly announced effort to bring 64-bit RISC computing out of the server closet or rendering house and onto the mainstream desktop."

Read the rest of the article here.

[Elektro]

I hope that the price for this thing won't be too big.

[DethKnight]

yeah, likewise
as this is going to be my next cpu purchase, whence it becomes available

[System]

I hope Apple don't absorbe them all! :lol:

[whabang]

Please hurry, IBM! I don't know if we can hold much longer!  :-D

[olegil]

Good article as always. There's both positive and negative sides to any decision, but I sincerely believe the 970 is gonna be a blast. Now all we need is a chipset that supports it. I don't believe in Thendic's idea of using this on an ArticiaSa, to say the least. If I ever heard a bad idea, that's the one. Oh, and is there even any memory technology available at 900MHz? Or are we talking like 4 DDR modules in parallell to give the required bandwitdh? ;-)

*twiddling thumbs*

[Minion]

One thing to bare in mind -  the processor will probably cost about £400-£600 per unit at decent speeds.

[Argo]

What you didn't believe them when they said the the Pegasos is compatable will all future processors. I doubt it would work with the mystic G5 we've all heard about.

[olegil]

"will work" is one thing. "will be worth laying out serious dough for" is another thing. Any 64bit high-frequency fsb CPU will be _severly_ hampered by running the memory and the AGP through an Articia chipset. And please don't tell me you could have memory on the CPU board. That would be outside the PCI and AGP DMA space, just like accelerator memory is non-reachable from Z2 and onboard chips on the original Amiga design. Chip ram problem all over again, huh?

Nah, gimme a new chipset on a new motherboard.

[Wittgenstein]

One thing to bare in mind - the processor will probably cost about £400-£600 per unit at decent speeds.

Why should it be that expensive? The cost of a processor depends on the yield and the yield on the number of transistors. This processor does only have 52 millions of transistors which is 3 millions less than the P4. This means that the cost shouldnt be much higher than the P4. This is also the reason that the Power4 its so expensive. It has around 180 millions of transistors.

/W

[Snuden]

Good article as always. There's both positive and negative sides to any decision, but I sincerely believe the 970 is gonna be a blast.

Oh, yes... It looks very promising.

Now all we need is a chipset that supports it.

Yes, I really hope MAI Logic can pull it off.

I don't believe in Thendic's idea of using this on an ArticiaSa, to say the least. If I ever heard a bad idea, that's the one.

Is it even technically possible? I don't think so.

Oh, and is there even any memory technology available at 900MHz?

I've heard of 600 MHz DDR for the latest graphics card, but such memory does unfortunately not come cheap :-( And still not good enough, as we need 900 MHz modules.

[Hammer]

Why should it be that expensive? The cost of a processor depends on the yield and the yield on the number of transistors. This processor does only have 52 millions of transistors which is 3 millions less than the P4. This means that the cost shouldnt be much higher than the P4. This is also the reason that the Power4 its so expensive. It has around 180 millions of transistors.

I don’t think IBM’s PPC 970 product line is isolated from economic of scale factors...

[DethKnight]

@argo

the mystic G5 we've all heard about.

lol; same comment on the bottom of this page ->

http://www.architosh.com/news/2002-10/2002c-1023-mcp7457-rm1.phtml

[DethKnight]

Now all we need is a chipset that supports it

maybe IBM has one, who knows....further speculation esp.
re:BladeCenter servers here

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/53/27827.html


4 ddr in parallel...... seems like several reviewers comment that the ppc970 is designed to be very SMP or AMP friendly, almost as if intended to be non-solo.

[Minion]

Why should it be that expensive? The cost of a processor depends on the yield and the yield on the number of transistors. This processor does only have 52 millions of transistors which is 3 millions less than the P4. This means that the cost shouldnt be much higher than the P4. This is also the reason that the Power4 its so expensive. It has around 180 millions of transistors.

And what about the laws of supply and demand?

On the DDR memory - Nvidia were making noises about 1Ghz DDR (i.e. actually 500Mhzx2)for their NV30 Chips, unfortunately, they are very rare and expensive.
What could be used is either quad band memory or DDR-II so it could be 225Mhzx4 instead of 450x2