IBM PPC 970 to hit 2.5ghz

[Mike_Amiga]

I read recently that for Macs or indeed the humble miggy would have to have software written or rewritten to take advantage of the extra speed those chips.

It was an article in a Mac magazine about what Apple are going to do next to keep up with the PC/Intel market with regard to processing power.

[Hattig]

I wish that Amiga.org would keep me logged in

there's still a lot of real estate open on that die

Yes, IBM use a lot of automation in their design - the IBM 970 is not an efficient processor at all, but on the other hand, IBM didn't spend $2B and 10 years designing it.

isn't the XE using the same processor hookup as Apple

Yes, but that is for G3 and G4, not for the 970 - Apple will need a new system controller for the 970, as the interconnect is completely different.

[amigamad]

Looks good about time ppc caught up.
 :-)

[BlackMonk]

Aye, I believe the PPC970 uses something called the "AIO" or "Apple I/O" bus instead of the G3/G4 Maxbus (maybe same bus for earlier 60x CPUs?)  450 MHz double-pumped for an effective 900 MHz rate.  And the interface, while not explicitly HyperTransport, seems to share some of the traits.  It would make sense considering that 1) Apple is part of the HT consortium and 2) word on the street is that Apple helped IBM design the system bus part of things.

IBM is an enterprise.  They sell 32-bit PowerPC CPUs.  They know that their customers do NOT want to rewrite all their applications in order to support a new CPU.  I would rather think that switching from a G4 to a PPC970 would entail either extremely minimal code changes or perhaps none at all.  IBM's customers would be angry if IBM broke legacy application support--look at how UltraSPARC, PA-RISC, MIPS, Alpha, and x86 are still around.  Their strength lies in part that a newer CPU works with applications written on an older CPU.

The POWER/PowerPC instruction set was defined as a 64/32 bit one something like 10 years ago, so it isn't like IBM is pulling this out of thin air either.

I think it's been known that the PPC970 SIMD instructions are "Altivec" for a while, now.  IBM might not have named them explicitly, but pretty much everyone knew.  Well, everyone who was following this CPU, that is.  

The only REAL issue with this is support.  Apple co-designed the interface.  IBM is integrating it into their workstations and blades and servers.  Who is going to develop and market a relatively low-cost motherboard?  It took HOW long to get these G3/G4 motherboards on the market?  And they are missing HOW many "modern" x86 features?

Maybe IBM will allow people to OEM their workstation motherboards and this won't be an issue.  Still, though, I'd think that the motherboard would be THE primary concern for using this new CPU with any future Amiga.

Amiga gets dragged up to date at last!

[downix]

Mike_Amiga wrote:
I read recently that for Macs or indeed the humble miggy would have to have software written or rewritten to take advantage of the extra speed those chips.

It was an article in a Mac magazine about what Apple are going to do next to keep up with the PC/Intel market with regard to processing power.

To take advantage of the 64-bit code, of course the OS and apps will have to be re-written.  However, the point of this design is code-reuse.  It can function as a G4-replacement as-is.  You just won't get maximum benefit without the rewrite.  Think the 386 which acted like  a higher-speed 286 for ages until OS's were written to take advantage of it.

[Psy]

strobe wrote:

CPU prices were never a major factor in cost.

Right but before Apple couldn't drop its prices becouse there was nothing to replace the aging duel 1.42 Power Macs.  With the 970s Apple can sell single 2.5GHZ Power Macs forabout  the same price if they wanted to and that would stop Apple's marketshare from shrinking as there will be a decent value for Macs again.

Plus Apple can sell duel 2.5Ghz to really show off.

[Herewegoagain]

I think it's been known that the PPC970 SIMD instructions are "Altivec" for a while, now. IBM might not have named them explicitly, but pretty much everyone knew. Well, everyone who was following this CPU, that is.

Well, I did know that it was stated before the SIMD unit would be Altivec compatable, but now it says Altivec SIMD on the specs.  It's just a releif that they are not "going their own direction" with the Altivec unit.

[BlackMonk]

Yeah, though considering the market they have with Apple, going their own way with the SIMD stuff would be shooting themselves in the foot, to an extent.  Why make the extra effort to make an incompatible solution when you can use an already pre-defined solution that there's a market for?  Knowhadamean?

But yeah, it's nice that they are solidly labelling it as Altivec.

Psy wrote:

Right but before Apple couldn't drop its prices becouse there was nothing to replace the aging duel 1.42 Power Macs.

Aging?  The dual 1.42 GHz PowerMacs only just came out like a month ago.  I'm not even sure if they are shipping yet.  Apple has been keeping up a 3-tiered pricepoint on their desktop "pro" line for a while.  I'd say even since the 7x00/8x00/9x00 days.  The new PPC970 systems would either displace all the G4 desktops or would be situated at the top prices, so around $3500 for the top of the line model.

downix wrote:

To take advantage of the 64-bit code, of course the OS and apps will have to be re-written.

To elaborate even further, apparently IBM has been contributing to the source code for Darwin, OS X's underlying foundation, for a while now.  And even a year ago there were references in the source code that IBM submitted that referenced SIMD instructions.  From what I gather as well, IBM (or someone) has been adding 64-bit extensions to bits and pieces for a while.  Since the underlying PPC foundation (Darwin) can be run on other IBM systems, the justification was that IBM was tweaking it to run on their POWER3/POWER4 workstations as an evaluation to replace AIX or some such thing.

Anyway, I don't think it will 1) be too much of an effort to get some real benefit from the 64-bit extensions (both memory and number crunching) and 2) there already seems to have been work done towards this anyway which would imply that they knew about the switch to 64 bits for a while and that they've been planning it for a while.

Heck, with the long lead-in time until the PPC970 release, I'm sure some Apple developers have prototype PPC970 systems that they can use to prepare the OS for when Apple releases the new systems.  Either way, Apple gets a performance boost regardless of the OS taking specific advantage of the new features.

Oh, and there's been some talk on one of the Mac messageboards I frequent that IBM tends to be conservative on their performance estimates.  And that the original clockspeed estimates were made last October so they've been refining their processes in the intervening months which helps account for the magically-higher clockspeeds.

Someone brought up concerns that those clockspeeds were guesses for moving to the .09 and .065 micron processes (did I move the decimal point too much?) but the press release specifically lists those speeds for the .13 micron process which is what the first run of PPC970 CPUs will be created with.

Anyway, enough o' my yappin'!

[Psy]

BlackMonk wrote:

Aging?  The dual 1.42 GHz PowerMacs only just came out like a month ago.  I'm not even sure if they are shipping yet.  Apple has been keeping up a 3-tiered pricepoint on their desktop "pro" line for a while.  I'd say even since the 7x00/8x00/9x00 days.  The new PPC970 systems would either displace all the G4 desktops or would be situated at the top prices, so around $3500 for the top of the line model.

Yhea but the dual 1.42 PowerMacs were not that top of the line when they came out.  Apple for some time has had a performance gap.  The 970 will hopefully close the gap and bring much need value to the PowerMacs.

[KingTutt]

Face it guys it will be a long wait before we see OS4, and an even longer wait before we see it on a PPC 970. I'm going back to my etch-a-sketch for now...pffft.