Hyperspeed: Yes, that's right - a 2MB Intel graphics chipset. It can barely do 800x600 without flickering.
OK, OK, I conceed that their graphics sucks.
Hyperspeed: Personally I was delighted when Apple announced the Dual-G5 was the World's most powerful computer.
Hard to vailidate, given that there were plenty of dual-CPU x86 solutions available at the time. Of course, whether a computer is defined as a "PC" or a "Workstation" is just as fuzzy.
That dual G5 cost as much as a good x86 server, too -- with liquid cooling to boot. ;-)
Hyperspeed: Innovative things like the Transmeta Crusoe couldn't compete, it was Intel this, AMD that.
Duh. Crusoe was slow. x86 chips at Crusoe speeds don't make a lot of heat. People don't seem to realize that the releationship between performance and heat is exponential. If you pull back performance a little bit, heat goes down a lot, thus, low-end PPC chips run cool compared to scorching-hot x86 chips, and haphazardly overclocked G5 processors in high-end Macs need liquid cooling compared to one of the new x86 mobile processors.
It's not about technilogical supiriority. It's about what the customer wants. If people are willing to put up with heat to get killer performance, that's what they get. Crusoe aimed for a niche market and just didn't strike it big. Now that heat is a major problem in portable computers, the big dogs are changing their priorities.
Crusoe was a good idea that didn't perform well in real-world situations, and probably got its inspiration from the FPU bug in the Pentium ("fix it in software"). Sony thought the Cell would be a kickass general-purpose chip that would allow them complete independence from any graphics partners. But, when they realized a dedicated GPU still does the job better, they changed their plans. No, they're not using four Cell processors in the PS3, they're using a CPU with muticored DSPs. Gee wiz. It's almost a throwback to the times when we had to buy FPUs seperately. These days, we call then "PPUs", or physics processors. :-)
Hyperspeed: For God's sake people. Buy something interesting. It's like everyone in the world buying a Mercedes when we could be driving minis, Smart cars, scooters, Quads and stuff.
I'd take
this over a motorcycle, anyday. God, I wish the US government would stop pushing SUVs up our butts.
Hyperspeed: We have to double our CPU power every 18 months! So what if we wanted to triple it... would Intel break their own Daddy's "Law"?
GPUs were doing that for a while. Of course, they're highly vectorized processors and generate about as much heat as a CPU, these days. Also, once people realized that a dedicated coproccessor could do a better job than a CPU (imagine that!), the market grew REAL fast. I'm sure Intel didn't see 3DFX coming at all while they were spending several years developing MMX.
When there's a sudden burst of innovation, usually it's because what we're using now isn't that good. Hence, my belief that if PPC is sooooooo technologicly supirior to x86, why don't PPC chips run circles around x86, instead of just keep-up?
Bloodline: I really don't think VP code is a good idea... Also Java is MUCH faster on the Core Duo than on the PPC, there have been quite a few threads about it on the Mac forums.
Why not VP? It's stupid for time-critical code, but would be great for GUI stuff instead of using interpreted languages like Perl. Also, Virtual Processing is a bit different than a Virtual Machine, like Java. I do
not see VP as a way of making things more portable. Write-Once, Run-Everywhere is a pipe dream when everyone wants their hardware to stand out. Coding for the lowest common denominator is dumb.
If there's one thing I've learned as a web programmer, is that things are portable because the developers are familiar with each platform they want to support, and WANT to support them all. If a developer doesn't give a damn about a platform, their code not going to work on it. Period.
I see using VP with native low-level code sort of like using a CISC front-end on a RISC core. It has its uses, so long as it's not abused.
I also find it funny that Java would run faster on an x86 given that it, technically, is big-endian native.
Bloodline: Apple had no choice...IBM weren't serious about pushing the 970 against the Athlon and P4.
Yeah, with the console market sewn-up, they have no reason to dabble with desktop computers, anymore. And since consoles and purpose-build devices don't need robust chipsets with lots of expandability, I don't think Cell et al are going to have any place in the desktop market. A CPU is no good without a decent chipset, no matter how much vector "supercomputer" power it has.
