1.3Gig Dual PPC A1XE

[chromozone]

GDay All
Has any one else heard references to a 1.3G XE?
Not sure but it may even support Dual PPC's.
I'm in Australia & heard it over hear via a supplier.

Can anyone confirm this is a planned product. ?

[tonyw]

The PPC 970 chip has been announced by IBM. It is expected to be released in 1.3 or 1.8 GHz versions, maybe this year, maybe next. Once it has been available for long enough that small orders like ours can be taken, people like Mai will be able to make some plug-in boards for them.

Meanwhile we have to put up with the poor, old-fashioned ordinary lightning-fast 800 MHz G4. Maybe one day we'll get the special "greased" lightning version.

tony

[Billsey]

Tony, MAI is a fabless chip designer. They don't even make the chips they design. They're certainly not going to make boards of any kind. :-)

[jd997uk]

@chromozone
There will be a dual G4 module available for the XE later on this year. Hyperion have had one for a little while and partial support for it will be in OS4.
Pictures of the module are available here.
I believe the card will be available with processors up to the current 1.3GHz top end CPU's.

-john

[mikeymike]

It will be "on the expensive side" as well :-)

[ikir]

It would be nice to have one! :idea:

I want a dual PPC Amiga :-)

[KennyR]

Don't get your hopes up too much. 800Mhz G4s are rare and expensive as it is, without going into 1.3GHz ones. And getting the chips is only the start - they have to be turned into boards, which isn't going to be easy when they're too expensive but all for a few people to afford.

And when they finally do get them, I suppose people will demand 2x 1.8Ghz ones instead...

[Quixote]

KennyR:

And when they finally do get them, I suppose people will demand 2x 1.8Ghz ones instead...

;-) Naturally.  There never was a future-proof computer, and there never will be.

[Rob]

There are a few more things to consider before getting too excited
about dual processor boards.

1. Applications or games have to be written to support dual processors
otherwise there is no benefit.

2. Software written for a single processor will run slower on a dual
processor board.

[tonyw]

@Billsey:

Mate, you're quite right. I should have said "Mai can design a board."

tony

[mikeymike]

@ Rob

In response to your first point:
If you have two processors, and the operating system has been designed to efficiently use multiple processors (I use the word 'efficiently' because if SMP is implemented badly you may as well throw the dual CPU module out the window!), then one CPU can be doing work while another application (which hasn't been designed to multi-thread) uses the other.  The application doesn't ask to use CPU0, it fires up a process, and the kernel decides what CPU is going to work on that process.  So while there isn't the advantage to be had of multi-threaded applications being able to use both CPUs at once, the application will still run faster on a dual CPU system.

In response to your second point:
Rubbish.  Where did you get that from?  I'm not even sure where to begin to correct you on this one, if you explain your logic behind this statement, I might be able to correct that :-)

If an operating system supports multiple processors, then there is an immediate benefit in running multiple processors.  The benefit is even greater still if programs running on the multiple CPU system are written to be multi-thread'able.  Threads, simply put, are like mini-processes running under the main process.  The kernel can, if it wants to, put 8 threads from a process onto 8 CPUs running in the system, and the work effectively gets done up to 8 times quicker than on an equivalent speed but single CPU system.

Another advantage of running a multiple processor system is that if an application decides to saturate one CPU for ages, you've got a spare :-)  Yes, a process can saturate both CPUs, but anyway :-)

As an on-the side note to multi-CPU newbies: If you have 2x 800MHz CPUs in a system, it doesn't make it a 1600MHz system!

[mikeymike]

Having said all that, I think most 'average' computer users (not doing anything hugely taxing with their system, just average everyday apps) won't benefit a great deal through upgrading to a dual CPU setup.

The time when you do want to upgrade to a dual CPU setup is when you actually *know* the CPU is a major bottleneck in your trying to do something on the machine.  This isn't necessarily as simple as it sounds to work out, as CPU usage can go way up just because other hardware is bottlenecking a process.  Disk I/O is a favourite.  Given the choice between a dual CPU setup or a single CPU machine with 5 fast hard disks set up to do RAID striped, I'd take the disks :-)

If you think the CPU is the major bottleneck, then using a decent set of performance monitoring tools that can report disk I/O, processor queue length, page faults, etc. is what you need to be sure of your diagnosis of the situation.  You need to be able to trace the bottleneck from the beginning to the end of the task being processed.

Applications support is an important factor as well, though for Rob suggested to be a problem,  it would have to be the most screwed up application I've ever seen (and I can't think of one doing this) to run slower on a dual CPU system :-)

[jeffimix]

Well, I don't really know too much about this so take my words with a pinch of salt but.

I always thought that you could write the OS to take full advantage of the two processors, so that anything written nto hardware banging, but through the OS, would take advantage as transferred. I know it doesn't work like that in reality, but is this merely because the OSes out there don't really take advantage of the dual processors like they could?

Second, I know that two 800Mhz processors Don't = a 1600Mhz processor, they have overhead, which is what stops them, correct?

Do Mac OS computers split up tasks between the two processors, so while one program runs on one processor, others can use the other one? This osunds really clever to me, but I agree its truly only useful if you do something on par with rendering two scenes at once in a 3D app. (Although I found that even on 1Ghz macs the barrier seems to be transferring data to disk. Never render straight to a zip disk, or floppy. Harddrives run faster, A question I have is, would the faster harddrives out there be the bottle neck nowadays,  If you could puttheir performance of data writing into hertz what would it be? RPMs mean nothing compared to the processor... just say if disks are bottle neck, I wonder, because if they are, whats the point of a 2gig processor? (for some apps that write almost constantly))

El cheapo IDE Harddrives nowadays are doing about 40..50 MB per second.

[ksk]

I'm almost certain that the 1.3Ghz card will be a single CPU card without L3 cache.

But it is almost as sure that it does not become available during this year... we can hope but the economies are against it.

In the end, time (&Alan R.) will tell.  


Also a dual  750FX @ 1Ghz would be a very interesting (fanless?) product...