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2GHz IBM Processors

Goodbye motorola :(

These seem like dark times for Apple, with not much light ahead (of course, it's not as bad as Apple pre-98...) From a software standpoint, Apple seems to be doing ok, but their hardware really needs work.

Personally, I've really given up all hope on Motorola... The G4 is a nice processor and all, but It can't keep up with the competition, and they have yet to even officially mention a desktop processor that blows the pants off of x86 processors. Right now, IBM seems to be Apple's best hope. Hopefully they can put out this new processor within 6-8 months, a year at the most.

I love the Mac platform (not like that :p ), and I know that the user experience is much better than anything else out there. I won't threaten to switch to windoze or anything, but I will say that Apple needs something good to keep attracting the switchers, and the people who are actually willing to use windoze...
 
Originally posted by gregorypierce
Why would it be a smack in the face to PC users? By Christmas AMD and Intel would still be faster in both terms of CPU clock and raw overall performance.
Click to expand...
I think if IBM can manage to put out a 2GHz chip with performance similar to a 1.3GHz POWER4, this chip will be roughly on par with or slightly slower than a 3GHz P4 in integer speed; however, I wouldn't be surprised to see it pull way, way ahead in operations that take advantage of AltiVec. The AltiVec-like unit will, I'm guessing, be able to handle double-precision FP in its new incarnation, and that means that if the OS X compiler can be sufficiently improved to automatically vectorize code to some degree, this new IBM chip will be very very very very fast at FP, faster by far than anything the x86 world will be able to offer for quite a while. Of course the chip's plain-jane FPU will likely be nothing to sneeze at, either.

The 6.4GB/s memory bandwidth figure quoted is suspiciously the same throughput offered by HyperTransport. So this new chip will certainly not be starved for data thanks to a crappy old G4-style bus.

Alex
 
On the processor rumors / roadmap for Apple:

Processors announced at the Microprocessor forum are usually some ways off, usually 6 months or more, though this is by no means a hard and fast rule. It is conceivable that through Apple's usual influence on it's suppliers the situation may be different in this case (their sales are effected more than other manufacturers by announcements like this), though there is no real reason to believe this is the case in actuality.

We also know that there is still life left in the old dog (Motorola) yet, and G4s with faster FSB's are around the corner, and will undoubtedly be used by Apple at some stage.

So, looking at the picture this way, our best guess has to be that true DDR machines with 7500 (G4++s) will probably appear in at the beginning of next year, and if there is to be a move to IBM processors it is going to happen n the mid to second half of next year.

Just got to put the realistic viewpoint here.

This isn't such a bad outlook. DDR-wise G4s will be formidable beasts, though we will still be looking at a performance deficit with the x86 world, unless Motorola can give us one last gasp and deliver impressive clock speeds. I for one wouldn't turn my nose up at a speedy DDR-aware G4.
 
Originally posted by G4scott
These seem like dark times for Apple, with not much light ahead (of course, it's not as bad as Apple pre-98...) From a software standpoint, Apple seems to be doing ok, but their hardware really needs work.
Click to expand...
I think if anything is making these times seem dark at the moment, it's Apple's business practices with regard to .Mac and Jaguar pricing. There is plenty of light ahead with regard to next-generation CPUs, and even more light when one considers what other options Apple has to stay competitive besides brute-force-quick CPUs. It seems like all the pieces, big and small, are in place for a Macintosh renaissance (by that, I mean, say, a doubling of market share) - the only missing piece is that new, next-generation Mac that wipes the floor with everything else. I think this new IBM chip is Apple's big chance. What Jobs has to worry about in the meantime is retaining the Mac customers he already has. I'll bet that for every switcher to the Mac platform, there is at least one switcher moving to the PC because it's such a better value (or at least apparent value). I don't think it would hurt terribly much for Apple to publicly state that the current Power Macs are upgradeable to the next-generation Mac CPU down the road, and to make a processor card upgrade available when the new IBM chip is available.

Alex
 
I See Stupid People

If it takes "years" to move the Mac to a whopping 2G processor, will anyone care?

Fact is, next to price, the other 95% look at processor speed as one of THE major buying incentive. If Apple intends to sway any of that 95%, our clock speeds must begin competing with the Dark Side... now. It seems that simple to me (which means it must not be that simple).

And while I'm typing...
**** the other 95%.
Let them keep doing their stupid things their stupid way. The more of them there are, the better we all look.

Keep up the good work Arn!

lazyrighteye
 
Originally posted by alex_ant
There is plenty of light ahead with regard to next-generation CPUs, and even more light when one considers what other options Apple has to stay competitive besides brute-force-quick CPUs...
Click to expand...

With motorola, it seems like that light moves 2 steps away from us for every step we take forward.

IBM's chip seems to be the processor that will wipe the floors with all other pee-cee's...

I was going to say something else, but I forgot...

damm...
 
Re: I See Stupid People

Originally posted by lazyrighteye
If it takes "years" to move the Mac to a whopping 2G processor, will anyone care?

Fact is, next to price, the other 95% look at processor speed as one of THE major buying incentive. If Apple intends to sway any of that 95%, our clock speeds must begin competing with the Dark Side... now. It seems that simple to me (which means it must not be that simple).

And while I'm typing...
**** the other 95%.
Let them keep doing their stupid things their stupid way. The more of them there are, the better we all look.

Keep up the good work Arn!

lazyrighteye
Click to expand...

Wow, you're the most Apple loyal newbie I've seen in quite a while... Most other newbies are saying "what's wrong with intel", and you're saying f*ck them all... I like that :p Just don't get too hardcore. Apple does need more market share to stay competitive.
 
We're going to know a lot more about all this once IBM gets to the podium and announces the new chips.

Say what you want about the megahertz myth. Windows machines feel very snappy in use, Macs tend to feel more sluggish. We need the speed IBM can promise. It's unfortunate Motorola has dropped the ball (being a Chicago-based company, I have a TON of cousins working there ... wait a minute, maybe they've been laid off...), but maybe Big Blue can jack up the MHz and pull us out of this.

We have the Best OS and the Best Industrial Design. We just need the Horsepower.
 
Last night I installed four HD's into my new dual 867 and I realized that this is the best case design I have ever seen. The fan is a little noisy, but what do you expect for something that will keep two processors, two optical drives, and four HD's cool. This evolution built on good design and good design theory has resulted in a machine that is nearly revolutionary...except for it's processors. jaguar is finally a solid optimization of a really good OS, so now that only leaves one point where Apple is not in the forefront, the processor.
The current processors are good, but they aren't as far ahead of the pack as the other elements. A G5 with real DDR and a faster bus should be untouchable in any debate or any benchmark. Let's just get one soon.
 
Originally posted by ElRayOX
Say what you want about the megahertz myth. Windows machines feel very snappy in use, Macs tend to feel more sluggish.

We have the Best OS and the Best Industrial Design. We just need the Horsepower.
Click to expand...

Jaguar fixes a lot of that. I've found that it's damn snappy.
 
Here's what I want (not being greedy)

What I would like is a machine that I can buy now (or very very soon) that takes into account that new things are going to be coming. I find it very hard to buy a new dual 1.25GHz machine today knowing that it meets my needs, but knowing that there are technologies coming that would be much, much better.

Give us a road map Apple!

I would love to be able to buy a machine today that had USB2, FireWire2, HyperTransport and the ability to be upgraded by swapping a daughter card. Or if that isn't doable, then give us a motherboard upgrade option.

I've been sitting on my G3 for waaaaay to long, constantly being underwhelmed by the new models and knowing that 6months after 6months there will be another speed bump.

I can understand keeping tight lipped about stuff, but being a little more open with the direction of things would have resulted (and would result) in more sales as far as people like me are concerned.

I'm not looking for anything free...I'm perfectly happy to buy a motherboard or preferrably a daughter card that results in a tidy profit for Apple. I'm just afraid to jump in the river, and Apple is making it that much worse by not providing any kind of a road map.

To make things worse, the rumors are vastly exceeding not only reality, but expectations. Remember all of those rumors of a G5 at the last MWSF? With no word from Apple, it seemed plausible. Then with nothing substantial announced there, it seemed like MWNY would be the place for the G5 to debut...now they're rumoring MWSF '03.

Now granted, these rumors are mostly generated by 12 year olds and shouldn't be believed, but the discrepency between the rumors and the reality is getting way to big and hurting Apple in the long run. Apple can prevent this by either providing more information to curb the rumors, or provide products that exceed the rumors (aint gonna happen).

See ya all at the Apple Store on Friday (Palo Alto for me)
 
Originally posted by gregorypierce


Why would it be a smack in the face to PC users? By Christmas AMD and Intel would still be faster in both terms of CPU clock and raw overall performance.
Click to expand...

While it is true that PC users will still have the clock speed advantage, a Power 4 Lite at 2GHz will outperform anything (single or dual) in the PC world.

A 1GHz Power4 is roughly equivalent to 4 2.2GHz Pentium IVs.
 
Well, I'm not thinking of switching either but after
talking to some friends about windows, and playing
around with the windows systems, I think I'd be
happy enough if I did switch.

I would seriously consider a windows machine for
my next system, but all my software is for the mac.

I've seen what the mac can offer. I've been using
a mac exclusively for almost fifteen year's. However,
I think that windows is good enough for me to work
with and the hardware isn't an issue as it always
seems to be with the mac.

Honestly, I don't see why a seasoned computer user
would switch to a mac. But the new, or inexperienced
computer user would definitely be better off with a mac.
 
Originally posted by beatle888
Well, I'm not thinking of switching either but after
talking to some friends about windows, and playing
around with the windows systems, I think I'd be
happy enough if I did switch.

Honestly, I don't see why a seasoned computer user
would switch to a mac. But the new, or inexperienced
computer user would definitely be better off with a mac.
Click to expand...

I think that the reasons to leave Windows are many.

Having just payed around with the machines of others, you are unlikely to have experienced the myriad problems Windows users face day to day.

I get the klez virus at lease three times a week (doesn't matter, as I read mail on my Mac), but for a Windows user this is a problem.

On my Windows machines, I get one BSOD a week (between 2 machines). 25% of the time, this is unrecoverable, which means serious repairs, and often reinstalling Windows. Either way, its 2 wasted hours a month.

Furthermore, while Intel and AMD are both faster at raw computation, Windows slows them considerably. The interface is still clunky, slow, and counterintuitive. I don't want to see Windows is shutting down for 5 seconds. I don't want to get Properties to find out a folder's size. I don't want to spend 10 minutes a day closing pop up windows in IE. I don't want to sign my first born to Mr. Gates in order to have a legal license.

While having a slew of hardware makes things cheaper, it also makes them less successful. This MoBo won't work with that card. This IRQ is already in use for that port, etc. My time is valuable enough that I would rather pay a premium to avoid the hassles.

The software argument is also pretty easy. There are 1,000,000 Windows titles. 9,990,000 of them are poorly coded crap, bloatware, spyware, etc. There are 10,000 titles for Mac....you do the math.

As an aside, if gaming is your thing, try a PS2...

I have to use Windows as a testing platform, and it sucks...a lot of developers are making the switch as a Mac is now a pretty UNIX box which works in a corporate environment, which is kind of a hold grail...

Anyway, there are a lot of good reasons to switch to Mac, and very few to leave. Power 4 Lite would seal the deal for a lot of people...
 
While 2GHz might be out of the question for a while, 1.6GHz might be about right, with something in the 1.4-1.5 range about perfect for a January release.

This would allow Apple several regular updates to the G5 to last them into 2004, when the next revision of the G5 would be released.

This would roughly follow Apple's patterns of upgrading.
 
IBM Roadmap

There's been a lot of referring to Motorola's roadmap for the PowerPC in the past: it might be worth looking at IBM's roadmap:
http://www-3.ibm.com/chips/products/powerpc/rdmap/
Looking at what's planned, we see a new series of PowerPCs that are:
multicore superscalar
SMP capable
Integrated SIMD (ie, vector processing, or "Alti-Vec like")
RapidIO
n-way crossbar CoreConnect
Call me an optimist, but this sounds much like the 64-bit PowerPC to be announced in October. So far, so obvious. The interesting thing is that this processor seems to coincide with the introduction of a low-k dielectric insulation. Coincidentally, IBM's new East Fishkill plant ( http://www-916.ibm.com/press/prnews.nsf/jan/B1F96D38480E6BC385256C070063FD88 ) has been set up to make low-k processors, and is currently gearing up to volume production by the end of the year. We can but hope that by the end of December this plant will be churning out large quantities of 64-bit PowerPCs. Question is, who'll want to buy them? Apple is one obvious possibility, but the scary thought is that IBM may be planning it's own family of desktops and entry-level servers running Linux.

D
 
benchmarks

now here is a question for all of you...is there a COMMON benchmark that can be run between a Wintel and Apple system? I am not concerned about the video as I know my new 16VRAM iBook or even a new DVI PowerBook won't hold a candle in video to my GF4 Ti4600 but on the business side or just computational processing power is there anything?
 
I would love it if apple could put these puppies into the next rev. of powermacs. The problem I see is that I remember seeing a post a while back saying that apple's current hardware won't support the power 4's. Even though its a PPC, its just incompatable w/ the current hardware. I don't know if this is true, or used to be true, but not anymore... But if that possible hurdle could be crossed, I'm so getting a new Pmac! My 8500 is just about maxed out.
 
You know, I really wish some of you (most of you?) stopped once and for all teh b/s about windows computers. Do you really need to do that ? does it make you sleep better at night ?? Are you so frustrated you have to come up with all this pure b/s about windows ?

I mean, come on. grow up. To me it sounds like looking for excuses to justify something (like yours is bigger than mine but mine is curved).

Two things I fail to understand: (a) why some of you do that at all (b) wtf are your arguments ? On (b) what I mean is that I have worked now for quite a few years in companies with pc's only and I cannot recall having all these problems at all. I can't remember the last time I had a crash and I consistently run many applications at the same time and the things are pretty fast.

Then I come home and enjoy my Mac
 
Vaporware

Sorry folks. I really don't mean to always be the negative nilly here, but I just don't think we'll be seeing anything like 2GHz G5s, Power4s or whatever they're being called today, anytime soon, if ever. Do I hope I'm wrong? Sure do. Do I think I'm wrong? Of course not.

This just sounds way too good to be true. Over the past 3 years I've been reading all these rumor sites, and I've yet to see anything in reality even close to the pre-MWExpo rumors hype (probably the worst by Apple itself this past January, but that's another story).

We have all read about how this or that particular new techology was gonna make Apple the king of computer manufacturers, how the new OS X would bury Microsoft, how the new PPC was going to crush Intel, etc, etc, etc. I mean I for one am just sick of this stuff. I simply can not latch onto all this fantasizing anymore.

My prediction? It ain't gonna happen. Apple will move to Intel or AMD first. In the near-term, Apple will compensate for hardware performance ineptness via quad-processor G4s.
 
Kethoticus:

This time around though, the rumors center around an actual chip that has actually been announced. This is starkly contrasted to the G5 rumors last year as well as the endless talk about some sort of 7470 or 7500 G4, or a full DDR FSB.

The fact is that the Power4 clocked in at 1.3ghz more than a year ago on 180nm technology. It is easy to believe it will hit 2.0ghz next year. I fully expect it to turn up during 2003, perhaps not at 2.0ghz, but then again it doesn't need that clock speed to perform well. We may not catch the P4... but we will be so much closer.
 
Re: Vaporware

Originally posted by Kethoticus
Sorry folks. I really don't mean to always be the negative nilly here, but I just don't think we'll be seeing anything like 2GHz G5s, Power4s or whatever they're being called today, anytime soon, if ever. Do I hope I'm wrong? Sure do. Do I think I'm wrong? Of course not.

My prediction? It ain't gonna happen. Apple will move to Intel or AMD first. In the near-term, Apple will compensate for hardware performance ineptness via quad-processor G4s.
Click to expand...

I doubt Apple will take the Intel route. Things aren't too rosey on that side of the fence either. P4 has a high clock rate but look at how Intel is getting sued over that now. x86-64 (Athlon, Opteron) hasn't proven itself yet and neither has IA-64. (Plus there's a lot of risk associated with IA-64. It's a whole different school of thought and another thread on it's own.)

However, quad processor G4s won't happen at least until the 7470 and really only if that processor goes back to using the full MERSI cache coherency protocol. The current batches of G4 class chips only use the four state MESI which makes them less efficient in quad processing environments without separate cache controller hardware, software, etc.

POWER4 Lite (this new PPC from IBM) looks, from what has been released about it so far, like it could be a winner. It would provide binary compatibility (investment protection), and a familiar environment (PPC ISA). It also has gobs of memory bandwidth in comparison to what we have today and should be a screamer if it's comparable to POWER4 (even if you do have to crank up the clock to make up for the fact that you don't have an enormous cache like on POWER4). It is also much less risky for Apple than the Intel or AMD strategy.

Hopefully this chip will come sooner rather than later (complete with auto-vectorizing compilers). What I find interesting is that the other desktop processors being discussed in that group (according to the schedule for the forum) are somewhat near term (Itanium 2, Athlon/Opteron). Maybe this is a good sign for this chip to see the light of day soon. *shrug* We can only hope.
 
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