970MP - Still Coming?

[Mord]

My point is that it didnt take 2 nor 4 years respectively for any of those architectures to develop a laptop friendly version of the processor (yeah I know the batter life on them sux but then again thats why most people buy them) And G4 is like what, 100 years old by now?

The point is that G5 is not a mobile friendly architecture and I dont think Apple can afford nor anyone will develop for Apple two totally different processors (thats why they are still stuck on G4 and G4s plain simply are underpowered by todays standards), Apple needs one that will scale from a laptop/mac mini to a Powermac but I know you know that...

The point is if Apple wants to gain market share and win the hearts of Wintel people it needs to not only equal the speed of current Wintel machines but exceede it because they are the underdogs and you will never win any market with being equal considering you are already a major underdog...

So my final point is that I guess the Power4 derived 970 is not panning out the way IBM and Apple wanted it to pan out from the beginning and considering there are other newer technologies already available I think its a waste of R&D money into 970s... And the last computer revolution that I remember came in the mid 1980s with the release of Amiga and Atari ST... And thats where the CELL comes in...

it took intel over a year to get a p4 mobile, the current g5 could be used in a powerbook circa 1.8-20GHz it's just apple dose not make brick laptops like the pc world, turion AMD chips are only now rolling off the lines and intels pentium M is just a souped up p3 so one could (quite unfairly i know) say that it took intel 4 years to turn the p3 into a decent moblie chip, apple is not the fastest of the bunch but technology wise they are not behind they just have higher expectations of a mobile chip like 4.5 hour battery life and to be not much more than 1" thick.

 

[poundsmack]

@blitzkrieg79

any P4 laptop is just a portable hot plate. i had a client bring one into me for repair saying it would not turn on. i tried to bot it and nothing happend but it was very warm. a long story short he had it always on the charger and had it on a leather foot stool and it got so hot the thermel indicators wouldn;t let the laptop start out of sheer fear of overheating. my solution was i put in in the mini frige i had for 5 minuites , pulled it out and it booted......there is no mobile P4. the centrino's are P3 based thats why its not an oven.

 

[blitzkrieg79]

Well all this talk about laptop chips but have you actually seen the latest Notebooks from Toshiba or Sony?

They are not only faster than Apples current offerings but also cheaper and NOT as hot as you guys made it sound to be, anyway Powerbooks aren't too cool either and considerign the gap between the fastest Apple laptop and PC laptop I right now I really cant think of one thing that would make a potential computer buyer to purchase an Apple based laptop maybe of course for MAC OS X but that price is a bit too high, I am definately not a PC troll as you guys say it but PC laptops definately offer more for far less than Apples offerings, faster processors, better video cards, better screens...

Anyway, I am not here to argue with anyone, I am here to cry out to Apple to hurry up with the next gen laptop and desktop processors as I want to spend my money on something revolutionary rather then evolutionary... if I want just evolution I just buy a PC which will be cheaper anyway... and I dont know how are the Freescale processors doing right now but I bet we will never see a Power4 derived Apple laptop...

So again, I wonder what the president of Sony was doing on stage in January and wouldn't it be interesting if Apple adopted a new architecture?

1980s-to early 1990s ---> 68K (CISC)
1990s to 2005 ---> PPC (RISC)
2006 - up ---> CELL ??

So to anyone downing CELL, Apple switched around their entire architectures a couple of times already, and from what I understand CELL really wont be too difficult to run on MAC OS X (CELLs architecture is versatile and it doesnt really have to require all this reprogramming or recompiling of it for Mac, it can be done the other way around, an Apple version based upon CELL fundamentals), and whose to say if Apple hasnt been working on it for the past couple of months? Their secrecy sux but when they leap they leap big...

Anyone give me a very good reason why Apple can't (won't) use the CELL in the future (I have in mind mid 2006-up)

 

[Kaborka]

The real benefit of Apple going PCI-e in the near term is that the latest video chipsets are PCI-e native and they require additional bridge logic to function on an AGP bus. Basically, the latest vid chips are cheaper in PCI-e versions than AGP version.

The real benefit of PCIe is, that "GPU->mem" writes are as fast as "GPU<-mem" reads, which is the precondition to using the GPU as a real coprocessor.

Kaborka

 

[Kaborka]

So to anyone downing CELL, Apple switched around their entire architectures a couple of times already, and from what I understand CELL really wont be too difficult to run on MAC OS X (CELLs architecture is versatile and it doesnt really have to require all this reprogramming or recompiling of it for Mac, it can be done the other way around, an Apple version based upon CELL fundamentals), and whose to say if Apple hasnt been working on it for the past couple of months? Their secrecy sux but when they leap they leap big...

Anyone give me a very good reason why Apple can't (won't) use the CELL in the future (I have in mind mid 2006-up)

I try it again
Cell is not suitable to run a full featured OS on it. Cell is a highly crippled Power?? core + 1 x Altivec with attached DSPs (the cells, called SPEs). It neither features any kind of code-morphing capabilities, so it cannot magically adopt to existing code and run it faster, nor does Cell accelerate scalar code.
To support Cell, Apple would need two little things: A Cell compiler (does not exist yet) and a completely new Code basis with lots of compiler hints in it to support Cell's explicit parallel architecture.
Other things:
- Far too expensive
- AFAIK does not support double precision fp math

Cell will never appear as main CPU in a workstation/desktop. Never!

Kaborka

 

[blitzkrieg79]

I try it again
Cell is not suitable to run a full featured OS on it. Cell is a highly crippled Power?? core + 1 x Altivec with attached DSPs (the cells, called SPEs). It neither features any kind of code-morphing capabilities, so it cannot magically adopt to existing code and run it faster, nor does Cell accelerate scalar code.
To support Cell, Apple would need two little things: A Cell compiler (does not exist yet) and a completely new Code basis with lots of compiler hints in it to support Cell's explicit parallel architecture.
Other things:
- Far too expensive
- AFAIK does not support double precision fp math

Cell will never appear as main CPU in a workstation/desktop. Never!

Kaborka

Well lol thanks for the reply... By any chance do you remember the blitter chip from good ol Amiga? I was thinking of CELL in those lines I guess... Apple could drop the dual configurations and offer a single dual core Powermacs with CELL as a coprocessor I guess...

Then again, Apple went away from its own architecture of the mid 1980s to mid 1990s and went with more cost efficient PC-like design, went away from SCSI and introduced PCI and AGP slots and USB(anyone remember the name of slots used in Macs before PCI was introduced?) but my guess is that it was different than what PCs had in that time, I know Amiga had Zorro...

I mention Amiga a lot because I think that was the best hardware ever made but the company obviously didnt put as many resources into marketing as it did in hardware, Amiga also had the best OS of its time, it only shows that not all the time the best technology wins...

 

[bbyrdhouse]

970 series is basically 3 years old...

I do not understand why we think that a processor can have only a two year life span. I believe that there is still some life in the 970 series.

 

[blitzkrieg79]

I do not understand why we think that a processor can have only a two year life span. I believe that there is still some life in the 970 series.

ok... I never stated that a processor can't have a longer than 2 year life span... What I did state is that 970 is 3 years old BUT there isn't a mobile version of it yet (and it doesnt appear there ever will be a 970 mobile) and to make it all worse (for the desktops) it doesn't appear it will scale any higher on the current 90nm process (and 65nm process is still year away, heck, the 90nm process hasn't been worked out of all the bugs yet)...

Thats all...

 

[Roller]

Then again, Apple went away from its own architecture of the mid 1980s to mid 1990s and went with more cost efficient PC-like design, went away from SCSI and introduced PCI and AGP slots and USB(anyone remember the name of slots used in Macs before PCI was introduced?)

The Mac II (first Mac with slots, 1987) had NuBus slots.

 

[Sun Baked]

The Mac II (first Mac with slots, 1987) had NuBus slots.

Those at least were some sort of standard, those darn PDS slots kept-a-changing.

 

[ShnikeJSB]

Well, I finally did it...

Well, after being a Mac user all my life, and being disappointed with the latest PowerBooks, I took the plunge and ordered a Dell Inspiron XPS Gen 2 with all the trimmings! They offered their 35% off coupon today. I couldn't resist. I needed to replace this 3.5+ year old Titanium PowerBook. I have been saving up for a LOOONG time. I was expecting to get another PowerBook, but they just suck so bad right now... I don't know if everyone noticed, but Dell added one of the new 100GB 7200RPM drives as an option!!! Which I went for... My total came to just under $3,500, which has MUCH more and costs LESS than an education discounted Apple PowerBook 17". Oh how I will miss Mac OS X... But this should be worth it (I hope). Here are the basics of what I ordered (from what I remember, since Dell's site seems to be down/really slow right now):

2.13GHz 770 P-M (I am a little bit leery on the non-64-bitness, but oh well)
2GB DDR2-533 RAM
100GB 7200 RPM Hard drive (WOOHOO! I have been waiting for these!)
256MB Nvidia GeForce Go Ultra
8x Double-Layer DVD+/-RW drive
Extra Battery and A/C Adapter
XPS 2 Backpack
Personalization Shield
Win XP Pro
Intel Pro A/B/G wireless
Bluetooth 2
As little software as I could
4 Year Premium Warranty
17" WUXGA (1920x1200) screen
Tripplite Plug-In Surge Protector
External USB Floppy
Whatever else I can't think of...

Once Apple comes out with nice NEW PowerBooks worth my time and money, I will sell that thing and buy one. But until then, I guess I am in the Dark side now... How appropriate for Star Wars Episode III coming out LOL! -JB

 

[ffakr]

I was expecting to get another PowerBook, but they just suck so bad right now... I don't know if everyone noticed, but Dell added one of the new 100GB 7200RPM drives as an option!!! Which I went for... My total came to just under $3,500, which has MUCH more and costs LESS than an education discounted Apple PowerBook 17".

I'm working on an edu purchased 17" powerbook right now and it cost my Division a hell of a lot less than $3,500. I believe the price was $2500. I can't check now because I'm in a Panera bread wifi network and thier stupid DNS is messed up so Apple's not available.
My (latest revision) powerbook shipped stock with Bluetooth and a 100GB drive.
Granted my 1.67 GHz G4 isn't as powerful as a 2.1 GHz P-M but your P-M will run at around 600MHz when it's in powersaving mode. I've worked on enough P-M machines to be very wary of them. I've seen too many that had noticeable lag during CPU scaling. Sure, the laptop is fast when cranked up but it idles so much slower that there is a noticeable performance lag everytime the notebook needs to do something computationally intensive. Your notebook may not suffer from this but I wouldn't buy one without testing it out personally first.

Frankly, I don't think you got all that great a Deal. My laptop was significantly cheaper even with an additional 1GB ram [aftermarket] and a BT Mouse. I'm still under $3,000 USD. I'd suspect mine is also smaller than yours and lighter. I don't see a lot of that variety of laptop in the office because I believe it's targeted in part to portable gamers so I can't say for sure that I'm familiar with the form. If it looks like other Dell 17" notebooks, it should have a luggage handle on it. The ones we see are big fat tanks.

I had the choice for a new computer when I purchased. Anything I wanted. I picked the 17" powerbook NOT because it's the fastest machine around but because it was big enough to be a desktop replacement but small enough to be a real portable. I'm very happy with my purchase (rather my Division's purchase).

Time to run, I'm going to go home and write some code in Quartz Compositor, and maybe mod_spotlight if I can find documentation on it. Too bad you can't say the same.

 

[jouster]

2.13GHz 770 P-M (I am a little bit leery on the non-64-bitness, but oh well)

Which tasks do you plan for your laptop that will require 64 bit-ness?

 

[ffakr]

Which tasks do you plan for your laptop that will require 64 bit-ness?

Don't you know, everything is TWICE AS FAST with 64bit support, especially in notebooks. You need to address 32 GB of ram in any respectable notebook and you absolutely need support for native 64bit integer operations in ALL your software!

 

[Mord]

it's the 1/2 clock speed elastic IO bus the killer integer performence and the much higher clock speed of the g5, hmm maybe thats it, and also what sucker wants to use less than 8GB ram?

 

[Frobozz]

By any chance do you remember the blitter chip from good ol Amiga? I was thinking of CELL in those lines I guess... Apple could drop the dual configurations and offer a single dual core Powermacs with CELL as a coprocessor I guess...

Oh, the Amiga. Strange how all good ideas come full circle eventually. The basic premise of the Amiga was a fully multitasking work environment that offloaded specialized work (such as graphics) from the CPU. Brilliant in 1985 and, strangely, briliant again in 2005. It only took the world 20 years to come back to offloading graphics work to the GPU!

The blitter, copper, Agnus, Paula, and Denise chips were amazing even 10 years after their debut. In case anyone needs information:

http://amiga.emugaming.com/customchips.html

... so I think the way CELL could be used is very similar to this concept. Specialized coprocessors. Heck, there is a company that already made a physics processing chip, dubbed the PPU (which is a terrible name.)

 

[Frobozz]

Well, after being a Mac user all my life, and being disappointed with the latest PowerBooks, I took the plunge and ordered a Dell Inspiron XPS Gen 2 with all the trimmings! They offered their 35% off coupon today. I couldn't resist. I needed to replace this 3.5+ year old Titanium PowerBook. I have been saving up for a LOOONG time. I was expecting to get another PowerBook, but they just suck so bad right now... I don't know if everyone noticed, but Dell added one of the new 100GB 7200RPM drives as an option!!! Which I went for... My total came to just under $3,500, which has MUCH more and costs LESS than an education discounted Apple PowerBook 17". Oh how I will miss Mac OS X... But this should be worth it (I hope). Here are the basics of what I ordered (from what I remember, since Dell's site seems to be down/really slow right now):

2.13GHz 770 P-M (I am a little bit leery on the non-64-bitness, but oh well)
2GB DDR2-533 RAM
100GB 7200 RPM Hard drive (WOOHOO! I have been waiting for these!)
256MB Nvidia GeForce Go Ultra
8x Double-Layer DVD+/-RW drive
Extra Battery and A/C Adapter
XPS 2 Backpack
Personalization Shield
Win XP Pro
Intel Pro A/B/G wireless
Bluetooth 2
As little software as I could
4 Year Premium Warranty
17" WUXGA (1920x1200) screen
Tripplite Plug-In Surge Protector
External USB Floppy
Whatever else I can't think of...

I sincerely hope you're happy with your purchase. However, I would love to see your long term reaction to this laptop. I know people with these, and, um... well, you'll find out. Anyway, If you get more than an hour of battery life out I will be amazed. And, for the love of Pete... you have to run Windows, man?! What the h-e-double-hockeysticks are you thinking? :-(

I'm actually thinking of getting a tricked out 15" 1.67 PowerBook.

 

[Mord]

yeah, that guy could have got a 17" powerbook with 2GB ram and save about $1k

1k is not worth a slightly faster HD a higher resolution screen, a faster gpu, the faster cpu and the 4 year warranty when you factor in the run time windows it's wieght/thickness and it's uglyness.

 

[Kaborka]

it's the 1/2 clock speed elastic IO bus...

One thing... . You get only "1/4 clock speed" in each direction, means that even a 2.7 Ghz Mac read (or write) with a maximum throughput of 5.4 GB/s from main memory (to main memory). Not even enough to exploit dual DDR400's 6.4 GB/s bandwidth.
Here is what the STREAM benchmark says:

1 x G5 2.0GHz, IBM XLC 6.0, 2xDDR400:
Copy: 3368 MB/s (<- balanced, READ==WRITE bandwidth, good for Elastic IO)
Scale: 2909 MB/s (<- balanced, READ==WRITE bandwidth, good for Elastic IO)
Add: 2526 MB/s (<- unbalanced, READ==2*WRITE bandwidth, Elastic IO sucks badly)
Triad: 2526 MB/s (<- unbalanced, READ==2*WRITE bandwidth, Elastic IO sucks badly)

1x Opteron 2.2GHz, Pathscale EKO 2.0, 2xDDR400::
Copy: 4811 MB/s
Scale: 4782 MB/s
Add: 4684 MB/s
Triad: 4681 MB/s
Good...

the killer integer performence...

One thing... .
Here is what the SPECint benchmark says:
1x PPC970FX (IBM JS20), IBM XLC 7.0, 2xDDR400: 1040 peak
Sucks badly...
1x Opteron 2.4GHz, Pathscale EKO 1.4, 2xDDR400: 1584 peak
Good...

Kaborka

 

[blitzkrieg79]

Oh, the Amiga. Strange how all good ideas come full circle eventually. The basic premise of the Amiga was a fully multitasking work environment that offloaded specialized work (such as graphics) from the CPU. Brilliant in 1985 and, strangely, briliant again in 2005. It only took the world 20 years to come back to offloading graphics work to the GPU!

The blitter, copper, Agnus, Paula, and Denise chips were amazing even 10 years after their debut. In case anyone needs information:

http://amiga.emugaming.com/customchips.html

... so I think the way CELL could be used is very similar to this concept. Specialized coprocessors. Heck, there is a company that already made a physics processing chip, dubbed the PPU (which is a terrible name.)

Finally someone who understands me lol Yep it is funny how all good ideas come full circles... One advantage Apple has over the PC world is that they control their own hardware, they got no competing Mac clones... Pretty much they can customize their architecture the exact way they want, they dont have to worry about standards or anything (well of course maybe except for the graphics cards and PCI devices, they cant really change that now as no one would manufacture any add-on cards for them)...

But then again, they went away from their own architecture and moved towards a PC-like mainly because they wanted to save money but then again Macs are not cheap computers by todays standards so it would be nice if they would do something architeture wise that would really set them apart from the PC world...

It seems to me that the latest OS release ("TIGER" - core audio/video) makes a bold move towards Apple escaping from the traditional PC-like design and I wouldnt be surprised if in a year or two we will see Macs with a powerful dedicated coprocessor such as the CELL to offload the audio/video tasks from the main CPU, just like 20 years ago...

 

[blitzkrieg79]

One thing... . You get only "1/4 clock speed" in each direction, means that even a 2.7 Ghz Mac read (or write) with a maximum throughput of 5.4 GB/s from main memory (to main memory). Not even enough to exploit dual DDR400's 6.4 GB/s bandwidth.
Here is what the STREAM benchmark says:

1 x G5 2.0GHz, IBM XLC 6.0, 2xDDR400:
Copy: 3368 MB/s (<- balanced, READ==WRITE bandwidth, good for Elastic IO)
Scale: 2909 MB/s (<- balanced, READ==WRITE bandwidth, good for Elastic IO)
Add: 2526 MB/s (<- unbalanced, READ==2*WRITE bandwidth, Elastic IO sucks badly)
Triad: 2526 MB/s (<- unbalanced, READ==2*WRITE bandwidth, Elastic IO sucks badly)

1x Opteron 2.2GHz, Pathscale EKO 2.0, 2xDDR400::
Copy: 4811 MB/s
Scale: 4782 MB/s
Add: 4684 MB/s
Triad: 4681 MB/s
Good...


One thing... .
Here is what the SPECint benchmark says:
1x PPC970FX (IBM JS20), IBM XLC 7.0, 2xDDR400: 1040 peak
Sucks badly...
1x Opteron 2.4GHz, Pathscale EKO 1.4, 2xDDR400: 1584 peak
Good...

Kaborka

To put it in simple terms (due to memory bandwith limitations) clock for clock (considering that Opteron has 512kb more cache) IBM and AMD processors are about equal in real world performance...

 

[Kaborka]

It seems to me that the latest OS release ("TIGER" - core audio/video) makes a bold move towards Apple escaping from the traditional PC-like design and I wouldnt be surprised if in a year or two we will see Macs with a powerful dedicated coprocessor such as the CELL to offload the audio/video tasks from the main CPU, just like 20 years ago...

Maybe , but not in one year. And don't forget that todays GPUs are also powerfull number crunchers. A Radeon X800XT delivers ~65 GFLOPS in single precision and a memory bandwidth of 35.8 GB/s. For a 8-Cell processor it is 256 GFLOPS / 44.8 GB/s. Not that different...

Kaborka

 

[daveL]

To put it in simple terms (due to memory bandwith limitations) clock for clock (considering that Opteron has 512kb more cache) IBM and AMD processors are about equal in real world performance...

I have a DP G5 @ 2.5 GHz and a DP Opteron @ 2.0 GHz. Both machines have been Folding 24x7, until recently (I got my electric bill and realized the Opteron was using over $20 a month!). Anyway, I was doing all my normal work/play on the G5, including streaming music most of the day and recoding DVDs, while the Opteron was virtually dedicated to Folding. At the end of the day, their Folding performance was nearly identical.

 

[blitzkrieg79]

Maybe , but not in one year. And don't forget that todays GPUs are also powerfull number crunchers. A Radeon X800XT delivers ~65 GFLOPS in single precision and a memory bandwidth of 35.8 GB/s. For a 8-Cell processor it is 256 GFLOPS / 44.8 GB/s. Not that different...

Kaborka

Well but Radeon X800XT is an expensive piece of hardware even by todays standards where CELL will be more mass produced and therefore not only more powerful than a dedicated GPU but also a couple of times cheaper...

And as much as people make the CELL to be more of a specialized processor CELL definately is not just a GPU, CELL resembles more of a traditional CPU than a GPU so CELL may not be the greatest idea for everyday computing apps but it definately seems that it can handle it a whole lot better (or at all) than a traditional GPU...

The thing that I like about the CELL is that it seems to be very versatile (customisible), IBM also wants people to use the CELL so I am more than sure they will customize it to Apples needs (especially that IBM and Apple have a good and long relationship and neither wants to lose the other one-jeeezzzz it sounds like marriage lol) and last but not least, due to its mass production CELL will make it possible to make powerful and CHEAPER devices utilizing such technologies...

 

[Mord]

I have a DP G5 @ 2.5 GHz and a DP Opteron @ 2.0 GHz. Both machines have been Folding 24x7, until recently (I got my electric bill and realized the Opteron was using over $20 a month!). Anyway, I was doing all my normal work/play on the G5, including streaming music most of the day and recoding DVDs, while the Opteron was virtually dedicated to Folding. At the end of the day, their Folding performance was nearly identical.

you bought a dual 2GHz opteron just for folding any chance of giveing it to me? , i'll pay for the electricity bill and i'll let it fold 24/7, honest.