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IBM PPC 970MP A Reality?
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So does this architechure design from Artica Semiconductor (attached) seem likely for the Power Mac, now that the existence of the PPC970MP has been confirmed? It has dual dual core processors, a DDR2 SDRAM 533/667 Controller, PCI Express, and 4 SATA ports with hardware RAID.
The built-in hardware RAID is nice but seems excessive. It can be found here. I think someone posted it here quite a while ago.
The built-in hardware RAID is nice but seems excessive. It can be found here. I think someone posted it here quite a while ago.
Attachments
CNET just posted:
"Intel will show off its upcoming Yonah processor in two weeks and showcase a technology that lets one processing core sleep while the other one drives....
"When workloads are light, DPC will slow down one processor core to extend battery life.
"'The power consumption of each one of the cores is totally different from the other core,' he said.
"DPC will be integrated into Yonah, Intel's first dual-core chip for notebooks, which will arrive in late 2005 or early 2006. Eden will demonstrate DPC at the Intel Developer Forum taking place in Japan April 7 and 8."
"Intel will show off its upcoming Yonah processor in two weeks and showcase a technology that lets one processing core sleep while the other one drives....
"When workloads are light, DPC will slow down one processor core to extend battery life.
"'The power consumption of each one of the cores is totally different from the other core,' he said.
"DPC will be integrated into Yonah, Intel's first dual-core chip for notebooks, which will arrive in late 2005 or early 2006. Eden will demonstrate DPC at the Intel Developer Forum taking place in Japan April 7 and 8."
I'm guess that powermac updates are gonna happen very soon. The dual 2.5 model is down to 2199 (new, not used) at my student store. If they are gonna use dual cores in the next revision then I won't jump on this, but if they just do speed bumps I will be mad I didn't buy one, lol.
We should know much more during the month of April.
F.O.S.E. schedule April 5-7 should let us know much more about Intel's plans with a keynote speech by Paul Otellini, President and COO, INTEL Corporation, CEO Effective May 2005.
Apple will be there too but we still don't know
what they plan to show there.
There's also a show the following week in Phoenix and then NAB the following week.
With all those government IT buyers, I hope they make a good impression.
http://searchcgi.apple.com/cgi-bin/sp/nph-searchpre1.pl
F.O.S.E. schedule April 5-7 should let us know much more about Intel's plans with a keynote speech by Paul Otellini, President and COO, INTEL Corporation, CEO Effective May 2005.
Apple will be there too but we still don't know
what they plan to show there.
There's also a show the following week in Phoenix and then NAB the following week.
With all those government IT buyers, I hope they make a good impression.
http://searchcgi.apple.com/cgi-bin/sp/nph-searchpre1.pl
SonComet:
Sun Baked:
DDR2 and PCI-E probably aren't unreasonable though, Apple has gotten pretty good mileage out of the original chips, and PCI-E seems like to plays perfectly into core image.
Edit: Actually now that I think about it more, I'll guess Apple will have a PCI-E and DDR2 chipset for the next PMac rev. Its been almost 2 years on the current one, and if they don't do the update this time around, we're pretty much looking at another year. (Historically speaking, Apple won't update the PMac unless they have faster CPU's to show, and CPU's just aren't gona scale like they used to.)
Odds are that the next mid-model PMac will be a similar price with similar specs, so I don't suppose there is much to loose by waiting. It seems unlikely that dual-duals will show up anywhere except at the top end of the range. Sticking with 970fx's for low and mid-range models would be a safe move for Apple since there are no supply problems with that chip, and since the price is bound to be pretty good.
Sun Baked:
Heh, the 4-port hardware SATA RAID was a bit hard to believe, wasn't it?
DDR2 and PCI-E probably aren't unreasonable though, Apple has gotten pretty good mileage out of the original chips, and PCI-E seems like to plays perfectly into core image.Edit: Actually now that I think about it more, I'll guess Apple will have a PCI-E and DDR2 chipset for the next PMac rev. Its been almost 2 years on the current one, and if they don't do the update this time around, we're pretty much looking at another year. (Historically speaking, Apple won't update the PMac unless they have faster CPU's to show, and CPU's just aren't gona scale like they used to.)
nek said:
Well actually since Apple has a small market share and is looking to gain more then they need to produce computers that are not only equal to the fastest in the PC world but exceeding them by a significan margin because otherwise to the average consumer Apple wont stand out too much... And as far as hardware RAID id concerned, I dont think its excessive, in fact, I have a hardware RAID built in on the mobo of my 2 year old VPR Matrix machine that i bought at Best Buy for $1599 back then... And actually it helps to speed up things...
It was the fact that a hired gun technology speaker would be designing the next Apple PowerMac and producing the System Controller that was a little hard to believe. Especially since this is a graphical representation of a speech he gave soon after the PowerMac G5 was originally released.ddtlm said:Sun Baked:
Heh, the 4-port hardware SATA RAID was a bit hard to believe, wasn't it?
Of course the 4-port SATA RAID is a little silly, I don't see Apple redesigning the K2 I/O chip just to add another SATA controller -- seems a 3-port SATA capability is what we have now, unless Apple has a hidden port on the chip (which is also possible.) The KeyLargo, which this chip replaces, lasted 5 years without major changes.
The Memory Controller is due for an update (DDR2 and PCIe quite possible) and the PCI-X HT Tunnel may get replaced with a PCI-X 2.0 HT Tunnel.
Redesign of the Memory Controller yes, replacement of the entire chipset with a single chip, no.
Good god man, how many pins do you think that would take? An insanely large amount with each one of those FSBs not sharing a darn thing.Sunrunner said:
The sheer number of pins on a dual mean they cannot stick with a single chip design. Heck the entire thing is complex enough that it needs a cheap and simple CPU just to do a power on reset (aka service processor.)
Of course the Memory Controller is an extremely hot chip and needs to keep moving to better fab techniques as the clock speed increase -- not too far away from needing active cooling right now.
The HT-Tunnels can be sourced from somebody else, and the I/O chip doesn't need to be updated very often.
I guess nobody here is familiar with the nVidia nForce (pro, 3 and 4) controllers. The Pro series can be either 1 or 2 chips, depending on how many PCIe lanes you want. My Opteron MB has a 4-port SATA RAID controller (SiL3114), which isn't anything new.
There was actually a rumor quite a while back, now, about Apple developing a SOC (System On a Chip), but its purpose was not clear; damn rumors.
There was actually a rumor quite a while back, now, about Apple developing a SOC (System On a Chip), but its purpose was not clear; damn rumors.
daveL, blitzkrieg79:
The reason hardware raid was silly is not because its expensive. Its silly because there is pretty much no way that 4 disks will be supported in a PMac that resembles the current models, because hardware raid is slower than software raid (if your CPUs aren't used already), and because proper integration into OSX would take a little effort. (Setting up disks in some BIOS-looking interface won't do.) With those things in mind, it just doesn't seem like a compelling feature for Apple to add.
The reason hardware raid was silly is not because its expensive. Its silly because there is pretty much no way that 4 disks will be supported in a PMac that resembles the current models, because hardware raid is slower than software raid (if your CPUs aren't used already), and because proper integration into OSX would take a little effort. (Setting up disks in some BIOS-looking interface won't do.) With those things in mind, it just doesn't seem like a compelling feature for Apple to add.
ddtlm said:
I have been doing Data Center and Network work for the past 17 years.
I have never found software raid to be faster than hardware raid for any system.
I do agree that Apple does not have to support hardware raid on their motherboards though. It isn't really necessary. They do support Fibre channel HBAs which in my opinion is good enough. They also sell Hardware raid adapters too
The following from Apple's website
PCI Hardware RAID card
This 64-bit/66 MHz PCI card provides enhanced reliability and performance to Xserve G5's internal Serial ATA (SATA) drives using a hardware RAID controller. Bypassing the on-board hard drive controllers, this card provides three independent 150MBps Serial ATA controllers backed by a high-performance RAID processor and 64MB of RAID controller cache with an on-card backup battery.
The PCI Hardware RAID controller provides RAID level 0, 1 and 5 capabilities to the Apple Drive Module bays and is managed by a provided command-line management tool. Multiple logical drives can be created, and each logical drive supports different RAID levels, different stripe sizes, and different cache policies. In the case of a drive failure in a protected RAID 1 or 5 configuration, drives can be hot-swapped and the RAID set can be rebuilt on to a new drive online while the server continues to serve data.
Note: RAID levels 0 and 1 require a minimum of 2 Apple Drive modules; RAID level 5 requires 3 Apple Drive modules. Apple recommends drive modules of the same size for each RAID set. The hardware RAID card does not support FireWire Target Disk mode.
ddtlm said:
I never used any kind of RAID product (s0ftware/hardware) on a Mac, but from what I know hardware supported RAID will beat software RAID in the PC world and there is no comparison at all (besides, Apple already has to process sound through its processor as it doesnt have a sound card to off load it so why to slow it down even more?)... My point is that if a $1599 PC has hardware RAID on the mobo then I dont see why a $3000 Mac cant have it and I am talking about RAID 0 where all u need is two HDs and not four and there is a significant improvement in program loading times and rendering and such... Apple wants to gain market share by just producing outdated technology in pretty package then they might as well release the Mac OS on the the x86 mainstream and they will be better off as a company... Apple is a unique company as in it controls the software and hardware it sells so they do have advantage there but it seems as if first they got stuck with Motorola and now IBM is not doing any better:S I like Apple because they are in it for the passion and not money (otherwise they would have become a software company long time ago) but I would love to see a computer released by them at a $2500-$3000 price level that basically IS the fastest in the world without any other words... Anyway, I still believe that 970MP wont be the processor that will make Apple the fastest in the world, but the Power5 derivative (aka Cell lookalike) will...
~loserman~:
The other day I noticed that my largest raid at work is powered by a PPC750, likely at much less than 1ghz. There's no way it can do calculations as fast as a 2ghz+ G5. Besides, AltiVec should eat up software raid stuff, seems to me.
blitzkrieg79:
Yeah but we aren't talking about data-center quality hardware raid. We're talking about a rinky-dink integrated $10 chip.
The other day I noticed that my largest raid at work is powered by a PPC750, likely at much less than 1ghz. There's no way it can do calculations as fast as a 2ghz+ G5. Besides, AltiVec should eat up software raid stuff, seems to me.
blitzkrieg79:
In the combined experience of myself and my co-workers, no low-end raid card is gona come close to software raid. If you drop the big bucks on some FC-attached external thing (Xserver raid or a compeditor) then you'll get good performance.
Sure they could do it, but I think they'd better serve their customers by offering software for most people and serious (read: expensive) hardware raid for those that care about performance. Cheap onboard raid is not going to speed anything up.
ddtlm said:
well and I can tell u that the on board RAID chip on my $1599 2 year old VPR matrix does speed things up especially loading times because i have two PC computers with basically same configuration but one doesnt have onboard RAID and the other one does have the so called "cheap" RAID... software raid vs hardware raid, if the RAID chip costs only so little then why not offload it off the CPU considering that sound is also processed by the processor directly and that alone takes away about 5-8% of cpu utilization???
blitzkrieg79:
Hardware raid helps where your CPU is already busy, but not a lot of people are going to demand max disk IO and max CPU usage at the same time. A program that reads in and processes a lot of data will often read or process at any given time, but not both at once. A well threaded program could do both at once, but hey we are talking about machines with multiple processors. Possibly even four processors, in the near future.
So I don't know why your raided machine is faster for what you are doing. There are countless things that can effect disk read performance.
Hardware raid helps where your CPU is already busy, but not a lot of people are going to demand max disk IO and max CPU usage at the same time. A program that reads in and processes a lot of data will often read or process at any given time, but not both at once. A well threaded program could do both at once, but hey we are talking about machines with multiple processors. Possibly even four processors, in the near future.
So I don't know why your raided machine is faster for what you are doing. There are countless things that can effect disk read performance.
Same reason Apple uses software sound, same reason they offer FX5200's instead of R9600's. If Apple did everything "could be" doing, or "should be" doing, we'd find them a lot less profitable.
Not very many people work the disks and audio hard at the same time.
ddtlm said:
well i understand your point but on the other hand, arent the powermacs pro machines? considering their prices they should offer those things that PCs have been offering for years, or maybe Apple needs to readjust its computer line and maybe introduce a headless IMAC with some expansion capabilities and then the PowerMac would be their real PRO line, I mean to me PowerMac is rather hard to define, its too powerful for just a home PC and somehow it just doesnt offer as much expandibility such as CAD/CAM Pro graphics cards to be a true workstation :S I am not here to argue by any means but I would love to see Apple reschuffle their line up a bit, I mean, I would never buy an Imac because it lacks expandibility and I dont like the all in one design as i like to have a computer and monitor separated from each other and the PowerMac for its price doesnt offer a whole lot more expandibility either plus it really lacks the Pro graphics cards... as far as RAID goes, I guess I am not the average consumer and I do need the little extras but I guess I am more demanding then most consumers...
Why are you guy letting Gary McMillian get on your nerves?
It's just a rehash of stuff from a year ago, with pictures for the cognatively challenged -- and done as a website to make his star shine bright.
It's pointless to let his drug induced fantasies bother you.
It's just a rehash of stuff from a year ago, with pictures for the cognatively challenged -- and done as a website to make his star shine bright.
Talk about the changes that will be coming with Tiger and the 970MP... much more interesting than this IEEE nerd.
It's pointless to let his drug induced fantasies bother you.