No IBM may be good news too
I think the report is very credible. In another forum, a poster familiar with the individual that reported his encounter with the IBM dude says that the he has a good track record.
The IBM guy would be insane to lie. He is faced with two options that would not cost him dearly: 1) say nothing or 2) say the truth, knowing that your superiors would back you up.
So, assume for a moment that Apple truly is not interested in Junior, would Apple do so if it did not have a better option? Not likely.
Someone made a good point about a non-compatible implementation of VMX by IBM. Most likely, a few tweaks and a simple re-compile would do the trick. Once one has gone to the trouble of programming with vector/matrix operations, the hard part is done.
This leaves the other possibility, there's an equivalent or better CPU out there. I say equivalent because time to market is an important factor too.
So, maybe IBM has another CPU. I doubt it. Most likely, I'd say Motorola has soemthing else to offer. So, is it a Book E chips w/AltiVec and maybe 64 bit...? Or, is it something like the speculated 7470?
I think the latter most likely, though the former I'd prefer. Even so, a 7470, as speculated, would be great. We'd have native DDR!!! If they'd add one more feature to it I'd be thrilled. How about an onboard RIO component? Yeah baby, yeah! (Oh yeah, MERSI too!)
For memory intensive apps, all those Gigaflops of CPU capability are untapped when there's a bottleneck in front of the CPU. A single 7455 at 1 Gig easily saturates the bus on big jobs. With a good implementation of RIO and MERSI, Apple could just keep adding CPU's.
I don't have great interest in a chip that is faster than what we have today where small jobs are concerned. But for big jobs that are memory intensive, two or four CPU's, with the right architecture, would KICK ASS.
So, I think the 74XX still has a lot of life to it. Would I like something with twice the superscalar capability and a true 64 bit arch? Sure.
The superscalar enhancement would help ALL applications but greatly increase the relative size and power draw. The 64 bit arch, well, I doubt I could afford to buy that much DDR RAM anyway. I don't see myself with more than 2 GB anytime soon. Besides, there are other ways to address more memory.
Eirik
PS I wouldn't hold your breath about one of Apple's CPU's being produced in the first 3 to 6 months on the 90 nm facilities. More likely, we'll see static RAM and high-end cell phone chips first. Plus, Motorola's announcement says they'll BEGIN to ramp up in 4Q02. That too indicates low volume for a while. We're stuck with the bottleneck for quite some time.
