Hopefully IBM will keep whatever is making these POWER 5 chips so fast when they start producing the PowerPC derivatives for Apple machines.
IBM, Moore's Law and the POWER 5 chip
"IBM's recent pSeries benchmark ought to raise a good number of eyebrows. Unix server benchmarks had previously been a game of leapfrog between IBM and HP, with IBM looking increasingly strong in the last round (in 2003) when its p690 server with 32 processors demonstrated a slightly higher transaction rate than HP's 64 processor Itanium 2 server. The latest benchmark from IBM leaves both previous benchmarks in dust. In the TPC-C benchmark, IBM demonstrated over 3m transactions per minute (tpmC) almost three times more than the previous highest result of 1.2tpmC, posting a 37 per cent price performance advantage in the process. Never in the history of the benchmarking of servers (or databases) has any company demonstrated such a dramatic lead over the competition. [...] While chip performance may have doubled every 18 months in the past, system performance has not and IBM has now delivered almost a tripling of system performance. That is what the benchmark indicates."
Granted this benchmark measures something specific, and the POWER 5 certainly is tuned for a different application, but its performance certainly bodes well for future Apple processors, couldn't one speculate?
IBM, Moore's Law and the POWER 5 chip
"IBM's recent pSeries benchmark ought to raise a good number of eyebrows. Unix server benchmarks had previously been a game of leapfrog between IBM and HP, with IBM looking increasingly strong in the last round (in 2003) when its p690 server with 32 processors demonstrated a slightly higher transaction rate than HP's 64 processor Itanium 2 server. The latest benchmark from IBM leaves both previous benchmarks in dust. In the TPC-C benchmark, IBM demonstrated over 3m transactions per minute (tpmC) almost three times more than the previous highest result of 1.2tpmC, posting a 37 per cent price performance advantage in the process. Never in the history of the benchmarking of servers (or databases) has any company demonstrated such a dramatic lead over the competition. [...] While chip performance may have doubled every 18 months in the past, system performance has not and IBM has now delivered almost a tripling of system performance. That is what the benchmark indicates."
Granted this benchmark measures something specific, and the POWER 5 certainly is tuned for a different application, but its performance certainly bodes well for future Apple processors, couldn't one speculate?
