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More IBM 64-bit Chip Speculation

Apple... Soon to be the only Mid-Line 64-bit game in town?

Intel Corp is to appeal a judge's ruling yesterday that its Itanium processors infringe on patents owned by Intergraph Corp, risking an additional $100m payout on top of the $150m it has already agreed to pay Intergraph, Kevin Murphy writes. Texas District Court Judge John Ward ruled that two Intergraph US patents are "valid and enforceable" and that Intel's products "literally infringe" upon them, Integraph said. Judge Ward also said Intergraph is entitled to an injunction on the Itanium and Itanium 2.
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Hrmmm... No Itanium? <grin> I bet intergraph would file the injunction just out of spite. :)

With Itanium gone... that would leave... ummm... AMD and Apple in the 64-bit market (not counting Sun, IBM, and their high end stuff).

Sooo since AMD has had such a hard time in the market, this would bolster *both* Opterons and G5s software support.

Ultracute...

Binky
 
i dont see intel dropping their itanium project.
they will simply just pay the other company off.
 
Itanium isn't going anywhere

I agree, there won't be any injunction... Intel has put BILLIONs, with a big fat B, into the itanium. They will pay off Intergraph long before it gets that far. They are currently appealing anyway so that right to injunction is most likely on hold.

The whole intergraph/intel thing is pretty funny. I highly recommend taking the time to read up on the whole conflict between the two companies.

It reads like a classic david and golaith story. Intel screwed Intergraph hard and often. Intel essentially forced Intergraph out of the hardware business. They were stealing their IP during this time and they continued to for long afterward (still do). The thing is, Intergraph keeps winning court cases against them. It's like the big bully who is threatening the littler kids, but the bully is really stupid and gets caught by the teachers every time.
 
...durned cat.

Anywayz...

I'd rather see improvements in SMP implementation from the software side both at Apple and with 3rd party developers at the next expo even more so that faster hardwarez.

Mac users would stand more to gain, and I'm pessimistically assuming that it's too much to ask for both,
c:p
 
Originally posted by zerokelvin
...durned cat.

Anywayz...

I'd rather see improvements in SMP implementation from the software side both at Apple and with 3rd party developers at the next expo even more so that faster hardwarez.

Mac users would stand more to gain, and I'm pessimistically assuming that it's too much to ask for both,
c:p
Click to expand...

The thing that would REALLY help the SMP performance would be a less crippled path between the processors and main memory, a 1.3GB/s link for _two_ processors to a 2.7GB/s memory system is the height of inefficiency.

compare to the Athlon/Alpha SMP model where each chip has dedicated link of 2.1GB/s (or more for the Alpha and AthlonXP 2700+/2800+) to the memory controller, which then has 2.1GB/s or more of bandwidth.

sure, there's still the potential for them to fight over the memory bandwidth, but at least the bottleneck is moved as deep into things as possible, instead of being stage #1 in the process.
 
HP's SPEC benchmarks

Interesting that HP would choose to switch the computers and OS'es from one test to the other while all others remained the same.
 
Re: Itanium isn't going anywhere

Originally posted by ffakr
I agree, there won't be any injunction... Intel has put BILLIONs, with a big fat B, into the itanium. They will pay off Intergraph long before it gets that far. They are currently appealing anyway so that right to injunction is most likely on hold.

The whole intergraph/intel thing is pretty funny. I highly recommend taking the time to read up on the whole conflict between the two companies.

It reads like a classic david and golaith story. Intel screwed Intergraph hard and often. Intel essentially forced Intergraph out of the hardware business. They were stealing their IP during this time and they continued to for long afterward (still do). The thing is, Intergraph keeps winning court cases against them. It's like the big bully who is threatening the littler kids, but the bully is really stupid and gets caught by the teachers every time.
Click to expand...

I have a friend/ coworker that worked at Intergraph for 7 years or so before being laid off. He said the company was always having money problems.

Not that it has anything to do with this, but its funny that a company makes more money in court than producing a product. God bless America.:p
 
thanks MOM :D


" IBM said the new PowerPC 970 microchip is a "lite" version of its Power4 chip..........IBM said its new PowerPC chip would go into production late next year and process 64 bits of data at a time at 1.8 Gigahertz, or 1.8 billion cycles per second.........An industry source said Cupertino, California-based Apple would use the chip in its Macintosh computers."

:p
 
I don't understand how they can already know the speed of the chip when it won't be in a computer till a year from now...
 
Originally posted by scem0
I don't understand how they can already know the speed of the chip when it won't be in a computer till a year from now...
Click to expand...

IBM most likely have them up and running in the labs.

how the media know?.. I have no idea.
 
Yeah, I am very sure they have them running in labs. But in 2 months wont they have 2 GHz, and in 4 months 2.5 GHz? And then they can manufacture a whole bunch of 2.5 GHz pmacs in august and september and release them to the public in october/november.
 
Originally posted by scem0
Yeah, I am very sure they have them running in labs. But in 2 months wont they have 2 GHz, and in 4 months 2.5 GHz? And then they can manufacture a whole bunch of 2.5 GHz pmacs in august and september and release them to the public in october/november.
Click to expand...

Not really, semiconductor R&D is always at least a year ahead of what we can buy.

eg, Intel recently demonstrated a P4 @ 4.7Ghz, fastest P4 we can buy is 2.8Ghz
 
Originally posted by scem0
I don't understand how they can already know the speed of the chip when it won't be in a computer till a year from now...
Click to expand...

Because it's not all shoot-and-hope. A lot of effort is spent "characterising processes" - learning what a given level can do and tweaking it to improve it. IBM will likely have targets for the capabilities of the chips to be produced by the new Fishkill fab line (assuming this is where they are made) and, given IBM has a reasonable amount of experience in this sort of area, their targets are probably achievable (if not already proven on small fab runs). I imagine that when Ford or GM design a new car engine, they can make a pretty good prediction of how powerful it will be before they build the first one.

The variation is most likely to be in the speed yields. That is, they will probably produce chips graded at (say) three different speeds. Know the relative ratio of these speeds in advance is where experience will really come in to play. And if something goes wrong, they'll just have more low end parts than they wanted. But the press release will still claim all three speeds, even if the top end one is in "short supply".

Or, in short, it's not totally random - experience counts a lot.
 
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