To ~loserman~ and daveL
~loserman~, I think you should read more carefully, I was referring to the Athlon dual-core (and I
clearly said so). I've said
nothing about the AMD Opteron and I've never mentioned the Opteron until this very message. For that matter, I've never mentioned the Xeon either. As I noted earlier (to daveL), I'm certain that everyone else here is talking about the 970MP and the competition for the 970MP is the dual-core Pentium and dual-core Athlon. It is
not some high-end server based upon the Opteron, POWER, or Sparc processor line.
In any case, if either you or daveL want to discuss specific details I'd have to suggest that you should at least start with a careful reading of what others have
actually said. Both of you have reported some correct information, but was it really relevant? I think it would be nice if we could stick more directly to the thread topics and not try to bring high-end server and exotic architecture details into what should be a discussion on the PowerPC, NAB announcements, and the Power Mac's
logical competition.
~loserman~ said:
If I was a betting man, I would bet on seeing a dual core PowerMac announced at WWDC.
At a minimum, I really hope you are right, since I'm not very optimistic concerning Power Mac announcements at NAB. WWDC is probably as "late" as Apple/IBM should be with the next Power Mac update.
And now a few of the "problems":
~loserman~ said:
The PPC970 has already been sampled and MAY be in production right now.
The PPC970 shipped almost two years ago, that's what most people refer to as the original Power Mac G5. The current G5s use the 970FX. I think you're being a bit sloppy in your writing because I guess you meant to say PPC970MP or just 970MP. I'm certain you know the difference, but to avoid future confusion you should both write what you're thinking and read (more carefully) what others are writing.
And this:
~loserman~ said:
When someone tells you about benchmarks on undelivered CPUs its time to consider the sources and wonder where their paychecks are coming from. Independent source hmmm I doubt it.
If you actually read my post you'd see that I said "dual Athlon (AMD)" and "dual-core Pentium." Benchmarks on both of those processors are all over the web. In fact, the Pentium dual-core will probably ship at NAB and dual-core Athlon systems are also scheduled to be available this month. However, dual-core Opterons aren't due until later this summer (I guess that is what you were trying to talk about).
Here maybe this will help:
the PPC970 is
not the same as the dual-core 970MP
the Opteron is
not the same as an Athlon
the POWER is
not the same as the PowerPC or PPC970
the Xeon is
not the same as the dual-core Pentium
the Opteron, POWER, Sparc, Itanium, and to some extent even the Xeon are
not in the same class of products as the G5 (PPC970), Athlon, and Pentium.
Finally, I apologize to everyone else in this thread for my detailed responses to ~loserman~ and daveL. I'm sure most don't want to wade through these small technical details. In any case, I doubt that I will be responding to any more comments in this thread from either ~loserman~ or daveL. That is, unless they make a truly misleading or incorrect statement that I considered relevant to the "PowerMacs at NAB" topic.
And my original post:
fpnc said:
All the benchmarks I've read (four or five independent sources) indicate that the dual-core Pentiums perform very well on optimized, threaded tasks. And the dual Athlon (AMD) benchmarks are roughly in the same ballpark. So, you can consider Intel the "weakest" but it still will offer significant performance improvements in content creation which has traditionally been one of the strong points of the Power Macs.
I've got to take my hat off to both Intel and AMD, they['ve] been able to move to multi-core chips faster than anyone was expecting. And you've got to ask, where is IBM and Apple? No one knows for sure, but the existing Power Macs are certainly reaching the end of their run as the premier video and image editing platform.
To which ~loserman~ responded:
~loserman~ said:
Was this a joke?
The Intel Dual Cores in the Xeon Line are a very poor implementation. No internal crossbar for processor to processor communications. They also will be crippled and starved for memory bandwidth.
In contrast AMD designed the Opteron line for dual core from the start. They already included the crossbar in the CPU and were just waiting on their 90nm process to be ready so that they could add the second core.
Unlike the Intel offering they included 2 memory controllers on die which allows ea processor dedicated memory bandwidth.
When someone tells you about benchmarks on undelivered CPUs its time to consider the sources and wonder where their paychecks are coming from.
Independent source hmmm I doubt it.
As to the IBM/Apple comment, IBM has been producing dual core CPUs since 2001. Their Power 4 CPU is dual core.
A scaled back version of this CPU the PPC970 is what Apple had IBM build for them. The PPC970 has already been sampled and MAY be in production right now. Apple and IBM are both tight lipped at times with the former being extremely so.
If I was a betting man, I would bet on seeing a dual core PowerMac announced at WWDC.
EDIT: Tried to remove some of the extra blank spacing in the message (this is getting too long).
