Re: Re: Re: Re: Motorola 7457 Upgrades
Originally posted by jettredmont
Link, please? I haven't heard any such thing.
I found this:
http://news.com.com/2100-1001-203750.html?legacy=cnet
(note the date: 1997 ...)
and this (April 2002):
http://www.gcn.com/vol1_no1/daily-updates/18212-1.html
and this (Aug 2002, talking about 64-bit procs though):
http://www.informationweek.com/story/IWK20020816S0025
and this (Aug 2002):
http://www.technologyreview.com/offthewire/3001_682002_4.asp
and this (Sept 2002):
http://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/releases/20020919tech.htm
And, yes, I read the article. How is anything it said supposed to make me feel better about Motorola's paltry contribution to the state of the Mac?
Dude, your web searching skills could use some honing.
My first search on "intel end moore's law" yielded this (5th in the list of search results):
Dec 11 2002: "Intel's Grove Warns of the End of Moore's Law"
http://www.theinquirer.org/?article=6677
Here's the text:
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ONE OF THE MAJOR TECHNICAL HEADACHES facing chipmaker Intel is the leaking of current from inactive processors, company chairman Andy Grove told an audience at the International Electron Devices Meeting in San Francisco yesterday.
"Current is becoming a major factor and a limiter on how complex we can build chips," said Grove. He said the company engineers "just cant get rid of" power leakage.
The problem of leakage threatens the future validity of Moores Law. As chips become more powerful and draw more power, leakage tends to increase. The industry is used to power leakage rates of up to fifteen per cent, but chips constructed of increasing numbers of transistors can suffer power leakage of up to 40 per cent said Grove. In chips made up of a billion transistors may leak between 60 and 70 Watts of power, he warned. The power is largely dissipated as heat causing cooling problems for powerful chips.
While Intel is seeking ways to design chips with multiple cores with improved design and better insulators, Grove suggested that Moore Law regarding the doubling of transistor densities every couple of years will be redundant by the end of the decade. Chip makers will have to make more efficient use of the transistor in order to deliver ever increasing performance, he suggested.
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Intel's been on quite a ride pushing its x86 processor to previously unimagined performance, but its inherently inefficient design WILL hit a wall. Over the years IBM and others in the Unix world (Digital, etc.) have always focused more on efficiency rather than brute force, which is why I still think they're better partners for Apple in the long run. High-end Unix machines still outperform any PC, and Intel is going to bring that power to the desktop workstation with its 970. Though Sun tried to come out with cheaper Unix workstations in the past, both Sun and IBM (and even HP, I think) have now seen the light and jumped on the Linux bandwagon. IBM's big plan for the 970, for example, is to make it the CPU of choice for lower-end Linux machines that are now overwhelmingly using x86 CPUs.
So I'm not worried. I think the Moto speed bumps for 2003 are a welcome surprise, given the moribund state of Moto's chip business, but really Apple is just stalling for time until they get the next-generation 970.
And it IS next generation. With all this talk about GHz, are people forgetting that Intel's pride and joy, the Itanium2, only runs at from 933MHz to 1 GHz.
Read that again:
***Intel's best and most expensive chip runs from 933MHz to 1GHz***
Don't compare the 64 bit 970 to an aging and creaky P4! Forget 4 or 5 GHz or whatever chips. The real news is that IBM's 970 will be keeping up with Intel's Itanium and AMD's Hammer in the 64 bit CPU arena. Sure, most apps will still be 32 bits, but for the pro users that are doing the most grumbling about GHz, I think you can expect pro apps to be optimized for 64 bit, the same way they are optimized for Altivec now for the G4 (and the 970 also has Altivec). And like Intel's Itanium, the 970 is optimized for multiple processors so if the 970 chips are reasonably priced, there's no reason why Apple can't market high-end multi-970 PowerMacs or high-end multi-970 XServes (for rendering farms).
