ClimbingTheLog said:
Look, I sat through a Motorola NDA briefing in the summer of 1998 about their processor roadmap. They guaranteed quad-core G4's running at 900MHz (I think, maybe 800) by the 1st quarter of '01.
Need I say more?
As much as I'm hoping we don't get burnt again, Freescale is already moving faster than Motorola was on the PowerPC arcitecture. Their new e500 core is on the line right now, runs ramping up for the embedded market.
On top of that, a huge portion of the Crolles2 budget is into research into alternative materials, process shrinks, and alternatives to traditional COMD techniques. This isn't just Motorol doing this... Phillips and ST are heavily invested in the line, and AMD, Sony, and others are buying into the PowerPC's newer, more open standards as well.
If nothing else, we ought to see a broadening of the technology over the next few years. That, and all these licensees are paying into IBM's coffers. They do
own PowerPC, after all.
ClimbingTheLog said:
GaAs tends to be much more expensive to produce. This is the stuff Cray's chips were made of.
As I mentioned above, I've been doing some research into the purposes of the fab, the R&D space, and their outlined projects for the next couple of years. Depending on just how much success they have, Motorola might start creating a little IP of their own on the PowerPC, something that they don't necessarily need to license from IBM. It may not directly help Apple, but the platform needs to expand in general if there's going to be the kind of economy of scale that would start to favor us.
ddtlm said:
I not concerned with samples, I care about products. I'm not aware of a 90nm Moto processor, perhaps there is one on the market. Someone should tell me about it. Unless Moto has a 90nm chip out, and a fairly complex one at that, then I don't think they can be viewed as being ahead of Intel in the tech game. Like I was saying, its easy to critisize Intels 90nm progress from the sidelines.
There is no Motorola chip actively being sold at 90nm that I am aware of. Granted, I'm new to seiving their site for information and they seem to be in a transitional phase. However, their entire top-end line is set to be transferred down to 90nm, with a whole wing of the fab dedicated to the 300mm wafer 90nm process.
Hey I'm not gona defend the Prescott. I'm just saying this isn't proof that Intel botched 90nm. Wait to see a 90nm Pentium M, then we can look at process and design separately.
Dothan. 10th of May, unless they slip the deliver date.
Well clearly cutting cache below a certain point is a severe problem. Adding "extra" cache is totally different. Going to 2MB of on-die cache (from 512k) didn't keep the P4EE ahead of A64.
That's because the Athlon 64 FX series (which is the only Athlon 64 to beat the P4EE, as of the last time I looked) uses a lowered version of the Opteron's memory controller, which AMD licensed from Cray. It's got a far better FSB and memory fabric than the Pentium ever has. Also, the Athlon 64 is a newer chip, not just a further ramping of the same execution cores and pipelines that were introduced three or four years ago.
Precisely why I don't believe it ever existed. Why would IBM work so hard for a design which, apparently, is primarily going to go into low-margin Macs? It could go into the embedded market but I'm thinking that most all IBM's embedded customers that want features like AltiVec are already running Moto chips. IBM would have a fight on its hands, no easy money there.
The G3 is still used in embedded designs, and if IBM could offer their G3 customers extra value and function on the processor they've been using, it wouldn't hurt them. Having something competitive with the G4 would give them a chance at Motorola's market, and unless I'm vastly mistakenm IBM's got a much bigger warchest than Motorola. They could weather the storm much better than even Intel could.
Also, unless I'm mistaken again, IBM is the only manufacturer of 750s.
Isn't the e600 a G4? Perhaps I'm confused. But in any case, I'm not aware of any processor which has significantly redesigned its FSB without changing pinouts. Even if no new pins need to be added, the DDR signalling isn't gona work with an old chipset, so what's the point of being pin-compatible? Pin-compatible is all about drop-in replacement, such as 7455 to 7457.
I linked to the Freescale PowerPC core site earlier in this post, but just to save you time, I'll confirm that their documents say the e6000 is a "G4e," or MPC74xx series derivative. I find it likely that if they're making it as backwards compatible as the site claims, the memory bus will run in older boards as well, just not with the advantages of the new bus or memory clock.
Even without them it's got a better SIMD engine and a higher clock.
Really? Dual-presion SIMD floats I could get excited about. However I've read informative articles that suggests it would be hard to do cause the execution units would be huge.
From the horse's mouth:
The e600 core is instruction set and pin compatible with the G4 core used in the award-winning, high-performance MPC74xx family of PowerPC processors; however the e600 core is planned to scale beyond 2 GHz and to support Chip Multiprocessing (CMP). Like the G4 core, the superscalar e600 core is designed to issue four instructions per clock cycle (three instructions plus one branch) into eleven independent execution units, and to include a full 128-bit implementation of Freescale's advanced AltiVec Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) vector processing technology.
SoC Implementation to include new buses and architectures:
In addition to leveraging enhanced PowerPC processor cores optimized for SoC design methodologies, Freescale's scalable SoC platforms draw from the company's large and growing portfolio of intellectual property (IP). This broad portfolio includes system fabrics (RapidIO, SerDes), network acceleration (10/100/100 Ethernet, ATM, HDLC, etc.), external buses (PCI, PCI-X, etc.), memory controllers (DDR and DDRII), general communications peripherals, and security engines. Access to Freescale's IP portfolio makes it fast, easy and cost-effective to mix and match functional blocks and develop new SoC-based products optimized for a wide range of applications.
Incidentally, the e500 embedded processor has a cool feature. It does on-chip encryption enhancements for industry standards like MD-5, RC5, and other that are listed in the specs.
Dont Hurt Me said:
Not a word, those of us long time Mac users know all about Moto's so called fictional dreams and road maps, we know all about the year at 500 or 450 rather and we know about the year at 1.42 or should i say 1.33.
Yes, we knows about a company under different management and entirely under Motorola's heel. Supposedly, Freescale is completely reorganized. It might as well be another company with the same IP and licensing rights.
I'm not saying that they're going to deliver on the promises they're making, but there might be reason to at least take them more seriously. The first of the new core designs
is done.
enough talk, show me a chip that can hang with AMD's Fx53 or even a stale yet still much faster P4. so Moto has a chip that equals a 2.0 P4 from 2 years ago. BFD! Moto is still Last place when you look at Intel,AMD & IBM.
Depends on the market. Embedded? Intel and Motorola are the big players, not AMD or IBM, though IBM does sell a large number of G3s in this market.
For laptop performance? Intel all the way right now, short of a major revolution from IBM or Motorola in the next few months. In a week, the Dothan 90nm Centrino is supposed to be droppping in at 2.0ghz. Considering that the 1.7 performs like a 3.0 ghz, the 2.0ghs could very well be faster than the top of the line P4 Northwoods, let alone the Prescotts. Scaling linearly, the 2.0 would reach a theoretical equivalent of a 3.5ghz P4, and since the Athlon FX and P4EE are neck and neck at the moment... It's interesting all over, right now.
Still amazed Apple went with this looser. Biggest reason for Apples lost marketshare is this slow cpu and Apples piss pot poor marketing.
I'm sure it has
nothing to do with the hundreds of PC component manufacturers and OEMs that compete on price.
