Nekochan Net

equivalent configs:

Xserve, 4 core 2.00Ghz Xeon, 4GB RAM: $3698
Xserve, 4 core 2.66Ghz Xeon, 4GB RAM: $4497
Xserve, 4 core 3Ghz Xeon, 4GB RAM: $5497
P505Q, 4 core 1.65Ghz POWER5+, 4GB RAM: $5,505

So, not a huge difference in these 1U servers. POWER6 should be priced similarly.

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My Systems:
Apple MacBookPro, 2.66Ghz Dual Core i7, Nvidia 330M GT, 8GB RAM, 240GB SSD + 750GB (optibay)
AMD Phenom II X4 3.4Ghz, Nvidia 9800GT, 8Gb RAM, 2TB + 1.5TB
Apple iBook G4, 1.2ghz G4, ATI 9200, 768MB RAM, 80GB.
HP c8000, 1.1Ghz Dual Core PA-8900, ATI FireGL X3, 6GB RAM, 2x73GB

I doubt that Apple wants to get into the whole issue of maintaining two different architectures, though- look how fast they completely dumped the PPC rather than keeping the G5 lines going for people who have PPC optimized apps. Two different lines require two substantially different hardware lines and two completely different firmware teams, with support becoming exponentially more complex (esp. hardware)- and I think Apple is targeting the same sort of market as Microsoft, the market that doesn't want to say "why aren't they exactly the same??" We're definitely seeing the triumph of mediocrity (at least AMD finally got a decent number of registers into x86 with x86_64), but So It Goes. The new Macs are fast and cheap, and for Apple's market that's what counts.

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Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!

Systems available for remote access on request.

(single-CM)

Yes, you are correct. I doubt they will ever have 2 lines. I was just arguing that POWER6 is not just for high end servers.

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My Systems:
Apple MacBookPro, 2.66Ghz Dual Core i7, Nvidia 330M GT, 8GB RAM, 240GB SSD + 750GB (optibay)
AMD Phenom II X4 3.4Ghz, Nvidia 9800GT, 8Gb RAM, 2TB + 1.5TB
Apple iBook G4, 1.2ghz G4, ATI 9200, 768MB RAM, 80GB.
HP c8000, 1.1Ghz Dual Core PA-8900, ATI FireGL X3, 6GB RAM, 2x73GB

If architectural registers were a metric for excellence, then I am afraid Itanium would be at the top of the heap

x86s have had a decent number of registers for a long time now. Out-of-order architectures have made the # of registers irrelevant for a long time, maybe in the 80s people still cared about registers as it was thought that compilers would have an easier time scheduling instructions.

Interestingly enough, the power6 is an in-order architecture, which means that an in-order machine has been at the top of SPECint for the first time in over a decade Which is fairly impressive.

As for pricing issues, from the pricelist in an earlier post shows that what apple's considers to be the high-end of their offerings (pricewise) is basically the low-end of the p-series for IBM.
Apple and IBM target somewhat markets with their xservers and the p-series respectively.
No one was really saying that the P6 won't make an appearance on the technical desktop or the "low" end server segments. It is just that those machines from IBM will be much comparable to the top-end offerings of apple, which means that apple would have to still worry about the mid and low-range price/performance offerings, in which the PPC was going nowhere.

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"Was it a dream where you see yourself standing in sort of sun-god robes on a
pyramid with thousand naked women screaming and throwing little pickles at you?"

Apple's laptops are a huge portion of their sales and are growing fast. Everyone saw it coming for Apple and the whole PC industry. So to Apple, any superiority of the G5's register sets or number of bits was pretty irrelevant, cause those laptops were still running the G4 for the forseeable future.

I guess you consider x86_64 a triumph of mediocrity against the G4? Cause for a fast growing and crucially important part of Apple's product line, the G5 wasn't actually happening.



The G5 Powerbook

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Maverick 3: Athlon X2 7750, 2gb, Windows Vista
Frank Dux: SGI Octane2 R12k 400mhz 1.5gb

"Chief, look! I learned to make fire! Who knows what we could do with this... We should learn to control it!"

"Ridiculous. How can you justify wasting time and effort on this so-called 'fire' when our children are freezing to death at night?"

No, the Opteron architecture was the first interesting thing out of x86 land for quite a while- say since the Pentium Pro. The mediocrity is the "PC-ification" of computing, and really I suppose in this case the processor didn't mean much, since the Mac had been pretty much PC-ified for a while (and even when it wasn't there were still odd design decisions that hamstrung the system).

_________________
Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!

Systems available for remote access on request.

(single-CM)

How much are those IBM's? Those "low end" IBMs listed earlier were starting around $5000.

I just read here that the first Power6 system - the p570 - will start at about $60,000.

And those MIPS SGIs were starting at around $15,000 IIRC.

Developing complicated, big hardware to sell in small numbers is a game played for very high margins.

_________________
Maverick 3: Athlon X2 7750, 2gb, Windows Vista
Frank Dux: SGI Octane2 R12k 400mhz 1.5gb

"Chief, look! I learned to make fire! Who knows what we could do with this... We should learn to control it!"

"Ridiculous. How can you justify wasting time and effort on this so-called 'fire' when our children are freezing to death at night?"