Nekochan Net

Seems like Power6 will come at near 5GHz speeds:

http://www.oracle.com/apps_benchmark/html/results.html

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400MHz R12k - Apple G4 Cube dual 500MHz/GF6200 - Newton Messagepad 2100 - Apple PowerBook 2400c/G3@240 - DECstation5000/133 - Apple Workgroup Server 9150/120 - Apple Macintosh IIfx - Apple Macintosh Color Classic (Mystic upgrade) - Sun Cobalt Cube 3 - Tadpole RDI UltraBook IIi

Perhaps I'm dense, but I'm not grepping any "power6" or "4.7" on that page... ?

hmm..
that must be because Oracle pulled down the power6 results.
Date on them was may 1st if I recall correctly.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/05/20 ... r6_oracle/

_________________
Sitting in a room.....thinkin' shit up.

400MHz R12k - Apple G4 Cube dual 500MHz/GF6200 - Newton Messagepad 2100 - Apple PowerBook 2400c/G3@240 - DECstation5000/133 - Apple Workgroup Server 9150/120 - Apple Macintosh IIfx - Apple Macintosh Color Classic (Mystic upgrade) - Sun Cobalt Cube 3 - Tadpole RDI UltraBook IIi

New info on the Power6:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/05/21 ... wer6_p570/


Seems like that last jab was aimed at Jobs...

_________________
Sitting in a room.....thinkin' shit up.

400MHz R12k - Apple G4 Cube dual 500MHz/GF6200 - Newton Messagepad 2100 - Apple PowerBook 2400c/G3@240 - DECstation5000/133 - Apple Workgroup Server 9150/120 - Apple Macintosh IIfx - Apple Macintosh Color Classic (Mystic upgrade) - Sun Cobalt Cube 3 - Tadpole RDI UltraBook IIi

Yes, but how much power does the thing consume and how much heat does it pump out? I've used a G5 with Final Cut and doing simple things like exporting with compressor (small 2 min clip) cause the fans to go into Delta mode. Worse, the exhaust could be used to dry clothes. In comparison, my Core Duo 2 workstation can run fanless (the Intel motherboard fan control stops the fan when the processor is idle) and even going 100% the fan is near silent.

That said, Itanium is going nowhere fast. Sun realized floating point wasn't that important for database and big iron machines and the new UltraSPARCs have much less floating point hardware (compared to integer). IBM with it's FP monster Cell isn't doing so hot either. The new Itanium 3s will be very compatible (using the same CS busI) with higher end Core Duo based Xeons. Since Xeon and Opteron chips have been moving a lot of enterprise applications to x86. I'm almost thinking Intel is positioning itself to be able to use the same processors, possibly by loading different microcodes on the same hardware to run x86_64 and IA-64. Maybe with hardware virtualization (it will have a hypervisor) both at the same time. Yes, I know with Itanium 2 they took out hardware x86 support, so who knows.

The Power6 just owns everything at the moment:

IBM's benchmark page: http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/p/benchmarks/

A comparison of 8-core spec_rate numbers:

8 core SPEC CPU2006 INT Rates
240 ___ IBM: 4.7Ghz POWER6
108 ___ HP: 3 GHz AMD Opteron 8222SE, DDR2 667
102 ___ HP: 1.6GHz/24MB Dual-Core, Intel Itanium 2
91.2 ___ Fujitsu Siemens: 2.66 GHz Intel QC Xeon processor X5355, FSB 1.333
81.6 ___ Sun: 2.15 GHz SPARC VI (Fujitsu)

8 core SPEC CPU2006 FP Rates
213 ___ IBM: 4.7Ghz POWER6
98.7 ___ HP: 3 GHz AMD Opteron 8222SE, DDR2 667
90.8 ___ HP: 1.6GHz/18MB Dual-Core, Intel Itanium 2
70.9 ___ Sun: 2.15 GHz SPARC VI (Fujitsu)
60.9 ___ Fujitsu Siemens: 2.66 GHz Intel QC Xeon processor X5355, FSB 1.333
58.2 ___ Bull: 3.4 GHz Intel Tulsa, FSB 800, 16MB L3

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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

The same as Power5 (I don't really know what a G5 is) according to all articles.

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As I understand it, all the Apple 'Gs' were Power4-derivatives... G3 was 32 bit, G4 was 32 bit + AltiVec, and G5 was 64 bit + AltiVec.

You got the last one right

G3 has nothing to do with POWER4, it is a follow on to the PPC603e processor co-developed by IBM and Motorola. The contemporary server/workstation chip from IBM at the time was the 64bit POWER3.

G4 was a G3+Altivec. The Altivec unit was designed by Motorola.

G4 stagnated in performance for a long time so Apple tapped IBM to develop a desktop version of the POWER4 64bit server chip. This was officially called PPC970 and Apple called it the G5.

The PPC970 took one of the cores of the POWER4 (the first dual core chip when introduced in 2001) and added Altivec (POWER4 didn't have Altivec). PPC970 also cut down on the bus and memory interface speeds compared to the POWER4.

Later on there was the PPC 970MP which was a dual core version of the G5 (the Powermac quad used 2 of these chips). This was still based on the POWER4+Altivec. However, by then IBM was selling POWER5+ chip in their servers/workstations. POWER5/+ was a big advance on POWER4 in that it had
- Vastly greater memory and cache bandwidth
- Lower memory latency due to on-die memory controller
- SMT (2 threads per core).

There was never an "Apple" desktop version of the POWER5 chip.

And now IBM has just introduced the POWER6 which is a kiss-ass processor. Interestingly, the POWER6 now includes Altivec (first POWERx chip to have it) as well as a decimal floating point unit.

_________________
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

Hey, thanks for clearing that up.

I always wondered, by the way, and I think you might have the answer, why was there never a G4 with a faster FSB? From how I understand it that was really the bottleneck near the end of the run...

Oh, in other vaguely related news - the EFIKA board is now 99USD. I'd snag a few if I had the cash, just to support the effort...

The G4 had a very small instruction window, so it couldn't have enough instructions to reorder to hide the growing latency between faster G4s and memory. It also has/had a very crappy branch predictor, compared to other contemporary processors, and no prefetcher at all (for the most part). So the G4 had many bottlenecks, a faster FSB would not have done much really with the microarchitecture left unchanged. Motorola also was in dire straits regarding their semiconductor section. So the G4 was going nowhere fast...

The G5 was very expensive, so I don't blame Apple for looking somewhere else for chips. I have some coleages in IBM and it seems that Apple's decision blindsided them.

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The Power6 has nothing to do with Apple, it's a server chip, a rather high end one, and Apple wants to make portable, quiet things. I don't see Apple going back to PowerPC no matter how fast the thing is.

They've already invested a lot into Intel, made a very big deal about totally dumping the PowerPC chips, and bragged about how fast they did the dumping.

This thing really, seriously doesn't look anything remotely like what Apple is going for, so wondering if it'll make Apple switch back is I think completely missing the point of the thing.

Besides, it's the CPU industry. They're normally one upping each other all the time.

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"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?"

I don't think anyone would seriously think Apple is gong back to Power.

On their servers it would make sense but I guess, from what's written above, that they will drop their server line.

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Drop their server line? Why in the world would they do that?

Please read my post again or, better yet, read frapazods. Thats the source here.

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