IBM's Power 970

Wow, that's pretty heavy stuff! I think the upshot of it all is that this nis a dman fast processor, designed specifically for SMP. Can't wait to see it in a MAC!

Preliminaries: die size, power consumption, and clock speed
Process Die Size _Transistors Core Voltage Power Dissipation
PowerPC 970 1.8 GHz 0.13um 121 mm2 52 million 1.3v 42 Watts
Pentium 4 2.8 GHz 0.13um 131 mm2 55 million 1.525v 68.4 Watts
G4e 1 GHz 0.18um 106 mm2 33 million 1.6v 30 Watts


As you can see from the table, the 970 at 1.8 GHz is much closer to the G4e than to the P4 2.8 GHz in terms of power dissipation. This means that Apple will be able to use this chip in the kinds of innovative enclosure designs that make their hardware continually appealing, regardless of how it performs. Furthermore, a 1U, 970-based version of the XServe is not out of the question. And if you consider the fact that the 970's power consumption at 1.2GHz is a mere 19W, it's almost certain that we'll see a future notebook from Apple based on the new chip.

I hope it comes to the desktop Power Mac at the same time & soon!
:)

I realize that in some sense it's not "fair" to compare a recently announced 64-bit processor that won't ship for at least a year to two 32-bit processors that are currently on the market.

At least another year... great. And that'll be 1.8GHz. Compared to 2.8GHz today. What will a Pentium be in a year? 5.6GHz (Intel actually does twice the speed every year, not like Motorola every 3 years...)
I love macs, but this is just BS!

It's a good article. Just like other "parallel" style processors with shorter pipelines, the one question will be how high it clocks. No matter how well the 1.8 GHz performs when it's released, if it hasn't moved up a bit in a year then Apple will be well behind once again. Hopefully IBM will prove to be better in this than Moto, but this is by no means a simple processor design like the P4!

Ars is one of my favorite sites. Its wasn't long ago that they didn't cover much Macintosh issues at all. Now they do them in excellence. Props to those guys over there (not to take any away from MacRumors, of course!)

Originally posted by TheT

At least another year... great. And that'll be 1.8GHz. Compared to 2.8GHz [B]today. What will a Pentium be in a year? 5.6GHz (Intel actually does twice the speed every year, not like Motorola every 3 years...)
I love macs, but this is just BS! [/B]

Take a look at this:

The Intel® Itanium® 2 processor is uniquely architected for demanding enterprise and technical applications. Itanium® 2-based platforms enable businesses and organizations to maximize their investments by delivering industry leading performance at lower cost with greater choice than proprietary technologies.

Available Speeds: 1 GHz, 900 MHz
Cache Level 3: integrated 3 MB or 1.5 MB
Level 2: 256 KB
Level 1: 32 KB
Features
Based on EPIC architecture
Enhanced Machine Check Architecture (MCA) with extensive Error Correcting Code (ECC)
Operating system support: HP-UX*, Linux*, Windows*
System Bus 400 MHz, 128-bit wide
6.4 GB/s bandwidth
Chipset Intel® E8870 chipset, OEM custom chipsets

Originally posted by TheT

At least another year... great. And that'll be 1.8GHz. Compared to 2.8GHz [B]today. What will a Pentium be in a year? 5.6GHz (Intel actually does twice the speed every year, not like Motorola every 3 years...)
I love macs, but this is just BS! [/B]

sure, intel will be way, way ahead in clock speed, but the ibm 970 may be an option for apple and better suited than the next generation motorola processor

we will just have to wait and see and see which direction apple goes with this information

At least another year... great. And that'll be 1.8GHz. Compared to 2.8GHz today. What will a Pentium be in a year? 5.6GHz (Intel actually does twice the speed every year, not like Motorola every 3 years...)
I love macs, but this is just BS!

Hmm, a traditionally pro-PC site writes a highly involved article on the design tradeoffs of a chip that won't be out for another half year and a mac user says that this chip is "BS".

In the next paragraph, the author explains that the comparison is done to compare architectures not performance. The assumption here is that Intel's offering on the desktop will only be a faster rendition of the Pentium 4, else he would have choses the more relevant Itanium or Opteron/Hammer or Pentium 4 XEON. The author wished to discuss design tradeoffs against other desktop CPUs that the readers might be familiar with.

Intel does not "twice"[sic] the speed every year. I think it is closer to doubling every year and a half. The problem is that Motorola's 25% speed boost in almost a year is pathetically slow by industry standards; not that Intels clock speed gains are incredibly impressive. Because of its extra long pipeline with spare stages thrown into the P4's design to account for anticipated wire delay, it would be surprising that IBM would have a chip that was as fast as a P4 in terms of clock speed, especially since it uses the same process, with smaller stage pipelines, and will be out in quantity in a year.

These speed gains do not come without a penalty (which you'd realize if you read some of the author's referenced articles). This is why the P4 was deservedly panned when it first came out--it was a worse performer than the PIII. The P4 design gave it room to grow (by increasing clock speed) and now it isn't so panned. It's not universally loved, either.

As a supposed mac lover, you'd also realize that clock speed is not the end-all/be-all of performance. While it is a factor: if you read the article, you'd see that PowerPC designs are designed more like the inside of McDonalds (many short lines served slowly serving multiple people at ocne) than the Pentium-4-like drive thru (one long line served very fast). The interesting thing here is IBM is trying have it both ways (multiple lines served fast).

How fast is an Itanium? (much slower than a Pentium 4). How much does it cost? (more)? Yet despite the slower clock speed, Intel seems to think that it is a good enough performer to justify the premium.

Every day, R&D departments are buying Athlon computers for HPC even though they're "slower" than the Pentium 4. People still buy Pentium III's for low-end servers despite the fact they are slower (though I believe this will flip to Pentium 4 XEONs next year). Right now, much smarter people than you an me spend $60k+ on n-way pSeries servers from IBM with a chip with a similar design to the PPC970 running at

Originally posted by TheT

At least another year... great. And that'll be 1.8GHz. Compared to 2.8GHz [B]today. What will a Pentium be in a year? 5.6GHz (Intel actually does twice the speed every year, not like Motorola every 3 years...)
I love macs, but this is just BS! [/B]

Once again, we have a "Mac fan" that has TOTALLY missed the boat in what the power of this processor really means to desktop computing and is completely blinded by MHz. If 64-bit processing, 2 Altivec units, 200 instructions moving through the processor at any given time and up to 8 way SMP aren't enough for you, then get a SGI or Sun workstation, and stay away from Macs.

I guess I took the bait.

Great post Tychay!