Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 5th Feb 2007 21:56 UTC
Remember PA Semi? The company has just released, as promised, its first chipset. "They are full 64-bit PPC, support virtualisation, and would do Alitvec but that name is copyrighted by Freescale. Instead they do 'VMA'. The three parts run at a max wattage of 25, 15 and 10W for the 2.0, 1.5 and 1.0GHz parts respectively, with typical wattage listed at 13, 8 and 6W. The individual cores are said to have a 7W max and 4W typical power consumption at 2.0GHz." PA Semi was one of the prime reasons why Ars's John 'Hannibal' Stokes doubted Apple's reasoning for the switch to Intel.
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Member since:
2005-07-06
These will have volume production in Q4, 2007, coinciding with Intel's 45nm Penryn CPUs. Penryn should debut at closer to 3 GHz than 2 GHz, with 2.66 GHz being a conservative estimate. At 2.66 GHz, Penryn should score about 2800 SPECint. Now, as the article points out, these PA Semi chips should score comparably to PPC 970 in SPECint, normalized by clockspeed. That puts a 2 GHz 1682M at a stunning... 1200 SPECint. This performance will almost be matched by Intel's ultra-low-voltage Core 2 coming out in Q2 which should get about 1150 SPECint at 1.08 GHz, with a TDP of 9W (1W typical).
So, can we leave the "switch" talk aside, since its clearly ridiculous? This CPU is not and was not intended for an Apple notebook. It's got some seriously interesting features like on-die 10 gigabit ethernet, integrated PCI-Express, and a mesh inter-processor communications mechanism. It's a very interesting chip... if you're building a router or a supercomputer.