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.
Permalink for comment 209533
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Recent Original Stories
Recent Comments
Headlines
Random Comments
Random Stories
Random OS Link
Member since:
2005-07-06
SPEC 2000 benchmarks tend to show huge differences in performance between processors, SPEC 2006 and other benchmarks show these differences are nowhere near as big
Well, since PA Semi only gave projected SPEC 2000 figures, I worked with what I had. I'd be interested to see SPEC 2006 benchmarks for these processors. And other benchmarks can show even bigger differences. GCC compilation, for example, absolutely flies on x86. x86's tend to have highly-optimized memory systems, since they have so few registers, and that gives them a big boost in code that deals with heavily-indirect data structures (graphs, trees).
Also, x86 have always been designed for integer performance first, nothing else is. The FP figures are the ones worth watching.
x86's are designed for integer performance because that's the most important thing in the desktop/workstation space. And that's the crucial point here: nothing else is designed for the desktop/workstation space. And no, FP figures aren't worth watching, because nobody cares about FP performance on a laptop. People only barely care about FP on the desktop, and will only care less about FP as more of that code is outsourced to the GPU.
Anyway, it wasn't designed as a competitor to a high end desktop part, it would be best compared to laptop parts.
Those are laptop parts! Even shipping laptop parts embarrass the PA-Semi chip (again, in laptop-relevant metrics). All this talk about bootcamp and SRAM is a cop-out. The simple fact is that the x86 world has the best laptop/desktop/workstation CPUs, period.
Edited 2007-02-06 02:07