Linked by Nicholas Blachford on Mon 15th Jul 2002 01:14 UTC
According to a brief paragraph on MacOS Rumours Apple may be switching to IBM POWER4 CPUs instead of the Motorola G5 for future Macs.
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The key strength of the Power4 architecture is insane I/O bandwidth, multi-processing, and giant caches. Once you strip all that out and put it into a Mac, you've got a chip that's SLOWER than current P4s.
On what exactly do you base this assertion?
A POWER4 "Lite" will be slower than the full POWER4 but there's no reason to suggest x86 will be able to beat it.
It may indeed be slower than x86, I don't know. It depends on the implementation and I don't expect IBM are likely to mess this up. IBM are not Motorola!
Sure, Apple + IBM might be able to ramp up the clock-speed before release, but then again, so can Intel.
Indeed, but not to the same degree, 2.53GHz P4 are already 0.13um whereas POWER4 are 0.18um, that means an immediate boost and further boosts in the future since IBMs silicon process is better than Intels. Intel can boost their clock speed also but not by as much and it wouldn't have the same effect - All CPUs are bandwidth limited and this increases with frequency. 10% greater Frequency does not mean 10% better performance, especially at higher frequencies.