“Last week at MPF, IBM unveiled some fresh details of its forthcoming POWER6 server microarchitecture. The company has been fairly stingy with POWER6 information, and most of what was released last week involved the system level. Nonetheless, there were a few interesting tidbits for those of us who are into microprocessors.”
A path to the future ?
Some bright spark will fit these into PowerMac systems
and have a blast but somehow I doubt Apple will do it.
If a third party managed it and the G6 benchmarks
trounced the latest Duo Core 2 then it would be very
interesting… for Apple anyways.
A path to the future ?
No, I don’t think so.
If they went back to the PPC, then they’d have to start designing their own machines again. It’s much cheaper to use box-standard Intel machines rebadged and recased.
I only knew of the source info after searching for it because I didnt expect “unveilled” to be anything but an information-starving press release
But .. now that I know .. LOTS to read
– Cool .
EDIT : I might just fall in love with the RWT – In-Depth Technical Analysis
EDIT : 2 Off-topic links (too old as news but IMO very interesting) – Novell change from Reiser to ext3 :
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-3513_22-6125509.html
http://enterprise.linux.com/article.pl?sid=06/10/12/2120204&from=rs…
http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-factory/2006-09/msg00542.html
Edited 2006-10-20 18:20
IBM is not gonna to make any G6 in any sort of way. IBM just won’t do it. If IBM would have been comitted to design a successor to the G5 Apple certinly would not have decided to go for Intel. That’s a matter of fact!!!!
IBM wanted to sell the Cell to Apple, they refused to use a chip that is srongly not designed for general purpuse computing, and that’s it, IBM did not have any thing else to propose.
Also if you think that it would be possible to fit a Power6 in a Powermac, please wake up!!! This chip is just too hot, yes it seems that they can keep it as hot as the power5, but it still too much for a form factor of a desktop computer or 1U servers. Remenber that the Power5 dissipates far higher heat and consums more watts than the G5 970 MP does, So how do you expect Apple to use such chips.
The Power6 is even not designed for this purpose, because anyway a single of this chip would cost higher than a entire high end Mac Pro. I mean this chip is designed for specific high end servers and markets and it cost for that matter. Moreover i dont think that the hand tuned circuit and layout design will help to make the Power6 a cheap processor. That’s just unusuable by Apple.
Apple did certainly hope that IBM would be commited to develop a Power6 derived Gsomething with the proper thermal requirement, but IBM REFUSED, so Apple said them see you guys…….
Apple needs an effecient design in terms of watt consumption and heat for their workstation, server AND laptop computers. IBM simply does not have anything to propose for the laptop anyway (besides single core processors with low frequency).
However i should say that the Power6 seems to be a monster and yes i like their design, those high-end technologies, it looks very impressive!
“Also if you think that it would be possible to fit a Power6 in a Powermac, please wake up!!! This chip is just too hot, yes it seems that they can keep it as hot as the power5, but it still too much for a form factor of a desktop computer or 1U servers. Remenber that the Power5 dissipates far higher heat and consums more watts than the G5 970 MP does, So how do you expect Apple to use such chips.”
Why? Both Power5 and Power5+ come in 1U and deskside cases:
http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/p/hardware/entry/505/index.html
http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/p/hardware/entry/520/index.html
“The Power6 is even not designed for this purpose, because anyway a single of this chip would cost higher than a entire high end Mac Pro. I mean this chip is designed for specific high end servers and markets and it cost for that matter. Moreover i dont think that the hand tuned circuit and layout design will help to make the Power6 a cheap processor. That’s just unusuable by Apple.”
I just checked prices on both machines. The Mac Pro starts at $2500, and the p5 505Q starts at $3400. If you start adding memory and other stuff to the Mac, one can easily spend $10,000.
I’m not arguing that Apple isn’t cheaper, it’s just not as cheap as your post claims. There is quite a bit of overlap in the 2 price ranges.
There’s overlap in the price range, but between completely different products. The Mac Pro is a quad-core machine. The deskside and 1U server you linked to are single-core machines (no doubt subsidized by their high-end brethren). The Mac Pro has a bunch of amenities (a real GPU, for example), those machines have none (they are servers). They’re also either loud (the 1U), or huge (the deskside). Oh, and the low-end models of both lines you pointed out are Power5 (previous-gen), not Power5+ (current-gen).
The cheapest dual-core Power5+ machine is $4,700. The cheapest such deskside is $8,500.
What’s the price of a quad-core Mac Pro like configuration? Well expensive enough that IBM won’t even sell them on their webstore!
A POWER class chip in a Mac Pro configuration would increase the price (and size) enormously. Everything about POWER5 is expensive. An MCM has 71 ceramic layers. Each chip has 7000 contacts. The MCM has 5,200 I/O pins. POWER6 will be even more sophisticated, with more pins (because of more I/O channels). Heck, it’ll take 14 channels of DDR2-SDRAM to saturate its 75 GB/sec of memory bandwidth. In comparison, even an $1000 Xeon gets by with a few substrate layers and 775 I/O pins.
Why did you change the name of the news item ?
The original title wasn’t sexy enough ? … might as well do it from the very start …
& no I don’t think so .
The Power 6 processor is too different to be an evolutionary step .
As mentioned before – this chip is server stuff & not desktop – or even laptop stuff .
… & even if it were to be some evolutionary step – Apple is now using Intel chips .
So any hype associated with G4/G5 processors ,new IMB processors & Apple is irrelevant .
There’s plenty of talk about a new POWER archetecture that will merge the POWER and PowerPC lines into one platform. Just what the processors will be like, I don’t know. I do know that Apple isn’t a backer of POWER.org and the associated organization. If you want to see new POWER stuff on the desktop you’ll have to be running Linux, MorphOS, or AmigaOS since these are the most likely to support the POWER archetecture.
http://www.power.org/forums/index.php is where the forums are located FYI.
the two-cycle latency for dependent integer instructions—has been removed from POWER6
Two-cycle Latency removed means 1 cycle Latency!!!
How did they do this?
Hand tuning?
or
Did they optimize and improve their circuit software,
if it’s a software enhancement, then,
you can expect a JUMP in CELL as well!!!