IBM has today presented various new versions of their G5 processor at the Power Everywhere Forum in Japan. Firstly, it introduced the much-anticipated PowerPC 970MP, the dual-core version of the G5. In addition, they also announced 3 low-power G5s, ranging from 1.2Ghz at 13W to 1.6Ghz at 16W. These processors will most likely find their way into Apple's Macs.
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Member since:"I'm being a bit sarcastic, of course, Yonah isn't exactly like the PII, but it's safe to say that the evolutionary jump any bigger than the one from the Athlon (K7) to the Athlon64 (K8). Mac folks cracked jokes about the aging x86 architecture with regards to the PII, and are now hailing Yonah as the second coming, and it's irking me off a little."
1st: I don't even own a Mac, I never had one for more than a decade.
2nd: Pentium M's are based on Pentium III's architecture, yes. They have numerous enhancements also like a beefier Brach Predictor, really good power management, among other things I really don't feel like explaining here. If you read some recent articles comparing a recent Pentium M running with an adapter on a Desktop motherboard (not a very recent one) you'll see that these mobile chips hold very well against even the best Athlon 64.
3rd: the Yonah processor will not only be a dual-core version of the Pentium M. It will have many important enhancements to it, including SSE3, better power management and power consumption. It will also feature an enhanced floating point engine and a beefed up instruction decoder that can handle "several" SSE instructions in parallel.
4th: It's dual core and both cores share 2MB of L2 cache which doesn't happen with current dual-core processors out in the market. This feature can be a very high performance bonus since the two processors can communicate with each other faster and easier.
Read about Yonah, I suggest. www.arstechnica.com is a good start.
Member since:
Member since:2005-07-06
If you read some recent articles comparing a recent Pentium M running with an adapter on a Desktop motherboard (not a very recent one) you'll see that these mobile chips hold very well against even the best Athlon 64.
You obviously just skimmed the articles. The Pentium M, when overclocked by at least 50%, can "hold very well" against a MID-LEVEL Athlon 64 in the demo benchmarks of three games. In all other tests, the Pentium M has its butt handed to it by all other processors, including low-end Athlon XPs.
Member since:"Additionally, it's very likely that the 2.5GHz multicore chips coming out now will be faster than the first iteration of dual-core Yonahs that'll be coming out next year. Those will debut at 2.13GHz, and Yonah's IPC isn't good enough to overcome that difference in most cases."
The 2.5Ghz multicore will be 'probably' faster than the Yonah's incorporated in the first Mactel Laptops, mac Mini and iMacs. Howhever, you are comparing high-end liquid cooled CPU with a mobile chip, and that is where the Macs are currently lacking most in terms of CPU performance.
Member since:2005-06-29
Member since:2005-07-06
Member since:2005-06-29
Never understimate a Macintosh apologists ability to repeat Steve Job's verbatem.
I'm not trying to be rude or insulting; but it does start to seem like that sometimes. This is one of those times where Mac fans cried for so long about how G5 was better than Xeon (we all know anything beats Prescott) and Opteron and now that Apple is leaving it suddenly Intel is going to produce an amazing x86 chip for them? Do you guys just trust Steve Jobs implicitly?
If I had been a big Mac fan (and I was a big fan of the G5 and the G4 actually) when this happened I'd have shut-up about processor superiority and started talking about hardware quality and OS superiority.
Member since:
Member since:The G5 in a Power Mac has got nothing to apologize for.
A G5 in a laptop was the problem. And IBM's time to market wasn't as good as one would hope. Had IBM started with the G4 and built it's 64bit replacement, then there might not have been this change to Intel.
I guess there are just so many good ideas when it comes to chip design.
But, it would have been interesting to see what IBM could have done had they started with the G4, added 64bit regs, and only increased the 7 stage pipeline to 10+, dual core, better Altivec...
Member since:All this brow beating about "how dare mac zealots sing the praises of intel when they bagged them for so many years" is starting to get me annoyed.
Each porduct should be judged on its own merits. I am an unashamed G4 fanboy, but in the last 12 months I have been getting increasingly jealous of my centrino toting friends. The P4 is a pilo 'o crap, but the Pentium M is really sweet.
Some intel chips are good, some are bad, some PPC chips are good, some are bad. It seems to me apple is just betting that future intel chips will be the better. There is a lot of water to go under the bridge before we can make any judgement as to wether or not this was a good idea.
The new WebKit Opera for Android has been released. "Opera 14 for Android is built on top of Chromium 26, with a total overhaul of the UI in native code, making it fit well with the latest Android design guidelines. Go get the build from Google Play or point your browser to m.opera.com, and give it a spin!"
The Verge pointed me to a blog post by Leap Motion - which reveals how their Kinect-like motion control works with Windows 8. "From the second you plug in your Leap Motion Controller, you'll be able to browse the web and interact with your computer just by moving your hands and fingers in the air. With Leap Motion technology and Windows, you can do everything that's possible with multi-touch inputs - without actually touching anything. This also means that existing applications in Windows 7 and 8 will respond to your natural hand and finger movements. Soon, we'll show you how Leap Motion will work with Mac OS X." Quite cool.
PocketNow interviews Marc Dillon, and there's an interesting note about why Jolla is keeping the display properties under wraps: "We're leaving some of those details out because we do understand that there are a lot of really big players in the market and they tend to take certain components in the market and dominate them. We created the ability to actually be able to run Sailfish on multiple hardware displays and be able to swap components, so this is part of the demand and supply planning phase. We are committed to this industrial design which is a 4.5-inch display, an 8 megapixel camera on the back and a front-facing camera at the front, and the exact specs of the display we'll provide when we're close to delivery." Something you rarely hear anything about.
"This is my NeXTstation Turbo Color booting the Mac System 7.1 Operating System using a hardware add-on called 'Daydream'. The Daydream has a Mac ROM and a few custom ICs in it and hooked up to the NeXTs DSP port. Turns your NeXT into a full fledged 68k powered Mac." So cool.
"The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 6.1, the first feature update of the NetBSD 6 release branch. It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed important for security or stability reasons, as well as new features and enhancements. Please note that all fixes in the prior security/bugfix updates (NetBSD 6.0.1 and 6.0.2) are also in 6.1."
"At the end of a week in which Electronic Arts confirmed it wasn't developing a thing for the Wii U, one of the software engineers in EA Sports' Canada studio, in a series of since-deleted tweets, disparaged the console as 'crap' and suggested Nintendo should give up on hardware altogether. 'The Wii U is crap. Less powerful than an Xbox 360. Poor online/store. Weird tablet', tweeted Bob Summerwill, listed as a senior software engineer at EA Canada, in a reply to a tweet posting a link about EA's no-Wii U news. 'Nintendo are walking dead at this point'." The Wii U is turning into the 21st century's Virtual Boy.
"In NixOS, the entire operating system - the kernel, applications, system packages, configuration files, and so on - is built by the Nix package manager from a description in a purely functional build language. The fact that it's purely functional essentially means that building a new configuration cannot overwrite previous configurations. Most of the other features follow from this." Interesting approach. A Linux distribution, sure, but with some very refreshing ideas about system configuration.
Appfour added, among other features, C/C++ support to its new version of AIDE. From Android-IDE, "Now you can write parts of your app or your whole app in C/C++ on your device. AIDE supports the Standard Android NDK toolchain (GCC 4.6 + Bionic, STL, ...). No changes are necessary if you want to build an app developed on a PC with Eclipse. C/C++ development is fully integrated: Build errors appear in the error list and files can easily be navigated to with Go to file. The editor supports C/C++ syntax highlighting."
Ars nails it: "The answer is that Google did announce what amounts to a fairly substantial Android update yesterday. They simply did it without adding to the update fragmentation problems that continue to plague the platform. By focusing on these changes and not the apparently-waiting-in-the-wings update to the core software, Google is showing us one of the ways in which it's trying to fix the update problem."
"It is good for programmers to understand what goes on inside a processor. The CPU is at the heart of our career. What goes on inside the CPU? How long does it take for one instruction to run? What does it mean when a new CPU has a 12-stage pipeline, or 18-stage pipeline, or even a 'deep' 31-stage pipeline? Programs generally treat the CPU as a black box. Instructions go into the box in order, instructions come out of the box in order, and some processing magic happens inside. As a programmer, it is useful to learn what happens inside the box. This is especially true if you will be working on tasks like program optimization. If you don't know what is going on inside the CPU, how can you optimize for it? This article is about what goes on inside the x86 processor's deep pipeline."
Member since:
2005-07-06
It's too little, too late... Yonah will blow away anything IBM has to offer, it seems to be a really well designed chip.
I see the Mac folks have overcome their cognitive dissonance in record time! Tell me, what are your thoughts on the G3 versus the Pentium II? Were you one of the Mac folks who though that the G3 was better? As I recall, most Mac folks didn't think much of Yonah's architecture back when it was called the PII.
I'm being a bit sarcastic, of course, Yonah isn't exactly like the PII, but it's safe to say that the evolutionary jump any bigger than the one from the Athlon (K7) to the Athlon64 (K8). Mac folks cracked jokes about the aging x86 architecture with regards to the PII, and are now hailing Yonah as the second coming, and it's irking me off a little.
In any case, the multicore G5 looks like a nice chip. It seems about time we saw one, given the G5's small die size. The 970MP should weigh in at about 170M transistors, making it closer in size to a single-core prescott than a dual-core prescott. Additionally, it's very likely that the 2.5GHz multicore chips coming out now will be faster than the first iteration of dual-core Yonahs that'll be coming out next year. Those will debut at 2.13GHz, and Yonah's IPC isn't good enough to overcome that difference in most cases.