At the MicroProcessor Forum, Dr. Brad McCredie of IBM continued to tease out particulars regarding the POWER6. The presentation discussed a lot of general microarchitecture features, but did not reveal many specific details; a full revelation of the microarchitecture will likely have to wait till ISSCC, next February. However, from the details that were revealed, it is clear that the POWER6 inherited many characteristics from its predecessors, yet made substantial improvements in others.
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Member since:2005-07-06
And? What's your point?
It's true that x86 won the desktop and server CPU war, but it still doesn't make it a more eleguant ISA: it's still crap.
To make an analogy, you can make *any* object fly with engines powerful enough, but that doesn't make it eleguant as beautifully designed planes.
Member since:2006-04-17
x86 hasn't won the server CPU war yet...
http://www.tpc.org/tpcc/results/tpcc_perf_results.asp
It is creeping upwards, but isn't going to get to
the top for quite a while, if it ever does.
Member since:2005-07-10
It is a more efficient design. PowerPC powers a significant number of embedded devices (games consoles being a biggy). Which, if I might say, work a lot more reliably than the average PC these days it seems. IBM handles the high end with Power 5 and Power 6. Freescale (nee Motorola Semiconductor) handles the embedded market. Just since PowerPC doesn't keep up with the Joneses (ie, AMD and Intel) doesn't mean it's a bad chip, it just means more astute people use it for what they need it to do.
Member since:
2005-06-30
Basically, x86 is garbage.
You know, people keep saying x86 is crap an PPC allows for cheaper/faster/more efficient design but it doesn't look like AMD or Intel are slowing down to listen.