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: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:2005-07-06
Benchmarks are only part of the picture: Alpha had very good benchmarks most of the time, it's still dead.
What were missing to x86 against PPC/Itanium is:
- high end RAS (Reliability Availability Supervision) features, x86 is getting more and more these features.
- bullet proof OS: if Linux isn't enough for some, Solaris is good enough for most.
One problem remaining with current x86s is the memory: FB memory has power problem and will be dumped, so getting box with many GB of RAM can be a problem (well FB works, but do you want to use a deadend solution).. But replacement is coming.
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.