Remember PA Semi? The company has just released, as promised, its first chipset. "They are full 64-bit PPC, support virtualisation, and would do Alitvec but that name is copyrighted by Freescale. Instead they do 'VMA'. The three parts run at a max wattage of 25, 15 and 10W for the 2.0, 1.5 and 1.0GHz parts respectively, with typical wattage listed at 13, 8 and 6W. The individual cores are said to have a 7W max and 4W typical power consumption at 2.0GHz." PA Semi was one of the prime reasons why Ars's John 'Hannibal' Stokes doubted Apple's reasoning for the switch to Intel.
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Member since:2005-07-06
SPEC 2000 benchmarks tend to show huge differences in performance between processors, SPEC 2006 and other benchmarks show these differences are nowhere near as big
Well, since PA Semi only gave projected SPEC 2000 figures, I worked with what I had. I'd be interested to see SPEC 2006 benchmarks for these processors. And other benchmarks can show even bigger differences. GCC compilation, for example, absolutely flies on x86. x86's tend to have highly-optimized memory systems, since they have so few registers, and that gives them a big boost in code that deals with heavily-indirect data structures (graphs, trees).
Also, x86 have always been designed for integer performance first, nothing else is. The FP figures are the ones worth watching.
x86's are designed for integer performance because that's the most important thing in the desktop/workstation space. And that's the crucial point here: nothing else is designed for the desktop/workstation space. And no, FP figures aren't worth watching, because nobody cares about FP performance on a laptop. People only barely care about FP on the desktop, and will only care less about FP as more of that code is outsourced to the GPU.
Anyway, it wasn't designed as a competitor to a high end desktop part, it would be best compared to laptop parts.
Those are laptop parts! Even shipping laptop parts embarrass the PA-Semi chip (again, in laptop-relevant metrics). All this talk about bootcamp and SRAM is a cop-out. The simple fact is that the x86 world has the best laptop/desktop/workstation CPUs, period.
Edited 2007-02-06 02:07
Member since:2005-07-08
It's just too hard to compete with Intel in the larger parts of the mobile space (12"+ laptops). AMD, who has been focusing on the x86 space for a couple of decades, is first starting to come out with parts that make sense next to Intel's mobile offerings.
But even they don't go toe-to-toe with Intel in price/performance yet, and Intel is doing a good job at staying a year ahead in process technology. If AMD can't quite get there with IBM and Chartered backing them up, then PA isn't going to make headway in the laptop market.
They know this. That's why I'm inclined to agree with Rayiner. There's a high-volume market out there that will soon dwarf the traditional PC market. It comprises increasingly capable ultra-mobile gadgets as well as larger embedded applications in the datacenter.
Imagine the datacenter in 10-15 years, composed of massive general-purpose compute nodes (virtualized mainframes running Linux) and dedicated I/O paths served by racks of re-provisionable controllers based on low-power integrated systems (probably running Linux). PA Semi probably wants to become the Cisco of enterprise I/O offloading.
Member since:2006-03-17
While I agree with your statements about the x86 line, I have to say that I feel Apple made a mistake in this 'switch' process.
I had an intense crash-course in the MacOSX world at my last job and I found them to be rather weak machines. Whether this was because they were older machines and I've been so spoiled by 2Ghz goodness, or if they really are as slow as they felt - I don't know, but they did have a different personality.
I've studied all the aspects (the Mach underpinnings, the tragedy of 'Classic', the bastardized unixness of it all, etc) - and I came to appreciate the amount of dedicated development time that went into making the total package. I personally don't really like the environment, but that's just my taste and I understand why some people prefer OSX over XP (and far too few consider Linux).
But for Mac users, I think it would have been best to maintain PPC chipsets - as there are many new PPC/variations coming into the market now. I've seen the poor performance of 'Rosetta' and feel pity for those that got stuck with new PPC laptops only to find they've been obfuscated. I know that it's great that new Mac laptops can run Windows, but to me - now it's just an over-priced PC laptop. If it had a unique CPU along with a unique OS - then I think it would be appropriate, but I've got a gut feeling that _someone_ will publicly crack OSX on X86 (correct me if this has not already happened, as it may) - so what's the value in a x86Mac? Show me a laptop based on the STI-Cell chip and I'd take more notice (this being feasable or not is probably fanciful musing).
While Intel will probably be providing Apple with their top-line Core2 chips, there's also AMD and others to consider (lets just say competitive options are better). I love my 2Ghz Turion64 (and I'm looking to upgrade CPU to an x2) But while Mac users can finally fight back against the "But it doesn't run windows.." argument, maybe it was better that they didn't. At least their machine was truly 'different', for better or worse.
Edited 2007-02-06 02:50
Member since:2005-07-06
x86's are designed for integer performance because that's the most important thing in the desktop/workstation space.
If you are doing video, image processing, 3D rendering, audio processing or even just playing games FP is more important.
And that's the crucial point here: nothing else is designed for the desktop/workstation space. And no, FP figures aren't worth watching, because nobody cares about FP performance on a laptop.
Today's desktop and workstations are laptops, the concerns are identical.
People only barely care about FP on the desktop, and will only care less about FP as more of that code is outsourced to the GPU.
Given things like SSE haven't been taken up as much as Intel would like that's somewhat uncertain.
Member since:
2005-07-06
These will have volume production in Q4, 2007, coinciding with Intel's 45nm Penryn CPUs. Penryn should debut at closer to 3 GHz than 2 GHz, with 2.66 GHz being a conservative estimate. At 2.66 GHz, Penryn should score about 2800 SPECint. Now, as the article points out, these PA Semi chips should score comparably to PPC 970 in SPECint, normalized by clockspeed. That puts a 2 GHz 1682M at a stunning... 1200 SPECint. This performance will almost be matched by Intel's ultra-low-voltage Core 2 coming out in Q2 which should get about 1150 SPECint at 1.08 GHz, with a TDP of 9W (1W typical).
SPEC 2000 benchmarks tend to show huge differences in performance between processors, SPEC 2006 and other benchmarks show these differences are nowhere near as big. Also, x86 have always been designed for integer performance first, nothing else is. The FP figures are the ones worth watching.
Anyway, it wasn't designed as a competitor to a high end desktop part, it would be best compared to laptop parts. That 25W figure includes a very potent NorthBridge. The best Intel parts currently use 35W, not including not including NorthBridge.
So, can we leave the "switch" talk aside, since its clearly ridiculous? This CPU is not and was not intended for an Apple notebook.
Apple were planning to use this processor at one point but then did the switch - which was not for technical reasons - I think the real reasons became obvious some time ago: Bootcamp and a big SRAM deal for the iPod.