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:2005-07-08
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:2005-11-14
Your post is very beautifully written, but devoid of substance.
Classic wasn't a tragedy in any sense. When its legacy cruft became too much to bear, Apple moved to a completely new OS (compared to Vista) which still managed to bridge backwards compatibility.
The "new variations on PPC" you mention are largely Cell processors which no one has tried to pass off as being suitable for general-purpose CPUs, or more powerful PPCs which still consume too much power to be laptop-feasible. Laptop sales outpace desktop sales, and vendors ignore this at their peril.
I'm disappointed that IBM refused to invest their own money in Apple's corporate future, too, but realistically PPC entered Apple when Intel had no comparable offerings. Intel caught up, fast, but IBM saw no incentive to compete with Intel and even sabotaged Intel emulation in the G5s without telling Apple.
As far as the 'can't tell them apart' argument is concerned, Macs have been running standard hardware for close to a decade. ADB, NuBus, RS422 serial ports and nonstandard analog video all died back in the Clinton administration. The silent argument from Apple on hardware is the same: OS and hardware run smoothest when designed by the same people. It's the model that used to rule the industry, and until IBM and Microsoft it was unquestioned. Thanks to cloners and Windows, compatibility and driver BSODs are a real issue. Linux has to work twice as hard to resolve this problem because of the amount of blackboxing. Yeah, I'll pay more for a system that doesn't fight or guess to work.
This is about performance, not gut feelings.
Member since:2006-03-17
Sorry, I jsut think that for the sake of Apple developers and customers, they should have held-on to the PPC line for a little longer. I'll say again that I'm not a big fan of the PPC, but the ultralow power-consumption of the newer models is quite impressive (and that's a major laptop benefit). The reliability of the PPC chip makers has always been a problem, and that was probably the deciding factor for the 'Switch', but it was a heck of a sacrifice.
Performance is important, but compatability's more useful. The Switch finally brings new Apple customers to the same table (and plugs) as PCs (more internally that externally). Now they can Really run Windows, good for them - so why didn't they just buy an HP/Gateway/Lenovo/etc? Apple controls the hardware - yes. But PCs have evolved to handle this diversity (maybe not all hobby OSes run on all laptops, okay). Windows is the MacOS of x86 (everyone insert your favorite MS joke here), but it's got home-field advantage in peripherals and software. Apple has made all sorts of devices (and they totally rock, don't get me wrong), but now they're being abandoned. I wish I had a BeBox 'Geekport' connector for windows - it was a kick-ass concept and device, but the company controlled it's demise. I fear the same fate for the loyal fans of Apple. (words from a BeOS refugee - we died on x86 too...)
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
If you are doing video, image processing, 3D rendering, audio processing or even just playing games FP is more important.
Very few people do any of these things on a laptop. Moreover, these characterizations aren't even accurate. Unless you're working with HDR images, your image processing is going to be dealing with integers, not floating-point values. While 3D rendering has a substantial floating-point component, the integer component is probably still larger. 3D rendering code is enormously data-structure intensive, and scanline rasterizers are still integer-based. And in gaming, almost all the heavy FP lifting is done by the graphics card. That was why the "Dothan" Pentium-M was so popular with gamers, despite its poor floating-point performance.
All of the things you mentioned are more FP-intensive than your average desktop program, but it's also important to keep in mind that program logic is fundamentally integer code, and aside from a few really specific computations (eg: encoding, signal processing), program logic will still make up a large fraction of your program. To use a concrete example, a 3D renderer will probably spend substantially more time loading, sorting, culling, rasterizing, and texturing triangles than it will transforming them. This implies that it's important to have a very good balance between integer performance and floating-point performance. It's fairly well-accepted that the G5 did not have an adequate amount of integer performance to balance its floating-point performance. Based on this CPU's projected SPEC scores (~1200/2000 at 2 GHz), this chip looks even more unbalanced than the G5. Under real-world code, that is going to be a problem.
Today's desktop and workstations are laptops, the concerns are identical.
Uh, no. Today's laptops are laptops. People doing heavy FP crunching are still by far working on desktop machines.
Given things like SSE haven't been taken up as much as Intel would like that's somewhat uncertain.
Because nobody wants to do single-precision FP on the CPU when the GPU can do it so much faster! If there really was a demand for heavy-duty FP on the CPU, people would've complained a lot more vocally about the shortcomings of the P-M through Core Duo chips. Poor FP performance just about killed non-Intel chips in the K5 and K6 eras, but since graphics cards took most of the FP grunt off the CPU, people really couldn't care less.
Edited 2007-02-07 20:20
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