"IBM likes to go on and on about the transaction processing power and I/O bandwidth of its System z mainframes, but now there is a new and much bigger kid on the block. Its name is the Power Systems IH supercomputing node, based on the company's forthcoming Power7 processors and a new homegrown switching system that blends optical and copper interconnects. The Power7 IH node was on display at the SC09 supercomputer trade show last week in Portland, Oregon, and El Reg was on hand to get the scoop from the techies who designed the iron. This server node is the heart of the 20 petaflop 'Blue Waters' supercomputer being installed at the University of Illinois."
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Member since:2006-01-02
I could see a quad A9, w/ a nice GPU tacked on (new PowerVR somethingrather?), being good enough for an overwhelming majority of desktop needs (as long as Windows is not involved).
The x86 chips that will beat it will be the next generation SFF-oriented ones (the Atom is around even, though it needs Intel's 45nm to manage that), much thanks to the only new general-purpose PPCs out there being whatever Freescale works on.
For every good solution you can think of, Intel can throw billions of R&D dollars at the problem and make it use x86, instead. AMD will then follow, with their own features, that vaguely look like something an Alpha had, or that a future Alpha was planned to have. Rinse and repeat 
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Edited 2009-11-29 06:10 UTC
Member since:2005-08-11
All the really important features of current CPUs, AMD had first. Multi-core? AMD had it before Intel. On chip memory controller? AMD had it before Intel. AMD had Hypertransport years before Intel had CSI (and that's just on Nehalems). They even broke 1Ghz first, back in the day.
AMD may be behind right now, but for most of this decade, Intel has been following AMD.
Member since:2005-07-12
You haven't been paying attention, then.
Steve Jobs said, in the 2006 MacWorld keynote, that Intel's Core Duo had 4x the performance/watt of the PowerPC chips they were using.
The numbers he gave place the G4 doing a tad better than 1/4th the performance/watt, and the G5 doing a little worse than 1/4th.
Member since:2006-01-02
It's a matter of perspective. As the clock speeds ramped up, the older versions do lack. However, the newer versions were quite impressive (like in the Mac Mini, later Macbooks, and now Freescale SoCs)...but the performance/watt, much like the Atom, is predicated on keeping the speed and voltage down, and thus the performance ceiling low. If you hunt benchmarks on the 'net, newer Macbook G4s are neck and neck with Atoms, using chips that are much older, and physically much bigger.
The G5 (970) was competitive, but not spectacular in any way, and it wasn't worth it for IBM to try to keep it up, as a part for Apple. It was really good in terms of throughput, but the K8 put the smack down on it in normal tasks (where, "smackdown," can be defined as, "this runs 5-10% faster on Linux/A64 v. OS X/G5, doesn't use much more power, and is way cheaper"), and it went downhill from there. Ironically, beefing up G4 (not based on a Power CPU), as Freescale did, might have been a better path to take, in hindsight.
Also, Apple cooked half their benchmarks, when they did the move. Many them were quite a ways off from what actual users could get. It's not that x86 are bad, but the G4 was quite a piece of work, and might still be in PC-like devices, updated with new names, if we had a fairer market.
Member since:2005-07-06
The numbers he gave place the G4 doing a tad better than 1/4th the performance/watt, and the G5 doing a little worse than 1/4th.
They were not comparing like with like. They were comparing a high end desktop chip with a mobile chip, a bit of a dodgy comparison.
As for the G4, same thing, they were comparing a new Intel with an old G4.
They also completely forgot to include PA Semi's chip, which is understandable because it would have completely destroyed their argument, it had better per/Watt than the Core2.
There is a word for this sort of thing, it's called marketing.
Member since:2005-07-12
I'm not sure about how the G4 compared to Core2 in performance/watt, as comparisons between the two haven't really been made anywhere, as far as I can tell. When Apple switched to x86, they started with the Core Duo, an earlier chip. That chip has much better performance/watt than the G4.
Intel's very strict philosophy for the original Core line of chips was 2% performance increase for 1% power consumption increase. The Intel engineers were very strict about that rule, and due to it's success, all Intel x86 cpus that followed were designed with the same principles.
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Member since:
2008-07-15
Which is why the ppc G4, which was very low-power and efficient, kicked the arse of Intel or AMD in its performance to power consumption ratio? Yes, Core2 and Athlon-64 were faster in terms of raw computing power, but they sucked up a hell of a lot more energy too. I've yet to see an X86 chip that can match the power-to-performance ratio of the ppc, Atom is a joke by comparison.
An ARM desktop might be nice for some uses, especially when Cortex A9 comes around. Current ARM chips, however, seem a bit under-powered for what many people use their desktops to handle. Curent ARM chips would be ideal for netbooks or other small devices. They're powerful enough to handle mobile computing and yet use very little power making battery life amazing.