“The year 2005 has been chock full of Power Architecture news – from Apple’s departure from the Power Architecture family to the up and coming Cell Broadband Engine processor; from Blade.org to Power.org; and from being named fastest growing semiconductor supplier of 2005 to being named 2005 Top Fab, find out why Power Architecture technology is having the best year ever.”
I had no idea the Power folks were so bitter towards Apple!
So IBM tell us what a great job they are doing!
How original.
Actually, given how much material has been released through developerWorks this year, I think IBM _is_ doing a great job. The developerWorks site is not constrained by NDA (what’s published is free for all developers to use) and is not encumbered by startup intiatives or anything like that. I’ve benefited from the material that was released, and I know other developers have as well. Their forums give developers access to engineers that work on the particular aspect, for free. It’s not perfect, but I’d say developerWorks is doing a great job and I check there regularly as well as look for listings here at OS News.
Well, this will be the first time in videogame history that all the major consoles will have almost identical architechture in the fact that all the processors are powerpc based.. Which is a win/win for IBM.. Think about it… No matter who wins the console wars, IBM will be there as well! Which means now we’ll see which company can optimize it’s system first…
As expensive as the platform is to deploy and maintain compaired to other commercial open systems vendors. I would bet that half of Powers success is due to vendor lockin scheme IBM uses will all its customers.
Edited 2005-12-16 17:45
Can you back up these claims?
I was under the impression that the power architecture consumed less power than the x86 atchitecture, and that would save electricity which would in turn save money. I’ve also never heard of the power architecture being expensive besides the somewhat higher prices for the chips because they aren’t produced in such large numbers as intel and AMD’s chips.
As for IBM and vendor lock-in I’ve never heard of something like that for several years.
If you know of a reliable source that backs up your claims I’d like to know about it.
Don’t ask a troll to justify themselves. It won’t happen. These are probably the same people who think Java is still slow.
IBM’s doing great things with POWER: all three next-gen consoles use Power. The POWER servers are growing (they finally found a workable marketing message for iSeries and pSeries continues growing).
Niagara will be interesting from a competitive standpoint, as long as Sun doesn’t come off like a bunch of blowhards. I think they leapfrogged POWER 5/5+, so we’ll see what happens with POWER 6.
Niagara will be interesting from a competitive standpoint, as long as Sun doesn’t come off like a bunch of blowhards. I think they leapfrogged POWER 5/5+, so we’ll see what happens with POWER 6.
I think there is a place for both to exist; I’m sure there are situations where POWER is superior and Niagara is superior – using the right tool for the right job.
What I would love to see, however, is IBM teaming up with SUN and getting Solaris working on their Cell and POWER processors – I’d love to see IBM put out a POWER based workstation using a POWER processor (be it that the amount of cache is reduced to something more desktop ; 512K) and coupled with an enthusiasts AIX licence, it would really create the type of growth needed out make their total size (in terms of customers) bigger than SUN.
But then again, I don’t see it happening, just as I don’t, unfortunately, see SUN pulling finger and start offering a Blade 150 loaded with a SPARC64 processor running at 1.6Ghz along with an integrated Quadro sitting on a PCIe bus.
Compared to a well written program in C, Assembler or even BASIC a well written program in Java is slow.
Its all relative.
It just may not matter if you have a 4Ghz processor.
Na, its actually more; “Here is a really cheap POWER machine – I mean, so cheap, its even cheaper than SUN!” then whilst the customer is waiting, you have the beedy eyed buzzword compliament spokes person rubbing their hands with glee knowing how much money can be extracted when he mentions that wonderful phrase, “would you like IBM Gobal Services to integrate this state of the art server into your existing infrastructure so that you can keep your legacy system and integrate the new one in?”
IBM is all very friendly until you say that you’re no interested in their services; suddely their tone goes from friendly to the type of reaction one see’s if one were to punch a persons mother.
Its funny though, with all this hype and so forth, I’ve yet to see a single one of their destop applications make their way to Linux – wouldn’t you think a better investment would have been to purchase Corel and port all their software to Linux? I mean, if one were going to spend $1billion, I can assure you, that would give a much better bang for the buck than implementing a useless threading library and yet ANOTHER filesystem. I mean, in all honesty, they didn’t really get much out of that fabled $1billion investment.
Lotus Notes, DB2 and all the Java/WebSphere battlewagon are not exactly desktop applications but run very fine under Linux.
Lotus Smart Suite? Non-existant – hell, its not even a CORE part of their product line up, so why not just opensource the damn thing and be done withit?
Lotus Notes? not that I want it, its a bloted POS that can’t even get basic USENET sentence looping and quotation done correctly, coupled that with the slow responsiveness, crash pronness and down write cludginess, if they ever find the people who designed it, they should be given a public flogging to the point that they can no longer have any feeling in any part of their body.
Now lets not get started on their development suite or there lack of a complete end to end development chain on the workstation front.
Then to top it all off, their compulsory registration that doesn’t work – I’m still waiting on that rego – 3 months after registering. If you need to register people so that you get feedback, maybe your product is so shit, that people don’t want to give honest feed back as it might be a little too close to home.
Why? They seem to have completely ditched the desktop space for both Windows and Linux — they sold their PC business to Lenovo.
They seem to be focusing on the server space for Linux now, for better or worse.
You forgot about the entire Eclipse ecosphere. The initial investment here was only $40 million USD, but IBM has been funding the development of the OTI labs (now part of IBM) to do open-source development on this project since 2001.
I can’t say I’m that interested in Power CPU’s running AIX but I am interested to see what Cell can bring to the table.
You’re not the only one
But as it seems, first viable option will be PS3 with disk kit. Which I intended to buy anyway.
Niagara’s going to be GPL, has way better networking perf – POWER’s got all the hooks in it to make people suspicious and ridiculous royalties…
Thats a laugh.
Power PC has totally lost its only significant desktop platform and is now relegated to the console market for a while.
/*Biased answer here*/
I for example see it as very good news. But, to admit I’m interested in Linux only. I own one G5, but hopefully my needs for OSX will vanish with their move to Intel.
Since PPCs biggest platform is now Linux, it means more vendor support for that one. And with a little of luck and more vendor support it will become defacto Linux hardware (with that I mean preffered platform if you’d like to use Linux, not Linux only hardware).
I was only waiting for that to happen’.
My next desktop options will be either Cell or 970 (now Opterons), I would already move on 970 with Linux, but practicaly the only 970 hardware was Apple. Well, I even tried to put Linux on my G5, but once I had problem with DVD-RW and Ubuntu second time some of hardware didn’t work, next time… (Call me cheap, but I’m not prepared to spend whole lot of a money for half assed support, this is why Opteron won this cycle of my hardware upgrades, although I was hoping on 970 much more). PB and wireless was a no go (although PB failed harder on other topics). Etc.
/*Unbiased part here*/
Power PC has totally lost its only significant desktop platform and is now relegated to the console market for a while
Yes, and you can believe that one month console sale will be bigger than Apple yearly Mac sale. Which is good for IBM, they haven’t lost with loosing Apple, they just gained much bigger customer in this case.
btw. You should check where all Cell will be implemented, you might be impressed how insignificant Apple is.
Well, I even tried to put Linux on my G5, but once I had problem with DVD-RW and Ubuntu second time some of hardware didn’t work, next time… (Call me cheap, but I’m not prepared to spend whole lot of a money for half assed support, this is why Opteron won this cycle of my hardware upgrades, although I was hoping on 970 much more).
Why on earth would you rather have a 970 than an Opteron? It runs hotter, and is slower for most code. Do you just happen to use the specific types of apps for which the 970 is faster (ie: FFTs and the like)? Or do you just have an affinity for PowerPC at a emotional level?
Do you just happen to use the specific types of apps for which the 970 is faster
Something like that, yes. Second thing was that when I was testing, 970 was actualy faster than Opteron. For example just check the tests where Linux was tested on Xeon, Opteron and 970. Performance is more or less the same (notice Linux was runing on dual 2.5, OSX on dual 2.7). It was OSX that caused those terrible slowdowns not 970.
Or do you just have an affinity for PowerPC at a emotional level?
You could say that too:) (at least to some small degree), just to be honest about me being partialy biased in this.
That is the thing with PowerPC it is not “only” a desktop chip. It runs in Consoles, desktops, midrange, mainframe and supercomputers!
So loosing the Apple market segment has probably not impacted there overall install base, due to in increase is console use (which sell more than Mac’s I presume).
I just gotta point out, Power 5+ was power5 on a different manufacturing process, and ibm did everything up to and including out bringing out the horns to trumpt its release.
I would love nothing more than to see a new architecture war emerge, but I think its going to happen more from– I cant f–king believe I’m saying this– the sun camp more than IBM. Actually PA Semi looks like the winners in this war.
Frankly the CPU itself is becoming less important, and more and more its hte platform the CPU is built upon. PowerPC, afaik, has no HyperTransport, has no integrated PCIe, no amazing connect. I dont think CoreConnect was scalable, and its more an IP solution for those wanting to spend millions than OEM/mobo guys. Sun got it right when they called the next wave thoroughput computing, and that story doesnt end at how many cores you have on die. Its about what kind of infrastructure your core is plugging into.
Cell is a step in that general direction, but I’d stake IBM as one to going out of their way to keep people from using Cell in new inventive ways, v. trying to spread Cell to the world. I dont see anything else in the pipeline to give me hope.
PowerPC looks like a wonderful competitor to the the CPU war that is ending. I dont see anything which could make it relevant to the new battle which is forming.