First post!

First comment? Assuming my comment works...

FP?

I am so happy for you - sitting there just stroking it.

can anybody tell me what this means? Is the 970 a great design, or just another dud?

interesting

An interesting article. It probably won't be known how well it can compete until they have the actual chip in their hands and benchmark it. It is interesting in the way the CPU is designed vs the Pentium IV and how it tackles the problems the CPU's face. I'm sure it won't be long until they compare it to the Opetron CPU which is coming out in early 2003 (hammer CPU). It will be another interesting article to read.

what it means...

...is that the author of the article (John "Hannibal" Stokes) has dug up as much as he can on the architecture of the 970, and is reporting what he's found. Even he doesn't go as far as to say that it will provide a tremendous speed burst - only that the potential is there to bring the Mac up to state-of-the-art in desktop performance.

It also means another week of debates on ArsTechnica about what it means. Another week of affronts, bravado and hubris.

And all it really means is that we'll have to wait to see what this chip will really do.

eh?

Well, I don't know squat about CPUs, so most of the article was Charlie Brown to me. I was hoping for a simple conclusion at the end, but there was none. I guess we'll have to wait untill 2H03 to find out how the baby handles.

I know!

It means we'll be still stuck in the dark ages, because the stupid thing is maxing out of first flight at 1.8 GHz, and the P4 will be at 10 GHz by then, and we all know that Apple's lying and MHz does matter (I know this for a fact, because so many people on MacNN say this, so it must be true) and we'll still be behind the curve by such a large margin, it'll feel like we're a JV basketball team playing against the Lakers! That's it! I'm getting a PC!

Sorry, someone had to say it! I just hope people read the whole thing and realize its kind of like sarcasm and decide not to waste an hour railing me about my PC-loving a** or what-not.

64 bit

The IBM 970 is able to run 64 bit and 32 bit applications at the same time, natively, with no emulation.

The AMD Hammer has to have a hard reset to switch between the two (restart the computer).

Intel is going to have a lot of fun trying to get PC users to 64 bit, having to explain to them why the new 64 bit processor is only 1 Ghz.

The new IBM is a tad faster than the 2.8Ghz Pentium 4 without using AltiVec since SPEC doesn't utilize SIMDs. So the fact the Pentium 4 will be past 2.8 Ghz next year doesn't matter a whole lot because AltiVec on this IBM will make AltiVec software much, much faster.

i think what

we are forgetting is that apple may put on the motherboard a bunch of dohickeys that make it even faster then the current specmarks say. graphic stuff bus stuff, hypertransport so the overall feel will be squishy good.

also, i think i read that the ibm guy said these numbers are conservative.

Yup...

I'm votin' for the doohickies!

Re: Yup

Ah, doohickies suck rocks! They eat too much power and don't provide a real speed boost. What we need are Thingamabobs! Now that'll make these chips really scream. But knowing apple, they won't implement true Thingamabobs, they'll do a half-assed job on the first rev and not be any faster then doohickey speed.

Just like apple to s**** over its users like that...

you're forgetting...

the frontside watchamakallits that does the pre-processing for the doohickies to complement the thingamabobs. quadruple thingamajigs will be the second generation processors. :P

Why

does macnn use funky redirect links like http://macnn.com/rd.php?id=730 in these articles? And try to hide it by changing the statusbar to show the eventual destination.

untrue

The AMD Hammer has to have a hard reset to switch between the two (restart the computer).

Thats totally false, it can run both 32 bit and 64 bit programs natively. Its much like the 16/32 bit CPU 68000 series was, where it can do both 16 bits and 32 bits. or whatever the chip was. If you run 32 bit apps, then it doesn't take advantage of the 64 bit things that it can run.

sigh...

guess my Pismo will have to soldier on until a PowerBook 970 becomes available.... hopefully by 2Q04 at least. I think I can hand on until then.

Re: 64 bit

>The IBM 970 is able to run 64 bit and 32 bit applications at the same time, natively, with no emulation.
>The AMD Hammer has to have a hard reset to switch between the two (restart the computer).

Wrong, the Opteron (Hammer) can run 64-bit and 32-bit apps side by side.

>The new IBM is a tad faster than the 2.8Ghz Pentium 4 without using AltiVec since SPEC doesn't utilize SIMDs.
>So the fact the Pentium 4 will be past 2.8 Ghz next year doesn't matter a whole lot because AltiVec on this IBM
>will make AltiVec software much, much faster.

Wrong again -- SPEC does utilize SIMD as long as your compiler does some level of autovetorizing. The IBM 970 SPEC _estimates_ that have been released probably factor in both the SIMD and IBMs Visual Age compiler which compiles much faster binaries than gcc which Apple uses... so expect worse SPEC results from an Apple solution using the chip.

Info

AMD's chip will not be for main stream use as Windows will not support 64bit yet, nor likely to until the next release. And it is unlikely that any Application developers will optomise their apps for 64bit if Intel is not supporting it.

Apple will have the only mainstream desktop 64bit computer for quite some time. Also note that the chip supports a 900mhz frontside bus. The operating system will only require minor tweaks to take advantage of it, and I could be wrong, but given the way OS-X handels memory atleast some of those performance enhancements will be passed on to existing apps.
Ibm has stated that it will run a 32 bit OS with minor modification (ie OSX) and Apps with no modification. They already have samples of linux compiled on it in the Lab.

My point about AMD's 64bit chip is that Windows may run on it, but to take advantage of 64bit it will have to have significant modification and microsoft are not likely to do this just for AMD, considering both their ties to Intel and AMD's market share would not justify the R&D costs.

Apple, controlling the OS will have no problems porting OSX and I would assume that they have a 64bit OS-X internally anyway, from pre-production motorola G5's. It's been previously stated in some Technical documentation regarding OSX, and If i can find it, I'll post it, that OSX is 64bit ready what ever that means.

That's nice, and which mainstream developers are planning on developing 64-bit apps for it? On 64-bit Windoze? What a nightmare that should be, and we mustn't forget, Intel's Itanium needs a completely new ISA. Developers are going to LOVE that. All the code will have to be rewritten from scratch. Anything that's going to be emulated will BITE -- big time compared to native execution.

Current apps running through Windows on ITANIC should be spectacularly slow. As for clawhammer... Doesn't that require hard restarts into the appropriate mode (32 or 64) to function accordingly? If so then that REALLY blows goats because that means it'll be another nightmare for programmers supporting a multiple versions of the same app.

Imagine x86 programmers developing an app for current Intel/AMD 32-bit and another app for Itanium 64-bit and another for AMD 64-bit. It's going to be a nightmare for them. I'm only speculating though. In the mean time, I'm going to ask around. Perhaps some of my programmer colleagues can shed some additional light on that situation.

I see suspect some interesting computability issues will crop up for the Windows/Intel/AMD people. Will apps developed for Itanium run on AMD's offerings? Will all the work be governed in the OS (Windows?) Can we expect M$ to get things right? What about mode change issues with respect to each CPU? From what I remember, Itanium doesn't have modes. Itanium has emulation - which we all know SUX.. AMD has both modes, but the system n

Info

Current apps running through Windows on ITANIC should be spectacularly slow. As for clawhammer... Doesn't that require hard restarts into the appropriate mode (32 or 64) to function accordingly? If so then that REALLY blows goats because that means it'll be another nightmare for programmers supporting a multiple versions of the same app.

Imagine x86 programmers developing an app for current Intel/AMD 32-bit and another app for Itanium 64-bit and another for AMD 64-bit. It's going to be a nightmare for them. I'm only speculating though. In the mean time, I'm going to ask around. Perhaps some of my programmer colleagues can shed some additional light on that situation.

I see suspect some interesting computability issues will crop up for the Windows/Intel/AMD people. Will apps developed for Itanium run on AMD's offerings? Will all the work be governed in the OS (Windows?) Can we expect M$ to get things right? What about mode change issues with respect to each CPU? From what I remember, Itanium doesn't have modes. Itanium has emulation - which we all know SUX.. AMD has both modes, but the system needs to be reset into whichever mode you plan to use (more confusion for endusers) So, who is going to be the traffic cop and make sure these apps run as planned on future AMD/ITANIC systems?

The word I've been hearing around the net is that 64-bit OS X will run 32-bit apps as usual; right alongside any 64-bit apps that might already be available.

As for this IBM CPU (if Apple is planning on using it) 32-bit and 64-bit apps will run natively and at full speed. HOWEVER (and this is the kicker) if you want to take full advantage of 64-bit computing you apparently need to do some word-size modifications within your code (i.e. yo'll have to do a little preparing). Otherwise, it should be pretty straightforward. Remember, the PowerPC was designed from the very beginning with rules governing BOTH 64-bit AND 32-bit operation, so it's been there, just rarely used.

As for other advancements... Well, this chip has AltiVec. The current bottleneck holding back astronomical AltiVec performance (as well as overall performance) on the current G4's has been the bus. That bottleneck has been effectively removed. This is the first iteration of the new *desktop* PPC based on Book-E as defined by Motorola and IBM. It's seriously low power. 19 watts @ 1.2 GHz 40-42 watts @ 1.8 GHz. BUT... That's on the current .13 micron Cu/SOI process. Everything will become smaller, faster and cooler as IBM ramps to .09 micron. These CPUs seem to be inline with PowerBook models too. And this is only the start. Oh, did I mention that this CPU only utilized roughly 50 million transisters? This is a *nice* CPU people. There was some serious thought put into the design. Not sure if I can say the same for the competition. Oh yeah, they have marketing to take care of that...

On the other hand, In

Err...

"So the fact the Pentium 4 will be past 2.8 Ghz next year doesn't matter a whole lot because AltiVec on this IBM will make AltiVec software much, much faster."

Well, actually that's wrong in a bunch of ways. First, there's no evidence that the 970's AltiVec will be faster - most of the redesign is in the core processing. I'm sure it will be faster, but we have no idea as to how much so.

Second, most real world software doesn't use AltiVec, so the fact that it's faster is sort of irrelevent. Sure, the people who use the Photoshop filters Apple loves to parade as 'benchmarks' will love it, but most of us won't notice it at all. That means that the core processing speed relative to the future P4 performance is actually relevent.

Oh, and the P4 will be past 2.8GHz *this* year. It'll be past 4GHz next year. And let's not forget - there are exactly 0 Macs which use the 970 at the moment while I can use a 2.8GHz P4 today and (if my board maker isn't lying to me) I can swap that for a 3GHz P4 as soon as I can get my hands on one.

Well, no - because surprise, surprise, I don't *need* a 3GHZ P4... everything I do on my computer - and I'll wager it's the same that most people do on their computers too and then some - I can do with a 1.3GHz Celeron or a 800MHz G4.

Fast is nice, but it's not everything.

re:sigh

I'm with you! Until Apple gets past 2Ghz, I'm on the sideline when it comes to new computer purchases. If that means 2H04, 1H05.... so be it.

so let me guess

you used all the megahurtz you have now (sigh) since you seem to think 2.8 gig is ALWAYS faster than 1 gigz....

i'm guessing p*** and napster does not even take up half your megahrtz.

P4s

Oh, and the P4 will be past 2.8GHz *this* year. It'll be past 4GHz next year. And let's not forget - there are exactly 0 Macs which use the 970 at the moment while I can use a 2.8GHz P4 today and (if my board maker isn't lying to me) I can swap that for a 3GHz P4 as soon as I can get my hands on one.

I think your board manufacturer is lying to you. I understood the new 3GHz models and above had a slightly different architecture and needed different mother boards than the

Wrong, the Opteron (Hammer) can run 64-bit and 32-bit apps side by side.




























 

Itanium

The Itanium CPU isn't even meant for consumer use now, or even in 5 years time. They will make the next iteration of the Pentium series when the P4 has run out of steam. Opetron will run faster than the same clocked speed Athlon on Windows regardless if your using the 32 bit version or not. THe first one coming out will be equal to a 3.3 Ghz Pentium 4 in performance specs, and thats is only the beginning.

Re: Yup

" Ah, doohickies suck rocks! They eat too much power and don't provide a real speed boost. What we need are Thingamabobs!"

I haven't laughed so hard on these forums in a good long while. Thanks so much for that.

ps. Good thing we're moving to IBM! If we left it to Moto we'd be LUCKY to reach doohickie speed! They're still thinking that whatchamacallits will do the job!

Re: Altivec

Actually, all applications will benefit from faster Altivec (which the 970 does have -- TWO altivec units) because the OS uses Altivec as often as practical. You may only see benchmarks on apps that are designed for Altivec, but all apps benefit.