PowerPC 970 Running at 2.5 GHz

kuwan writes "IBM has just released a press release that indicates they have the new PowerPC 970 running at 1.8 to 2.5 GHz making it 'the fastest PowerPC so far.' IBM's original estimates were to have the chip running at 1.4 to 1.8 GHz at introduction, so this is very good news for those of us hoping Apple will use this as their next-generation chip."

More Information

[robbyjo]

Here [ibm.com] you can find a more technical details than just press release.

Here [ibm.com] is the actual spec about the PowerPC 970.

Ars Technica [arstechnica.com] articles. Apparently, PPC 970 just last year's news. The real news is just the cranked-up speed...

Re:Obligatory Questions

[addaon]

Does it run linux?

Yes. Or at least, PowerPC linux works great, and linux is 64-bit clean. I don't know of anyone running linux on a current 64-bit powerpc, but I'm sure it's been done.

How many fps on doom 3

More a function of graphics card than processor these days, no? With any luck PCI-X will be available with these systems. Bandwidth never hurts.

How many keys/s on rc5-72

A surprising number, although presumedly only a linear increase (with clockspeed) over current PowerPC's. Altivec has a number of instructions which are very useful for rc5 (and very useless elsewhere), and the bitwidth of Altivec is, of course, unchanged.

Can i overclock it?

Probably. IBM has been doing so remarkably good clocking design on their consumer chips lately. The 750FX, for instance, used in current iBooks, is software overclockable, takes about 10-30 cycles to change clock speeds, and mine (600MHz on the die) runs at 900MHz stable, although I tend to avoid that for battery life reasons. (Note that os x 10.2 blocks software overclocking by resetting the clockspeed every 1000th of a second or so. Os x 10.1 allows it, and 10.2 can be forced to rather trivially.)

How hot is it?

Not very. Don't have numbers off hand, but I believe the 1.8GHz numbers were at least comparable with current 1.3Ghz G4 numbers... 30-40 watts or so.

Re:?!?!?!1

[addaon]

This is the same 970 as before. No lengthened pipeline, although the 970 has a relatively long pipeline to begin with. And they probably hit 2.5ghz by selective testing... I haven't seen suggestions they can manufacture these chips in quantity yet. Keep in mind that Intel demos ~5GHz chips every few months or so. Even so, it's promising that the design seems to scale up that far without issues and without needing a process change.

Re:noo

[aSiTiC]

Learn a little about superscalar architecture. PowerPC architecture is far superiour to Pentium *.

Pentium is basically a CISC processor that takes CISC x86 instructions and converts them to RISC operations. PowerPC is RISC through and through.

The Pentium 4 requires 20+ pipelined cycles! PowerPC 6** only has 4 pipelined cycles. Hmm... I wonder why the Pentium 4 is clocked so high?!?!

Explanation

[TWX_the_Linux_Zealot]

"First of all, what is the processor that Apple using now? Isn't it some sort of PowerPC already? I see this one supports Altivec and I know that G3 and G4 Apple computers have the same instruction sets. Is this just another implementation, or is G3 and G4 relatives of this new processor?"

Apple does currently use a PowerPC processor in their computers. They have for the past eight years or so. Currently they're using the "750" edition, a'la G3 and G4, which are supplied by both IBM and Motorola.

"Second: what operating system does the IBM PowerPC run?"

The IBM machines with these series of microprocessors are things like the later generation AS/400s and RS/6000's. There are also some workstation machines (both badged as such and badged differently) with IBM PowerPCs in them. AS/400s use OS/400. RS/6000s can run many different OSes, including Linux and AIX.

"I suspect that the article is just confusing and processor itself is not made by IBM. Right??"

Wrong, at least on who makes the microprocessor. Motorola hasn't been doing so well lately, and even early on they had to deal with IBM to meet quota. IBM's hand in the PowerPC line is visible in Macintosh 5200's, which were common schoolroom computers that are starting to be end-of-lifed. They're dating back to August 1996 or so.

Re:please explain

[Anonymous Coward]

the PPC 970 is a IBM designed processor when previously, Motorla developed all the PPC CPU's. Apple own the TM PowerPC so they can change hardware vendors and slap their name on it no problem. IMHO, I think this is very good for the computing world.

Re:please explain

[MikeMo]

The 970 has the same instruction set (99%) as the G4, but it also has a very, very different internal architecture that should make it quite a bit faster than the G4 at the same clock rate. It's actually a scaled-down version of the Power4 chip, the CPU in a lot of IBM's much larger systems. The Power family is the root of the PowerPC chip, which was actually created by IBM/Apple/Motorola to simply use the same instruction set.

The IBM Power4 runs many of IBM's OS's.

Re:Motherboards ready for 2.5MHz?

[addaon]

What's more interesting is that the frontside bus of the 970 was designed to scale with processor speed. So the 1.8GHz was supposed to have a 900MHz (well, presumably 225MHz quad-pumped) FSB, using a multiplier of 2. The 2.5GHz, then, has two options... either drop down a notch to use a multiplier of 3 (getting an 833MHz FSB, which is manageable)... or go full-hog and hit a 1.25GHz FSB. While I suspect that for the 2.5GHz chip the answer is, unfortunately, the former, the question is a bit hazier in the case of a 2GHz part... 1GHz is manageable but impressive, whereaz 666MHz simply isn't enough. Of course, they can allow non-simple multipliers and solve the issue, but I do recall that they were planning on supporting only integral multipliers.

Re:please explain

[binaryDigit]

First of all, what is the processor that Apple using now? Isn't it some sort of PowerPC already? I see this one supports Altivec and I know that G3 and G4 Apple computers have the same instruction sets. Is this just another implementation, or is G3 and G4 relatives of this new processor?

Apple currently uses the G4 and G3 family. The G4 has AltiVec, G3 does not. G4/G3 are product names, whereas 970 are more like model numbers. There all related in that they implement the PowerPC ISA (Instruction Set Archetecture).

Second: what operating system does the IBM PowerPC run?

Depends on who is selling the machine the chip is in. Apple sells OS9 and OSX. IBM has AIX. And of course there's Linux and BSD. These are the most common.

I suspect that the article is just confusing and processor itself is not made by IBM. Right??

Nope, IBM does manufacture the 970. IBM also makes G3's. AFAIK Motorola is the only one making G4's right now (could be wrong here, could be that IBM is cranking some G4's as well). Also note that both Motorola and IBM sell other variations of the PowerPC (most well known is the PPC that powers the Nintendo GameCube).

Re:please explain

[Uller-RM]

PowerPC is an open architecture; several companies make different CPUs based on the design. IBM's historically made them for servers (the 970 was originally intended to be a server chip) while Motorola made them for desktops (Apple). Only problem is, Motorola sucks -- and their growth in the wireless business has gotten them to the point where they don't need Apple's business any more, so they have no real reason to improve their CPU line.

The G3 and G4 are also PowerPC chips -- they just are specific models made by Motorola. It's half new implementation, half relative.

Finally, a CPU doesn't run any specific OS -- OSes just have to be written for that CPU (and more generally, for the system architecture that CPU uses). Linux has supported the PPC for a long time; there's a distro called Yellow Dog that specifically targets Macs, and does a good job of it. Mac OS X's kernel, Darwin, has been backported to Intel IA-32. Windows used to be available for Alpha processors. It's just a matter of coding and hardware knowledge.

Macs could use the speed

[jmichaelg]

I hired a graphic artist to design a brochure for our product. When we were down to final tweaks, she brought in her Titanium Mac so I could look at the changes as she made them. It was the first time I had seen Illustrator running on OS X on a Titanium. Watching the glacial screen redraws (she had a lot of filters running) made me think that if there ever was a task that would clearly benefit from multiples of more CPU horsepower it was Illustrator drawing complex images. 64 bits at 2.5 Ghz should help a lot.

You have to have the patience of Job to be a graphic designer. That's Job, not Jobs.

From the Specs...

[aSiTiC]

From reading the specs it says:

9 Fetch, Decode Stages
5-13 OoO Execute Stages
2-3 Dispatch, Commit

So at total of 16-25 pipelined stages. I also notice that the longest(25) is for the Alti-Vec engine. This is very comparable to Pentium 4 which has 26 pipelined stages, although Pentium 4 does not have a vector engine.

Re:Let's see some FAB speed scores

[AresTheImpaler]

here is some info i found.. might help:
SPECint2000
- 937 @ 1.8 GHz
SPECfp2000
- 1051 @ 1.8 GHz
Dhrystone MIPS
- 5220 @ 1.8 GHz
- 2.9 DMIPS / MHz
Additional Performance
- Peak scalar GFLOPS = 7.2
- Peak SIMD GFLOPS = 14.4
- RC5 : 18M keys/sec
Unfortunately at the very bottom it says that some of this are estimates.. here is the link where I got the info: http://www-3.ibm.com/chips/techlib/techlib.nsf/tec hdocs/A1387A29AC1C2AE087256C5200611780

Re:please explain

[TheRaven64]

First of all, what is the processor that Apple using now? Isn't it some sort of PowerPC already?

G3 and G4 are Apple marketing terms for current PPC chips, made by IBM or Motorola (the G3s in the iBooks are made by IBM). The only real difference between the two is that the ones with a G4 sticker on it supports AltiVec and SMP (I'm simplifying here for the sake of brevity, before I get flamed). Both are 32-bit chips.

The 970 will probably be called a G5 by Apple (although they may drop the G_ naming convention and call it a PPC64 or something) and is a 64-bit PPC chip based on IBM's Power4 series, with AlriVec tacked on. Power4 is a PPC-derived architecture, specifically designed to run in high-end UNIX servers, where x86 just doesn't cut it. With the 970 IBM are trying to move this technology to the desktop.

Second: what operating system does the IBM PowerPC run?

It will run any OS that runs on current PPC chips (PPC Linux and OS X, for example), although it will probably require OS modifications to take advantage of the 64-bit features of this chip.

I suspect that the article is just confusing and processor itself is not made by IBM. Right??

The chip indeed is made by IBM, as are the G3s in the current iBook range (as I recall Motorola G3s top out at <600MHz, while IBM make them up to 1GHz). Apple is expected to be one of the largest customers for these chips, hence their mention.

Re:So what about the old rumor about IBM chips in.

[pressman]

IIRC. this is the new-fangled Power4 stripped down for use in desktops. It is a 32bit chip with full backward compatibility with 32-bit applications.

Typically Apple would release a machine with this kind of new technology at a big tradeshow like Seybold or something since it is aimed at the more professional user. So, labor day weekend might be when we'll see this baby hit the market. Maybe even Macworld Boston, but that would more likely produce speed-bumped iMacs and iBooks, possibly a Powerbook speedbump too.

Re:Obligatory Questions

[rindeee]

If by "current 64bit PowerPC" you would qualify a Power4, (or Power4+ if you're lucky enough) then yet, many people run Linux on a 64bit PPC. Most of the pSeries line from IBM will run the SuSE and RedHat distros specific to this line and Debian will runs nicely as well.

Re:So what about the old rumor about IBM chips in.

[rgraham]

How does this effect the rumor status for the old story about Apple possibly using that new fangled Power-4 chip by this summer? Is this the same chip in question?

I don't know what story you're refering to but the 970 is derived from the Power4.

Does anybody know if this is a 64-bit or 32 bit-processor?

64-bit

Re:Let's see some FAB speed scores (specs here)

[writertype]

Well, hauling out the report [extremetech.com] from Microprocessor Forum it looks like:

The core, as defined, contains 64 Kbytes of instruction cache, 32 Kbytes of data cache, and 512 Kbytes of 8-way set associative level 2 cache. Unlike the Power4, the core does not apparently contain an onboard cache controller to enable the use of off-chip L3 cache.

The front-side bus electrically runs at 450-MHz, double-clocked to an effective rate of 900-MHz, generating a peak bandwidth of 7.2 Gbytes or 6.4 Gbytes/s of useable bandwidth after transaction overhead is taken into account, Sandon said. Five instructions can be issued and acted upon at any one time, while a total of 200 instructions can be "in flight" at any time, taking into account instructions that are stored in queues.

Performance-wise, IBM believes the chip can record a benchmark of 932 on SPECint 2000 and a score of 1051 on SPECfp2000, both at 1.8-GHz. Peak SIMD GFLOPs should be about 14.4, Sandon said. Using Dhrystone MIPS, the chip should output a score of 5,220. or 2.9 DMIPS/MHz/. IBM expects the chip should test 18 million RC5 keys per second.

Just Plain Wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

It's called the AIM Alliance. Apple, IBM, Motorola have been involved from the very beginning. The PowerPC family is a large and successful family of RISC processors (mostly embedded, other devices like the GameCube, etc..) Motorola has focused on the embedded markets although they develoepd AltiVec whihc IBM refused to license. IBM focused on the high end with the Power Series. Apple, Motorola, and IBM all contribute design elemnts to the PowerPC spec. Certain parts of that family have been successful to various extents at various times, but it looks like the best is yet to come.

Apple doesn't own the trademark and doesn't slap the name on whatver chip it's shipping. Currently, most G3s come from IBM, Motorola is currently the sole supplier of Apple G4s, but it was rumored that IBM helped with production at a time when Moto couldn't meet demand. Now IBM has licensed AltiVec and is pushing into the desktop by scaling down the POWER series.

Re:noo

[York the Mysterious]

I really hope this is a joke. Obviously a lot of that is opinion. I'm not going to bother to argue that, but the thing on the SuperDrives. Look up things before you write a comment like that. The new SuperDrives write DVD-R/RW and DVD+R/W. There isn't full support for the +R/RW standard in the OS integrated burning, but it works fine if you use a third party program like anyone that cared about +R/RW would anyways. They don't even burn RAM discs. No one does that anymore. The older Pioneer SuperDrives could only burn DVD-R/RW. You got us there. So what though?

Re:Let's see some FAB speed scores (specs here)

[nosferatu-man]

For comparison's sake, the P4 Xeon @ 1.8ghz pulls 703/717 (int/fp) on SPEC CPU2000.

Assuming a linear scaling in SPEC performance, we can look forward to a 2.5ghz 970 scoring about 1294/1460, which is pretty respectable. Not a world beater (especially for 2H03), but a far cry from the abominable performance of the current G4.

'jfb

Re:Obligatory Questions

[addaon]

It's really not hard. I don't have anything formal written up, but just read the IBM docs on the 750FX. Basically, you initialize a register with the multiplier you want, wait a few cycles for the PLL to lock, and then send an instruction which switches the machine from one PLL to the other (there are two). You can then reverse the process. One PLL is initialized from hardware to the speed of your computer, but they're both settable. If you disable clockspeed switching on moving to battery (which does it's own thing, of course), all you need to do under 10.2 is disable the kernel's resetting of the clock. Just grep for the opcode to write the appropriate register in the kernel; if my memory is correct, it occurs twice in the kernel, never figured out what the first one did... may just set the second PLL for battery-removal clocking later on. In any case, no-oping out both of those occurances causes no problems at all, that I've noticed. Of course, every update that changes the kernel (10.2.4 being the latest) requires you to redo this, but it's about one minute with grep and a hex editor. That should be enough to get you going... took me about four hours, and I didn't even know PPC machine code when I started.

Re:When Used....

[Tar-Palantir]

Power consumption is good, according to a recent MacAddict article. It mentioned that the 1.8GHz chip had low enough consumption to be put in a laptop. Drool....

Re:Compare Top MAC/DELL PRICES!

[Anonymous Coward]

You do realize that a Quadro4 700XGL video card (not for regular consumers) is around $400 and the GeForce4 MX is under $100?

You are comparing a workstation for professionals (Dell: note the ECC ram, Zeon chip, etc.) with a mac for consumers that just so happens to feature dual cpus.

Re:Let's see some FAB speed scores

[Clockwurk]

Because we're all too lazy to copy/paste [ibm.com]

Re:Let's see some FAB speed scores

[Monokeros]

OK, Everyone who wants to understand which processor is fastest should really take a course on processors. Here's the (condensed) deal with the MHz myth:

All other things being equal, faster clock frequency = faster processor. The trick is in the magic words "all other things being equal". If I have a 1 GHz G4 and overclock it to 1.8GHz it will be faster. That's because the processor is using the exact same process but all the steps in the process suddenly take less time.

The problem is that no two processor designs are the same. RISC vs CISC isn't even the only consideration. There are cache sizes/locations, number of pipeline stages, number of pipelines, processor component layout, all kinds of crap. And thats just IN the processor. Motherboard designs don't even enter into my discussion.

PPC and x86 are very different, as well you know if you are a nerd (if you aren't then what are you doing here anyway?). But even processors that run the same instruction set are different enough that clock frequency doesn't necessarily dictate relative processing speed. This is why if you went to tom's hardware when the P4's first came out and looked at the benchmarks, initial P4's were rated as slower than P3's which were running at a SLOWER clock frequency. And I don't think I have to tell you about AMD vs. Intel processors at equal clock speeds.

The point is that clock frequency is a number that represents something that is actually going on inside your processor. It doesn't always accurately represent speeds relative to other processors, but its a pretty good heuristic when used wisely. If you're comparing the speed of different P4's you wouldn't be in error if you said "I want a 2.6GHz P4 because its faster than a 2.2GHz P4". However, you probably would be in error if you said "I want a 2.6GHz P4 because its faster than a 2.5GHz Power5".

Re:Compare Top MAC/DELL PRICES!

[Anonymous Coward]

or build it yourself...

$200 dual Athlon MP mobo
$400 2 Athlon MP 2400s
$500 2Gb PC3200 DDR
$200 WD 180Gb HD
$300 Radeon 9700 Pro
$400 17" flat panel
$100 case+power supply
$330 Sony DVD+/-R
$ 50 52x24x52 CD-RW
$ 20 keyboard & mouse
$ 0 Linux

Total- $2500

Re:Help

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a T-R-O-L-L. 'Tard.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:From what i understand...

[Shuh]

They shrunk the size of the gates on the transistors, basically trading reliability for performance. Considering that one of the main selling points of Apples is their longevity and ability to hold value due to it, I can't help but wondering if this is the right move.

As reliable as Apples are, they are still pretty much consumer and light server iron with consumer-grade reliability. All they are doing to the 970 is scaling back from industrial server-farm $30,000 workstation reliability to normal consumer-reliability... right where Apple has always been.

Estimated Scores of 2.5GHz Chip

[Galahad2]

Assuming the same bus speed (which is impossible, so take these numbers to be within, say, one hundred points of reality) and linear performance progression, the 2.5GHz chip should have:

SPECint2000 =
937 / 1.8 = 520.5 points/GHz * 2.5
Estimated Score ~= 1300
Average P4@3.0GHz score ~= 1080 (the 970 = 20% faster)

SPECfp2000 =
1051 / 1.8 = 583.9 points/GHz * 2.5
Estimated Score ~= 1460
Average P4@3.0GHz score ~= 1100 (the 970 = 33% faster)

RC5 =
18 / 1.8 = 10 * 2.5
Estimated Score ~= 25M keys/sec
Average P4@3.0GHz score ~= 4.3M keys/sec (the 970 = 581% faster)

Take these numbers with a grain of salt, but they're somewhat interesting. I like the RC5 score, especially. ;)

Ignorance is no excuse.

[pastafazou]

That's a wonderful list you have there. It's full of machines that cost hundreds of thousands and even millions of dollars. Does Apple produce a high end server like that? No. So the fact that Apple isn't on that list means nothing. You might also want to take a closer look at the list. See number twelve, held by IBM? That's a Power3 cluster. The Power3 is IBM's version of the G3. Look a little further down now. See number 19, IBM's ACSI Blue-Pacific? It's using the 604e processor. That's the processor Apple DISCONTINUED 6 YEARS AGO when they released the G3!!!!! Now if you want to learn just a little bit about powerful Apple processors, try EP2 Cluster [ist.utl.pt] or Bio-IT News [bio-itworld.com]. Maybe in the future a bit of knowledge before you open your mouth might be prudent.

Re:Macs could use the speed

[JohnsonWax]

Unfortunately, Illustrator has a problem in that the app double-buffers the display, and OS X automatically double-buffers the display, so you've got a lot of unncessary graphics crap going on. That's a big part of the glacial screen redraws and I don't think that CPU would fix it. The Windows version doesn't suffer from this.

On top of that Illustrator does have some other bug fixes and optimizations to do. Hopefully we'll get a 10.1 version before too long.

Re:x86 does have vector support

[Dominic_Mazzoni]

Yeah you're right I didn't account for MMX and SSE.

However there is little comparison.

Alti-Vec
# 32 separate Registers
# 128 bits per register
# No interference with FP registers
# no context or mode switching
# max throughput: 8 Flops / cycle

MMX/SSE
# 8 MMX registers shared with the FPU, 8 for SSE
# 64 bits per mmx register, 128 bits per xmm register
# MMX stalls the FP registers
# context switching required for MMX
# max throughput: 2 Flops / cycle

When you are playing a 3D game do you really want your FPU stalled for vector calculations?


To be fair, you could program your 3D game to do all FPU calculations in SSE. gcc has an option to do this automatically now. And SSE2 is one step ahead of AltiVec in one regard - it supports a few double-precision operations.

But aside from those two nitpicks, I agree completely. I've hand-optimized code for both Pentium/SSE and G4/AltiVec and there's no comparison: SSE provides a small performance boost for a lot of work, while AltiVec provides a large performance boost for a little bit of work. AltiVec has very fancy shift, rotate, and shuffle instructions that are completely lacking in SSE. These are useful for more than just RC5 - they're totally necessary to vectorize many more complicated algorithms without the overhead of putting the data in the right place eating up any potential speed gains.

That's why the 970 in a Mac will easily beat the P4 in a number of tests: Apple has optimized hundreds of system calls to use AltiVec already, so many programs get the speed gain automatically.

Re:you gotta wonder...

[g4dget]

Well, for scientific users the debate about which platform to use has *significantly* been mitigated by the presence of a true UNIX with OS X allowing for the easy porting and running of code already written for other *nix distros.

While UNIX compatibility in OS X is great, calling it a "true UNIX" is really rather misleading. First of all, the kernel isn't a UNIX kernel, it's a hacked Mach kernel with a BSD compatibility layer. Furthermore, there are very significant differences in userland, including things like a case-insensitive file system, huge changes in system administration, lack of device nodes for things like audio and video, multiple views of the file system (from Carbon/UNIX), etc. Also, the standard UNIX window system, X11, is at best bolted onto OS X.

Now, you may think all these things are improvements to UNIX, and you might be right. However, they make OS X pretty significantly different from UNIX. And while some applications port with no problems to OS X, others require incorporating Cocoa or Carbon code for porting, which can be a lot of effort.

Re:-1, Troll

[kuwan]

I actually posted the story to Slashdot first, then MacSlash later, but MacSlash was faster at putting it up. Probably because they don't get as many story submissions as Slashdot.

Kuwan
--
Get HyperSpell [kuwan.net] for OS X - Instant access to OS X's built-in spellchecker.

Re:Explanation

[SmittyTheBold]

IBM made quite a few of the first 601 processors in the first-gen Power Macs, too. Motorola and IBM both manufactured basically every generation of PPC chip up until the Motorola-exclusive 74xx line.

As it stands now (and as I understand it now...) Apple gets all current G4s from Motorola while the G3 supply is solely IBM.

Apple servers up 370% in Q3 2002

[afantee]

Apple shipped 7484 servers (presumably mainly Xserve) in Q3 2002. In contrast, there were only 3500 Itanium 2 based servers sold in the whole of 2002.

The future looks even better for Apple in the server space, following the recent release of the new Xserve and the Xserve RAID. I can't wait to see an Apple 64 bit PPC 970 blade server to blow the crappy Dell out of the water.

Quoting numbers attributed to Internet World, MacInTouch (Saturday, Jan 12) reports that Apple's share of the server market has more than trebled from 0.2 percent to 0.7 percent (Q3 '01 vs Q3 '02). An equally telling statistic is the fact that approximately 40 percent of growth had taken place by the end of Q2 '02 (ie before Apple's Xserve was released).

In terms of unit sales, Internet World quotes the following for Apple:
? Q3 '01 2,049
? Q2 '02 3,937
? Q3 '02 7,484

Re:Apple Needs to design a good MB

[KefkaFloyd]

That's because the G4 in its current state cannot support a faster bus (hence the abstraction of the DDR memory from the system bus). The 970 will fix this problem (and so would the G4 7457-RM, but that's still vapor at this point).

Unfortunately, the press release has been removed

[Blondie-Wan]

MacAddict [macaddict.com] and others are reporting that the press release has been removed from IBM's site; clicking the link to it in this story now takes one to a listing of IBM's German press releases. The pr on the 2.5 GHz 970 seems to have been completely removed. Might the announcement have been premature?