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Technology (Apple) Businesses Apple Technology Hardware

Inside the PowerPC 970 163

Posted by CmdrTaco from the take-a-closer-look dept.
daveschroeder writes "Jon "Hannibal" Stokes has posted a long-awaited, very detailed analysis of the IBM PowerPC 970 at Ars Technica. Notable quote: 'The 970 was made for Apple'."
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Inside the PowerPC 970 More

Inside the PowerPC 970

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  • DUPE (Score:4, Informative)

    by wang33 ( 531044 ) * on Wednesday May 14, 2003 @11:58PM (#5961327) Homepage
    See here More on the power pc posted yesterday [slashdot.org]

    • Re:DUPE (Score:1, Offtopic)

      by class_A ( 324713 )
      How the fuck is that off topic?
    • Here's the patch.

      Link here. [slashdot.org] In your browser, find "CmdrTaco", click on the checkbox next to it, and then go to the bottom and click "submit" (rough translation from swahili: submit = "apply patch".

      [JUUUUST kidding, don't do this or you won't see any more of CmdrTaco's articles.]

      • I really don't think it's possible for each of 30 people to be aware of all 30 other articles. Why not assign one person to read *all* articles, and flag dupes? Then everything has to be cleared by him, and we'll eliminate dupes. And if CmdrTaco or someone else has a reason that it should go up again, he can argue it out, and modify the headline accordingly, so the readers will also know why this should go up again.

        • Nonsense (Score:3, Interesting)

          by Karl Cocknozzle ( 514413 )
          I really don't think it's possible for each of 30 people to be aware of all 30 other articles.

          Bullshit. When I worked foy the University Daily Paper we had no problem avoiding duplicate stories all over the paper... And we ran FAR MORE THAN 30 STORIES A DAY.

          In my example it was a bunch of drunk/high/rushing out to get laid coward students--Can't professionals who are being paid do their damn job right do AT LEAST as good as the wasted college kids?

  • deja vu (Score:5, Funny)

    by groundpig ( 583981 ) on Wednesday May 14, 2003 @11:59PM (#5961328)
    Its like comparing apples with apples... Its a dupe.

  • Dupe? (Score:5, Funny)

    by krisp ( 59093 ) * on Wednesday May 14, 2003 @11:59PM (#5961333) Homepage
    It's ok, the last post didn't get enough comments. Please continue discussion.

  • One long read... (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Thaidog ( 235587 )
    Interesting idea to say that the vector units were "hacked" onto the power arcitechture... and this being the reason therefore this chip is designed for apple...

    • Re:One long read... (Score:1, Interesting)

      by batboy78 ( 255178 )
      I'm more concerned about the release of the PPC 980 the mobile edition of the 970 in a nice 15 inch Al Powerbook. If you are into the rumor mill your should check out MacBidouille's [macrumors.com] website. He has some speculations about speed and performance against the current line of P4 processors.

  • In the market for a 64-bit workstation? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by idiotnot ( 302133 ) * <sean@757.org> on Thursday May 15, 2003 @12:02AM (#5961345) Homepage Journal
    Fast forward a few months....hmm...a few options:

    Sun: Nice hardware, very expensive, CDE.
    AMD: Commodity hardware, cheap, WinXP.
    HP: Intel hardware, very expensive, CDE or WinXP.
    I think I know what I'd buy.

    Of course, the Athlon64/Opteron would get quite a bit of consideration due to my hobbies.

    But I think it'd end up being the Mac.

  • It's a dupe (Score:1, Redundant)

    by PD ( 9577 ) *
    And I even e-mailed daddypants to notify him that it was a dupe.
    • Same here. Nice to know the on-call editor responds the e-mail.

      On-call doesn't mean "I'm at The Matrix Reloaded and can check e-mail when I get back." And if it did, I certainly wouldn't be here at work right now.

      • Has anyone seen the listed on-duty editor actually CHANGE? Every time I can remember seeing it it's always daddypants, does this person sleep? If so, this must be nap time.

  • There has been a change ... (Score:4, Funny)

    by binaryDigit ( 557647 ) on Thursday May 15, 2003 @12:06AM (#5961365)
    ... in The Matrix. That strange feeling of deja vu can only mean one thing! Either that or the /. editors are asleep at the wheel again.
  • I understand that a while ago there was some competition between IBM and Motorola about whose chip would be the G5. Was Motorola ever a serious contender, and if so, has Apple decided on IBM? I haven't heard much about Motorola for some time.

    • Re:Is this the G5? (Score:4, Informative)

      by binaryDigit ( 557647 ) on Thursday May 15, 2003 @12:15AM (#5961404)
      I understand that a while ago there was some competition between IBM and Motorola about whose chip would be the G5. Was Motorola ever a serious contender, and if so, has Apple decided on IBM? I haven't heard much about Motorola for some time.

      Mot actually had a G5 on the roadmap. They apparently got all the way to samples, but then ditched the effort. There never was a competition per se wrt the G5 name. There was a bit of friction over AltiVec, as IBM wanted to focus on clock speed and didn't think AV was worth the complexity (and hence why Mot came out with the G4 while IBM stuck with the G3). Motorola hasn't been serious about the mainstream cpu market for a while as they've been losing money on it. They'd rather focus on things like embedded proccies and cell phones (and related chips).

      I don't know which came first, Mot ditching G5 so Apple pleads with IBM to come out with 970. Or Mot gets whiff of 970, so sees a way out of doing G5. Perhaps others more "in the know" can chime in?
      • I think people look at the wrong area when they finger Motorolla about PowerPC, they always point out that Apple is a small customer and that the R&D is expensive etc. Well as you stated they had the G5 mostly completed when they shelved it. I think it has to do more with the freaking rediculous price of modern fabs. Fabs are a HUGE capital cost for a bleeding edge facility, and other than Apple Motorolla doesn't have a huge need for one. IBM on the other hand needs up to date fabs for their own product
      • Mot actually had a G5 on the roadmap.

        Wow, ditching a whole CPU has got to hurt. At least Motorola, however, knows how to steer around the iceburg to focus on their core business.

    • Re:Is this the G5? (Score:4, Informative)

      by Duck_Taffy ( 551144 ) <cheneyho@@@yahoo...com> on Thursday May 15, 2003 @12:32AM (#5961465)
      Officially, the PowerPC G5 is the Motorola PowerPC 8500 chip. So this would not be it. Apple may or may not call a computer that features IBM's PowerPC 970 the PowerMac G5 or PowerBook G5, but it wouldn't be the actual G5 chip. Although I don't think this chip officially has a G* name, I'd be more inclined to designate it the G6, since the G5 was actually a 32-bit chip.
      • well, G5 was written on a roadmap I once saw describing the Motorola MPC 85xx series - but seeing as how that series has been on sale for about a year now with no sign of a CPU variant suitable for Apple to use, I guess we can forget about the MPC 85xx being used in PowerMacs. Personally, I'd like Apple to adopt the moniker "G64" for their PPC 970 powered machines - that'd stick it to Intel alright, and the idiotic warez kids would stop comparing clock speed and start comparing word length instead of gettin
    • Motorola's G5 is smaller and lower-power than it was originally going to be. IBM has basically taken over making Mac CPU's over the past few years. They make G3's and G4's and the PowerPC 970 is going to be Apple's G5.

  • Inaccuracy, Part I (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 15, 2003 @12:11AM (#5961390)
    Unfortunately, the vector performance of the G4e has been consistently bottlenecked by Apple's lackluster motherboard and chipset designs--specifically the anemic frontside bus and memory subsystems that Apple has saddled the PowerMac line with.
    This implies that the decision of how much bus bandwidth to give the G4e was up to Apple - which it was not. Motorola designed the processor (for Cisco, depending on who you believe), and Apple made do with the anemic MaxBus at 133mhz that they got from Motorola.

    Apple'd be putting DDR400 on the G4 right now if they could. None of this (well, except the decision to go Moto) was their fault.

    My real problem with the current G4e situation, aside from the 167 SDR FSB, is the fact that it's a shared bus topology, which is just ridiculous. To my knowledge, there's nothing stopping Apple from putting out a chipset that gives each G4e a dedicated FSB (even if it's still 167MHz SDR) to the chipset.

    As far as the low MHz and SDR situation, I've also never been totally convinced that Apple wasn't partially to blame for this either, unless they just have zero clout with Moto SPS.
    • Whoa! A duplicate article, this I've seen before. But this is nuts!
    • Not SPS, its MPS ( I think thats the correct acronym for the organization that handels microprocessors, its been awhile). And yes Apple has little if no clout with SPS, or at least they did'nt. Things might have changed. Apple is a very very flacky customer. Most of the time, that I was involved with them, they did not know what they wanted. I personaly had little respect for their engineering. They used to be incredibly myoptic and narrowly focused. This does not work well when they keep changing their min

  • Isn't it obvious... (Score:5, Funny)

    by GrodinTierce ( 571882 ) on Thursday May 15, 2003 @12:14AM (#5961401) Journal
    I believe that Hannibal mentions that the 970 is designed for SMP.. Clearly CmdrTaco is just testing its newest feature: you click post and the operation gets carried out by both processors.

    Tierce

  • Dual FPUs! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 15, 2003 @12:15AM (#5961402)
    Reading through the article, its nice to see some real design going into a processor. Looking through Intel's last few chips, they've been upping ther clock speed and packing in more cache.

    Yeah, yeah, they are hog-tied because you can't easily re-compile the entire windows platform to use new instruction sets. Linux users, of course, don't have this problem (muhahahah).

    Did anyone else catch the bit on the twin FPU's? I'm just imagining what this thing is going to do with vector operations and frequency transforms.

    For most of you non-engineers:

    -Most 3d vector operations are affine tranformations. Using a 4x4 array of floating point numbers you can translate, rotate, and scale. Works beautifully, but it's a lot of calculations.

    -The Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) is used a lot in signal processing. It's a floating point monster.
    • In response to your FFT being a floating point monster... in a lot of cases, couldn't you turn it into an integer monster? I've been thinking about this, and it occurs to me that the vector can be decomposed into halves (thus the 2^x units in the FFT), but a vector and angle theta it can as easily be decomposed into to vectors half the length, one at angle phi, and the other at angle (2theta-2phi).

      That, where phi is any angle. That being the case, it seems to me that you could pick your values phi to co

      • integer FFTs aren't uncommon (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Trepidity ( 597 ) <delirium-slashdotNO@SPAMhackish.org> on Thursday May 15, 2003 @07:00AM (#5962764)
        You just use fixed-point arithmetic instead of floating-point (i.e. a fixed 32 bits of precision, or 16 bits, or whatever). A simple way of doing is is to make INT_MAX/2 = 1.0, -INT_MAX/2 = -1.0, and everything in between scaled appropriately. (/2 to avoid overflow). Then you implement fixed-point addition, multiplication, division, and subtraction (as commonly doing in hardware DSP chips) and you've got yourself an integer-only FFT.

        Some really old C code doing something along these lines is available here [www.jjj.de].

    • Re:Dual FPUs! (Score:3, Funny)

      by pmz ( 462998 )
      Did anyone else catch the bit on the twin FPU's?

      Yeah, but they only work when the aftermarket mini-turbochargers are attached and a fiberglass spoiler is added to the heatsink. The resulting turbo lag adds latency that really defeats any advantage of the second FPU. It's really too bad, because the 970 could have pushed Photoshop easily into the 12s.
    • Is this the new way to deal with duplicate articles? Repost highly moderated comments from the last article. Very interesting. At least it was two ACs who posted these two comments. If it was a reg user I'd hope they get torched.

  • drop AltiVec (Score:2, Insightful)

    by g4dget ( 579145 )
    If the 970 were solely intended as a Linux desktop platform for IBM, they would've preferred to reduce the 970's die size, power consumption, time-to-market, etc. by just leaving out the Altivec unit altogether, instead of shoehorning it into the design the way they did.

    This is probably true and rather unfortunate. AltiVec is important for Apple marketing because it lets them claim impressive performance figures without actually needing to push the state of the art in terms of processor design further th

    • nope. (Score:4, Interesting)

      by netsrek ( 76063 ) on Thursday May 15, 2003 @12:39AM (#5961484) Homepage
      Try doing audio signal processing or heavy graphics/video work.

      You're pretty thankful for your Altivec then...

      I saw such an insane improvement in Reaktor when it got Altivec enhanced...

      • Re:nope. (Score:3, Insightful)

        by iomud ( 241310 )
        But you don't need altivec for a next gen chip that's so much faster than it's predecesor that no one would notice. There is a huge disparity in the performance of current G4's and whatever they're gonna call the 970 based machines.

        • Re:nope. (Score:2)

          by gig ( 78408 )
          Altivec is much, much, much faster than you think it is.

          If you're thinking of an Intel/AMD SIMD that gives you a 1% improvement then it would make sense to drop it from a next-gen chip that is 100% faster.

          Altivec often gives double or more performance, though. Since the CPU-intensive Mac apps all use it, it makes sense to keep it in there and just make it faster, too.

          Altivec is also exactly what you'd want if you are doing DSP and encryption and encoding MPEG. We do a lot of that on the Mac. All you have

      • Re:nope. (Score:1, Flamebait)

        by jovlinger ( 55075 )
        ya.

        But there's like three people in the world who actually use altivec. Hardly optimizing for the common case... (that said, I do run mplayer which I think relies on similar SIMD instructions on the x86 to provide realtime img post-processing).

        Wouldn't it be cheaper for all concerned for apple to seriously subsidize a PCI photoshop accelerator (basically a card full of DSPs and RAM with a wide bus)?

        I'm thinking back to the days when I would read BYTE and to drool over this black (really cool, in those da

        • Re:nope. (Score:3, Insightful)

          by bnenning ( 58349 )
          But there's like three people in the world who actually use altivec.


          More than 3 people have ripped music in iTunes. Then there's the tremendous acceleration it provides for encoding DVDs, Final Cut Pro's real-time effects, BLAST, and plenty more. It's not even close to just Photoshop.

          • yep (Score:3, Insightful)

            by Zergwyn ( 514693 )
            I agree with this totally. A surprisingly large, and ever increasing, amount of OS X libraries use altivec, which means that developers using those libraries get some acceleration for free. Altivec is much easier to optimize stuff for then MMX, SSE2, etc.

        • Re:nope. (Score:2, Informative)

          by andrewski ( 113600 )
          They had a Mac with a DSP built-in back in the day. The Quadra A/V! It blasted the shit out of most any other computer when it came to Photoshop - rivaling modern computers for some tasks.

          • Re:nope. (Score:2, Interesting)

            by drunkenbatman ( 464281 )
            They had a Mac with a DSP built-in back in the day. The Quadra A/V! It blasted the shit out of most any other computer when it came to Photoshop - rivaling modern computers for some tasks.

            They actually made two: the Quadra 660AV and the Quadra 840av (there was also a centris line without the fancy stuff). The 660 used a 25MHz 68040, and the 840 used a 40MHz 68040, and had a seperate DSP that you had to write specifically for.

            Apple's thought was kinda ahead of the curve at the time, in that they were

      • Re:nope. (Score:2, Insightful)

        by g4dget ( 579145 )
        If you spend $3800 on a high-end Mac, you get something that runs a small number of hand-optimized commercial programs really fast. That may be useful for some of Apple's core audience.

        But if you spend the same $3800 on x86 hardware, you get a small compute cluster that runs a lot of software faster and without AltiVec optimizations. For most scientific applications, as well as most video and audio applications, that's probably a better deal in terms of bang-for-the-buck, but, admittedly, it's probably

        • It's also something that isn't necessarily feasible for the kind of audio work I do.

          Clustering multiple machines together is still problematic for stuff like this.

          It makes writing music with software instruments/fx bloody annoying as well.

          Scientific stuff is a whole nother ballpark, just pointing out that I know I'm not the only musician who uses the Altivec stuff a hell of a lot...

        • Re:nope. (Score:2)

          by gig ( 78408 )
          A HUGE number of Mac apps use Altivec.

          You benefit especially in PowerBooks where you do these massive computations on a low-power CPU.

          Altivec apps (off the top of my head): Pro Tools, Logic, Cubase, Performer, iTunes, Final Cut, Avid, iMovie, iDVD, iPhoto, QuickTime, Mac OS X (Quartz, CoreAudio, Disk Copy, more), Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Flash, FreeHand.

          You have to run an Intel chip at 70 watts to get it to brute force these computations as fast as a 15 watt chip with Altivec. Get

    • Re:drop AltiVec (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      A few problems:
      (A) SIMD is really bloody fast if you use it. And Apple does. Heavily. Would you want to rewrite OSX, significantly slowing it down, to create an altivecless version?

      (B) Apple has gone through two major transtions: 68k->PPC, Mac OS Kernel->BSD kernel. Another rewrite requiring transition is possible, but over something this small? That seems unlikely. And I bet users would be THRILLED when some apps just stop working.

      (C) The other option is to just crack those 128 bit instructions dow

      • Re:drop AltiVec (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Ikari Gendo ( 202183 )

        SIMD is really bloody fast if you use it. And Apple does. Heavily. Would you want to rewrite OSX, significantly slowing it down, to create an altivecless version? ... Apple has gone through two major transtions: 68k->PPC, Mac OS Kernel->BSD kernel. Another rewrite requiring transition is possible, but over something this small? That seems unlikely. And I bet users would be THRILLED when some apps just stop working.

        Er ... OS X doesn't need to be rewritten. It runs on Altivec-less G3s, and probably

    • Re:drop AltiVec (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Daleks ( 226923 ) on Thursday May 15, 2003 @12:47AM (#5961513)
      But the reality of regular high-end computing is that people don't have the time to optimize their software for the latest oddball hardware platform. And even something like a hand-coded vectorized BLAS library doesn't help because most scientific software still doesn't use such libraries.

      ATLAS [sourceforge.net] is a BLAS implementation that is tuned for each system that it runs on. The people at Mathworks use this as the underlying BLAS system in Matlab. Mathematica Maple, etc. [sourceforge.net] use this as well. There is even a G4/AltiVec optimized version available here [sourceforge.net]. This is the whole point of layered software.

      • Re:drop AltiVec (Score:3, Insightful)

        by jovlinger ( 55075 )
        Don't forget the oh-so-cool Fastest FFT In The West.

        IIRC, it will partically evaluate the code against the known size of the input, and I think also do some data-driven special-casing.

        Basically, it beats the pants off standard-library FFTs.

        While I'm at it, responding to grandparent:

        most scientific software still doesn't use such libraries

        Would you care to elaborate? I mean, if you're not writing against known ultra-optimized libraries, what business do you have expecting your software to run fast? Th

        • djb (of qmail fame) has some rather uncomplimentary [cr.yp.to] things to say about the accuracy of FFTW's speed claims.

    • Re:drop AltiVec (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Wyatt Earp ( 1029 ) on Thursday May 15, 2003 @12:50AM (#5961526)
      AltiVec is nice for somethings.

      My iTunes ripping of mp3s nearly tripled when I went from a 466 MHz G3 to a 400 MHz G4 due to iTunes being optimized for AltiVec.

      Some Photoshop actions and filters see up to 800% improvments.

      Running iMovie exports on a 600 MHz G3 iMac take 2-300% longer than on a 400 or 500 MHz G4
      • Agreed. I use Logic Audio a lot, and my 350 MHz G4 can run about 3 times more simultaneous real-time DSP plug-ins than my 500 MHz iBook. I realize the 66 MHz system bus on the iBook comes into play here (it's 100 MHz on my old G4), but my mom's iMac (400 MHz with 100 MHz system bus) performs about as well as my iBook.

      • Re:drop AltiVec (Score:3, Informative)

        by cygnus ( 17101 )
        AltiVec is nice for somethings.
        that's not just AltiVec accounting for that increase. the G3 uses the old 60X bus designed for the original PPC chips. the G4 uses the MaxBus, which offers streaming from RAM. the G3 burns up a lot of it's bus repeatedly asking for the next block of whatever from memory, while the G4 can say "fetch me these next few blocks." that makes a huge difference on a slow bus.

    • Re:drop AltiVec (Score:5, Informative)

      by Textbook Error ( 590676 ) on Thursday May 15, 2003 @12:55AM (#5961549)
      AltiVec is important for Apple marketing because it lets them claim impressive performance figures without actually needing to push the state of the art in terms of processor design further than Intel.

      No, AltiVec is important for Apple full stop - in the short term to make up for the anemic bus speeds allowed by the G4, and in the longer term because a SIMD unit is now as expected a component of modern desktop CPUs as an FPU is.

      And even something like a hand-coded vectorized BLAS library doesn't help because most scientific software still doesn't use such libraries

      The only thing you can really sure about "most" scientific software is that it needs an FPU. Scientists and engineers do a huge variety of simulations, some of which are vectorizable and some of which aren't.

      If AltiVec has a weakness in the scientific field, it's the lack of support for double precision. And there's nothing in the instruction set which precludes this, so I wouldn't be surprised to see it appear in some future CPU.

      Imagine how much better it would be if Apple could ship systems based on the 970 today, rather than after a few months additional delay due to AltiVec.

      If it didn't have AltiVec, it wouldn't be what Apple needs in a desktop CPU - not much point in getting what you don't need a few months early (not like that would happen anyway: this isn't lego: you can't unplug "the AltiVec bits" without any impact on the rest of the design).

      And every dollar and watt that is shaved off the AltiVec price makes it a much more viable processor for servers and blades, which would get volume up and prices down.

      Except that Apple aren't currently in the blade market at all, and have a fairly small presence in the more general server market. If they can sell a few boxes there, fine, but getting the volume up means targetting consumers - not server farms.

    • Re:drop AltiVec (Score:5, Interesting)

      by GlassHeart ( 579618 ) on Thursday May 15, 2003 @01:12AM (#5961625) Journal
      AltiVec is important for Apple marketing because it lets them claim impressive performance figures without actually needing to push the state of the art in terms of processor design

      Don't confuse "new" with "state of the art". The former is just something that hasn't been done before. The latter is something that yields "impressive performance figures". If Altivec is competitive with Intel, then it is state of the art, by definition, even if it's 20 years old. The CPU cache is a decades old concept, yet CPUs with caches are still state of the art.

      Imagine how much better it would be if Apple could ship systems based on the 970 today, rather than after a few months additional delay due to AltiVec.

      Don't underestimate the cost of software. Your idea is expensive, because it requires software vendors to maintain two different versions of their code. This can lead to buggier or more expensive products, or it can lead to the "abandonment" of the G4 installed base. That could easily be worth the few months for Apple.

    • Re:drop AltiVec (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Apotsy ( 84148 ) on Thursday May 15, 2003 @01:55AM (#5961817)
      You'd be surprised how much stuff in Mac OS X is AltiVec optimized. Even memcpy gets a boost from it. It's a lot more than just a "gimmick".

    • Re:drop AltiVec (Score:4, Informative)

      by afidel ( 530433 ) on Thursday May 15, 2003 @03:49AM (#5962136)
      Actually every single application that is actually pushing the PC at this point benifits from vector units. Lets look at what is somewhat strenuous for a modern PC, 3D rendering:yep, media encoding and transcoding:yep, audio processing and creation:yep, 3D gaming:yep, etc. Basically all of the applications that will push a PC are things that process large chunks of data that can be worked on efficiently by a vector processing unit. This isn;t a server processor, it's a PC processor. If you want a server processor get a Power4 or Power5 with the huge cache and multicore chips that are designed for that market.
    • "But the reality of regular high-end computing is that people don't have the time to optimize their software for the latest oddball hardware platform."

      Yet you keep saying they have nothing better to do than recompile their code whenever Intel blesses them with a ne processor, like SPEC tells them to.

      • Yet you keep saying they have nothing better to do than recompile their code whenever Intel blesses them with a ne processor, like SPEC tells them to.

        I have actually consistently argued against using Intel's Pentium 4 compiler (and Itanium as well), for pretty much the same reasons I think AltiVec is a bad idea.

        But, hey, don't let little details like facts get in the way. After all, you are on a crusade, and if the cause is as worthy as Holy Apple, anybody who doesn't agree with you is a mortal enemy,

        • Hey, YOU keep saying that SPEC scores are the bee's knees. But don't let the facts get into YOUR way.
          • Hey, YOU keep saying that SPEC scores are the bee's knees.

            And what does that have to do with anything? SPEC scores can be measured with many different compilers, and, obviously, I prefer to use SPEC scores that don't rely on weird compilers like the Intel compiler.

            But even if people use Intel compilers for benchmarking, that still tells us a lot. For the comparisons you seem to be obsessed with, the P3/G4, the gcc and Intel scores for the P3 are similar. P4 systems beat G4 systems both in terms of top

            • the gcc and Intel scores for the P3 are similar.

              Sure, if you think that 10% higher scores (ICC 7.0 against gcc 3.2.2) or even 20% (against gcc 2.95) are "similar" - and that includes "evil" SSE support on gcc. And if you happen to use MS C...

              Last but not least: even if all you care about is raw, non-SIMD performance - unless you used a 604 based Mac over a Pentium+ PC, why should I (or infact anybody) listen to you?

    • Altivec is used by hundreds of Mac apps. It is not there for marketing or benchmarks.

      When an app is updated to use Altivec, you typically see double the performance. So you can run 40 effects in real-time and then you get the Altivec version of your app and you can run 80 effects in real-time.

      Photoshop filters are the least of Altivec's uses. Encoding MPEG-2 and MPEG-4, encryption of any kind, Digital Signal Processing ... these are what Altivec is used for.

      Mac users are doing heavy audio, video, encodin

  • Imagine a Beowulf clu... (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    ...

    Eh, nevermind.

  • See, your friend's enemy is your friend. No wait. Your friend's friend can also be your enemy. No...

    Ah frig'..

    Apple is going along /w IBM on their new chips. No more analysis :)

  • Up to marketing, not technology (Score:4, Interesting)

    by mariox19 ( 632969 ) on Thursday May 15, 2003 @10:30AM (#5964517)

    For me, the most interesting part of the article concerns the pricing of the new machines as the real question. According to the author, the chip will make Apple machines technologically competitive. The question is, will Apple price them to gain market share, or continue to sell to a disappearing niche of luxury computer buyers.

    Maybe Apple's concentration on developing software, and selling that software (rather than giving it away), along with its new business ventures, such as .Mac and the new iTunes online music store, point to a new business model that can afford to cut the margins on hardware.

    If they don't lower the price of their machines -- the top ones, namely -- they will suffer, long-term. I don't think they need to be on par with PC's; I just think they cannot be too much more expensive than the PC's.

    • Yeah, macs are a bit more expensive, but not really by much if you compare to comparable brands and quality, not self assembled garage models.

      And I agree in theory on your pricing opinion, but it's just that in reality Apple have been pricing their machines in pretty much this way for 20 years, and they have made a very successful business out of it. They've also continuously been pronounced on the verge of death for all those 20 years.

      So I don't expect either Apple pricing or their good fortunes to chang

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