Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Technology (Apple) Businesses Apple Technology

Motorola to Boost 0.13-micron PowerPCs 274

Posted by pudge from the speculation-premature-may-it-never-be dept.
Anonymous Cow writes "From The Register: 'Speculation that Motorola may soon cease to be a supplier of processors to Apple may be premature. The chip maker yesterday said it had successfully implemented low-k dielectric materials in its 0.18 micron silicon-on-insulator (SOI) processors, bringing an estimated 20 per cent speed bump to the PowerPC line. Motorola expects to roll out the process on its 0.13 micron chips this month...'"
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Motorola to Boost 0.13-micron PowerPCs More

Motorola to Boost 0.13-micron PowerPCs

Comments Filter:

  • 20%? nothing...! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by davids-world.com ( 551216 ) on Tuesday June 03, 2003 @07:36AM (#6104348) Homepage
    twenty percent won't do, dear mr. motorola. the new chips might a nice quick upgrade for a few apple machines, but on the long run we need state-of-the-art cpus.
    • twenty percent won't do, dear mr. motorola. the new chips might a nice quick upgrade for a few apple machines, but on the long run we need state-of-the-art cpus.

      Not that I completely disagree with you, but stop and ask *why* you think such CPUs are so important. Apple is focusing on laptops and quiet PCs like the iMac. Low power is very important in that regard. You wouldn't want to blindly throw all that away in exchange for the 5-fan monsters Dell is shipping.

      In all honesty, the sweet spot of CPU sp

      • Re:20%? nothing...! (Score:2, Insightful)

        by illuvata ( 677144 )
        1 GHz might be enough for most things, but that wont help apple. the problem is that apple needs to offer fast computers, which actually sell. see, those people that only need 1 GHz computers probably already have one, so they really dont matter

        also, of course i can do everything with a 1 GHz cpu. however, i can do it faster with a 3 GHz one. true, i could just wait half an hour everytime i want to apply some complex filter in photoshop, but i dont want to

      • Re:20%? nothing...! (Score:4, Insightful)

        by diverman ( 55324 ) on Tuesday June 03, 2003 @11:01AM (#6105582)
        Oh please! 1GHz is a sweet spot? Give me a break! Software will constantly push the limits of CPU power. Hell, even the operating system will start to push it over time.

        There are so many reasons why Apple needs more speed out of their processors. For one, I am not going to invest in a machine that won't be able to run the operating system being released in 2-3 years. Even if it's a little slow, being a few years old, it should at least be able to deal with things well.

        There are also a lot of people that need power. Apple wants a share of the server market. They're not going to do it with only dual 1.4GHz G4s. They need more power!

        20% is a joke! The real promise is still IBM's 970s. Almost double the computing power at the same GHz, and higher available speeds. Sure, power consumption might be of concern for laptops, with their recent focus, but 20% still isn't going to hold much water in a PowerBook.

        Stop making the age-old mistake of saying "no one needs more" about technology. Every idiot who has said that has been proven to be rediculously wrong. Hell! Bill Gates said no one would need more than 640K on a computer, didn't he? And I can't tell you how many time I've heard that same general statement from people over the years. Just accept that you WILL need more, and it will be sooner than you think or expect. History has shown this time and time again.

        -Alex
        • Bill: Steve?
          Steve: yeah, what's up?
          Bill: Saw this on a /. posting. For one, I am not going to invest in a machine that won't be able to run the operating system being released in 2-3 years
          Steve:Well, now what? Are they starting to catch on?
          Bill: More marketing Steve. Oh, and Stevie boy, less jumping please.

        • Re:20%? nothing...! (Score:4, Insightful)

          by Junks Jerzey ( 54586 ) on Tuesday June 03, 2003 @11:18AM (#6105739)
          Oh please! 1GHz is a sweet spot? Give me a break! Software will constantly push the limits of CPU power. Hell, even the operating system will start to push it over time.

          The cry for raw speed is so vulgar! Look, I've done commercial 3D game development on an 866MHz Pentium III. It was completely and utterly fine, and not just in a "barely acceptable" kind of way. I had no need to upgrade. Eventually I did upgrade (for other reasons) and I can't tell the difference performance wise. Now, sure, the people who use Photoshop for a living on 600dpi images, or the people who do high-end CG work using Maya, they're extraordinary cases. Those people are in the "I'll pay $5000 for a decent performance increase" category.

          Realistically, going from 1GHz to 3GHz does not give you a 300% speed increase. It's more like 50%. Personally, I'm getting tired of the usual 12% clock speed increase that results in a 6% benchmark score increase at the expense of 15% higher power consumption.

          • Re:20%? nothing...! (Score:3, Insightful)

            by diverman ( 55324 )
            My comments weren't just about raw power. They are about where things are going to be in the next few years. Whether it's because software developers are writing inefficient code or that the software really does need that kind of power to do what it does is irrelevant as far as an end-user goes.

            As a developer myself, I agree that programmers should be better about trying to conserve CPU cycles. Most do, after an initial release or two.

            What I find rediculous is that people fight getting faster machines!
          • Oh, and by the way... it's not just high end users. When was the last time you tried to use iMovie and apply some effects. Dear God that sucks up CPU. And THAT is the app that Apple encourages the average user to use!!! Continue to iPhoto, iDVD, etc... all of this stuff is CPU intensive. Apple is pushing this for your average user! Not the power user!

            So, tell me again how the computing power of today is enough. It barely looks like it keeps up with the apps Apple is trying to push on it.

            -Alex

        • There are so many reasons why Apple needs more speed out of their processors. For one, I am not going to invest in a machine that won't be able to run the operating system being released in 2-3 years. Even if it's a little slow, being a few years old, it should at least be able to deal with things well.

          Also let us not forget the lesson of the early PowerPC adopters. Fearing the discontinuation of the 68k-based macs (which did come to pass) they upgraded to the latest greatest thing. Then support for P

      • So you'd rather encode 1.5hrs of video to MPEG-2 format before burning with a 1ghz cpu rather than a 3ghz cpu?

  • don't speed bumps ... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Potor ( 658520 ) <farker1NO@SPAMgmail.com> on Tuesday June 03, 2003 @07:46AM (#6104391) Journal
    slow you down?

  • Beyond 1 GHz..? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by girl_geek_antinomy ( 626942 ) on Tuesday June 03, 2003 @07:47AM (#6104393)
    From the article on The Register:
    candidate processors include the MPC7457, which has yet to ship but is set to take Motorola's G4 family beyond 1GHz.

    I don't know where they've been looking but under my desk just here is a dual 1.25GHz G4 tower... there are 1.42s out there, too...

    Honestly, I don't know what I'd do with a dual 2GHz G4 at the moment... apart from the two folding@home [stanford.edu] clients I'm running, I'm using perhaps 10 - 20% of the CPU on this machine, and that's running OS X and a heap of graphics apps...

    • Re:Beyond 1 GHz..? (Score:4, Informative)

      by The Original Yama ( 454111 ) <lists.sridhar @ d h a n apalan.com> on Tuesday June 03, 2003 @08:14AM (#6104494) Homepage
      Read the rest of the article:
      Interestingly, Motorola said it had been delivering low-k dielectric 0.18 micron SOI processors for a full quarter. The 7455 is just such a chip - Motorola's claim may explain why Apple has had such success overclocking the 1GHz 0.18 micron MPC7455 to 1.42GHz in its Power Mac models.

    • Re:Beyond 1 GHz..? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by tbmaddux ( 145207 ) * on Tuesday June 03, 2003 @09:17AM (#6104860) Homepage Journal
      Honestly, I don't know what I'd do with a dual 2GHz G4 at the moment...
      Well, let's see. You don't have to have one, of course; as the hypothetical 2GHz G4 dualies ramp up the low end machines can get cheaper, smaller, and faster. And you obliquely mention scientific analysis; I analyze weeks worth of timeseries data on a G4 1GHz/DP machine. Right now the code takes 15 minutes and halving that time would be a significant boost. There are some sensitivity tests to model parameters I that I could make more thorough simply by adding points. I could do more in other overnight simulations. And I'm sure gamers and people who grind Photoshop jobs or render all day will appreciate the speed-up.

      Finally, there may be something you or I haven't thought of yet. Apple is doing a good job of finding new things for us to do with our faster processors (iDVD, for example, uses a lot of resources) while other software/OS companies have not done such a good job of finding a "killer app" for having computers faster than they were in 1999. Not that iDVD is the killer app -- I think it's still out there waiting to be found.

    • 3D modelling and rendering would be helped quite a bit.

      Check out SketchUp [sketchup.com] - expensive software, but the downloadale demo gives you 8 hours in which to become addicted to it.

  • Apple leaving Moto? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by iJed ( 594606 ) on Tuesday June 03, 2003 @07:50AM (#6104404) Homepage
    I do not think it is correct to say that the speculation was that "Motorola may soon cease to be a supplier of processors to Apple." Most Mac users (and nearly everyone else) know that the Moto G4 and maybe some upgraded G3 will be part of Apple's consumer products for some time yet. The PPC970 will be used on high-end systems only at introduction.
    • The promise of much faster G4-class processors than anticipated calls into question suggestions not only that Apple will ditch Motorola across the range, but that it sees the 970 as a PowerBook solution, at least in the short term.
        1. The PowerBook is Apple's high-end laptop
        2. The PowerMac will almost certainly get this chip long before a PowerBook ever does. Apple has never had a new chip in a laptop first.
        3. People say that this chip currently consumes to much power for laptop use. It will take the second revision with a smaller process to make a laptop version.
        4. Some rumors sites claim to have information on a motherboard for the 970. This motherboard is either for a PowerMac, an Xserver or the mythical Xstation.
        • Apple has never had a new chip in a laptop first.


          The G3 was introduced in Powerbooks and towers simultaneously.


          # People say that this chip currently consumes to much power for laptop use.


          I've heard conflicting numbers, but most say a 1.2 GHz 970 consumes roughly the same power as a 1.0 GHz G4. So it might be possible, although the motherboard upgrades needed to support the 970 might increase the power requirements too much.

      • I think that it was a typo in the article. From their concolusion:

        The real choice, though, is Apple's. We suspect it will choose a multi-vendor approach, utilising chips from IBM and Motorola by matching processor characteristics to application: G4 for mobile machines and consumer desktops, 970 for pro desktops and servers.

  • Well (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Znonymous Coward ( 615009 ) on Tuesday June 03, 2003 @07:51AM (#6104407) Journal
    I don't think the Motorola is completely out of the picture. When the 970s come, Apple can use these new G4s in the iBook [apple.com] product line to bump up their "consumer" grade laptops.

  • This is what Quark was waiting for (Score:5, Funny)

    by chia_monkey ( 593501 ) on Tuesday June 03, 2003 @07:53AM (#6104414) Journal
    Good googly!
    This is what Quark has been waiting for. Now that we can zoom along at these blazingly fast new speeds, Quark will finally release the OS X version and the Mac platform will be saved.

    Hurray!

    • Quark is Dead (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      InDesign is already beginning to take over Quark's previous business.

  • 20% of which speed? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 03, 2003 @07:54AM (#6104418)
    Which 20% would Motorola be referring to? If you remember correctly, you will note that the current 1.42GHz machines user overclocked 1.25GHz parts. Underneath that large heatsink in each 1.42GHz powermac is a chip containing the numbers 125.

    I doubt it will be a big jump, merely allowing a jump from 1.25GHz to 1.5GHz.

    Of course, I fully expect Apple to do their overclocking again, and attempt to pull 1.7GHz out of these systems.

  • Still Playing Catch-Up (Score:5, Informative)

    by peatbakke ( 52079 ) <peat AT peat DOT org> on Tuesday June 03, 2003 @08:03AM (#6104450) Homepage
    Low-k? Welcome to the ballgame. IBM rolled out low-k, SOI, and Cu three years ago ... on 0.13 micron. See here [chipcenter.com] and here [chipcenter.com]. So did Intel [siliconstrategies.com].

  • Not for high end Macs (Score:5, Interesting)

    by adzoox ( 615327 ) * on Tuesday June 03, 2003 @08:32AM (#6104585) Journal
    The PPC 970 (& later 980) are all but confirmed and shipping according to several sites (non rumor sites too). The most vocal being MacBiduolle. They had a Quicksilver prototype 2 months before it's appearance and have been on the money for most things. There are CONFIRMED machines in Adobe running 970s too.

    Apple will most likely use this as an oppurtunity to drop the G3. Finally Apple will have Altivec across the board. You have to take into account that the manufacturing process also reduces heat and well ... size ... making this sound more and more like a processor for an iBook.

    I also beleive Apple will use this as an oppurtunity to make everything above 1Ghz this year. We will most also likely see quad G4 Xserves because of this (moto producing better G4s)

    The 970 is a great chip. It's benchmarks at the Microprocessor Forum VERY HANDILY beat EVERY processor put up against it - even the AMD 64 bit!

    Apple shouldn't move to x86 as suggested in the redundant Apple naysayers. (hey you "apple is dead people": how about looking in my journal?) I rather like the RISC processor anf the PPC - there is MUCH less code overhead and easier "addon" capability (cache, media functionality, i/o) - Motorola has been the hold up in it's development and needed someone like IBM to step in and lend a hand, they have done so.

    • Re:Not for high end Macs (Score:3, Informative)

      by Wiz ( 6870 )

      The 970 is a great chip. It's benchmarks at the Microprocessor Forum VERY HANDILY beat EVERY processor put up against it - even the AMD 64 bit!

      Sorry, that is just rubbish. The 970 is not the best processor ever evented. Check out this link:

      970 news at Ace's [aceshardware.com]

      It's SPEC figures are good. But they are below the P4 and Opteron which you can easily go out and buy right now of course.

      It is also a lot lower the real big machine like the Alpha, Itanium 2 and IBM's own Power4. I think IBM would be very silly if

      • Re:Not for high end Macs (Score:4, Informative)

        by Dixie_Flatline ( 5077 ) <<moc.liamg> <ta> <hog.naj.tnecniv>> on Tuesday June 03, 2003 @09:47AM (#6105042) Homepage
        Actually, the PPC970 is quite a bit faster than the Power4 by design. The PPC970 is faster, but they traded the speed for decreased reliability. The Power4 is meant for true enterprise applications, so IBM made sure that the chip has decent performance, but basically never fails.

        • Re:Not for high end Macs (Score:4, Informative)

          by nosferatu-man ( 13652 ) <spamdot@homonculus.net> on Tuesday June 03, 2003 @11:53AM (#6106094) Homepage
          Well, you're half right. The POWER4 is designed for reliability. However, at 1.7ghz, it handily outperforms the projected numbers for a 970, particularly and unsurprisingly in floating point performance.

          SPEC2000
          POWER4 @ 1.7ghz: 1113/1699 (int/fp)
          PPC970 @ 1.8ghz: 937/1085 (int/fp) *projected

          Don't get me wrong: as soon as a Mac with this baby in it is available, I'm upgrading, but let's call a spade a spade. The 970 looks to be decently faster than what we currently have in raw processing power, but with a radical, "holy cow where're my pants" faster memory interface.

          'jfb
  • Motorola will definately continue to be a chip supplier for Apple for a long time. IF Apple uses IBM's chips, it will only be in PowerMac G4s, and possibly the iMac and eMac eventually, but not for quite a while. IBM has stated that they will not have a low-power version of the 970 ready for at least a year, and I think we'll see G3 iBooks around for quite some time, at least as long as Apple wants to keep them in the $1000 entry-level price range and keep them cool enough to not burn people like the G4 p

  • Weird Anagram (Score:4, Funny)

    by jabbadabbadoo ( 599681 ) on Tuesday June 03, 2003 @08:41AM (#6104630)
    The following suggests that Motorola is participating in some dark cryptology conspiracy. (all lower case to avoid /.'s lameness filter :-)

    motorola processor
    otorola processor - m
    torola processor - mo
    trola processor - moo
    tola processor - moor
    tola procssor - moore
    tola procsor - moores
    tola pocsor - moores r
    tola pocor - moores rs
    tol pocor - moores rsa
    tol ocor - moores rsa p
    tol oco - moores rsa pr
    tol co - moores rsa pro
    ol co - moores rsa prot
    l co - moores rsa proto
    l o - moores rsa protoc
    l - moores rsa protoco
    moores rsa protocol

    Weird indeed... especially when condiering this one [motorola.com] (search for RSA in the document)

  • Motorola does supply other companies (Score:3, Informative)

    by John_McKee ( 100458 ) * on Tuesday June 03, 2003 @08:58AM (#6104738) Homepage
    Just because Motorola has developed a faster PowerPC, it does not automatically mean that Apple will be using it. PowerPCs are used in other systems, particuarly embedded applications where a majority of PPCs end up.

  • Too little, way too late (Score:4, Insightful)

    by TheSwirlingMaelstrom ( 580923 ) on Tuesday June 03, 2003 @09:17AM (#6104857)

    Sitting on or near my desk are a 800MHz Athlon (running a Linux 2.4.x kernel), an 800MHz G4 Titanium (MacOSX 10.2.x), and a 1.8GHz P4 laptop (Linux 2.4.x). The Titanium was bought for me by my employer, since many of the people here use them, and I do application and hardware support, as well as Astrophysical research.

    I have benchmarked my applications on these three platforms (and the best benchmarks are, of course, your own applications, aren't they?). The G4 is slower, by about 20%, than the 800MHz Athlon. Arguably, if my applications were made 'Altivec-aware' they'd run significantly faster on the G4, but if I were to use SSE2 extensions on the Athlon or P4, they'd run faster on those platforms, too.

    Although I kinda like MacOSX (and abhorred MacOS9), and think Apple wins top marks for esthetics, their hardware is way too slow for a 20% improvement in processor speed to give them the boost they need.

    The best move for Apple will probably be to go with the new IBM chips.

    My 0.02CDN.

  • Still Too Little, Too Late Anyway (Score:4, Interesting)

    by mgbastard ( 612419 ) on Tuesday June 03, 2003 @09:40AM (#6105008)

    This is actually bad news. The MPC7457 still doesn't make full use of the bandwidth available in the DDR400 RAM the Macs are currently using. The MPC7470 does, but we're still not getting that chip - for whatever reason - I assume its a manufacturing & design issue. It's been a very long delay.

    Motorola looks pretty amateurish with this feeble boost. This is a manufacturing tweak that intel and IBM have made months ago in their primary foundries. The MPC7457 likely isn't going to get used in any serious Macintoshes - perhaps it will go into the iBook and iMacs eventually.

    So perhaps Motorola has given up on the MPC7470, and conceded that market to IBM's 970 and 980 chips. Let's hope so; I would like to buy a new workstation pretty soon. ;-)

  • Motorola is done (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Drakon ( 414580 ) * on Tuesday June 03, 2003 @09:41AM (#6105015) Journal
    Motorola has been driving themselves very very deep into the embedded market. They're making the Motorola PowerPC into a chip for cars, phones, handhelds, refridgerators, etcetera, ad nausium

    IBM is moving in the other direction, which is frankly the direction that apple NEEDS to go if they want to compete and keep this architecture.

    They're planning on keeping this architecture.
  • The repeating puzzle of these debates is why people feel compelled to have them. Apple will continue to successfully sell to a niche market that appreciates specific values of the Apple product line. I won't bother to enumerate them, it's been done before.

    The nature of these disputes is fundamentally fundamentalist: Person A is angry because person B fails to see the revealed truth. The relativity of that truth always fails to impress itself upon the fundamentalist.

    My own viewpoint is that instead of ragg

  • The Facts of the Rumor (Score:2, Informative)

    by Dak RIT ( 556128 )
    Reading through these comments so far it doesn't seem many people have read through the entire article. The summary doesn't really give an accurate picture of what the "20%" speed bumb is.

    What was that? A lead in? Yeah, ok, now let me see if I can shed some light on these rumors (well ok.... I'm going to shamelessly quote the article in an attempt at karma whoring):

    Interestingly, Motorola said it had been delivering low-k dielectric 0.18 micron SOI processors for a full quarter. The 7455 is just such

    • This could bring the G4, at least for a time, up to par with the 970.

      Not with the G4 being limited to a 167mhz SDR bus. The G4 is bandwidth starved and upping the clock speed is an exercise in the very definition of "marginal return".

      'jfb
    • The other claim being made is that substantially faster G4s than previously expected will be in the pipeline. The G4 was originally expected to top out at 1.3GHz, although may be pushed beyond that now (2GHz+ was rumored).

      It's funny that you use the word "pipeline". The G4e's short pipeline (11 stage I think? And the G3 is 7? something like that) won't let it be pushed very far, or so I would think. Especially not up into the 2GHz range.

  • Item's from March. Its June. Lots has happened. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by crovira ( 10242 ) on Tuesday June 03, 2003 @10:23AM (#6105305) Homepage
    This is a dead issue. Specially when dealing with Apple's supplier list. People have gone insane trying to guess what Steve Jobs is going to do.

    That is the kind of stochastic tittilation usually provided by people trying to predict the direction the an elephant will travel from a point of view only slightly in front of its tail.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • They've been doing a lot of that lately, but not much of that other thing. What's it called? Oh yeah, "Motorola delivers."

  • Motorola sells lots of PowerPCs (Score:5, Informative)

    by Erich ( 151 ) on Tuesday June 03, 2003 @12:23PM (#6106362) Homepage Journal
    And apple is not the big customer.

    The big customer is everyone who's buying PowerQuicc's and putting them in embedded spaces. PowerQuicc's with RapidIO connections, PowerQuicc's four-on-a-board, lots and lots of PowerPC chips going in lots and lots of embedded spaces.

    I was recently at the Global Signal Processing Expo [gspx.com] and it was amazing how many people were doing tasks involving heavy signal processing -- where you would expect DSPs and FPGAs -- on PowerPC chips. The interesting thing was that raw number-crunching power wasn't always the most important thing -- many times it is bandwith (what kind of interconnect you have to your processor makes a huge difference when you are trying to process gigabytes of information a second). Sometimes it is programmability that is the reason (use of familiar tools is a big plus). Sometimes you just want to use the same chip to do your signal processing as your network I/O.

    Companies like Sky Computers [skycomputers.com] are selling more PowerPCs than companies like Apple Computers [apple.com].

  • This explains a lot (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Enrique1218 ( 603187 ) on Tuesday June 03, 2003 @12:36PM (#6106515) Journal
    "Our goal is to stay with a frequency doubling every 18 months or so, and get into the 2GHz range for PowerPC, but at very low power consumption of, say, 20W," said Dirk Wristers, director of device/integration for Motorola's MOS-13 wafer fab, according to an EE Times report. "The frequency could be higher if we were at higher power." This statement indicates why they have been slower than Intel/AMD. They basically designing to meet notebook specification. Notebook processor always lags behind desktop counterparts because of power consumption. In fact, the centrinos only top out at 1.6 Ghz which is basically in the ballpark of Motorola current G4 at 1.25. Considering they primarily sell to embedded application hardware such as switches where low power consumption is a needed, they will never be able to keep pace with Intel/AMD in terms of desktop processors. This may be why Jobs is pushing the sale of notebooks.

Slashdot Top Deals

Our OS who art in CPU, UNIX be thy name. Thy programs run, thy syscalls done, In kernel as it is in user!

Close