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Motorola G5 - 2Ghz 64bit 152

Posted by Hemos from the yet-more-info dept.
Nerdkiller writes " An article appeared on ZDnet with some information on the G5 chip expected in 2 years. It will be competing with the Intel Merced which is expected out around the same time. A full 64 bit 2 Ghz processor. The Intel Merced will be able to support 64 bit processing, however it must be run under emulation for 32bit code. The G5 requires no change in current code with exception to some low level OS stuff. "
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Motorola G5 - 2Ghz 64bit More

Motorola G5 - 2Ghz 64bit

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  • QNX [qnx.com] runs on PPC. It probably doesn't support pmacs, though, but i'm guessing you'll probably be able to find embedded altivec g4 based SBCs soon.

  • The "extensible architecture" is part of the previously announced "Booke E" project:

    Check it out [ibm.com].

  • Re:Huh? (Score:1)

    by Rone ( 46994 )
    >> The powerpc chip is meant for macintosh products and thats all the is to it.

    Not so. IBM has been making heavy-duty UNIX workstations based on PowerPC chips (such as the RS-6000, if memory serves me correctly) for quite a while now, and Motorola has also been selling slightly-modified versions of the chips for use in embedded systems for a long time.

    Apple may be the most noted user of PowerPC technology, but it's far from being the ONLY user of it.
  • But unlike MMX, SSE, or 3DNow, Altivec is an entirely separate vector unit, with its own vector permute unit to chop shop the data, so it is usable by the SIMD instructions. So unlike AMD's or Pentiums a PPC 7400 (aka G4) can process FP, Int and Altivec at the same time, no mode switches or register swaps.
  • The first PPCs had x86 instruction hardware support.

    References, please? I've seen nothing to indicate that any PowerPC chip that actually made it out the door had x86 instruction support; all I've heard were claims that a 615 chip was being developed that would run x86 code, and, if I remember correctly, claims that Exponential's 704 would have x86 support.

    The PPC is basically a RISCified mixture of m68k and x86

    The PowerPC architecture is derived from IBM's POWER architecture (yeah, the same POWER architecture to which you referred with "IBM Power"), which first showed up in the RS/6000's, with assorted changes, e.g. single-precision floating-point and multiply and divide instructions that don't go through an MQ register. Please explain how a POWER derivative is "a RISCified mixture of m68k and x86, just a little cleaned up".

  • the 32- versus 64-bit refers to the size of the
    instructions on the chip

    No. Check out the PowerPC Programming Environments Manuals section of this page [motorola.com], and the (PDF) documents it links to. The instructions are 32 bits; the addresses and data they manipulate can be 64-bit in 64-bit PowerPC processors.

  • As I stated in another post, when people talk about 32- or 64-bit chips, they are usually talking about the length of the
    instruction set.

    And as others stated in replies to your post, that's not the case; the instructions are 32-bit in the 64-bit PowerPC architecture.

    With 64-bit instructions you can create new operations, or more likely address more memory.

    You can address more memory without 64-bit instructions; you might just have to do more work to synthesize addresses, and if the address is just a pointer you've been handed, or a pointer in a data structure, you don't have to synthesize the address.

  • A few inaccuracies with the post I am replying to (Most of these are just nit-picks from someone familiar with the instruction set):

    * It is SIMD, in that each altivec operation does the same thing to each part of the altivec register.

    * Altivec has 32 Altivec (128 bit) registers, not 64, in addition to the 64-bit floating point and 32-bit integer registers.

    * Altivec registers can be treated as:
    - 16 8-bit, 8 16-bit or 4-32-bit integers
    - 4 32-bit floats
    - 128 bits for bitwise operations
    There is no support for 64-bit integers, or for 16-bit or 64-bit floats - only 32-bit floats are supported.

    * There is no explicit support for fixed point operations, although there is provision for converting between floating and fixed point.

    * Altivec instructions take 1,2 _or_3_ registers as source, and one as destination.

    It is also rather fun to program (even if only using an emulator at the moment) :-)

    - Roy Ward.
  • If you expand the PPC family to include the POWER chipsets used in RS/6000s, then you can also include the POWER3 as a 64bit PPC...

    I'd include in the PowerPC family any chip that implements the PowerPC instruction set architecture, and this press release [ibm.com] says:

    The POWER3 design is based on the highly scalable PowerPC architecture, IBM's strategic architecture used in its designs for embedded controllers to desktop-class processors to high-end processors. The PowerPC architecture provides the ability for thousands of POWER3 microprocessors to be combined into a single, unified computing unit.

    (although it's not entirely clear how the instruction set "provides the ability for thousands of POWER3 microprocessors to be combined into a single, unified computing unit"). The RIOS chipset in the first RS/6000's implemented the POWER architecture, which had a few things PowerPC doesn't and didn't have somethings PowerPC does (but there is a common subset of the instruction set), as did the RSC (which I'm told stood for "RIOS Single-Chip", and which I've heard was modified to make the 601), and the POWER2 chipset implemented the POWER2 architecture (added a few things to POWER, but also lacked some stuff PowerPC had); I guess POWER3 finally picks up all of PowerPC.

    However, it, like the RS64 in some other RS/6000 models, and the models used in the AS/400's (one of which is the RS64 III, as per this paper [ibm.com], presumably with "tags-active" mode turned on in the AS/400's and off in the RS/6000's), are proprietary to IBM, unlike the 4xx, 6xx, and 7xx chips, which IBM Microelectronics sells [ibm.com].

  • Pentium chips still run 16bit code. Lets try to enter the realm of fully 32bit architecture (NT, MacOS, Linux, ect.) and leave 16bit behind. Having a fully 64bit system will be nice and all but it's not quite needed yet for the home or office, unless of course your business includes high performance servers or giant 3D workstations. As seen with many flavours of Unix-linux included-a 32bit architecture works fine for most applications. The rise in 32bit Xeon servers and Pentium workstations shows that 32bit isn't obsolete yet and can do the same job as it's 64bit counterparts sometimes for much less money. And just two things for you to think about, keeping CISC on a RISC chip and comparing it to a 32 and 64bit core complaining about performance issues is comparing Apple and oranges. Having the ability to process 32bit code on a 64bit chip if anything increases the speed because you can have two 32bit instructions run every cycle rather than a single 64bit instruction. This means the 32bit code is run at twice the speed as if it were run on a 32bit chip. Second of all Motorola already makes 64bit chips, these funny things called PowerPC chips. IBM and Apple use them, Apple runs 32bit code on the 64bit chip and now the 750 which is 128bit much faster than it ran on older chips.
  • >In contrast, the 64-bit version of the G5 (which will also be available in a 32-bit version) will be able to run 32-bit applications "in full native mode," Swearingen said.

    If the 64bit version runs 32bit applications just as good as (or nearly as good as) an 32bit version and it only takes a few modifications to make the 32bit application run, then why make the 32bit version?

    Seems like a waste of time to me?!
    That time could (maybe?) be used for getting the 64bit version out a bit earlier...
  • I agree, but since this is Intel's butter and bread, they are aggressively supporting any company that can come up with creative ways to use all that available horsepower; therefore creating demand. Microsoft, for one, will probably come up with Office 2002 with a 3D-animated Office Assistant paperclip with artificial intelligence and speech recognition..well, you get the picture.

    Seriously though, so far game companies have been at the forefront for pushing the performance envelope. During the next two years, broadband, always-on Internet connections will drastically change the computing needs. Increased need for security will lead to use of stronger encryption, people would like to watch streaming videos with larger screen size and better frame rates, and so on.

    And don't forget, software people will always manage to find a way of bloating their software with new features that will suck up all available CPU power. Even good old Linux is not the same thing it used to be five years ago. I mean, it was possible to do a lot of work on a 486DX-2/66 with 8MB RAM and trusty twm. Now everyone and his mother seem to run Gnome or KDE for just having a couple of open xterms.
  • Er, sorry, stray "e" there. Why doesn't Slashdot allow authors to edit their own comments?
  • Or, here [ibm.com] to be more specific.
  • Thanks. I was just being lazy... ;)
    --
  • Wait 2 years for a 64 bit G5

    Or 1 year for a 64 bit Merced

    Or buy a 64 bit alpha today

    Decisions Decisions...

  • Hmmm... IBM released a standard not too long ago. If memory serves. And at least ONE other company is working on making PPC machines (that's based in that standard - I think). Can't remember their name though.

    Anyway it's a pretty fair thing not wanthing to open a HW platform for outsiders (and the last time Apple tried it they where pushed out of maketspace instad of expanding the total). It IS there Apple makes the most of their money.

    Try asking Psion or IBM (for their server machines that is) or whoever else who makes non-'standard' computers if they want to open their HW platform and let competitors use their research to take some of their marketshare.
  • > and that the G4 makes this possible for
    > wont of a RTOS.

    Isn't Apple's Darwin a Real Time OS? I thought I read that in an article about QuickTime Streaming Server.
  • So you can play out Star Trek in your house. Dictating your report for the boss whgile listening to mp3s and surfing all at the same time on the same computer. More realistic games are another option, maybe first person shooters but also ultra real racing and flying games, detective games with super realistic environments.
  • Having the ability to process 32bit code on a 64bit chip if anything increases the speed because you can have two 32bit instructions run every cycle rather than a single 64bit instruction.

    Not if, say, a 32-bit arithmetic instruction uses an entire ALU, as I think is the case on most 64-bit machines; I don't know if there are any that'd split a 64-bit ALU up into two 32-bit ALUs and run two 32-bit instructions through them (especially given that registers generally aren't split that way, either).

    The SIMD "multimedia" instructions that most general-purpose instruction set architectures have picked up may process multiple less-than-full-word-size units in one ALU and in one instruction, but that's one instruction, not two.

    Second of all Motorola already makes 64bit chips, these funny things called PowerPC chips. IBM and Apple use them, Apple runs 32bit code on the 64bit chip

    What chips that implement the 64-bit version of the PowerPC instruction set does Apple use? (Chips that implement the 32-bit version of the instruction set, but that have a 64-bit bus interface, don't count as "64-bit chips" here.)

    and now the 750 which is 128bit

    No, it's 32-bit - it implements the 32-bit version of the PowerPC, without the AltiVec instructions, and according to this page at Motorola's Web site [motorola.com] it has only a 64-bit bus interface for data.

    Perhaps you're thinking of the 7400 [motorola.com], which has the AltiVec instructions, but it also has only a 64-bit data bus, and only implements the 32-bit version of the core PowerPC architecture (note that the page for the 7400 links to the 32-bit version of the "Programming Environments Manual"), even if it also implements the AltiVec instructions that work on 128-bit registers.

  • Um, I don't want to be the one complaining about new cool (hot?) processors, but to start hyping something we'll see in two years sounds a little bit extreme. I mean, that's almost the way Wintel do business, right?

  • Squirtle's law (Score:3)

    by Squirtle ( 73289 ) on Sunday September 19, 1999 @11:06PM (#1672719) Homepage
    Every two years the speed of software halves.

    So all this stuff makes not a damn bit of difference.

    Now look - you've gone and made me grumpy.
  • I stand corrected. Thx.

  • If only... (Score:3)

    by Krellis ( 19116 ) <slashdot@nOspam.krellis.org> on Sunday September 19, 1999 @11:06PM (#1672721) Homepage
    Now if we could just get some additional, good, free, open-source operating systems ported to run on this chip, it would be even better.

    LinuxPPC is there, and good; I've been very impressed by what it can do. But wouldn't we all like to see FreeBSD, or other Linux distributions ported to run (and run well) on PPC chips? And even better, now on the G5. I can just see the performance of a full 64-bit native OS running on that chip... *drool*

    But then again, we have plenty of time before they come out to do the work!

    ---
    Tim Wilde
    Gimme 42 daemons!
  • This is all fine except that future 3D card have their own geometry engine, which means the only job left to the CPU is AI and a bunch of small non-intensive tasks. This means there will be hardly any difference between a 400 Mhz Celeron and a Athlon 700 if you fit a card with geometry engine. My opinion is that the video chipmaker (nVidia) are going to get the big bucks Intel and AMD used to have from gamers. Now it is common to pay more for your 3D card than for your CPU, and according to price quotes from nVidia on the new GeForce 256, it is going to be even worse.

  • Huh? (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Why was this posted under the Apple heading? Slashdot needs a seperate topic for PowerPC related articles.
  • To increase my rc5 stats. That's probably about it. Pathetic existance, isn't it? -Saxton


    _________
  • I don't understand what they mean by saying that the new processor will be able to run 32-bit applications 'without emulation'. All processors have a certain amount of legacy stuff they have to support. Journalists would have us believe that while Merced will 'emulate' x86 instructions, the Intel 686 CPUs can run them natively. But the i686 uses a RISC core and translates instructions before executing them.
  • Posted by Nr9:

    Cuz its no emulation.
    software or hardware
    no decoding.
    it is the same instruction set
    64 bit PowerPC is designed with binary compatibility with 32 bit powerpc.
    intel 686 CPUs run them natively cuz thats the only ISA they can run.
  • Can anyone explain how much difference there is between the architecture of the G4 and G5? I was reading just yesterday that the theoretical limit on cycles for the G4 was 4 gigaflops -- will the G5 be just a faster version of the G4, or will there be much change in architecture?

  • And then you go up exponentially from there if you want to apply those real time effects to video, or render massive 3D spaces.

    Computers aren't fast enough until there are no wait cursors or progress meters ...
  • Agreed. Thankfully, IBM just released the specifications for the PPC motherboards for anyone to use and create freely. (I'd say they open sourc'd it, but I feel that I'd be using the word improperly--plus it's really a noun, not a verb).

    ARGH! I tried to find a link to the slashdot article or something on macweek/techweb/etc, but I couldn't find it. Anyone have the info?
  • There will be at least 2 makers of PPC motherboards. One company is Prophet. For more info on the open PPC mobo project, check out this link [openppc.org].
    --
  • My guess would be that a 32 bit version would be cheaper and useful for the embedded OSs mentioned in the article. They would need to be tweaked to work on the 64 bit chips anyway. PowerPC's biggest market is in embedded devices, after all.

  • Re:Why make a 32bit version? (Score:3)

    by rugger ( 61955 ) on Monday September 20, 1999 @12:59AM (#1672736)
    There seems to be some misunderstanding on the PowerPC archetecture.

    The PowerPC architecture is a instruction set definition written by Apple/IBM. It specifies a set of 32bit and 64bit instructions that PowerPC implementations must follow. 32bit implementations do not need to implement the 64bit instructions. (they are specified as optional in the specifications)

    Under PowerPC, 32bit and 64bit code can be executed at the same time (no mode switching like x86).

    All current PowerPC chips are only 32bit implemenations. It appears that the G5 will be the first 64bit PowerPC implementation.

    It makes no sense ditching the 32 bit instructions because supporting them is

    1) Not very expensive in the PowerPC archiecture (unlike Merced)
    2) You can write faster programs by mixing the faster 32 bit instructions with the slower 64 bit instructions when needed.
    3) Allows people to run existing and 64bit software transparently. (imagine 64bit modules on a 32bit database server)

  • Re:Run 32-bit apps 'without emulation'? (Score:3)

    by TurkishGeek ( 61318 ) on Monday September 20, 1999 @01:00AM (#1672737)
    Yes, AMD K6 has a RISC core underneath, and instructions are translated to what AMD calls the "R-ops", if my memory serves me right. AMD K6 has its roots in the NexGen Nx686, which was the successor to Nx586, the first x86 clone on the market which could compete with Pentium's performance.(it was a nice processor, but it flopped for several other reasons) The reason I'm telling this is that Nx586 had an assembler of its own, and theoretically could be programmed using its own RISC assembly language, bypassing the full x86 compatibility layer altogether.

    Anything derived from the P6 core (Celeron, Pentium Pro, Pentium II/III) behaves pretty much the same way-x86 instructions are converted to RISC-like shorter ops, and executed by the core. I believe Intel calls these "micro-ops" rather than "R-ops" like AMD does-hence avoiding the "R-word" they don't like to use much...
  • Now last I looked, TI's 'C6x architecture was headed that way with speed and scalability, but no one is ever going to write or port a general purpose OS (ie, Linux, Windoze, MacOS, Be) for/to that chip.

    Uh, why would you port a general purpose OS to a DSP chip? DSP chips are special purpose devices that fit a lot of niches (well, okay, niche really isn't the word since they outsell CPUs by orders of magnitude) that don't need general purpose processors. Much better to have a controller chip of some kind (say x86 or PPC) interfacing with a DSP farm for processing.
  • Well Motorola will certainly need every minute of those two years to achieve their goal. A 2 GHz G5 represents a factor of four increase in clock rate for the PPC family in 24 months. Sorry but semiconductor technology *might* provide a factor of two on its own. This means that the G5 will have to be a very deeply pipelined design. This is a completely radical departure for PPC designers and I would anticipate both massively slipped schedules and disappointing results. Even if Motorola had experience with the tools and techniques for this style of design I would expect the curse of complex CPU design to apply like it did for the 21264, merced, and UltraSPARC-III. Don't hold your breath for either the delivery date or the 2 GHz clock rate. The other thing is I doubt Mot would invest the huge resources in the G5 unless it was also well suited for high end embedded control (would you bet a few hundred million bucks on Steve jobs being consistent? remember when Apple was the blue chip sustomer for the StrongARM? :) This means the G5 is unlikely to be as bleeding edge in complexity, bandwidth, and parallel execution resources as IA-64 and Alphas of the same era and will do less work per clock cycle.
  • one thing that strikes me as odd is that the G4, at least according to Apple, is native 128bit.. why take a step back.. if they are migrating Mac OS X to make full use of the G4 hardware it just doesnt make sense to have the next processor be 64 instead of 128bit.

    just a thought

    -Z
  • No that is the bit size of the alta-vec extentions that they hype almost as much as intel did MMX (just alta-vec is hopefully more useful than intels braindead MMX)

    Hopefully G5 will also have these extentions.

    just the answer :)
  • That's alot of speculation and pessimism about a processor we know almost nothing about.
    --

  • Correction (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Ummm... The statement in this article is not correct. Merced has already taped out and if it takes them 2 years to produce Intel has serious problems. By then it will be Madison or McKinley. Also the Merced processor has two different parts to its logic. 64 bit and 32 bit architecture, so the processing between the two is seamless. Also I saw someone refer to Intel as Wintel. I don't like Microsoft either, but when you make processors, you have to make them work with the software everyone is using. Reguardless of what everyone thinks, the people who run this company are not idiots, they support what is used. As far as Linux is concerned, now that it is being used more... Intel is starting to support it. If you didn't hear, Linux ran great on the Merced at an expo a few weeks ago. :)

  • StrongARM Embedded? (Score:3)

    by Christopher B. Brown ( 1267 ) <cbbrowne@gmail.com> on Monday September 20, 1999 @02:09AM (#1672754) Homepage

    The difference between an ``embedded processor'' and a ``general purpose processor'' is as much marketing as anything else

    At one point, the StrongARM was being strongly promoted as a Network Computer [hex.net] (aka ``X-Terminal'') device. Note the announcement of 1997 of the Digital Network Appliance Design.

    And note that it is the processor used in the Rebel/Sidewinder [rebel.com] that Corel Computers used to hawk.

    The point of all of this is that the CPU is clearly not so ``embedded'' that it would be inherently useless in a ``desktop'' role.

    It ought to have been possible to build motherboards integrating a CPU, video chipset, and Ethernet that could retail for less than $150, and this could have brought us $300 computers a year or so ago, and provided slick little boxes to velcro to the sides of 17" monitors.

    If I could have bought a StrongARM motherboard for $100, I probably would have built a machine by now.

    But no motherboard leads to no systems. Note that exactly the same reasoning may be used with MIPS...

  • ...that by the time G5's come out, Apple will have 750Mhz buses. Likely, once G4s hit 1Ghz, the boards will have 500Mhz buses.

    Wish I could cite you something, but I can't find it right now. That's what makes the most sense, though.

    J.
  • For the L2 cache on the 500 MHz models (half-clocking on all models) . It should hellp a lot.

    You can't bend the laws of physics, just work around them. I believe the main bus (processor card to memory) is 125MHz. Processor to main short-term storage will be a problem for many years to come, to say the least.
  • Your point is correct. But the ability to use a computer you already have as a general-purpose DSP is very powerful. It allows you to do it without having to add a card to your box, deal with driver / compatibility issues, etc. It lets software designers skip the step of creating hardware (that most people won't want to buy, anyway). And most importantly, it saves on costs: a software-only DSP could be downloaded free, but creating a hard-wired DSP solution means nobody will ever get the result for free.
  • You can use a computer you already have as a general-purpose DSP without using a DSP chip as the CPU. However, you're not going to get as good of performance (read: You get what you pay for). And the majority of DSP chips are not compiler friendly (although this is changing in some of the newer generation chips) because DSP chips have structures that are difficult to map into HLL's like C. Putting a general purpose OS on a DSP chip will only end up hurting performance. If you want a quick prototyping base for DSP work, use your computer. If you want peak price-performance, you're going to do it on a DSP chip and with a minimal RTOS.
  • The G4 is not a SIMD processor. All instructions are fixed length (good thing if you ask me). They added 160-some odd vector instructions, which allow the 128-bit vector registers (all 64 of them) to be treated as either 16 8-bit integers, 8 16-bit integers, 4 32-bit integer, 2 64-bit integer, 8 16-bit floats, 4 32-bit floats, or 2 64 bit floats. There are also quite a few fixed point operations. All instructions take either one or two sources, and one destination, which is the most efficient instruction design since there are so many registers on the chip (you don't have to deal with registers being overwritten by single machine instructions if you don't want to.)
  • I had heard that the G5 will have multiple AltiVec logic units on it, much the same way as the current generation has multiple Integer logic units. You may want to check www.mcg.mot.com -- they build PPC boards (ATX, VME, cPCI) and have some flavor of Linux supported that has an embedded taste.

  • PC266 at www.macosrumors.com/8-99.html (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Shepherd ( 17338 ) on Monday September 20, 1999 @07:21AM (#1672761) Homepage
    They talk about Apple working on 266MHz SDRAM implementations, probably for future G4s and in anticipation of G5s.

    Someone else mentioned that Alpha gets it's 200MHz/250MHz bus by multiplexing a 75MHz 256bit wide bus. I can imagine 8 64bit memory buses running at 100MHz, which is can be worked with as a single 800MHz 64bit bus. But that's a darned high wire count. More likely you'd get 8 32bit buses at 100MHz or even at 133MHz.

    Excuse me if I don't make much sense, I'm speculating here =)


    -AS
  • You mean, buy a 64 bit alpha 5 years ago.

    "The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
  • You do realize that by the time the G5 ships Mac OS X will have been out for at least a year an a half? You might want to go read up on OS X and them come back and let us know what your specific objections are to a Mach 3 based real-time OS with a full BSD 4.4 layer, a graphics engine more powerful than anything ever seen before, most of the APIs of NeXTStep, and ease of use better than the current Mac OS.

    Yes, the current Mac OS sucks, but Apple knows this, and it has less than a year (and possibly as little as 3 months) to live.

    --
  • Apple was testing 233 or 266MHz RAM and has it working (accoring to the article) but has not committed to implementing it commertially yet because it is so hard to find. This is just for the G4's also, don't know what's cooking for G5. http://MOSR.com, you will have to look to find the article (may instead have been on appleinsider, I can't remember.
  • That deserves to get moderated as flamebait. Apple's stock broke 80 today. It was at 12 a couple of years ago. Apple is a Fortune 500 company. Apple is growing at twice the speed of the industry as a whole. Out of all the companies in the _world_, Apple is number 10 for brandname recognition. It's one of the few companies that's known well enough to effectively advertise using only its logo. Mac sales are booming, QuickTime is a hit, Mac OS X is on target for an early '00 release, Mac OS 9 is shipping next month, right on schedule. Two million iMacs were sold this last year. There are already 160,000 iBook preorders.

    Apple is innovating again. A month after Apple demos a wireless technology Compaq and Dell start babbling about how wireless is the future. Apple is selling the largest TFT display you can buy. Suddenly PCs are mysteriously showing up in colors.

    You might not like Apple or any Apple products. You might hate them all. Apple has pulled some really irritating crap lately, this is certainly true. But Apple is not going away any time soon.

    And if you like the PPC, you better be glad about that. Apple is the only thing keeping the PPC alive in the PC market. IBM just wants to make high-end chips for its servers, and Motorola just wants to make embedded stuff. Unless Linux on PPC suddenly becomes much more popular, if the Mac dies the PPC will become irrelevant in personal computer industry.

    --
  • Too bad the G5 is a Motorola product and not an IBM one then. IBM has't announced anything beyond faster G3's.
  • Hey guess the rumour I heard! You say Apple won't be around in 2 years, but Apple says YOU won't be around in 2 years! Any truth to these rumours?
    --
  • Perhaps Apple won't be around. Maybe none of us will. But to say that Apple's suits against what were most likely intentially designed clones/knock offs are bad business ethics is poor rational. Not to beat a dead horse (faster! faster!) but, if I tried to sell a soft drink cola in a red can with the name Coki Coli in a cursive font, you bet your ass that giant Atlanta-based soft drink firm would sue me to Armageddon. And they'd be right to do it.

    Re: disabling upgrade potential. While, *yes* apple made a bone headed move with the BW G3 firmware update, it *is* reversable. Remember, firmware is sw upgradable. Further, Apple sources have indicated the firmware block will be removed.

    Dwindling market share: Actually, market share has increased over the last year. Further, no matter how you slice the market share dilema, a user base around 4-5 million is significant. And i think I'm estimating low.

    Overpriced/underpowered: Compared to what? A top level Dell machine is going to cost about what a new G3 will cost. Apple component quality is equal or higher than Dell's pro line. You pay a bit more, for both than a you-build-it, but the machines are, by and large, reliable. I like the piece of mind. Many home users and businesses do, too.

    As far as performance goes, Photoshop on my g3/233 outperforms most PII systems going to the 350 range. MS-Office opens faster as well. Note, these aren't Apple's figures, but my, personal, real world observations.

    But, yes, seeing open G4/5 motherboards for linux/*BSD would be very cool. Cross platform competition is good and I think the PPC architecture has fewer performance compromises than the x86 platform.

  • So DEC Alphas and AMDs use a 200MHz FSB, or whatever they call it, and Intel/VIA/etc will be using 133MHz FSB as well.

    I'm not sure how the RAM and bus speed correlates, but Apple seems to be actively researching 266MHz RAM, most likely in anticipation of G5s. It has also been documented that PC133 outperforms RAMBUS, so PC266 may be what you're looking for.

    Look at http://www.macosrumors.com/8-99.html under the 8/16 update.


    -AS

  • "640k should be enough for everybody"

    604e should be enough for everybody.


    ---
    Have a Sloppy day!
  • Commentary about the open PPC motherboard can be found at Tidbits [tidbits.com], and the design itself will be available at IBM Linux page [ibm.com].

    -F.

  • Untrue (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Shepherd ( 17338 ) on Monday September 20, 1999 @05:55AM (#1672777) Homepage
    I'd actually believe that Motorola has no problem selling it's PPC and 68k CPUs in embedded systems, and it was only recently with the advent of $600 systems that the popularity of architectures and CPUs becomes an issue.

    I mean Motorola sells a 68k CPU with every Palm and Visor out there. If they have an embedded processor in a cell phone, I'd think they would be selling more cell phones than PCs. Yes, PPC CPUs in computers would be more popular, but it wasn't necessarily the most profitable or intelligent thing to do; it would require that Motorola(or someone else) support AGP chipsets, PCI chipsets, memory chipsets, etc, for a single system to make a profit.

    If you haven't noticed, Apple does this all by themselves. If you search IBM's website for PowerPC, you'll also see that they had PowerPC systems for sale since 1996 or something, but at $6,000 costs.

    I can't imagine anyone just picking up the PowerPC platform until LinuxPPC stabilizes and matures, because I don't think anyone can compete with Apple on a design standpoint and no one can compete with Intel on a price standpoint.

    Apple may be our only hope here =(


    -AS
  • By the time the G5 is out, the MacOS as you know it today will have been dead and buried for at least a year and a half.
  • so why hasnt anyone posted in here yet? Do you all just have nothing to say or what? This is the first time I've seen 0 comments for an article that is atleast a few hours old. :)
  • AMD may be gone in two years, given today's news that Intel just cut a sweetheart deal with Gateway. If Intel can reverse the trend among the big players towards using AMD chips, it's Goodnight Irene.
  • A 750MHz FSB? What are they planning on using to do this miracle? On-chip fiber optic? Current technology tops out at a 200MHz FSB and Motorola is going to try and achieve a 3.5X improvement in the state of the art in two years? I think not. Most likely this will be running at 2GHz on a 266-300MHz FSB - although possibly this 266MHz FSB could be double-pumped.

    If you can cite something - anything - to back up this claim I would be extremely interested in reading about it.
  • >Every two years the speed of software halves.
    -------

    I'm anxious to see the 1Hz processor (in about
    28-30 years, assuming the current clock speed is
    500Mhz)

    Just don't ever try to play mp3 files on it.

  • well, in all fairness the G5 would not be the first 64bit PPC. That distinction goes to the PPC620, released in '94. If you expand the PPC family to include the POWER chipsets used in RS/6000s, then you can also include the POWER3 as a 64bit PPC...

    since I'm a nice guy I'll even look up a link for ya:

    www.chips.ibm.com/news/1994/94101810.html

  • In two years, we'll all be riding our personal flying choppers.

    In two years, we'll all have huge, digital, plasma televisions on the living room wall. Some of us will also have them in the bathroom.

    In two years, we'll have Linux on our credit cards, in our running shoes and trainers, in our hats, heads and toasters.

    In two years, we'll be living under the sea and speaking with the dolphins.

    In two years, we'll have an outpost on Mars.

    In two years, we'll all be two years older.

    In two years, the world will collide with an asteroid and only the bacteria will survive. Some Linux boxen will still not need to be rebooted.

    http://www.worldnewyork.com [worldnewyork.com]

  • I was unaware that gcc isn't available for LinuxPPC.

    Wow...I'm just chomping away at all the troll-bait that comes my way this morning. Must be a Monday.

  • Um, I don't want to be the one complaining about new cool (hot?) processors, but to start hyping something we'll see in two years sounds a little bit extreme. I mean, that's almost the way Wintel do business, right?

    Well, yes, if Motorola was the Monopoly and they where just throwing out a few numbers to keep everybody duped into using their product instead of a superior competitor's product, then I would agree it was the way Wintel do business.

    But I don't see it this way. Car companies demo future designs all the time. I know what cars of the future are probably going to look like. Many other companies make future announcements. It's not just enough to know where you are now, you need to know where you are going.

    A "roadmap" is indespensible. Motorola is doing it right by letting us know what the future will look like. This isn't the "vapourware" that we get from other companies that when the competition releases a technically superior they cry, "Oh, we've been planning this for years. Why we'll have a similar product release in just a short time!"

    Good for Motorola! I can't wait to use the G5 in my servers in coming years. Right along with my Alpha's, and Sparc's.

    -Brent
    --
  • Other Linux distros? Debian, YellowDog

    BSD? NetBSD, MacOS X

  • There is not much information out about the G5.
    The roadmap say it has a new bus topology and a new pipeline.
    Also an "extensible architecture" is mentioned (whatever that is.)

  • Re:G5 vs G4 architecture. (Score:3)

    by Oniros ( 53181 ) on Sunday September 19, 1999 @11:37PM (#1672792)
    I forgot the url to the roadmap:
    http://www.mot.com/SPS/PowerPC/overview/newroadm ap.pdf
  • But wouldn't we all like to see FreeBSD [...] on PPC chips?

    No, not really. Despite the recent dabblings with the Alpha, the focus of the FreeBSD group has always been on getting it to work well on Intel hardware. Look to the other BSDs for PowerPC support:

  • Sounds too good to be true. (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Although the x83 family is not a very efficient design because of the enormous amount of resources occupied by backward compatibility, it just isn't bad enough to allow competition to overcome intel's main advantages: compatibility and price/performance ratio (and perhaps FUD-proofness).

    Throughout the past decade and a half, many competitors have made products that were superior to intel's in every way but compatibility and price/performance ratio. None of them ever crawled out of their niche market.

    Now this Motorola announcement not only promises to beat intel at both counts, but also to do this by an incredibly wide range

    When something sounds too good to be true...
  • Maybe the G5 will finally make the MacOS run as fast as linux and some windows machines. Macintoshes have always had great chips, but the software's overhead has been killing the speed and making most people think that Macs are slow and a joke. May the G5 prove the power that Apple can wield.

    Dan
  • To elaborate on what rugger said, the 32- versus 64-bit refers to the size of the instructions on the chip, which operate on chunks of data that may or may not be the same size.

    The current PowerPC chips use 32-bit instructions. On the G4 the integer registers also happen to be 32-bit, while the floating point registers are 64-bit and the AltiVec (vector) registers are 128-bit. The point of AltiVec is not to be used for 128-bit wide chunks of data (though it could be) but to instead manipulate several floats or ints at the same time (2 x 64, 4 x 32, or 8 x 16).

    The advantages of 64-bit instructions would be: a) adding new and different instructions, b) addressing more memory, or c) a little bit of both. I haven't seen the 64-bit instructions, so I'm not sure which route they took. Even in the current PowerPC there is no shortage of instructions, and most programs only use a portion of them, so I'm not sure there is much need to create more. On the other hand, addressing gobs and gobs of memory is a definite benefit for servers.

    Why keep making 32-bit versions? As others have noted, if you don't need to address all that memory then there is little real world benefit. For embedded and desktop systems this may well be the case. Again for servers a different story. Also, the bigger and more varied the instruction set, the more physical space it takes up on the chip. This space could be used instead for more registers or multiple cores, both of which might be more handy for most users.
  • NetBSD 1.4 runs on the Mac. You have to dedicate an entire hard drive to it (Apple's partition map isn't yet supported). External Device support is kind of sketchy, but then it's a work in progress. I'd expect the G4 Macs to be supported relatively soon.

    Also, the Mac OS X BSD foundation is based on FreeBSD 3.x sitting on top of a Mach 3.0 microkernel. It should be out by next spring. I like what I've seen so far.

    Macs rock (the user experience and hardware, that is, not the core OS). BSD rocks. Linux.... is all right.

  • Hi,
    I've been working with the ti c6x for about a
    year now. The reason why no-one will port linux
    to it is that it doesn't have an on-chip MMU and
    I'm not aware of a simple way of adding an
    external one. Also my gcc port is coming along very slowly :(

    Greg
  • And how soon are we going to see Merced in desktops and laptops (haha) at a personal computer price point? Comparing the G4 to Merced isn't fair until that happens. There are already 64 bit implementations of the PPC architecture, and have been for many years. Try looking at the POWER series.

    --

  • Well, if you have been paying attention to posts in the past weeks concerning the EV6 bus (Alpha / Athlon), you would know what I am writing here.

    What Alpha busses do is have a 256 bit wide bus running at 87MHz, and multiplex the data to a narrower, faster bus. The switch bus operates at 64 bit / 350 MHz or faster. The dual processor Alphas have 2 64 bit PCI, 2 RAM _AND_ 2 CPU busses, all switched, interconnected and multiplexed. It is somewhat like a siamese computer, any part of the computer can ask any other part for any data. I believe that the dual 500 MHz systems have a theoretical 5.6GB/s bandwidth.

  • I don't agree with your analysis (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    It is true that Motorola sells PPC CPUs for embedded systems. For example, they are fairly common in switches and routers.

    However, the reason why they don't sell any PC style motherboards is because they are restricted by an agreement with Apple that dates back to the beginning of the Power Computing consortium. I believe that the same agreement or similar one prevents IBM from selling PPC motherboards, and that is why IBM is publishing a reference motherboard design to get other MB makers into the business. IBM is permitted to sell AIX PPC systems, but there are restrictions on what they can sell to keep them from competing with Apple in the PC market.

    Apple is not our only hope here. Apple will never sell motherboards, only systems, and they will never let IBM and Motorola out of their agreements.
  • Free BSD is the Direct Descendnt of 386BSD, it is Intel only.

    NetBSD is the mos portable BSD, While OpenBSD is the most secure, and is probably pretty portable, but FreeBSD is the least portable, but I'm sure that speeds it up.

    Not that it couldn't be MADE portable, I believe Linus used to say that Linux wasn't portable, and now its prettymuch everywhere, so there you go. NetBSD is there now though, which is why apple "borrowed" from it for Darwin/OSX. (you have to give them credit for re-releasing their improvements)
  • isnt that RTL or register transfer language ? The RTL instructions are executed by the processor but any others are converted to RTL ops. I use a RTL simulator once..pretty neat. I'd like to see altivec (cray fp type instructions) supported by linux tho..its missing out on the altivec stuff with the g4 which is a shame.
  • thats true and thats also why its replaced with MacOS X now which is BSD.
  • As I stated in another post, when people talk about 32- or 64-bit chips, they are usually talking about the length of the instruction set.

    The size of the data units manipulated can vary, but is usually at least as big as the instruction set. In the G4 the integer unit is 32 bits wide, the floating point unit is 64 bits wide, and the vector unit (a.k.a. Velocity Engine, AltiVec) is 128 bits wide. The intended use of the vector unit is not to manipulate quadruple precision floats (though it could), but to manipulate multiple pieces of data with one instruction (2 x 64, 4 x 32, or 8 x 16).

    With 64-bit instructions you can create new operations, or more likely address more memory. Personally, I think the benefits of 64-bit instructions are somewhat oversold except for servers, which is exactly what all the 64-bit processors are targeted at.
  • theres a simple solution to the laws of physics - parallelise. we have a 50 mhz optical chip prototype running in a lab now..why cant we have a 5Ghz version of that soon ? MEMS devices can already channel light around a single chip..you can always do the same on a motherboard./
  • The critical resource whose availability or lack will most control whether PPC "G5" winds up in widespread use is that of Cheap Motherboards.

    If you look at the various architectures on which Linux runs, there are three varieties, in general:

    • IA-32, where there is a bountiful selection of inexpensive motherboards.

      There are a boatload of IA-32-based Linux systems.

    • Systems where there are a few motherboards available. Alpha and SPARC, mostly.

      There are a fair number of such systems.

    • Systems for which motherboards are virtually unavailable. StrongARM and MIPS are good examples of this.

      ... And this correlates with the tiny quantities of people running these architectures.

    PPC is hard to assess; it is easy to buy a PPC Mac from Apple, but fairly difficult to buy just a motherboard.

    If PPC motherboards were readily available, PPC would be vastly more popular...

  • natively. But the i686 uses a RISC core and translates instructions before executing them.

    Uhhhhh. AFAIK, all ix86 chips are still (regrettably) CISC. I've been told that AMD K6 chips are running a RISC core, but then my sources have been known to be horribly wrong.

    I'd like to think the i686 runs a RISC core, but I've already done enough wishful thinking for one day.

  • I'm not sure how fast a 2 GHz CPU will seem unless we start seeing some really fast RAM and BUSes. Right now the fastest bus I've seen is 133 MHz, and the fastest large scale RAM on the horizon is still RAMBUS. Neither of these will allow a 2 GHz processor to run anywhere near it's full potential. Even with lots of cache you would only approach some upper bound that wouldn't be anywhere as high as 2GHz.

    There needs to be some other advances, other then jacking up the CPU speed, before processors like this become useful. Maybe it'll be a new RAM or BUS design (RF anyone?), or a new way of dealing with code internal to the CPU to make memory more effecient then using it for cache. Which ever it's time to start looking at them.

  • Incredible chip! (Score:3)

    by Zoinks ( 20480 ) on Sunday September 19, 1999 @11:49PM (#1672820)
    The more I read and hear about the PPC roadmap, the more I drool.

    The G4, with the AltiVec additions, makes a fantastic DSP development platform. In case you didn't realize, Altivec supposedly completes a multiply-accumulate every clock cycle minumum (It can actually do 4 per clock cycle because of the SIMD architecture). Doing a single-cycle MAC is almost the definition of a DSP. But to really take good advantage of the DSP aspect, you need an honest-to-goodness RTOS.

    Now last I looked, TI's 'C6x architecture was headed that way with speed and scalability, but no one is ever going to write or port a general purpose OS (ie, Linux, Windoze, MacOS, Be) for/to that chip.

    The G4, however, already runs at least MacOS and Linux. Unfortunately, neither of these are real-time systems. (Has RTLinux been ported to PPC? A great project, if not!) And it's too bad that the situation with Be prevents them from taking advantage of this great chip.

    Anyway, I guess my point is just that having a hosted (versus embedded) DSP development system would be just the coolest, and that the G4 makes this possible for wont of a RTOS.

    I have not seen anything yet that state explicitly that the G5 will have AltiVec on it. God, I hope so, though.

    (drool-mode off)

  • According to the current information from Intel and companies working with them, Merced is "only" 1 year away, not 2.

    Haven't both Merced and NT 5^H^H^H^HWindows 2000 been "only one year away!!!!!" for a few years now?

    "But we're serious this time!"

    Uh huh.
  • As long as people don't whine and bitch about not being able to upgrade their already-too-fast-for-their-own-good G4 machines to G5s, that is.

    Hey, anybody want to sell me their "useless" "non-upgradable" blue and white G3? Since the machine is obviously so out-of-date and nonexpandable, I'll give you $500 for it.

    Now, as for the G5, provided it supports the same kind of multiprocessor architecture as the G4, I can only guess at what this could mean for applications like Photoshop, Final Cut Pro, After Effects, and Quake. "Omigod!" would be my guess, though. :-]





  • That is, if you believe the IA-64 application developer's guide on intel's website (developer's section). It's a 1.9MB PDF document. For full detail, check out chapter six. You can see the glorius mapping of IA-32 registers, ala PII's MMXregs on FPregs.

    What would be interesting is how much extra silicon/cost will it take up? Will the heat dissipation levels be acceptable?

    If it makes sense, it brings us to another question, why don't Motorola have an IA-32 unit on their PowerPC chips?

    Later

    Hasdi
  • Seeing as overall system speeds double every 18 months, a 2GHz new-generation PPC chip, probably running on a "brand new" 200MHz bus at launch, sounds about right two years from now.

    If it's going to be sold as a high-end workstation/server CPU, it should benchmark about 2.6 times faster than the high-end Alpha. If it's going to come out at the mainstream price point, figure on it benchmarking 2.6 times faster than an Athlon 650.

    Wake me up when Moore's Law finally breaks. Looks like it still has legs. And no, the zippy faster-bus Mac G4/500s won't do it when they ship in a month or two. Certainly not at twice the price of an Intel box.
  • The glory of this version of the G5 is that it is aimed at your and my desktops! The 64 bit Intel chips are for extremely high end servers, etc.

    Incidently, one of the things that got IBM into the ppc game initially was the ability of the design to efficiently use cheap memory. This has evolved and improved over time, so that the G4 can run at 8 times its memory speed without an outrageous performance hit. Intel has problems with multipliers over 4 or 5. Hence, the 2 GHz chip should only need 250 MHz memory bus, and there may be some tricks to play there (?) which will keep the actual memory requirements to less than 250 MHz.

    There may be some G5's shipping before 2 years too, only for high end servers, and limited production runs because of this. This Motorola announcement is about production in quantity, not about existence. (The current G4 Mac's are probably pre-production-in-quantity, since Motorola announced opening up the line to produce them about the time Apple announced the G4 Macs, which are shipping even before the G4 comes on-line in the production cycle. The G5 will probably also have a pre-production issue of significant size, but aimed primarily at hardware vendors first intro products.)
  • CHRP spec is not open. yet. its due in fall99 and you will see mobos soon after.
  • No, RTL has nothing to do with computer architecture whatsoever. RTL stands for "register transfer level" and is used to refer to a level of abstraction in the description of digital hardware. An RTL description is the description of the internal workings of a digital system using some kind of hardware description language like Verilog or VHDL, or some other notation; that clearly defines the registers, or the state elements, and transitions between them. In case of chip designs, an RTL description of a digital system is usually the input to a logic synthesis system to create the chip.

    You probably ran an RTL simulation of a processor. There is no such thing as "RTL instructions".

  • I am more interested in faster system overall then cpu. Except for computation, 2Gig CPU is useless if there is only a 200Mhz bus. I hope that the bus specifications are atleast 1GigHz by then, with faster memory. If they become affordable and graphics and internet connections are fast enough then maybe we'll finally move to video conferencing to the average user.

  • I'm not sure that running 32bit code natively would be advantagious for the IA-64. I think that it is time to say goodnight to x86. It is tied up in so much cruft that it is choking the potential of newer software.

    In support of this argument I invoke the memory of the PPro, which sucked when running both 16 and 32 bit code. (Okay, obviously not at the exact same time, in fact switching back an forth is what caused the slow-down.)

    Wouldn't you rather run Linux on a box optimized for 64bit operation?

    -P

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