Yesterday, “IBM announced two new lines of its PowerPC 970 processor, better known as the G5, and they’re impressive beasts,” Andrew Orlowski writes for The Register.
Orlowski writes, “A new, low-power 970FX consumes between 13W and 16W at frequencies of 1.2GHz, 1.4GHz and 1.6GHz. That’s more than the 10W that the Freescale MPC7448 found in today’s 1.5Ghz PowerBooks consumes, but around half the maximum power consumption of Intel’s Pentium M, which powers today’s Centrino laptops. IBM is also unveiled the dual-core 970MP codenamed ‘Antares’, at clock frequencies of 1.4GHz to 2.5GHz. Each core has 1MB of L cache, and one core can be turned off to save power.”
Orlowski speculates that these new processors will be the last PowerPC-based Macs that Apple will produce before switching to Intel-based processors.
Full article here.
Related MacDailyNews articles:
IBM introduces dual-core PowerPC G5 chips up to 2.5GHz, could be used in Apple Power Mac G5 – July 07, 2005
Intel-based Macs running both Mac OS X and Windows will be good for Apple – June 10, 2005
I can’t keep up with these beans any more.
CT
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Nothin’ but sweet talk.
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Consumer satisfaction.
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Complacency
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We got a GREAT ride!
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The Speed Brokers know.
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The new dual core 2.5 GHz processors have double the L2 cache for each core than the 2.7 GHz 970FX chips do. When this is combined with the other minor efficiency improvements of going to dual core the 2.5 GHz dual cores will be about as fast as a system with two 2.7 GHz processors.
Will it be practical to create a machine with two dual core processors (four cores total)? Maybe. Yet it is not as trivial an issue as many believe. The 2.5 GHz dual core chips are certainly as hot as the single core 2.7 GHz chips and may be hotter. (I’ve yet to see any numbers on this.)
With regard to the low power 1.6 GHz G5 showing up in a laptop… The 1.6 GHz G5 could be faster than the 1.67 GHz G4 currently shipping in Powerbooks. If so, this would be due to the fact that the G5 has a much faster front side bus.
However…
Many of Apple’s current laptops have less than 50% of the power requirement (and heat) due to the CPU itself. So a moderate change in power requirements (and heat) due the the change to a G5 processor would probably not be an issue. Yet the same thing that would make a 1.6 GHz G5 as fast as, or faster than, a 1.67 GHz G4 is what may break the bank on power and heat. The front side bus is faster on the G5. This means faster glue chips (those that interface betweent the CPU and the rest of the system), faster memory, etc., etc. All these faster components lead to more power required and more heat to be disipated.
All those little things do add up. It’s not just the CPU.
Will we see a Dual Processor, Dual Core (i.e., four total cores) Power Macs in the near future? I hope so, I’d probably buy one, but I won’t count on seeing them soon.
Will we see a 1.6 GHz G5 Powerbook in the near future? I’m not betting on it. But if they do ship one *and* they have faster graphics processors than the current ones have then I’ll buy one in a heart beat.
Apple is passing up a GOLDEN opportunity. Let me ask the question:
“Why switch processors when you can use both?”
Why would Anybody that has the choice to use two chips only use one? I mean if you could choose to use the best processor for the job or just the best processor that a single supplier why wouldn’t you have more choice? Being able to use more than one processor is a trick that no other computer maker can do. OK Sun. But think about this if you want a tablet Pentium M, if you want a multi processor server with massive bandwidth use PowerPC.
Apple has for too long hitched its future to the progress of a single chip design. If they develop systems for two chips (three if you include AMD) Apple could guarantee to have the fastest workstation / server on the market. But now they are going to just take whatever Intel gives them. Yes it’s more engineering but apple has always been about having the best not having the lowest common denominator.
One last point. Intel has an even more abysmal track record at meeting performance benchmarks than any other chip company save Motorola. The problem has always been having only one source. If Steve Jobs really thinks that Intel is going to be orders of magnitude better than IBM in performance/watt years from today he has slipped into his own reality distortion field. We all know that years from now is never ever how it appears today.
HEDGING YOUR BETS IS THE WAY TO GO!!!
It will be interesting to see what happens if IBM actually pulls its finger out and starts producing the CPUs that Apple has been clammering and screaming for.
I understand that certain sections of IBM were none too pleased that the chip manufacturing side of things cut Apple adrift. Not all of IBM is so short-sighted it would appear.
the only thing stopping me from adopting a two-chip future is a another keynote speech.
i’m in the catbird’s seat. totally.
Wingsy wrote:
“There is no such thing as power efficiency when it comes to chips. Every watt of power that goes into the thing comes out as heat”
It seems to me all that lost heat is tremendous lost potential. Are there any ways Apple could recover the heat energy as electrical energy? Extended battery life beats a nuked lap any day.
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Ralph:
The “Script Kiddies”, as they are often called, are taking advantage of the Windows operating system. Windows just happens to be running on Intel (or AMD).
As I understand it (and while I’ve been writing software since the 60s, I’m no expert on computer security) the issue has virtually nothing to do with the Intel chip. The issue is how Windows is coded. The issue is software access points that seemed intelligent back in the early 90s when Win95 was developed that are just security holes now and/or just dumb design and coding mistakes.
Windows running on a PowerPC chip, or an Alpha chip, or anything else would be almost as vulnerable. It would be almost as easy to write a virus for Windows on Itanium as it is to write one for Windows on Intel/AMD. Would there be as many viruses, trojans, etc. as there are for the Wintel (Windows + Intel — and I include the Windows + AMD in the same group because the use virtually identical instruction sets and execution schemes) platform? No. Reality is there are so many viruses for the Windows platform because it is so prevalent.
This absolutely does NOT mean that the only reason there are viruses for the Wintel platform is because it is so prevalent. However, Windows on a different chip (say the PowerPC chip if Microsoft still supported it as it once did, or Windows on Alpha chip if Microsoft still supported it as it once did) would maybe have 5,000 viruses instead of the almost 100,000 on the Wintel platform.
How many does Macintosh OS X have on PowerPC? Not 5,000. Not even 5. Not even 1. It has zero. Mac OS X does not have zero viruses because it is on PowerPC. It has zero viruses because it was designed and implemented intelligently.
If Apple transitions to the Intel CPU intelligently (and there’s every reason to believe they will) then there will be zero viruses for Macintosh OS X on Intel for quite a while to come.
re. Wingsy: “There is no such thing as power efficiency when it comes to chips. Every watt of power that goes into the thing comes out as heat, as the chips do not convert the electrical energy taken in into any other form.”
– this is why Apple needed to “think different” … a Powerbook that doubles as an oven or an iBook toaster/coffee-maker … Now that would get me to upgrade.
Now we are looking at cooler Intel chips I’ll have to wait a while.
re. zamboni: “It seems to me all that lost heat is tremendous lost potential. Are there any ways Apple could recover the heat energy as electrical energy? Extended battery life beats a nuked lap any day.”
– I see auxilliary steam power laptops coming in the very near future …
The Powerbook Iron – you know it makes sense.
Clarify how “HEDGING YOUR BETS IS THE WAY TO GO!!!” is “Apple is passing up a GOLDEN opportunity.”
Apple is hedging it bets, so why are they passing up a golden opportunity?
I want a honda that gets 117mpg
zupchuck:
I truly believe that any advantage that Intel has currently or in the near futrue will be short lived. I believe that each chip will always have over time some sort of competitive advantage over another. It may be power consumption, or bandwidth, or integer processing, or floating point processing, or Single instruction multiple data processing. The point is that if Intel has an advantage today in a particular performance criteria it will likely be shortlived and surpassed in another category.
Apple could take advantage of the competitive advantage of a particular chip and build a device that takes advantage of that. That is if they build a tablet today they would certainly use a Pentium M, where if they were building a server where bandwidth was a big deal a PowerPC chip would be the choice. Software would run on either with the fat binaries so you wouldn’t have to worry about that. The point is “MICROSOFT DOESN’T RUN ON 2 CHIP ARCHITECTURES!!!” This is a competitive advantage for Apple. Apple could always have the best machine for the task.
By totally switching to Intel, or staying with PowerPC for that matter, Apple cuts itself out of any future advancements in the opposing chip architecture. Apple has had one chip supplier forever and it has almost killed it. What if in two years the road map isn’t going as planned? I know chip manufacurers always meet their goals, but what if Intel doesn’t? What if IBM has 3 to 4 times the perfomance per watt that Intel has? Shouldn’t Apple take advantage of that? What if IBM starts using carbon nanotubes to fabricate chips and pushes its chip speeds out of reach of Intel, shouldn’t Apple take advantage of that? Using both chips would hedge apples bets. There is no logical reason that AMD should be outpacing Intel in performance but it is. IBM has as many smart people and as much access to capital as either AMD or INTEL. If Apple continues to use both architectures Apple could always be on top.