Tabris, now that Apple has gone Intel, is there any non-server market left for PPC?
I don't know for sure, and I can't really find out. Unless 'we' are the market. (Or at least people thinking along the same lines as me, looking to move from XP, but not to Vista, instead to Linux, OS X.5, OS X.6, Solaris, and other OS's, using Virtual Machines. Get a clean slate and try and make / port / refine 'good, quality' software for a 'differet' [well, non-Windows, non-x86] platform - Give IT a nice clean slate for one.
Cut the 'backwards compatibility cord' and let fly.
If you count me as part of that market, then yes, There is a market.
Even Cyrix / National Semiconductor / Via are doing well in the Asian market, with a similar design. Sure FPU performance sux, but FPU performance on the Sun SPARC has typically been pretty bad compared to x86 and it has a huge market.
- The irony is these P.A. Semi redesigned G5 / Power5 CPUs have strong FPU performance, and strong everything else performance. - I would call it a CPU without a weakness, and coming from me I feel that really means something. - The only things that comes to mind is (1) 'It isn't an x86 design, and (2) the royalties don't go to Intel, which isn't exactly a weakness until you bring into account that Intel is the 800 pound Gorilla with a giant legal team.
Could be large in Asian markets, which is good news for Australia since we can tap their 'grey' market more easily than the US. Assuming they sell exclusively to Asia, which is also unlikely.
But I wouldn't exlude these chips from server installations, 216 watts for 32 G5 like cores at 2 GHz, it was only a few years ago that was thought impossible by Apple, which is why they went to Intel.
That is damn sight better performance all up, performance/watt, and performance/cubic inch, etc than most other systems on the market. Including IBM 'Mainframes', and Sun UltraSPARC or CoolThreads designs.
Frankly that alone deserves heaps of attention, Heck if most x86 software needs a re-write to take advantage of 64-bit, but most Power5 / G5 software is already 64-bit, and we are going down both the multi-core path, and performance/watt path, then I can only see these guys shaking the market up.
Think about it:
- A PDA that can run most fully fledged Operating Systems using just 1 or 2 cores.
- A laptop with 3, 4, 5 or 6 'G5' cores and still within laptop power designs.
- Servers with 32+ cores using only 216 watts (typically) for processors.
The source code and binaries for PowerPC software (Operating Systems included) still exists,
it may even become free / open-source, and it
already takes full advantage of 64-bit PPC (G5 style) processors, will scale to multi-core designs easily, and most of it supports the SIMD instructions on offer. - The software did all this years ago, just back when the only G5 systems made the PreScotts look good (performance per watt wise).
A 2 GHz G5 core is enough for most 'normal' single threaded apps, with 2, 4, 6, or 32+ of them running in a 'normal' SOHO sized PC, within 'normal' power and cooling specs is a huge jump.
A Core 2 Duo needs around 65 watts, at least 40 watts for the similar clocked low power designs using Intel NGMA.
With this design one could run 9 cores for every 2 cores in an Intel Xeon 5100/5300 series server, or Core 2 Duo desktop. Even 6 cores for every 2 in the mobile and lower power server arena (eg: Blade servers, or where cooling and/or performance per watt is more important).
They've covered blades, low power devices, huge core count servers, desktops, laptops, decent single threaded performance, floating point performance (for scientific community), even routers + embedded hardware, and pretty much everything else with
just one chip.
If a CEO / CIO with half a clue is reading this please start mass manufacturing and get economy of scale going, this chip was built to cover the market end to end.
Look at the Power5 and G5 designs, examine them for say 30 minutes, then disect this P.A. Semi design, noting it scales both ways. Wikipedia has heaps of links, but knowledge alone doesn't make a company.
I can safely assume most people know the difference between (the various) Pentium 4 NetBurst designs and Athlon 64 / K8 designs, this stuff isn't all that different.
It is a real kick in the ribs that IBM are only doing heavy-iron, but I can see this becoming the next 'big' Open Source style platform, which means eventually I'll become commercial since it'll be far more cost effective (which is why Novell bought out SUSE Linux, instead of re-writting NetWare to support x64 and scale beyond 64 GB).
Thanks to .NET and Java the future is psuedo-code anyway, not binaries (which I don't agree with, but not for this thread I guess), and such 'psuedo-code' would compile to give absolute world-class performance on a platform designed from this P.A. Semi stuff, scaled to 32 - 256+ cores.
Just 1 server cabinet would provide all the processing capacity that large (50,000 staff) enterprise would ever need.
Most software in the world is sub-standard quality anyway... just not just migrate to a totally new platform, re-using old binaries and source code to get there, and start over afresh ?
The open source community already have Linux on PlayStation 3, and likely on Xbox 360 too, both those platforms DESIGNED FROM THE GROUND UP FOR GAMING, use PowerPC processors (althought the SPEs in the Cell are overkill and wasteful). - Yes gamers that is right, not Athlon 64, not Core 2 Duo, and not x86/x64.
But a console is such a small device, with such a consumerish power (usage and number crunching) level.
Combine this tech (which is already based on not so old IBM designs) with IBMs new tech to use a DDR style system within CPUs to double performance while keeping power usage very similar and you've got alien grade technology (relative to everything else on the market).
PS: Doom on PowerPC ran with 4 times the pixel count compared to Doom on x86 for an equal priced machine. This is back when games did not have a GPU to offload 3D rendering too. Surely there are people here who recall this ?
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