[The Ancient One]

That rumor that Apple is not interested in IBM's chips for the Power Mac may just have been a bit premature:

http://www.macedition.com/nmr/nmr_20020914.php

[euphras]

Quote:
"IBM had Mac OS X running on GPUL (Power4) by November 2001, was delivering Prototypes to Apple by March of this Year, and was testing prototype Mac Hardware Systems and core Apple Application Software by April."

If thats true then im a lucky man this evening

......man, OS X running on prototypes.......cmon Micros*ft, get warm clothes!!

[fulmer]

I'm not surprised. IBM says the POWER4 is designed to be 100 percent compatible with PPC.

[OreoCookie]

Never have

[macaddled]

Great news!

300 posts!

[businezguy]

This is just a rumor. I wouldn't get too excited.

I'm not disputing the possibility Apple may be considering the IBM processor, but I don't believe this confirms anything.

[macaddled]

Of course not. It ***CONFIRMS!!!!**** it.

[fulmer]

when naked mole rat comes out of hibernation long enough to post, he is almost always correct.

[RichardS]

Ah, but combine that with this little bit by moki: http://forums.appleinsider.com/cgi-b...1&t=002118&p=5

posted a month and a half ago (long before the NMR report). At the time, the comment went pretty much unnoticed, because nobody knew what the hell GPUL was.

I would definitly label this **CONFIRMED**.

[Zimmerman]

Call this hush puppie cynical, but that guy has the credibility of... well... Bill Clinton and Bill Gate's love child. I'm thinking Apple is going over to x86 over Power4

</stir pot>

hehehe

[macaddled]

Why do you say that? Cuz he writes funny? He has a fantastic track record.

[fulmer]

Originally posted by macaddled:
Why do you say that?

hence the stirring of the pot...he's just lightly trolling, since the x86 debate always generates a lot of emotion.

[slider]

Originally posted by fulmer:


hence the stirring of the pot...he's just lightly trolling, since the x86 debate always generates a lot of emotion.

Oh, is that why I was crying?

[Zimmerman]

Yep, fulmer has it 'bout right. I am real cynical about the whole issue because historically Apple has chosen the looser. Well, the G3 had potential (hence the 1ghz IBM G3's that came BEFORE the 1ghz motorola G4's). Apple chose motorola 68x because there were concerns that x86 would never scale past 200mhz. But, that is all water under the bridge and I will be lining up like all the other puppets when Apple's newest, latest, and greatest comes out. Apple and me are kind of a love-hate relationship. I might have stated before that I am not so much a fan of Steve Jobs/Apple vs. the Macintosh machine.

PC users ask me why I like Macs, I reply, "They are comfortable to me." And no one can say a thing.

[Jasoco]

All I want is a nice speedy fast processor by the time I can afford a PowerMac.

[OreoCookie]

Well, but there is a lot of evidence pointing in that direction. We'll see when Apple delivers some boxes in order to optimize their software for that new baby ...

[Spliffdaddy]

Originally posted by OreoCookie:
Well, but there is a lot of evidence pointing in that direction. We'll see when Apple delivers some boxes in order to optimize their software for that new baby ...

They delivered them months ago.

Can you say "AMD".

I thought you could.

[OreoCookie]

I can, I've had two (plus one) AMD CPUs working for me already (two 486 and one 29something CPU in my LaserWriter IINTX).

BTW, AMD has rescheduled the ClawHammer ...

[Spliffdaddy]

Apple isn't getting the 'clawhammer' yet...if ever.

The Mac validation machines are using SiS 745 chipsets with onboard firewire, DDR 266 suppport, and a XP 1800+ processor. and a funky BIOS setup menu with a 'toggle' for the two ROMs.

and lookie...a header for wireless LAN - with no pins soldered, unfortunately.

can you say "AMD"?

I thought you could.

[macaddled]

So there are people who still believe that Apple, in the near future, is going to tell Adobe, Microsoft, Digidesign, Quark, etc etc,

"Ok, we've just asked you to rewrite your applications/device drivers/etc for a new operating system. Many of you aren't even quite done with that yet.

Now go rewrite all of that, again, to a different chip instruction set."

Please. The power of various systems will ebb and flow as different companies make progress. We've only been really behind for two, maybe three years. Try to take a longer view.

I need faster machines, yeah, but it's still a long way off from throwing away 15 years of time, money and experience on the Mac platform.

[OreoCookie]

Originally posted by Spliffdaddy:
Apple isn't getting the 'clawhammer' yet...if ever.

The Mac validation machines are using SiS 745 chipsets with onboard firewire, DDR 266 suppport, and a XP 1800+ processor. and a funky BIOS setup menu with a 'toggle' for the two ROMs.

and lookie...a header for wireless LAN - with no pins soldered, unfortunately.

can you say "AMD"?

I thought you could.

And there are also new machines out with the new version of the G4.

There are many machines made in Cupertino that have never seen the light of day.
We know that there is a program to keep the x86 version of OS X on par. Does it mean they will actually release it? Not necessarily.

[milhous]

Bring on the Power4!

[3.1416]

Originally posted by macaddled:

Now go rewrite all of that, again, to a different chip instruction set."

Applications aren't written in assembly language these days. Very little of an OS X app (possibly none if it doesn't use Altivec) would have to be changed to run on x86 or another processor.

[OreoCookie]

Can you imagine waiting for Photoshop and (the yet-to-come) QuarkXPress another one or two years? I don't care about these apps, but some folks do.

Photoshop uses assembly for many routines, that would have to be rewritten ...

IMHO, the GPUL aka Power4Desktop is the most likely alternative. x86 is just a fall back plan (that every thinking company should have in a situation that Apple is in).

[Graymalkin]

The Apple x86 speculation is pretty silly if you actually consider the logistics of such a change. While some programs are entirely portable between chip architectures, much of Cocoa is written to be this way in fact, it is a long and very very difficult process to port architectures.

The reason the 68k emulator was able to work so well when Apple transitioned to the PowerPC chip is because CISC architectures are scores easier to emulate of RISC chips than the other way around. Had Apple gone from PPC (lets pretend it existed then) to 68k the transition would have rendered all previously available software useless on new machines.

The same goes for switching from PPC to x86. There's a portion of software that is a mere recompile and it will work fine. That portion is not nearly as large as the software that is NOT merely a recompile away from running on a new platform. There's a good deal of software available for the Mac that is not written in languages that have efficient x86 compilers, there's yet more in house software that relies specifically on Macs being a PPC platform.

Moving within the PPC architecture is MUCH more plausible than Macs running on x86 chips. The fact(rumor) Apple in maintaining a full x86 build of OSX for x86 is not a suggestion they are switching platforms but instead keeping their options open. I bet deep in the bowels of a Redmond sub-basement Microsoft still has a dev team working on their non-x86 Windows NT ports. Darwin is pretty easily ported to whatever system you wanted. It might not be worth the effort but it is possible. The same goes for the entire Cocoa framework, it was originally designed to be highly portable.

Asking developers to support three versions of a product, two of which are on an entirely different platform than the third is a bit much. There's a handful of companies that can actually do business supporting a large number of platforms. Their software prices range in the thousands. Alias|Wavefront sound like a familiar name? Newtek? Oracle?

Smaller developers, won't touch multiple platforms or at best only one or two platforms. This says nothing about hardware manufacturers who at present barely support OSX on the PPC. Give me a break.

[file]

graymalkin,

so how much work would it take for a port to the power4?

let's say a fairly complicated program like word or photoshop?


just somebody new to apple looking at this situation, whatever happens...it ain't happening soon. sounds to me a year - year and a half away before a new chip is out.

[BlackGriffen]

Originally posted by file:
graymalkin,

so how much work would it take for a port to the power4?

let's say a fairly complicated program like word or photoshop?


just somebody new to apple looking at this situation, whatever happens...it ain't happening soon. sounds to me a year - year and a half away before a new chip is out.

The thing is that the chip is not a Power4. It's made using technology from the Power4, but it will be a PowerPC. The only possible hitch will be that it is rumored to be a 64 bit chip. this shouldn't pose a problem because current PowerPCs actually run on a subset of the PowerPC ISA. That's right, PowerPC has been 64 bit ready this whole time. IBM even briefly made a 64 bit chip, but they discontinued it because it was uneconomical at the time. IIRC, the trick to pulling this off is that the instructions are still 32 bit long, it will just be the addresses and the integers that will be lengthened. Don't get me wrong, those facts alone will require some porting work, but it will be a couple of relatively minor things in the Kernel/System and possibly a couple of code jobs that depend on the size of the integer.

At any rate, even if it was still a Power style chip, I doubt it would take much work. They are closely related architectures, and I even recall hearing rumors of some binaries being able to run on both IBM's Power and PowerPC servers.

Changing over to x86, OTOH, brings up all sorts of issues. Endian, optimization issues out the yin-yang, loss of Carbon (that would take a massive effort to port), etc.

BlackGriffen

[fulmer]

Originally posted by file:
graymalkin,

so how much work would it take for a port to the power4?

let's say a fairly complicated program like word or photoshop?

IBM's own website says the Power4 is designed to be 100 percent compatible with the PPC. No porting or recoding for a particular processor. So there would be (if IBM is being truthful) no work involved in running PPC Mac apps and OSes with the Power4.

[Superchicken]

Not to mention who wants to put more money in Intel's pocket?

But has anyone noticed that also OS 9 won'tbe bootable in January, think that might be because of the whole 64 bit chip thing???

dono if it would be.
But I dono this guy sounds kinda weird in the article.. I deffinately do hope though that IBM chips start showing up in iMacs and Power Macs soon... unfortunately my next Mac will be an iBook anyway... oh well... I just hopethose go G4 soon.

[file]

ok, now i know software can run on a modified power4.

now, some more questions:

How fast can IBM modify a power4 into a desktop type processor?

What kind of scalability does a modified Power4 have? When the P4 hits 4 ghz, will it be able to get there too?

What performance gains can we expect?

What makes you think it is a 64 bit processor when even in the PC world it is having trouble catching on?

[Graymalkin]

Originally posted by file:
graymalkin,

so how much work would it take for a port to the power4?

let's say a fairly complicated program like word or photoshop?


just somebody new to apple looking at this situation, whatever happens...it ain't happening soon. sounds to me a year - year and a half away before a new chip is out.

A little history and info on the POWER/PowerPC chips is needed I think for this all to make sense to people who don't spend as much of their time as I spend of mine doing this stuff.

Back in the early 90's IBM decided it wanted into the high end workstation market after failing with their PC/RT based on the ROMP processor. They went with a new design inspired by their 801 project which pretty much pioneered the idea of making a badass RISC processor, a bitm ore ambitious than the ARM folks.

Their first chip was named POWER (Performance Optimization With Enhanced RISC). It was a 32-bit chip and was very powerful for the time. In 1992 IBM teamed up with Apple and Motorola who were looking to create a true microprocessor version of the POWER chip which was a monster. This became the PowerPC. The PowerPC 601 was their first processor and based heavily on the POWER chip. It lacked several registers the POWER had for the sake of size because these were highly specialized registers and instructions using them were emulated on the 601. The 603 was incremental improvements on the original 601 design. Around 1995 the design took the brainiac approach and separated the functional units into 6 separate units. Two simple integer units, a complex integer, FP, load/store, and a branch processor. The FPU was a very very nice one.

From there the 620 was developed which was a 64-bit version of the 604. Also game the 740/750 which kept some of the 620's features (albeit in 32-bit form) and used the simpler FPU from the 603. The 750 is what we know as a G3. From there came the 74xx or the G4. Workstation versions of POWER continued to get better as well. The POWER2 added some instructions, more cache space, and a second floating point unit. The POWER3 added yet more functional units for a total of 8 and allowed for much higher clock speeds. The 64-bit version was named the A25 and was used in AS/400 systems.

Then came everyone's favorite POWER4 which increased the pipeline depth of some units and used smaller trace sizes to allow for very high clock speeds. It is a true computing powerhouse at the cost of a lot of money, silicon, and electricity.

So you see, all POWER and PowerPC chips stem from the original POWER chip. PPC compilers (GCC included) can be set to compile for system agnosticism where they will only use registers and instructions available to PowerPC chips and thus be backwards compatible with the POWER superset by default. A good bit of software using portable C or similar need only be recompiled if it has some sort of PowerPC affinity that would break on a actual POWER chip. Inline assembly might also have to be changed in some cases but not all. For the most part however PPC software is going to work on a POWER or PowerPC as long as MacOS boots on it to provide the frameworks and libraries necessary to run. In short most software will run just fine on the mythical IBM chip, something I'm sure IBM has paid close attention to if it is indeed intended as a G4 replacement.

The G4 would be a much better contender would someone stick a second FP pipeline on the farking thing. The Athlon blows things out of the water in most tests because it has three FP pipelines. AltiVec in nice and all but a majority of problems it does not solve and is inefficient to use it when a scalar operation will do just fine. IBM's technology is sweet no doubt but the G4 is being crippled by politics rather than design.

[file]

thank you for some ibm/power4 history. i read every word and found it very interesting.

does motorola have any chip designs apple can use for it's next generation processor?

[Superchicken]

Mottorola is evil, they're working on embeded chips not designed for desktop systems. With a bit of cash in R&D they could make a desktop chip, but they don't thinka pple's worth it.

By the way...

Can anyone think of any reason why IBM would make this proccessor if Apple wasn't gona buy. Short of having thier own secret OS that they're gona set up or running a flavor of linux on it or something.
Cause like... really no one's gona buy it if Apple's not, like I mean what else could they use it for, I've heard G4s are used in routers and what not... but is that a big enough market to justify spending the cash to make and fab this chip?

[hmurchison2001]

Originally posted by Superchic[k]en:
Mottorola is evil, they're working on embeded chips not designed for desktop systems. With a bit of cash in R&D they could make a desktop chip, but they don't thinka pple's worth it.

By the way...

Can anyone think of any reason why IBM would make this proccessor if Apple wasn't gona buy. Short of having thier own secret OS that they're gona set up or running a flavor of linux on it or something.
Cause like... really no one's gona buy it if Apple's not, like I mean what else could they use it for, I've heard G4s are used in routers and what not... but is that a big enough market to justify spending the cash to make and fab this chip?

Well IBM won't be solely selling these to Apple. Looks like Linux might be in the game as well

http://www.architosh.com/news/2002-0...c-altvec.phtml

[Graymalkin]

Originally posted by Superchic[k]en:
Mottorola is evil, they're working on embeded chips not designed for desktop systems. With a bit of cash in R&D they could make a desktop chip, but they don't thinka pple's worth it.

By the way...

Can anyone think of any reason why IBM would make this proccessor if Apple wasn't gona buy. Short of having thier own secret OS that they're gona set up or running a flavor of linux on it or something.
Cause like... really no one's gona buy it if Apple's not, like I mean what else could they use it for, I've heard G4s are used in routers and what not... but is that a big enough market to justify spending the cash to make and fab this chip?

IBM has their own "secret" OS already, it's called AIX and is far from being some big secret. AIX is fully POWER/PowerPC compatible and they run it on all of their high end workstations and servers. The POWER4 as is is a bit much to stick in their RS/6000 machines or IntelliStations so as desktop version of the POWER4 for said machines would actually make a lot of sense. Currently they use a combination of POWER3, 604e, and RS64 chips in those machines and streamlining everything to a single processor stepping would save them some money.

[Superchicken]

Originally posted by Graymalkin:


IBM has their own "secret" OS already, it's called AIX and is far from being some big secret. AIX is fully POWER/PowerPC compatible and they run it on all of their high end workstations and servers. The POWER4 as is is a bit much to stick in their RS/6000 machines or IntelliStations so as desktop version of the POWER4 for said machines would actually make a lot of sense. Currently they use a combination of POWER3, 604e, and RS64 chips in those machines and streamlining everything to a single processor stepping would save them some money.

see this is what happens when graphics geeks post on hard ware forums... man... why am I never right with my little comments.... sigh some day I shall say something smart on here... until then... I'll just keep doing what I do best... asking people to post information on things then sounding smart to people who don't know what the heck I'm talking about !

[chris v]

The latest:

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,3959,543317,00.asp

"Sources"?...

CV

[macaddled]

Just read that article as well. Most of it seems like further detail on what we already knew or suspected... nice to have extra logs on the fire.

Until the last paragraph: we're still getting the G5? Rumor overload, I tells ya.

[The Ancient One]

Originally posted by macaddled:
Just read that article as well. Most of it seems like further detail on what we already knew or suspected... nice to have extra logs on the fire.

Until the last paragraph: we're still getting the G5? Rumor overload, I tells ya.

Well, you can choose your video card manufacturer this year. Maybe we'll be able to choose our processor manufacturer next year.

[macaddled]

Well, that article has made the front page of Ars Technica, which always makes me feel like my little town has just been featured on the national news or something.

It's a good point Hannibal makes about eWeek being a very reliable rumor source. Late to the game, usually, but very solid.

[hmurchison2001]

Somehow I just think these initial GP-UL based Macs will be spendy.

Apples purchase of Shake and Silicon Grail means they'll need beefy hardare.

My prognosis....$5000 Macs are coming in a year.

[macaddled]

See, there you are again!

Honestly, I would love to see Apple with a range of machines from current prices up to workstation, $10k models for video/compositing/3d whathaveyou. My company, which is tiny, would buy two or three of those bad boys in a second.

[OverclockedHomoSapien]

Nevermind...

[gumby5647]

Originally posted by hmurchison2001:


My prognosis....$5000 Macs are coming in a year.

But, as long as they are Mac's that are worthy of a 5G Price tag, im sure that many people won't mind dropping 5G's....

[macaddled]

Over on Ars there's a guy who's claimed to have seen it...

linky