[quote]Originally posted by Fat Freddy:
<strong>I don't hold my breath on the new 970.
The 970 should available at the end of 2003, right?
At speeds up to 1.8GHz, right?
900MHz FSB, right?
2.9MIPS/ MHz, right?
The G4 should reach 1.8GHz at the end of 2003, right?
133MHz FSB today, at the end of the year maybe 800MHz (RIO), right?
2.3MIPS/ MHz, right?
Thats an advantage of 2.9/ 2.3 = 1.26 points
, right?
It doesn't impress me.
I hope i am wrong!
The only advantage of the 970 is 64bit and the SPEC benchmark!</strong><hr></blockquote>
Well, consider this then,
1. The PPC970 has not one, but TWO Altivec units. Altivec performance will be off the charts. Furthermore, the PPC970's altivec performance won't be choked by a slow bus....according to those who know about this sort of thing, the current G4 altivec quickly chokes because the MPX bus cannot feed it fast enough. So not only will a major bottleneck be removed, but an additional SIMD unit will be added. For altivec-optimized applications, the 970 will shame Pentium 4s, no doubt about it.
2. The typical trade-off for MHz is to lower the MIPS/MHz, partially by adding extra pipelines. Yet, the 970 clocks significantly faster than the G4, and STILL turns out more MIPS. Also, the 970 is going to debut at 1.8 GHz, probably on a 130 nm process. This leaves lots of room for scaling...IBM could migrate the 970 to 90 nm fairly quickly, and probably scale to 3 GHz within a year or so of the 970's introduction. In contrast, the G4 debuted at 400 MHz and is near the end of its life.
I think the PPC 970 is far, far superior to the G4, and it's going to be faster than x86 for some time after it's introduction. Maybe on par with x86 for FP caculations, but for any Altivec enabled tasks, the CPU is going to blow x86 away.
Apple was right all along about their focus on altivec....it's a secret weapon that has allowed Apple to keep up despite the disastrous G4, and it will enable Apple to smoke the competition when IBM finally begins fabbing the PPC.
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