You can get the top p670 with a Power4 for a smidge over $100k I think.
But what I meant was that IBM is still making workstations well above the price of a G4 PowerMac, and these are still based on the 604e!
Their Power3 based offerings are evn more expensive, and yet there are these rumours flying around that they will be able to offer a dressed-down Power4 based PowerPC at a pricepoint where Apple could just slip it into their desktops?
I don't buy it. IBM would use this new chip first surely?
The POWER4s The Register is talking about aren't meant for Macs they are just meant for IBM workstations.
A dummied down POWER4 may or may not be in Apple's future but this release was always planned for IBMs use so it isn't anything too special. Unless of course you are in the market for an IBM workstation.
Hmm, let's see, Apple takes 1 or 2 G4 PPC chips that cost 100-200 dollars a piece, sticks them in one of their towers and sells them for at least 500 dollars more than a comparable P4 system, when the highest speed grade P4s cost upwards of 600 dollars.
I wonder how cheap this cut-down Power-4 would have to be for Apple to use it?
Never gonna happen!
What's gonna happen is, eventually this Power-4 technology will trickle down in some mutilated fashion, and all too late, mind you, into IBMs embedded PPC products such as the PPC 7xx series and that's when Apple will use it.
The high cost of IBM's machines isn't because of the processor, they put a lot of other high end equipment into these machines and sell it with expensive software and an IBM support contract.
If they did design a POWER4 for Apple then economies of scale would bring the processor price down to reasonable levels, and Apple would put it in a machine designed for the desktop market. Intel is selling chips of about the same order of complexity (but single core) in the desktop and notebook markets, so why do you think IBM couldn't? The only reason they haven't is because they don't have a consumer OS and application base to build machines for... they are the original PC company and their shot at defining a new platform died with PreP/CHRP in the mid-'90s. If Apple has asked them to build the processor, however, I'm sure they will.
Programmer could you define this news and what does it meant for Moto and IBM who are in Rapid I/O when Apple is with HyperTransport (ie. AMD).
"RapidIO advances
PLX's top rival, Tundra Semiconductor (Ottawa), is taking a different course, with plans to roll out in the next three months four-port switches and bridges for the RapidIO standard initiated by Motorola Inc. Other devices, including parts for serial RapidIO, are in the works, said Ian McGill, vice president of marketing for Tundra. Like Advanced Switching, RapidIO targets routers, switches and other comms systems including storage systems, and has backing from Nortel and Ericsson, among others. McGill said systems using RapidIO will probably not ship until 2004, about the same time PCs using Express hit the market."
Does this means that we will never see a G5 with RIO before 2004 or mid-2003. If this is true, I really think that Apple would paid big $$$ to have a new FSB, better FPU units, 256 bits AltiVec, etc. for the G4 coupled with HT... and Apple has the right to ask cuz of this: Motorola reports that its top ten end-customers, which accounted for about half its revenue in 2001, were Apple, Bosch, Delphi, Hewlett Packard, Lucent, Motorola, Qualcomm, Siemens, Sony, and Visteon.
BEIJING -- Motorola Inc. here today outlined its new strategy in China, announcing plans to spend an additional $1 billion in R&D and hire 4,000 more engineers in that nation.
And what if the next processor for the PowerMac would be a Dual Core 8540 with AltiVec mixed with the POWER4 ? Is it possible ? When it come to price, it will be certainly in the same ball park that the current G4, no?
Here's my new idea for a shared processor scheme that scales with flexability.
Take your master processor, with all the modern bells and whistles. Long pipeline, big L2 cache, on die memory controller, etc. It connects via the motherboard with RapidIO. In fact this processor has 2 16bit RIO ports. Because one would be for slave processors. These eunich processors would be processors with their nads cut off. They would have identical processing units, but would only have one RIO port that would connect to a central RIO hub that in turn connects to the Master processor. The RIO would have about 60Gbps bandwidth (7.5GBps). The slaves would also lack the memory controller. This would limit the pin outs to about 120 since 16bit RapidIO only requires 76 pins. A smaller package would be easier to design and make the processor card simpler to design for more than 2 processors. All processors would access memory over RIO to the memory controller in the master processor.
With a setup like this you can have 2, 3, 4, 5 processor setups with simple modifications to the processor card design. Is this not a feasible idea?
Hmmm. I suppose I could just be obtuse this morning. But why is everybody assuming that "apple pie" is really Apple PI?
Is it possible that "apple pie" really information sharing of some form (sharing the pie, so to speak) a la Amiga?
I seem to recall that Amiga remained quite viable for a long time with this method, even with dirt slow CPUs. It even remained as a hidden unit inside video-editing equipment well after it was available as a desktop.
I would think that could also explain "Trinity" in it's most basic usage - Amiga used 3 proc's - each for a different function, didn't it?
Anybody think this feasible?
My apologies, but there simply wasn't enough rampant speculation going on in this thread.
BEIJING -- Motorola Inc. here today outlined its new strategy in China, announcing plans to spend an additional $1 billion in R&D and hire 4,000 more engineers in that nation.</strong><hr></blockquote>
It's not so good when you look at it from the standpoint that they'll probably lay off another 4,000 engineers in the U.S. and shut down more fabs here.
As for the Register article, I really don't see why anyone is getting axcited about it. The article does not have any info on a workstation version of the Power4 (let alone really any different version than what's been out for awhile. It's just talking about a <b>workgroup</b> server version. It seems to strongly allude to the chips in these just being reject silicon from the high-end line of servers, where one core doesn't work and has been cut off or disabled. While a smart move on IBM's part, as a way to make use of bad chips, it's hardly a viable approach for Apple chips. At least, I should hope IBM isn't producing enough partial reject chips to meet all of Apple's PowerMac requirements. Of course, a 1/250 success rate might help explain the cost of the Power4!
Just some more fuel to the fire. Ok, it's SpyMac, but this stuff is fairly obvious. Unfortunately they have the same line ThinkSecret was carrying about the Jobs vs. Sculley announcements, and we all know how that one turned out.
[quote]Apple plans on making big waves in the graphics industry, and at Macworld New York, CEO Steve Jobs will shed some light on a long-planned project that will showcase Apple's commitment to the high-end graphics market.
As we reported at the beginning of April -- before the announcement of Apple-branded servers, the purchase of Silicon Grail, or even articles suggesting Pixar's move to OS X -- Apple will announce a strategy that will be mutually beneficial to both Pixar and Apple.
To protect our source, we are not able to provide any further details on the new technology. However, a quote from our original story stands true:
"[Steve Jobs] could be stepping on a lot of feet... I have a feeling [Jobs] does not want anyone to know of this strategy."
<hr></blockquote>
Ok, it's entirely possible Jobs can reveal his fantastic 3D graphics strategy and only speedbump the machines to 1.1 GHz , but like others have said, this only increases the necessity and probability of vastly faster machines.
BEIJING -- Motorola Inc. here today outlined its new strategy in China, announcing plans to spend an additional $1 billion in R&D and hire 4,000 more engineers in that nation.</strong><hr></blockquote>
<strong>umm.... is that the link you meant to post? or...am i missing something?? </strong><hr></blockquote>
Damn, that is weird. It was a story on Excite yesterday about Moto's credit rating going down to right above JUNK status. So Moto isn't in good shape right now. I'll try to verify the link.
Maybe an odd question, but how many posts until this thread is dead? It get tiresome scrolling through 6 screens. I vote for new clean thread where people can repost cleaned up condensed versions of anything relevant. (then again my posting here is just adding to the problem I'm griping about) sorry. <img src="graemlins/embarrassed.gif" border="0" alt="[Embarrassed]" />
Look to the right of the posts in the listings, there are numeric indicators of how many pages any given post is comprised of... Clicking on one of the numbers will take you directly to the page you want, no need to go through all of the preceding pages to get to the latest dirt...
Comments
You can get the top p670 with a Power4 for a smidge over $100k I think.
But what I meant was that IBM is still making workstations well above the price of a G4 PowerMac, and these are still based on the 604e!
Their Power3 based offerings are evn more expensive, and yet there are these rumours flying around that they will be able to offer a dressed-down Power4 based PowerPC at a pricepoint where Apple could just slip it into their desktops?
I don't buy it. IBM would use this new chip first surely?
A dummied down POWER4 may or may not be in Apple's future but this release was always planned for IBMs use so it isn't anything too special. Unless of course you are in the market for an IBM workstation.
I wonder how cheap this cut-down Power-4 would have to be for Apple to use it?
Never gonna happen!
What's gonna happen is, eventually this Power-4 technology will trickle down in some mutilated fashion, and all too late, mind you, into IBMs embedded PPC products such as the PPC 7xx series and that's when Apple will use it.
[ 06-14-2002: Message edited by: timortis ]</p>
If they did design a POWER4 for Apple then economies of scale would bring the processor price down to reasonable levels, and Apple would put it in a machine designed for the desktop market. Intel is selling chips of about the same order of complexity (but single core) in the desktop and notebook markets, so why do you think IBM couldn't? The only reason they haven't is because they don't have a consumer OS and application base to build machines for... they are the original PC company and their shot at defining a new platform died with PreP/CHRP in the mid-'90s. If Apple has asked them to build the processor, however, I'm sure they will.
"RapidIO advances
PLX's top rival, Tundra Semiconductor (Ottawa), is taking a different course, with plans to roll out in the next three months four-port switches and bridges for the RapidIO standard initiated by Motorola Inc. Other devices, including parts for serial RapidIO, are in the works, said Ian McGill, vice president of marketing for Tundra. Like Advanced Switching, RapidIO targets routers, switches and other comms systems including storage systems, and has backing from Nortel and Ericsson, among others. McGill said systems using RapidIO will probably not ship until 2004, about the same time PCs using Express hit the market."
it's from there: <a href="http://www.siliconstrategies.com/story/OEG20020607S0056"; target="_blank">http://www.siliconstrategies.com/story/OEG20020607S0056</a>;
Does this means that we will never see a G5 with RIO before 2004 or mid-2003. If this is true, I really think that Apple would paid big $$$ to have a new FSB, better FPU units, 256 bits AltiVec, etc. for the G4 coupled with HT... and Apple has the right to ask cuz of this: Motorola reports that its top ten end-customers, which accounted for about half its revenue in 2001, were Apple, Bosch, Delphi, Hewlett Packard, Lucent, Motorola, Qualcomm, Siemens, Sony, and Visteon.
[ 06-14-2002: Message edited by: jeromba ]</p>
(06/06/02 14:52 p.m. EST)
BEIJING -- Motorola Inc. here today outlined its new strategy in China, announcing plans to spend an additional $1 billion in R&D and hire 4,000 more engineers in that nation.
Take your master processor, with all the modern bells and whistles. Long pipeline, big L2 cache, on die memory controller, etc. It connects via the motherboard with RapidIO. In fact this processor has 2 16bit RIO ports. Because one would be for slave processors. These eunich processors would be processors with their nads cut off. They would have identical processing units, but would only have one RIO port that would connect to a central RIO hub that in turn connects to the Master processor. The RIO would have about 60Gbps bandwidth (7.5GBps). The slaves would also lack the memory controller. This would limit the pin outs to about 120 since 16bit RapidIO only requires 76 pins. A smaller package would be easier to design and make the processor card simpler to design for more than 2 processors. All processors would access memory over RIO to the memory controller in the master processor.
With a setup like this you can have 2, 3, 4, 5 processor setups with simple modifications to the processor card design. Is this not a feasible idea?
Is it possible that "apple pie" really information sharing of some form (sharing the pie, so to speak) a la Amiga?
I seem to recall that Amiga remained quite viable for a long time with this method, even with dirt slow CPUs. It even remained as a hidden unit inside video-editing equipment well after it was available as a desktop.
I would think that could also explain "Trinity" in it's most basic usage - Amiga used 3 proc's - each for a different function, didn't it?
Anybody think this feasible?
My apologies, but there simply wasn't enough rampant speculation going on in this thread.
<a href="http://theregister.co.uk/content/61/25728.html"; target="_blank">http://theregister.co.uk/content/61/25728.html</a>;
[ 06-14-2002: Message edited by: Harald ]</p>
<strong>oh ! :eek: this is GOOD news !
(06/06/02 14:52 p.m. EST)
BEIJING -- Motorola Inc. here today outlined its new strategy in China, announcing plans to spend an additional $1 billion in R&D and hire 4,000 more engineers in that nation.</strong><hr></blockquote>
It's not so good when you look at it from the standpoint that they'll probably lay off another 4,000 engineers in the U.S. and shut down more fabs here.
[quote]Apple plans on making big waves in the graphics industry, and at Macworld New York, CEO Steve Jobs will shed some light on a long-planned project that will showcase Apple's commitment to the high-end graphics market.
As we reported at the beginning of April -- before the announcement of Apple-branded servers, the purchase of Silicon Grail, or even articles suggesting Pixar's move to OS X -- Apple will announce a strategy that will be mutually beneficial to both Pixar and Apple.
To protect our source, we are not able to provide any further details on the new technology. However, a quote from our original story stands true:
"[Steve Jobs] could be stepping on a lot of feet... I have a feeling [Jobs] does not want anyone to know of this strategy."
<hr></blockquote>
Ok, it's entirely possible Jobs can reveal his fantastic 3D graphics strategy and only speedbump the machines to 1.1 GHz
<strong>oh ! :eek: this is GOOD news !
(06/06/02 14:52 p.m. EST)
BEIJING -- Motorola Inc. here today outlined its new strategy in China, announcing plans to spend an additional $1 billion in R&D and hire 4,000 more engineers in that nation.</strong><hr></blockquote>
But this isn't-
<a href="http://apnews.excite.com/article/20020615/D7K5ABA80.html"; target="_blank">Motoral credit rating lowered</a>
[ 06-15-2002: Message edited by: KidRed ]</p>
<strong>umm.... is that the link you meant to post? or...am i missing something??
Damn, that is weird. It was a story on Excite yesterday about Moto's credit rating going down to right above JUNK status. So Moto isn't in good shape right now. I'll try to verify the link.
Ok, the above link is fixed now.
<a href="http://apnews.excite.com/article/20020615/D7K5ABA80.html"; target="_blank">http://apnews.excite.com/article/20020615/D7K5ABA80.html</a>;
[ 06-15-2002: Message edited by: KidRed ]</p>
Look to the right of the posts in the listings, there are numeric indicators of how many pages any given post is comprised of... Clicking on one of the numbers will take you directly to the page you want, no need to go through all of the preceding pages to get to the latest dirt...