Power4 or 5 versus G4 74XX
Altivec, full speed L2 and newly implementation of L3 are key features of the current G4 lines. But for the higher end IBM Power series, very little information are published. I wonder what are the major differences? As for most posts that have mentioned the Power4 series and the soon to be released a cut down version Power4 with SIMD, bandwidths have been heavily mentioned to reduce the bottlenecks between the processor and its other connecting devices But what did IBM do to increase bandwidth, did they just jack up the speed by utilizing DDR, rambus or they just simply design multiple buses to ease traffic in order to for the processor to crunch more data? As for other enhancements of the PowerX chips, I hear about multiple cores alot, did the chip contain more than 1 processor inside and what are 8 way symmetric process that they have been mentioning. Well, my major question is how these features leapfrog the current PM line and how much better compare to those new Pentium 4.