Oi... certainly a lot of misinformation floating about out there.
- Most software will never go 64-bit. 32-bit mode is more than adequate and is more efficient that 64-bit mode unless you specifically need a 64-bit address space or integer word.
- 64-bit colour doesn't benefit at all from 64-bit integer registers. 64-bit colour is actually 4 16-bit values (red, green, blue, and alpha). New graphics hardware supports floating point values and 128-bit colour as well. The VMX/AltiVec unit has already made the Mac very capable of dealing with that. This level of information may never reach the display, but it is important for the internal calculations and for high-dynamic-range images.
- There are techniques that take advantage of a 64-bit address space without needing lots of actual RAM (or virtual memory even). These are called "sparsely addressed data structures". It can be useful, but only rarely.
<strong>And it extends to some of the bigger programs! Someone mentioned ProEngineer. ProE needs double precision floating point out the wazzu. But... we've had double precision floats since forever. I'm not positive about ProE, but I'm not sure even that will necessarily see a significant speed up.</strong><hr></blockquote>
It will, but not because the 970 is 64 bit. The 970 has more FP units and significantly more bandwidth from main RAM (and from other 970s!) to those units. It should dramatically accelerate FP code in general relative to the 7455. Depending on the implementation of the units, it could especially speed up 64-bit FP. The 7455 can do 64 bit FP, but obviously not quickly.
[quote]<strong>By far the biggest advantage for most of us is access to more than 4GB of RAM. That doesn't generally require a full switch to a 64bit CPU though.</strong><hr></blockquote>
It doesn't require a switch to any CPU: The 7455 can access that much RAM - and more - right now. Mac OS 9, however, has a hardcoded 2GB addressing limit, and furthermore, it reserves the uppermost 512KB for device drivers (so they can map physical hardware registers on accessory devices to RAM, and also for DMA) - which leaves the well-known 1.5GB limit for application use. Given these assumptions, OS 9 takes poorly to more than 1.5GB of physical RAM - let alone 4GB or more.
What a 64 bit CPU gives us is the ability of a single application to get more than 2GB of virtual memory, by increasing the size of pointers (a special kind of value - almost always an integer - that is used to hold an address in memory) to 64 bits. This is useless to the majority of Mac users, but people working with large multimedia projects, large databases, and particularly large physics and engineering simulations will welcome this new freedom.
[quote]<strong>For the libraries/Frameworks, won't the 'Fat binary' history of NeXt help out here?</strong><hr></blockquote>
I think MWNY '03 is the absolute latest. There is a real chance that both Apple and IBM have been purposely modest in their claims, or I should say, IBM has, at the urging of Apple, been modest in their forecast. We have a powermac case designed to cool something a lot hotter than dual G4's. We have plants coming online with .13u fab capacity and a stated intention to penetrate the desktop market. Something's afoot. Sure, Apple's lips are bolted tighter than my first girlfriend's knees, but that only tells me there's something good hiding inside.
I think MWNY '03 is the absolute latest. There is a real chance that both Apple and IBM have been purposely modest in their claims, or I should say, IBM has, at the urging of Apple, been modest in their forecast. We have a powermac case designed to cool something a lot hotter than dual G4's. . .
</strong><hr></blockquote>
I hope you are right, and I have been thinking the same thing about the wind tunnel design, that it is for more than dual G4s. Yet, everytime I am optimistic I get disappointed. So for now, I'll be content with second half of 03.
<strong>Sure, Apple's lips are bolted tighter than my first girlfriend's knees, but that only tells me there's something good hiding inside.</strong><hr></blockquote>
Best analogy ever! <img src="graemlins/lol.gif" border="0" alt="[Laughing]" />
<strong>Aren't the 970's suppose to use less power than the dual 1,25 GHz G4, then why would they need the windtunnels for air flow</strong><hr></blockquote>
Single 970's are supposed to use less power than the dual 1,25's, not dual 970's, which will probably be used in the powermacs.
Perhaps, I'm not getting it here but many people have said in this thread that 64 bit apps are not the be all and end all and won't give much benefit etc over 32 bit apps. so what exactly is the great benefit from the 970? if the 64 bit issue is not an issue then how will it give us kick ass wintel killing performance?
<strong>Perhaps, I'm not getting it here but many people have said in this thread that 64 bit apps are not the be all and end all and won't give much benefit etc over 32 bit apps. so what exactly is the great benefit from the 970? if the 64 bit issue is not an issue then how will it give us kick ass wintel killing performance?</strong><hr></blockquote>
One word: marketing. The P4 was slower clock for clock then the P3 but the P4 could scale higher with insanely long pipelines. Who actually needs a 3 GHz P4 with HT to type papers and surf the net, but I digress. Hopefully IBM can pull this off and get it out the door before the Hammer or the Itanic (Itanium) which seems to not be able to run 32 bit code without a huge hit. So, Apple could have the first desktop computer to go 64 bit and not run dog slow on normal 32 bit apps.
<strong>One word: marketing. The P4 was slower clock for clock then the P3 but the P4 could scale higher with insanely long pipelines. Who actually needs a 3 GHz P4 with HT to type papers and surf the net, but I digress. Hopefully IBM can pull this off and get it out the door before the Hammer or the Itanic (Itanium) which seems to not be able to run 32 bit code without a huge hit. So, Apple could have the first desktop computer to go 64 bit and not run dog slow on normal 32 bit apps.
</strong><hr></blockquote>
While the 970 & its "64-bitness" will give certainly give Apple some marketing potential that it currently lacks, this isn't the most important feature of the 970. It will still have a lower clockrate, and by the time it ships it will likely still have lower SPECmarks. There will be a new supply of bake-offs that they can do to demonstrate PowerPC superiority again, but that's not a big deal either.
The really big deal behind the 970 is that it reinforces once again that PowerPC does have a future. Its on an advanced process, there is a short term migration path to a better process, and there are long term plans for follow-on designs from a company that has a vested interested in delivering them and is obviously capable of it.
<strong>how will it give us kick ass wintel killing performance?</strong><hr></blockquote>
Although there are a lot of apps that could care less about the 64bitness, there _are_ some that will love it. Some just access to more RAM (which doesn't automatically force one to a full 64bit chip, as noted), others will benefit from being able to manipulate really large integers. At the very least, I expect to see 32 versus 64 bit benchmarks run, with the 970 running faster, of course.
64bit apps are historically non-desktop apps. Intel & AMD's route to 64bitness looks a LOT rougher than the ppc 'Gosh, we'll let the 32 bit apps run in 32 bit mode, and the 64 bit apps run in 64 bit mode with 0 penalty' approach. Having a chip that does _both_, and _well_, will/could be an excellent selling point for the XServe2, or whatever else goes into that product line. (Here's another vote for the 'XStation', as many 970s as fit in the box without catching fire too often.)
The second full FPU, the new FSB, and the SMP ability are what makes it look good to me. And the brand name.
Motorola's been having "problems" ever since 1997ish, when the clones were killed off. (Costing Mot something like $100 million.) Since then Apple's sort of been kicking for 'something a little better than Mot's embedded processors'. IBM makes embedded processors too - but they also use their own Power line chips in a LOT of other things. So they don't have a purely 'embedded' outlook on things. The current and future IBMPower CPU lines DO end up in "real" supercomputers. At least with IBM Apple can say 'More power please, here's $$$', and get _something_, even if it is a lot hotter than they would prefer.
As some have hinted at in their posts the reason that many say that 64 bit desktop computing won't amount to much of an an advance in performancefor the platform is that the percentage of desktop users that use the apps that would benifit is debateably low. A short list might include iMovie, iDVD, iPhoto,, Logic Audio, Shake, Final Cut Pro, Quicktime. See a pattern here? Yes they are all multimedia apps but they are also all Apple apps. Databases also qualify (Filemaker) and 3D apps like Maya.
<strong>As some have hinted at in their posts the reason that many say that 64 bit desktop computing won't amount to much of an an advance in performancefor the platform is that the percentage of desktop users that use the apps that would benifit is debateably low. A short list might include iMovie, iDVD, iPhoto,, Logic Audio, Shake, Final Cut Pro, Quicktime. See a pattern here? Yes they are all multimedia apps but they are also all Apple apps. Databases also qualify (Filemaker) and 3D apps like Maya.</strong><hr></blockquote>
The multimedia angle would of course be valuable to me (thanx for the responses to my post) but won't apps have to be rewritten? I use After Effects, Premiere, Poser, 3D Studio MAX ( ), Photoshop, DVD Studio Pro, Director, Flash etc and not all of them take advantage of Altivec as it is never mind a 970. Poser for example runs like a dog on my Dual 450. It takes around 20-30 seconds to save or open a file and as for rendering. Sheeesh! I've ended up working on Poser on my PII400 instead. Director also has serious memory problems and seems unable to take advantage of my dual procs. Also, doesn't maya still not see dual prcs under X (or have I got that wrong?). I still have a horrible feeling that the original poster has something here. After all, remember the hype about Altivec? then it transpired that software had to be rewritten for it for any advantage and finally it turns out that some software may never have been rewritten to take advantage of it anyway.
The multimedia angle would of course be valuable to me (thanx for the responses to my post) but won't apps have to be rewritten? ....blablabla etc....</strong><hr></blockquote>
Apps won't have to be rewritten, they'll run very fast on the 970 as they are, but to make the app go at optimum speed, it has to be recompiled, which is a much quicker and easier process than rewriting.
Poser for example runs like a dog on my Dual 450. It takes around 20-30 seconds to save or open a file and as for rendering. Sheeesh! I'v </strong><hr></blockquote>
Really? Are you opening a model with 100000+ polygons?
Back to my Dual 500 days it took around 10 seconds to load a Poser 4 High Res male model.
As for rendering. Forget it. All metacreations' app are hopelessly slow on rendering. If you want rendering speed. Export the model into other apps like Cinema, EI, LW, XSI or Max and do the animation and rendering there
Well remember with 64 bit procs the advantage is with addressable memory and larger integers for number crunching. Therefore most code is fine. Your mostly dealing with variable types. This can requrie a little fixing or just a recompile depending on the code.
Video/film applications don't really need or benefit from having a 64-bit machine. They benefit far more from AltiVec/VMX. Typically these apps operate on frames at a time and managing the read/writing to the disk is pretty simply. Only customers that actually have more than ~4 GB of RAM will really notice an improvement, and that is going to remain a fairly elite set of users for some time yet.
3D applications also do not benefit from a 64-bit address space, nor 64-bit integers. They operate on floating point numbers (and some can use the AltiVec/VMX unit to great effect) and their data sets are generally much smaller than 4 GB. Again, high end users might be pushing the envelope but most users will be perfectly happy in 32-bit space.
Users with really large databases can benefit quite a bit, especially when running servers that have many simultaneous users. Other applications with enormous data sets will also benefit.
Most users would never actually notice a difference. The technology to go 64-bit on the desktop has been around for a decade, but there has been virtually zero reason to go there and since it has costs it never happened. Now the cost of going 64-bit is so small that "virtually zero reason" is a good enough reason... and the benefits of using the same processor on the desktop, in notebooks and in servers is too great to be ignored.
. . . The technology to go 64-bit on the desktop has been around for a decade, but there has been virtually zero reason to go there and since it has costs it never happened. Now the cost of going 64-bit is so small that "virtually zero reason" is a good enough reason... and the benefits of using the same processor on the desktop, in notebooks and in servers is too great to be ignored.
</strong><hr></blockquote>
I'll believe that, and maybe the cost of going 64 bits is less on the 970 PPC then on Intel? Yes, No? Also think of what it does for Apple's image. There are some who will want it just to have the latest and greatest technology.
Comments
- Most software will never go 64-bit. 32-bit mode is more than adequate and is more efficient that 64-bit mode unless you specifically need a 64-bit address space or integer word.
- 64-bit colour doesn't benefit at all from 64-bit integer registers. 64-bit colour is actually 4 16-bit values (red, green, blue, and alpha). New graphics hardware supports floating point values and 128-bit colour as well. The VMX/AltiVec unit has already made the Mac very capable of dealing with that. This level of information may never reach the display, but it is important for the internal calculations and for high-dynamic-range images.
- There are techniques that take advantage of a 64-bit address space without needing lots of actual RAM (or virtual memory even). These are called "sparsely addressed data structures". It can be useful, but only rarely.
<strong>And it extends to some of the bigger programs! Someone mentioned ProEngineer. ProE needs double precision floating point out the wazzu. But... we've had double precision floats since forever. I'm not positive about ProE, but I'm not sure even that will necessarily see a significant speed up.</strong><hr></blockquote>
It will, but not because the 970 is 64 bit. The 970 has more FP units and significantly more bandwidth from main RAM (and from other 970s!) to those units. It should dramatically accelerate FP code in general relative to the 7455. Depending on the implementation of the units, it could especially speed up 64-bit FP. The 7455 can do 64 bit FP, but obviously not quickly.
[quote]<strong>By far the biggest advantage for most of us is access to more than 4GB of RAM. That doesn't generally require a full switch to a 64bit CPU though.</strong><hr></blockquote>
It doesn't require a switch to any CPU: The 7455 can access that much RAM - and more - right now. Mac OS 9, however, has a hardcoded 2GB addressing limit, and furthermore, it reserves the uppermost 512KB for device drivers (so they can map physical hardware registers on accessory devices to RAM, and also for DMA) - which leaves the well-known 1.5GB limit for application use. Given these assumptions, OS 9 takes poorly to more than 1.5GB of physical RAM - let alone 4GB or more.
What a 64 bit CPU gives us is the ability of a single application to get more than 2GB of virtual memory, by increasing the size of pointers (a special kind of value - almost always an integer - that is used to hold an address in memory) to 64 bits. This is useless to the majority of Mac users, but people working with large multimedia projects, large databases, and particularly large physics and engineering simulations will welcome this new freedom.
[quote]<strong>For the libraries/Frameworks, won't the 'Fat binary' history of NeXt help out here?</strong><hr></blockquote>
Oh yes.
<strong>
I think MWNY '03 is the absolute latest. There is a real chance that both Apple and IBM have been purposely modest in their claims, or I should say, IBM has, at the urging of Apple, been modest in their forecast. We have a powermac case designed to cool something a lot hotter than dual G4's. . .
</strong><hr></blockquote>
I hope you are right, and I have been thinking the same thing about the wind tunnel design, that it is for more than dual G4s. Yet, everytime I am optimistic I get disappointed. So for now, I'll be content with second half of 03.
Barto
<strong>Sure, Apple's lips are bolted tighter than my first girlfriend's knees, but that only tells me there's something good hiding inside.</strong><hr></blockquote>
Best analogy ever! <img src="graemlins/lol.gif" border="0" alt="[Laughing]" />
[ 12-01-2002: Message edited by: crawlingparanoia ]</p>
<strong>Aren't the 970's suppose to use less power than the dual 1,25 GHz G4, then why would they need the windtunnels for air flow</strong><hr></blockquote>
Single 970's are supposed to use less power than the dual 1,25's, not dual 970's, which will probably be used in the powermacs.
?900MHz FSB, which scales with the processors as they get faster
?more FPU's (which'll double the FP performance)
?8/5-way superscalar (?)
?built for SMP
?very good performance/power-ratio
?built and manufactured by someone else than mot, which also led to plans to migrate quickly to a better process (0.09µ)
?longer pipeline combined with above leads me to believe the processors will scale alot upwards quickly
etc.
[ 12-01-2002: Message edited by: r-0X#Zapchud ]</p>
<strong>Perhaps, I'm not getting it here but many people have said in this thread that 64 bit apps are not the be all and end all and won't give much benefit etc over 32 bit apps. so what exactly is the great benefit from the 970? if the 64 bit issue is not an issue then how will it give us kick ass wintel killing performance?</strong><hr></blockquote>
One word: marketing. The P4 was slower clock for clock then the P3 but the P4 could scale higher with insanely long pipelines. Who actually needs a 3 GHz P4 with HT to type papers and surf the net, but I digress. Hopefully IBM can pull this off and get it out the door before the Hammer or the Itanic (Itanium) which seems to not be able to run 32 bit code without a huge hit. So, Apple could have the first desktop computer to go 64 bit and not run dog slow on normal 32 bit apps.
A@ron
[ 12-01-2002: Message edited by: A@ron ]</p>
<strong>One word: marketing. The P4 was slower clock for clock then the P3 but the P4 could scale higher with insanely long pipelines. Who actually needs a 3 GHz P4 with HT to type papers and surf the net, but I digress. Hopefully IBM can pull this off and get it out the door before the Hammer or the Itanic (Itanium) which seems to not be able to run 32 bit code without a huge hit. So, Apple could have the first desktop computer to go 64 bit and not run dog slow on normal 32 bit apps.
</strong><hr></blockquote>
While the 970 & its "64-bitness" will give certainly give Apple some marketing potential that it currently lacks, this isn't the most important feature of the 970. It will still have a lower clockrate, and by the time it ships it will likely still have lower SPECmarks. There will be a new supply of bake-offs that they can do to demonstrate PowerPC superiority again, but that's not a big deal either.
The really big deal behind the 970 is that it reinforces once again that PowerPC does have a future. Its on an advanced process, there is a short term migration path to a better process, and there are long term plans for follow-on designs from a company that has a vested interested in delivering them and is obviously capable of it.
<strong>how will it give us kick ass wintel killing performance?</strong><hr></blockquote>
Although there are a lot of apps that could care less about the 64bitness, there _are_ some that will love it. Some just access to more RAM (which doesn't automatically force one to a full 64bit chip, as noted), others will benefit from being able to manipulate really large integers. At the very least, I expect to see 32 versus 64 bit benchmarks run, with the 970 running faster, of course.
64bit apps are historically non-desktop apps. Intel & AMD's route to 64bitness looks a LOT rougher than the ppc 'Gosh, we'll let the 32 bit apps run in 32 bit mode, and the 64 bit apps run in 64 bit mode with 0 penalty' approach. Having a chip that does _both_, and _well_, will/could be an excellent selling point for the XServe2, or whatever else goes into that product line. (Here's another vote for the 'XStation', as many 970s as fit in the box without catching fire too often.)
The second full FPU, the new FSB, and the SMP ability are what makes it look good to me. And the brand name.
Motorola's been having "problems" ever since 1997ish, when the clones were killed off. (Costing Mot something like $100 million.) Since then Apple's sort of been kicking for 'something a little better than Mot's embedded processors'. IBM makes embedded processors too - but they also use their own Power line chips in a LOT of other things. So they don't have a purely 'embedded' outlook on things. The current and future IBMPower CPU lines DO end up in "real" supercomputers. At least with IBM Apple can say 'More power please, here's $$$', and get _something_, even if it is a lot hotter than they would prefer.
<strong>As some have hinted at in their posts the reason that many say that 64 bit desktop computing won't amount to much of an an advance in performancefor the platform is that the percentage of desktop users that use the apps that would benifit is debateably low. A short list might include iMovie, iDVD, iPhoto,, Logic Audio, Shake, Final Cut Pro, Quicktime. See a pattern here? Yes they are all multimedia apps but they are also all Apple apps. Databases also qualify (Filemaker) and 3D apps like Maya.</strong><hr></blockquote>
The multimedia angle would of course be valuable to me (thanx for the responses to my post) but won't apps have to be rewritten? I use After Effects, Premiere, Poser, 3D Studio MAX (
<strong>
The multimedia angle would of course be valuable to me (thanx for the responses to my post) but won't apps have to be rewritten? ....blablabla etc....</strong><hr></blockquote>
Apps won't have to be rewritten, they'll run very fast on the 970 as they are, but to make the app go at optimum speed, it has to be recompiled, which is a much quicker and easier process than rewriting.
No worries here.
<strong>
Poser for example runs like a dog on my Dual 450. It takes around 20-30 seconds to save or open a file and as for rendering. Sheeesh! I'v </strong><hr></blockquote>
Really? Are you opening a model with 100000+ polygons?
Back to my Dual 500 days it took around 10 seconds to load a Poser 4 High Res male model.
As for rendering. Forget it. All metacreations' app are hopelessly slow on rendering. If you want rendering speed. Export the model into other apps like Cinema, EI, LW, XSI or Max and do the animation and rendering there
3D applications also do not benefit from a 64-bit address space, nor 64-bit integers. They operate on floating point numbers (and some can use the AltiVec/VMX unit to great effect) and their data sets are generally much smaller than 4 GB. Again, high end users might be pushing the envelope but most users will be perfectly happy in 32-bit space.
Users with really large databases can benefit quite a bit, especially when running servers that have many simultaneous users. Other applications with enormous data sets will also benefit.
Most users would never actually notice a difference. The technology to go 64-bit on the desktop has been around for a decade, but there has been virtually zero reason to go there and since it has costs it never happened. Now the cost of going 64-bit is so small that "virtually zero reason" is a good enough reason... and the benefits of using the same processor on the desktop, in notebooks and in servers is too great to be ignored.
<strong>
. . . The technology to go 64-bit on the desktop has been around for a decade, but there has been virtually zero reason to go there and since it has costs it never happened. Now the cost of going 64-bit is so small that "virtually zero reason" is a good enough reason... and the benefits of using the same processor on the desktop, in notebooks and in servers is too great to be ignored.
</strong><hr></blockquote>
I'll believe that, and maybe the cost of going 64 bits is less on the 970 PPC then on Intel? Yes, No? Also think of what it does for Apple's image. There are some who will want it just to have the latest and greatest technology.