PowerPC 970 is POWER too

henriokhenriok
Posted:
in Current Mac Hardware edited January 2014
I didn't know this..



According to this press release issued by IBM the PowerPC 970 we have come to love and adore, isn't just a PowerPC-processor. It's also a POWER-processor.



AFAIK this isn't mentioned anyware else before this, and I have looked. What impact this might have on anything I don't know.. IBM is running Linux, AIX and OS/400 on POWER-based machines. AIX and Linux run on PPCs so.. OS/400? Who'd want to run OS/400 on a machine with PowerPC 970?

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 3
    wmfwmf Posts: 1,164member
    It doesn't matter.
  • Reply 2 of 3
    splinemodelsplinemodel Posts: 7,311member
    Last I checked, PPC was a superset of POWER. Moto threw in a bunch of redundant register move instructions, and they are why IBM made the 970 have a crack stage in the pipeline. (i.e. microcode).
  • Reply 3 of 3
    henriokhenriok Posts: 537member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Splinemodel

    Last I checked, PPC was a superset of POWER.



    That's not true. There are several fully compliant 32/64 bit PowerPC chips that not include the POWER-ISA, such as Northstar, Pulsar, I-Star, and S-Star. The POWER-ISA certainly is similar to PowerPC, and it's true that PowerPC is based on the POWER-architecture, but neither is a subset of the other. There are stuff in PowerPC that's not included in POWER and vice versa. The first POWER processor that included the full PowerPC-ISA was the POWER3. And.. since 970 is based on POWER4, it was probable, but not certain, that it also included support for the POWER-ISA. Apparently it does.



    Read more here..
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