Briefly: Power6, EMI bought out, YouTube on Apple TV
IBM has helped the PowerPC architecture regain some ground lost to Intel with the advent of a new supercomputer-class chip. Meanwhile, new anti-DRM advocate and iTunes partner EMI has agreed to be bought out by a private group. And hobbyists have put YouTube on Apple's network media device.
IBM debuts 4.7GHz Power6
While most chipmakers are stressing the parallelism of many cores in a single chip, IBM on Monday revealed the POWER6, a new dual-core processor that the company boasts as the world's fastest.
The New York state-based firm has used energy optimizations to double the clock speed to an unprecedented 4.7GHz without consuming added power. The chip could also run at the same speed with half the consumption, IBM says.
Its speed is reportedly three times faster in heavy-duty benchmarks than Intel's pure 64-bit Itanium, representing a comeback for the PowerPC architecture from which POWER draws its base. The PowerPC G5 system used in late iMacs and PowerMacs was based on a stripped-down version of the POWER4 introduced first in 2002.
Perhaps fittingly, IBM also compared the 300GB of raw bandwidth available through the POWER6's system bus to an Apple product. The sheer speed was enough to "download the entire iTunes catalog" -- 5 million songs -- in a single minute, according to the company.
EMI bought out, unprotected music remains
In a surprise announcement, EMI said today that the private equity group Terra Firma had successfully won a takeover bid, acquiring the music label for about $4.7 billion.
The terms of the deal gave relief to those worried about an acquisition jeopardizing the safety of its landmark deals to offer music without copy protection through Apple's iTunes and Amazon's unnamed store. The music recording and publishing arms would stay together, Terra Firma said.
And while the deal was still wrapping up as of press time, the deal has also eased concerns that Warner Music would validate seven-year-old rumors of its own buyout attempt of EMI. Warner CEO Edgar Bronfman publicly derided Apple head Steve Jobs for even suggesting the removal of DRM, indicating that any music under his label would have to be sold with anti-piracy measures in place.
Apple Store music playlist revealed
ifo Apple Store has successfully discovered the most recent playlist for Apple's retail outlets, which determines the music that plays in the background of all the company's 180-plus stores. The rotation is said to change every three months to stay current and maintain variety.
Though the 150-song list is dominated by clearly recognizable pop songs found on the iTunes Store from artists such as Gorillaz and U2, the company has also included the occasional independent tracks from slightly more exotic artists such as Mulatu Astatke and They Might Be Giants.
YouTube reaches Apple TV
Nicknamed "A Series of Tubes," a new unofficial plugin for the Apple TV promises to expand the media streaming hub's Internet functionality beyond watching movie trailers and reading Top Ten lists.
Using a combination of RSS news feeds and a Flash player, the Apple device can access any of the most recently spotlighted YouTube clips as well as the most commented-on or viewed movies from any given month or week.
The modification is just the latest in a series of unofficial add-ons for the device, which trickled out almost immediately after the device appeared in mid-March.
The Apple TV hobbyist website AwkwardTV is said to be receiving the YouTube extension in its plugin directory soon. In the meantime, view a brief movie demonstrating the software below.
IBM debuts 4.7GHz Power6
While most chipmakers are stressing the parallelism of many cores in a single chip, IBM on Monday revealed the POWER6, a new dual-core processor that the company boasts as the world's fastest.
The New York state-based firm has used energy optimizations to double the clock speed to an unprecedented 4.7GHz without consuming added power. The chip could also run at the same speed with half the consumption, IBM says.
Its speed is reportedly three times faster in heavy-duty benchmarks than Intel's pure 64-bit Itanium, representing a comeback for the PowerPC architecture from which POWER draws its base. The PowerPC G5 system used in late iMacs and PowerMacs was based on a stripped-down version of the POWER4 introduced first in 2002.
Perhaps fittingly, IBM also compared the 300GB of raw bandwidth available through the POWER6's system bus to an Apple product. The sheer speed was enough to "download the entire iTunes catalog" -- 5 million songs -- in a single minute, according to the company.
EMI bought out, unprotected music remains
In a surprise announcement, EMI said today that the private equity group Terra Firma had successfully won a takeover bid, acquiring the music label for about $4.7 billion.
The terms of the deal gave relief to those worried about an acquisition jeopardizing the safety of its landmark deals to offer music without copy protection through Apple's iTunes and Amazon's unnamed store. The music recording and publishing arms would stay together, Terra Firma said.
And while the deal was still wrapping up as of press time, the deal has also eased concerns that Warner Music would validate seven-year-old rumors of its own buyout attempt of EMI. Warner CEO Edgar Bronfman publicly derided Apple head Steve Jobs for even suggesting the removal of DRM, indicating that any music under his label would have to be sold with anti-piracy measures in place.
Apple Store music playlist revealed
ifo Apple Store has successfully discovered the most recent playlist for Apple's retail outlets, which determines the music that plays in the background of all the company's 180-plus stores. The rotation is said to change every three months to stay current and maintain variety.
Though the 150-song list is dominated by clearly recognizable pop songs found on the iTunes Store from artists such as Gorillaz and U2, the company has also included the occasional independent tracks from slightly more exotic artists such as Mulatu Astatke and They Might Be Giants.
YouTube reaches Apple TV
Nicknamed "A Series of Tubes," a new unofficial plugin for the Apple TV promises to expand the media streaming hub's Internet functionality beyond watching movie trailers and reading Top Ten lists.
Using a combination of RSS news feeds and a Flash player, the Apple device can access any of the most recently spotlighted YouTube clips as well as the most commented-on or viewed movies from any given month or week.
The modification is just the latest in a series of unofficial add-ons for the device, which trickled out almost immediately after the device appeared in mid-March.
The Apple TV hobbyist website AwkwardTV is said to be receiving the YouTube extension in its plugin directory soon. In the meantime, view a brief movie demonstrating the software below.
Comments
2) I have a feeling that Apple's contract is tight enough to not affect the deal with EMI.
3) Excellent work with the YouTube plugin for AppleTV.
Hey, who uses the ppc chips now that apple doesnt? I heard something about sony or xbox, but i wasnt sure.
Nintendo and Microsoft for the Wii and XBOX(360), respectfully. The XBOX360 uses 3 PPCs and requires no incremental updates or advances, like Apple constantly wanted.
The PS3 uses a Cell processor jointly developed by Sony, Toshiba, and IBM.
"The chip could also run at the same speed with half the consumption, IBM says." Then why not just save electricity and just run it at half consumption?
damn, i want a power6 processor. i can see why apple switched to intel, but those power6s processors have been sounding pretty sweet to me.
You are aware that these POWER5/6 cpu's are not the same as the G4 and G5's, are you?
As mentioned in this article, Apple used different, stripped down versions and never used these processors which are only meant for big mainframes. They are not used in any desktop machine and with power consumptions like 170 Watt you can forget any laptop use. Let alone that even the Mac Mini would start at about $11,000 if these processors would be used.
It sounds nice but this news has little to do with Apple or the decision to switch to Intel.
POWER6 (like POWER5 and POWER4 before) are mainframe-class chips. They sport very high speeds, but at an extremely high cost, and with high power consumption. Giving the pricing, cooling, and power requirements of desktop systems (not to mention laptops), there is no way this chip will ever make its way out of the machine room.
Everybody (including Apple) knew all about POWER4 and 5 when Apple made the decision to move to Intel. None of it mattered, because IBM wouldn't put all that tech into the PPC (the consumer version of the architecture) without Apple paying all of IBM's R&D costs. And given the G5's track record, I doubt it would ever run cool enough to go in a laptop or iMac or mini.
POWER6 is lapping Intel, POWER5+ was already way ahead. This just makes Intel's Itanium efforts look weak.
The last CPU to lap other architectures was the DEC Alpha, when it went to EV6.
Figures?
http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/p/hard.../perfdata.html
8 core SPEC CPU2006 INT Rates
240 ___ IBM: 4.7Ghz POWER6
108 ___ HP: 3 GHz AMD Opteron 8222SE, DDR2 667
102 ___ HP: 1.6GHz/24MB Dual-Core, Intel Itanium 2
91.2 ___ Fujitsu Siemens: 2.66 GHz Intel QC Xeon processor X5355, FSB 1.333
81.6 ___ Sun: 2.15 GHz SPARC IV (Fujitsu)
8 core SPEC CPU2006 FP Rates
213 ___ IBM: 4.7Ghz POWER6
98.7 ___ HP: 3 GHz AMD Opteron 8222SE, DDR2 667
90.8 ___ HP: 1.6GHz/18MB Dual-Core, Intel Itanium 2
70.9 ___ Sun: 2.15 GHz SPARC IV (Fujitsu)
60.9 ___ Fujitsu Siemens: 2.66 GHz Intel QC Xeon processor X5355, FSB 1.333
58.2 ___ Bull: 3.4 GHz Intel Tulsa, FSB 800, 16MB L3
(Opteron ain't doing so badly for having a total of 8MB L2, compare that to the 96MB L2 the Itanium 2 system has; the 32MB L2 & 128MB L3 the POWER6 has is used well though, the SPEC rate 2006 scaling is near 100% per doubling of cores)
Of course this ain't for your common garden workstation system, this is going to run Oracle or simulations in high end compute supercomputers.
Nintendo and Microsoft for the Wii and XBOX(360), respectfully. .
Its "respectively", not "respectfully".
Even if it meant an extension of the PPC line, I think it was still smart to dump the arch. There are still some hangers-on but I think the G5 PPC was a mistake of an architecture and the PowerMac G5s were irritating in too many respects, I'm glad I don't have one by my desk anymore.
In a surprise announcement, EMI said today that the private equity group Terra Firma had successfully won a takeover bid, acquiring the music label for about $4.7 billion.
This is looks like a terribly overvalued deal..... this is a company whose stock has fallen by half since early 2002, has seen declining sales, and falling/volatile profits (indeed, losses recently).
They made less than $90 million last year (and will make probably less this year), and some private equity genius is willing to pay $4,700 million!?
Wow, private equity is beginning to scrape the bottom of the barrel.
Its "respectively", not "respectfully".
its is it's. We all make mistakes and spell checker isn't infallible. No need to post a reply to comment soley on grammar.
its is it's. We all make mistakes and spell checker isn't infallible. No need to post a reply to comment soley on grammar.
I like how IBM compares the features to the G5 and current Apple products as if Apple is going to come back.
"The chip could also run at the same speed with half the consumption, IBM says." Then why not just save electricity and just run it at half consumption?
IBM technology is meaningless to most people now. Even the games consoles are struggling. The Xbox 360 runs too hot, the PS3 isn't delivering the performance they were hoping and the Wii is almost just a Gamecube.
Now is the time to develop a games machine that is designed to run standard PC games using a Core 2 Quad CPU. Instant catalogue of cheap games and guaranteed future support. You wouldn't need Windows completely, just the bits that PC games need.
The POWER 6 part of the story really has nothing to do with Apple. It's not the same type of chip and Apple never used a POWER chip in any shipping product.
Even if it meant an extension of the PPC line, I think it was still smart to dump the arch. There are still some hangers-on but I think the G5 PPC was a mistake of an architecture and the PowerMac G5s were irritating in too many respects, I'm glad I don't have one by my desk anymore.
Yeah. I'm fairly certain my 1st Gen MBP is faster than my 2.0Ghz Dual G5 (also 1st Gen) was. I'm glad I dumped it off. And even if the laptop isnt as fast, it is close enough, and portable. Switch to Intel was a good thing.
This is looks like a terribly overvalued deal..... this is a company whose stock has fallen by half since early 2002, has seen declining sales, and falling/volatile profits (indeed, losses recently).
They made less than $90 million last year (and will make probably less this year), and some private equity genius is willing to pay $4,700 million!?
Wow, private equity is beginning to scrape the bottom of the barrel.
Yes, because private equity firms are run by people who are so stupid, they have no problem spending 4.7 billion dollars on a company. Obviously they need to hire you and they would actually have tons of money at their disposal.
Or perhaps they see more to EMI then just what they made last year.
Yeah. I'm fairly certain my 1st Gen MBP is faster than my 2.0Ghz Dual G5 (also 1st Gen) was. I'm glad I dumped it off. And even if the laptop isnt as fast, it is close enough, and portable. Switch to Intel was a good thing.
Word. Screw IBM. The had their chance, they blew it, they can go back to making the BIGGEST FASTEST OMFG MOST AWESOME CHIP ON THE PLANET. And people that need it, more power (heh, pun unintended) to them. As for the "rest of us", the Core2Duo is kickass. Reallly.
Yes, because private equity firms are run by people who are so stupid, they have no problem spending 4.7 billion dollars on a company. Obviously they need to hire you and they would actually have tons of money at their disposal.
Or perhaps they see more to EMI then just what they made last year.
Maybe.
But I doubt it. (Altho, I don't think they are stupid ones, as much as the people feeding them the debt to do this buyout are; and that is your typical local banker).