CPU/Mobo New PowerPC Announcements

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P.A. Semi's major PowerPC announcement, and looking back at The Switch

There have been a few recent PowerPC announcements that have caused the Mac Faithful to wonder anew about The Switch and the "real" reasons behind it. First, there was the 970FX announcement, which clearly showed that IBM is capable of putting out a 970 processor that compares quite well with the Pentium M in performance/watt. And then there's the 970MP, which Apple has used to make a monster of a quad-processor 64-bit RISC workstation. For even the most diehard Jobs fans, both of these product releases, especially when set against Intel's current performance/watt woes, raise serious questions about the public case that Teh Steve made for The Switch.

To make matters even more interesting—or more vexing, if you were one of the true believers in PowerPC's alleged power failure—P.A. Semi has just announced a dual-core 64-bit PowerPC processor SoC that, if the specs and numbers are to be believed, could take PowerPC to a whole new performance/watt level. Check out these stats, distilled from the press release:

* Two 64-bit, superscalar, out-of-order PowerPC processor cores with Altivec/VMX
* Two DDR2 memory controllers (one per core!)
* 2MB shared L2 cache
* I/O unit that has support for: eight PCIe controllers, two 10 Gigabit Ethernet controllers, four Gigabit Ethernet controllers
* 65nm process
* 5-13 watts typical @ 2GHz, depending on the application

Yup, they appear to have crammed all that stuff onto one laptop-capable chip, and it's due out sometime in very late 2006 or early 2007.

Continued at Arstechnica

The PWRficient Architecture at RealWorldTech

65nm fabrication, a DDR2 memory controller PER CORE and 10Gb ethernet? A lot of madness happening here - there's something fishy going on.

 

[KingKrool]

This is a couple of days old (wanted to post it then but the site was giving db errors then).

This thing is cool and proves that powerpc is not dead. In fact, if linux gets more on to the desktop, who knows, you might find desktops based on PowerPC. And besides, I think that Apple might just continue some of their PowerPC based designs...

The cool thing about these is the power... amzing, just 13 Watts - 25 Watts per dual core chip!!! PowerPCs!!!

 

[Aditya]

13 - 25 WATTS????

WTF :|.

I think thats too low .

 

[KingKrool]

Read the article man... and u will see. It can be done. Via's processors run on 2-3 Watts... admittedly they are slow and suck, but still 1Ghz speed (Via C3) is 1 Ghz...