2005 Good Year for Power Architecture 181
An anonymous reader wrote to mention an IBM article looking back on what the piece calls the best year ever for the Power Architecture. From the article: "While IBM is considered by many to be an 800lb. gorilla, in the microelectronics space, it is actually very small -- last year IBM was way down at number 21 on the iSuppli list of the top 25 semiconductor suppliers worldwide. Now, that isn't necessarily a bad thing: for instance, it means that IBM Semiconductor solutions is small and nimble and competitive -- and this agility (coupled with the fact that we do get to share Research and some other resources with the parts of IBM that are 800lb. gorillas) has led some to predict that the IBM chips division will be named the fastest growing semiconductor supplier of 2005. In fact, there is a very good chance that IBM may regain the coveted #18 spot on iSuppli's list this year!"
spot 18 (Score:5, Insightful)
Whats so special about spot 18?
Re:spot 18 (Score:5, Funny)
It's twice nine which is a magic number because it's three threes.
KFG
Re:spot 18 (Score:4, Funny)
It's barely legal.
Re:spot 18 (Score:2)
Re:spot 18 (Score:2)
Eighteen is eight, eight is five, five is four.
Four is cosmic.
IBM Article By IBM (Score:1, Informative)
Re:IBM Article By IBM (Score:2, Funny)
. .
A story about corporate blogging just two stories ago; and now a practical demonstration of astroturfing a public forum.
Happy New Year, same as the old.
KFG
Re:IBM Article By IBM (Score:5, Insightful)
Now, it may not seem newsworthy to some to put a navel gazing press release up on the front page, but some will find it interesting to get a glimpse of part of IBM's internal workings. Take it or leave it, the article is not some kind of Google ranking ploy.
Re:IBM Article By IBM (Score:2)
From TFA: "Last year we attempted to sum up the whole of the microprocessor news for the year and were accused by some (*cough* Slashdot readers *cough*) of being biased."
Trying to make themselves feel better (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Trying to make themselves feel better (Score:1)
Re:Trying to make themselves feel better (Score:2)
Think of it like the 68k to PPC switch of the 90s for apple. This is a migration.
Re:Trying to make themselves feel better (Score:2)
Re:Trying to make themselves feel better (Score:2)
Rosetta developers docs [apple.com]
Re:Trying to make themselves feel better (Score:2)
Re:Trying to make themselves feel better (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Trying to make themselves feel better (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Trying to make themselves feel better (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Trying to make themselves feel better (Score:2)
Re:Trying to make themselves feel better (Score:2)
Re:Trying to make themselves feel better (Score:2)
Now Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo may have potentially larger markets, but right now Apple is still shipping more G5s than Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo combined, that and each G5 is higher margin than a Cell based CPU.
Re:Trying to make themselves feel better (Score:2)
Consider the masive number of systems MS will be shiping in 1Q05 -- surely the CPUs for those systems are long since bought and paid for.
Re:Trying to make themselves feel better (Score:2)
1Q06 of course.
Re:Trying to make themselves feel better (Score:4, Insightful)
Now Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo may have potentially larger markets, but right now Apple is still shipping more G5s than Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo combined, that and each G5 is higher margin than a Cell based CPU."
Ok, I don't know where you get 400k. I hope that you are correct, but from what I here there will be around 3 million 360's sold by July of this year if they hold their current pace. Now as far as PS3's go, it would be a fair estimate to say that they will be close to their 90 million PS2's sold in 5 years. So lets just say they average 10 million a year for the next 5 years of PS3's. Now you also didn't mention all the hub manufacturers out there like Cisco. They also use power chips. When you start to add it up, the loss of Apple for the gain of Microsoft and Sony was huge win for IBM.
So in short Apple switching to Intel is a small loss for power, BUT there are some serious advantages now for Power as well. Microsoft and Sony will not require a new fab to be built for ~5 years! Cisco cares about the performance of the Power chip, but they care more about the power consumption. Intel on the other hand needs to focus on mobile chips, desktop chips and server chips. They will need to build their 65nm fabs as fast as possible then spend billions on the next version. Granted Intel spends around 10Billion a year in R&D so they can handle it as long as Wintel desktops keep selling like they do.
Now the real quesiton is why did Apple switch? This is off topic, but it doesn't make sense that they switched to a 32bit chip FROM a 64bit chip. Now if they would have switched to x86-64, that would have made better sense. I do feel for all those poor saps who are going to buy PPC or X86 Mac in the next year or so. I feel for them because I went through the 68k to PPC migraiton and bought all the load of crap that Apple fed back then. It is the same load of crap they are trying to spin today.... fat binaries.... blah blah blah. The truth is that if you go with a new X86 machine a bunch of your old stuff will not work and you will be praying that someone will code a new version that works as well as your old one did. Now after this painfull migration is over in a couple of years and if Apple moves to X86-64, then they will probably be better off. They just better pray (not that many in Apple belive in God), that sales of their Ipod don't faulter.
Apple has some other issues that they need to address. One is their view of open source. They use it a TON in their OS yet their sales guys go around and bash it whenever they get a chance. The next is their view on technologies such as Java. Again their sales guys go around and bash it, yet all their Java apps will not need to be ported to this new architecture. One sales guy just recently said to me that he would NEVER load any JVM on his system because he hates slow Java applications. I then informed him that it was loaded by default. He smiled and told me he knew that and he was "just kidding", but I have to wonder how many poor saps he talks to that don't know that and then repeat the same crap he just said. Lastly, and perhaps the biggest issue is why on earth would our development shop write software for X86 Macintosh? Lets look at the marketshare as it is and as it will be for the next few years. What percentage of all new desktops do you believe will be running X86 OSX?
I
Re:Trying to make themselves feel better (Score:2)
And? I fail to see your point, there is not much difference with IBM which sells servers chips too and embedded chips which cover a wide range of usage.
For the off-topic part about Apple:
1) I don't understand why Apple made the switch too.
2) you say it like not beleiving in God is a problem for me it is an intelligence sign.
3) Free software such as Linux is a competitor so why wouldn't they bash it if they get a chan
Re:Trying to make themselves feel better (Score:3, Insightful)
What I mean by this is that Intel has to additionally focus on desktop performance against AMD. IBM does not need to worry about this market. This market has razor thin margins that only can be maintained by enormous sales. Quite a few people believe that this market is going away, or at best has leveled off and will not grow significantly.
"you say it like not beleiving in God is a problem for me it is an intelligenc
Re:Trying to make themselves feel better (Score:2)
I have 3 PowerPC Macs. I know the x86 transition is coming, so I've put a total freeze on buying any software that isn't available as an x86 fat binary.
If Adobe want me to buy a Photoshop upgrade, they'll get Photoshop running on x86. Because if they don't, I won't buy the upgrade, even if I don't have an x86 Mac yet. Because I know that sooner or later, I will have, and I want all my s
Re:Trying to make themselves feel better (Score:2)
I disagree. If Windows will boot on a Mac like so many think it will, and if Wine for OSX really takes off amonst Mac users, a lot of companies aren't going to bother with an OSX-86 version of their software. Especially with OSX-86 having a tiny marketshare for its first couple of years. They'll just tell the Mac users to boot into Windows or run it under emulation. It could ve
Re:Trying to make themselves feel better (Score:2, Insightful)
Or do you think the Apple folks *like* to be hopelessly behind when it comes to portable computing power?
(And, yes, I too hate the fact that they switch. Now I'll be in the same boat with the Gigahertz bean counters
Re:Trying to make themselves feel better (Score:3, Insightful)
There's a reason that doesn't make sense: it probably isn't happening. Yes, Intel does make 32-bit chips, but most (all?) of its recent chips have 64-bit extensions. It's entirely possible, and I would say also quite likely, that Apple will restrict itself to the subset of Intel chips that have 64-bit capabilities. It's the only sane thing to do, and as f
Re:Trying to make themselves feel better (Score:2)
This doesn't maean that you are incorrect, it just means that they have been working on a 32bit X86 version for YEARS.
Re:Trying to make themselves feel better (Score:2)
Re:Trying to make themselves feel better (Score:2)
Re:Trying to make themselves feel better (Score:2)
64-bit is currently a non-factor for the Mac market, and will be until OSX 10.5 comes out. Right now the OS is still primarily 32-bit only (Only Unix Deamons can run 64-bit), and every commercial application except one is 32-bit.
The thing that didn't make sense was hyping "64-bit" support on the G5 chips without the software to back it up. They probably regret that now, because even though the userbase is runnin
Re:Trying to make themselves feel better (Score:2)
Re:Trying to make themselves feel better (Score:2)
Re:Trying to make themselves feel better (Score:2)
Over 1 million Macs in the last quarter, 600k of them IBM supplied. Which means in a healthy year (it it looks to be shaping into one), Apple will ship over 2 million G5 based Macs in the next year, making them nearly as large a customer as Microsoft, and when you factor in that the G5 is probably a higher margin part for IBM than the Xenon (though no guarantees), it would seem to place Apple in the same ballpark as Mi
Re:Trying to make themselves feel better (Score:2)
Re:Trying to make themselves feel better (Score:2)
(Anyone know if the Xbox360 dev kit uses GCC?)
You left out the Revolution. Wich is also a powerp (Score:2)
Re:Trying to make themselves feel better (Score:2)
Xbox 360 and PS3 customers will see some amazing games running on native HDTV output. Everyone looks a bit deeper will see it runs on PowerPC architecture.
Most important of all, I am writing this as an Apple customer here, there are no PCs here. Steve Jobs made me so mad saying lies about Power architecture so I write like a Dell g
Re:Trying to make themselves feel better (Score:2)
PowerPC is huge on server,embedded and various platforms. http://www.power.org/ [power.org]
It is a "architecture committee" in fact. It is not only IBM. IBM makes better publicity.
I just didn't like Steve Jobs making funny face when he said "I promised 3 ghz". Yes he promised but a RISC CPU obviously have problems with high speeds. A computer legend like Steve Jobs knows Mhz is NOTHING in this time.
It is all what performance you get from professionally coded, optimised ap
Re:Trying to make themselves feel better (Score:2)
Re:Trying to make themselves feel better (Score:4, Informative)
IBM won't be hurting by loosing Apple, neither will PPC. I am a bit sad to loose the only "mainstream" consumer-level PPC hardware, but there are some smaller PPC manufacturers such as Genesi to provide for the hardcore PPC fan market.
Subtle sense of sarcasm? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Subtle sense of sarcasm? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Subtle sense of sarcasm? (Score:2)
Apple shipped over 600k G5 desktops last quarter; Microsoft shipped only 400k XBox 360s this Christmas. Apple probably also shipped another 600k G5 desktops in the same period Microsoft shipped their consoles.
So right now Apple ships more high margin units than Microsoft does. Maybe by next march that will shift when Sony unleashes the PS3, but if it's only Microsoft vs Apple, Apple is still the bigger customer!
Re:Subtle sense of sarcasm? (Score:3, Interesting)
There's another issue. Desktop systems use a whole range of chips, including last year's model and the latest and greatest. Next year MS will be using the same chip they did this year.
Re:Subtle sense of sarcasm? (Score:2)
Re:Subtle sense of sarcasm? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Subtle sense of sarcasm? (Score:3, Interesting)
Of course it's nothing to laugh at, but it's a totally different market than the desktop CPU.
Re:Subtle sense of sarcasm? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Subtle sense of sarcasm? (Score:2)
Re:Subtle sense of sarcasm? (Score:3, Interesting)
The R&D for fabs must still be done for IBM's own POWER and joint venture with AMD but there is a client less to recoup the cost.
I always find it funny that IBM's say that they don't care about Apple because it was a low volume client, I bet that they don't sell that many high-end POWER CPU too, compared to the number of PPC micro-controllers sold, yet investements for the high-end tech is impor
Re:Subtle sense of sarcasm? (Score:2)
Just because a console is (arguably) sold at a loss doesn't mean the individual component manufacturers are selling the parts for a loss. Usually quite the opposite.
Re:Subtle sense of sarcasm? (Score:2)
If Microsoft sells a $600 console for $400, and that $600 console is compared to a $1300 computer, it would make sense that the components chosen for that console are cheaper than that for the computer, right? Especially if Apple's historic 20%-ish margin applies, so that the $1300 computer really costs Apple $1000, then taking out the $200 or so for the LCD to make the systems comparable, Apple's parts must cost Apple more than Microsoft's parts cost Microsoft.
This is even bigger when yo
Re:Subtle sense of sarcasm? (Score:2)
Sure Power is used elsewhere, but we're not talking about those since theyre like change. Recently consoles have exceeded the average desktop in cpu power, and since the CPUs for both consoles are 'specialized' or highly customized, I imagine the margins are higher than if they were run of the mill G5. For Apple machines the chips we
Re:Subtle sense of sarcasm? (Score:2)
Still, of the three consoles you mentioned, only one is out in 2005, at a trickle rate, not much of a win for Power or PPC this year.
Apple isn't that far behind. Apple sold something like 5 million Macs in 2005.
Mod "Ignorant" - 4.5 million macs in 2005 alone (Score:3, Interesting)
That's just 2005, in 2004 it was something like 3-4 million - and they've been selling PPC computers for a lot longer than two years.
Between the PS3 and the 360 there probably will be ten million chips going out next year, I'm just saying Apples contribution is not as insignificant as you make it sound. And even though Macs are moving to Intel next year they'll still be selling Quad G5's for some time.
Re:Subtle sense of sarcasm? (Score:2)
A pity really... I'd love to see a dual MPC8641D (dual core G4) in the retail marketplace and more of the PPC970MP as well. They are both great processors that few have used to their full potential.
Printers (Score:5, Interesting)
Nope, Cars (Score:2)
Good link. (Score:2)
So much the silly idea of Apple being the largest PPC customer.
frankly, with all of the growth opportunities that we have in front of us, it was not a good use of our resources to try to defend half a percent market share, which is how much desktop we have against Intel."
Re:Nope, Cars (Score:2)
3 or 4 Power chips is about right; I forget if the 5/7 series use an integrated PCM or not - expect one doing telematics, one doing chassis control, and one doing ECM. If its seperate TCM/ECU, stick 2 Power chips in there.
Re:Printers (Score:2)
It could also be a disaster if Mac users find themselves spending a lot of time in Windows. If a lot of Apple customers start dual booting, what incentive is there for companies to port their Windows software over to OSX-86? And if a lot of Mac users find themselves in Windows more, then why pay the Apple tax?
Quotes (Score:2)
Re:Subtle sense of sarcasm? (Score:5, Insightful)
Umm, no, Apple was never anywhere near their biggest customer. Apple was only notable for building PCs with power chips, but the vast majority of power chips never went into PCs. Apple was a rather small customer, and one that was constantly demanding special treatment.
Re:Subtle sense of sarcasm? (Score:2)
Well, yeah, because the PPC processors they used were custom models made just for them.
IBM is huge, of course. But regardless of size, a customer that costs more than they pay is something any business will happily give up. I'm NOT privy to the details, but the rumours were that IBM was barely making money on Apple, and actually makes higher margins (after R
800lb. gorillas building processors (Score:1)
Re:800lb. gorillas building processors (Score:2, Funny)
Nah, they're busy writing Shakespeare, remember?
Re:800lb. gorillas building processors (Score:1)
Am I alone in thinking that... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Am I alone in thinking that... (Score:2)
Re:Am I alone in thinking that... (Score:2)
Re:Am I alone in thinking that... (Score:2)
Losing customers (Score:1)
Re:Losing customers (Score:2)
It's quite possible that the XBox 360 and the Revolution totally tank, which isn't good for IBM. It's not unlikely, given past performance, that only one of the three consoles really takes off; then couple that with the low margin, high volume characteristics that describe the console market, vs the low volume but high margin characteristics that describe the Apple market.
Re:Losing customers (Score:2)
indeed but it seems to me power owns the next generation console market whoever wins.
Re:Losing customers (Score:2)
Re:Losing customers (Score:2)
There is no immediate push for the chip to be faster, smaller, lower power consumption, etc.
Don't get me wrong, I'm sure there will be incremental improvements in the processors used over the lifetime of the XBox 360 production schedule. But it won't be an absolute necessity.
It should be far easier for IBM to plan the production of the chips to coincide with demand for the XBox360.
Re:Losing customers (Score:2)
Re:Losing customers (Score:3, Insightful)
Last time I checked... (Score:1, Funny)
Yes, 2005 was the best year - when Power went ... (Score:1)
The world is too complex for this rating system (Score:2, Insightful)
IBM 2-0 for 2005 (Score:3, Insightful)
Apple, in the meantime gets Intel, where they're not even close to being the big I's largest customer, and have only their prestige to trade for favors (compared to Dell, whose Intel loyalty is beyond understanding these days).
Re:IBM 2-0 for 2005 (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:IBM 2-0 for 2005 - Microsoft ain't stupid (Score:2)
Let's see. It would have been work. And it would have broken compatibility with every older computer in user's hands each time Microsoft did this. End of operating systems upgrades for all those users. I'll bet Microsoft considers this a problem, even if you don't. And keeping track of all the different Windows versions for each new Intel update wouldn't be easy either.
Besides, just how usefu
Re:IBM 2-0 for 2005 - Microsoft ain't stupid (Score:2)
You missed one. They also moved from 68008 24-bit addressing to 68020/30/40 clean 32-bit addressing,
Re:IBM 2-0 for 2005 (Score:2)
Well, I am a G5 1600 user converting to dual G5 2700 soon myself.
BTW, to check PowerPC stuff , check http://www.power.org/ [power.org] , better news there. Better than this PR thing. From Power committee. (official)
(posting with karma bonus for obvious reasons)
Small? (Score:5, Funny)
in the microelectronics space, it is actually very small
I thought everything in the microelectronics space was very small...
Re:Small? (Score:2, Funny)
It was a pretty good year for Sparc too... (Score:4, Interesting)
Personally I thought it was a particularly good year for Sun's Sparc processors - see this Forrester research article [forrester.com] for example. Here are some recent Sun SPECjbb performance benchmarks [sun.com] against IBM's Power P5.
But since Sun isn't a leading Linux advocate, I don't expect them to get Slashdot front page coverage like IBM seems to...
800 lb Gorilla? (Score:3, Funny)
Times certainly have changed.
Re:800 lb Gorilla? (Score:2)
Biggie Size me.
IBM doesn't produce a lot of what they design (Score:2)
Re:See, good move apple! (Score:3, Interesting)
Motorola/Freescale G4
IBM G5
Intel x86
They can choose the best CPU for their needs.
What's so idiotic about that?
Re:See, good move apple! (Score:3, Insightful)
Nor were they forced to support IBM; they chose IBM for the G5 and dropped IBM for the G3.
The only CPU they are 'forced' to support is Motorola, because they don't have a replacement for the G4, until Intel.
Apple has a choice; they decided, two years ago, to go with IBM instead of Intel or AMD, though that choice existed too.
Today Apple decided to support x86, instead of AMD or IB
Re:See, good move apple! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:See, good move apple! (Score:2)