Comment Re:1.8ghz in 2003? (Score 1, Interesting) 660
"64 bit is nice, but I doubt the chip will be more powerful than an x86 chip at twice speed."
Where do you get twice the speed? Do you mean twice the _clock speed_? Clock speeds really, really, absolutley, do not determine speed or performance. Did you know that a P4 takes 20 clock cycles to perform a multiply? You can chop up your instructions as much as you want, and increase the clock to hell, but not change performance at all.
The chip IBM is making is a mips based chip, and takes fewer cycles to perform all its instructions. It also has a _ton_ more registers, which means you can perform significant operations without going to or from memory.
Reading or writing a number to memory is about 100 times slower than an arithmatic instruction.
"Nowadays, most CPUs (including x86) have 64bit floating point coprocessors to handle most mathematical code, so 64bit CPUs won't give you much of an improvement there either."
But to use those coprocessors, you have to go into modes like mmx. And bolted on extra instructions like mmx have restrictions on them, like not being to do mmx and floating point math at the same time.
For the future, 64-bit is the way to go, and x86 is not. I think one of these IBM processors will be the ideal linux machine. (It'll be low power too, so I won't need a hairdrier-loud fan like I do with my athlon :) )
Where do you get twice the speed? Do you mean twice the _clock speed_? Clock speeds really, really, absolutley, do not determine speed or performance. Did you know that a P4 takes 20 clock cycles to perform a multiply? You can chop up your instructions as much as you want, and increase the clock to hell, but not change performance at all.
The chip IBM is making is a mips based chip, and takes fewer cycles to perform all its instructions. It also has a _ton_ more registers, which means you can perform significant operations without going to or from memory.
Reading or writing a number to memory is about 100 times slower than an arithmatic instruction.
"Nowadays, most CPUs (including x86) have 64bit floating point coprocessors to handle most mathematical code, so 64bit CPUs won't give you much of an improvement there either."
But to use those coprocessors, you have to go into modes like mmx. And bolted on extra instructions like mmx have restrictions on them, like not being to do mmx and floating point math at the same time.
For the future, 64-bit is the way to go, and x86 is not. I think one of these IBM processors will be the ideal linux machine. (It'll be low power too, so I won't need a hairdrier-loud fan like I do with my athlon
