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IBM opens up Power chips, ARM-style, to take on Chipzilla

theregister.co.uk

71–80 of 96 posts

Re: IBM opens up Power chips, ARM-style, to take on Chipzilla

#71
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Mostly harmless." For some reason that was the first thing that came to mind, reading your comment ;-)

Motorola thought it was going to take over the world. Our company made a desktop environment for Unix so all the vendors would send us their equipment to port to. At one point I counted over 20 different versions of Unix and associated hardware. We even had a Sony Workstation. The M88K system had big vertically stackable blocks with ribbon cable connectors at the back between the units for power and data. [1] [2] One…

Thanks for sharing this. The machine looks like something out of an alternative future...

Re: IBM opens up Power chips, ARM-style, to take on Chipzilla

#72
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ARM chips outsell x86 chips by at least a factor of two, and I'm pretty sure more than that. For each Intel desktop/laptop there are twenty ARM chips in microwaves, cars and airplanes. In the beginning it had a lot to do with toolchain support, these days I think it's a combination of force of habit and the fact that you can fry an egg on an x86 floating point unit.

From what I know of the space, ARM is not used very much at all in cars or aviation. These are both areas where PowerPC dominates. I'd guess most modern cars have at least a dozen PowerPC chips. And both ARM and PowerPC outsel x86 by a hell of a lot more than a factor of 2. It's at least a factor of 10, and that's almost certainly low too. x86, in terms of units sold, is an extremely small market.

at first, I took factor 10 for a binary joke :)

Re: IBM opens up Power chips, ARM-style, to take on Chipzilla

#73
post #2

"With its embedded Power chip business under assault from makers of ARM and x86 processors" I didn't know Power chip business still existed.

ARM chips outsell x86 chips by at least a factor of two, and I'm pretty sure more than that. For each Intel desktop/laptop there are twenty ARM chips in microwaves, cars and airplanes. In the beginning it had a lot to do with toolchain support, these days I think it's a combination of force of habit and the fact that you can fry an egg on an x86 floating point unit.

More like a factor of 10.

Re: IBM opens up Power chips, ARM-style, to take on Chipzilla

#74
post #2

"With its embedded Power chip business under assault from makers of ARM and x86 processors" I didn't know Power chip business still existed.

Last I heard (it's been about a year since I looked into numbers), Power/PPC chips appeared to be outselling x86 chips by a substantial margin with the caveat that it's hard to come by numbers from the "smaller" x86 vendors (like Via) that might very well be selling larger numbers than expected of the low end alternatives but at much lower prices and margins and so fly under the radar.

x86 is likely something like the 4th or 5th largest chip architecture by volume shipped today. Last estimate I've seen was in the 360 million range per year, maybe as high as 400 million.

That's after ARM, likely to ship 3 billion this year, MIPS and PPC probably in the 500+ million range each unless there's been massive unexpected changes over the last year.

X86 gets all the attention because it's on desktops and in laptops and because Intel is disproportionally important because their revenue is several times that of any other CPU manufacturer because nobody else ships nearly as many high end chips (e.g this puts Intel at 7 times Qualcomm, at second place, in revenue from CPU/MPU's last year: http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/cpu/display/20130521205843_Inte... )

And for the surprise contender, it is unclear where the 6502 architecture falls: It ships in "hundreds of millions" a year according to Western Design Centre). Note that this might very well largely be in the form of licenses for embedding the cores in custom ASICs or in FPGAs, so whether you'd want to count that is another matter (as an example, some Amiga's had keyboards with an embedded 6502 core + PROM and a tiny amount of RAM). It's possible that some of the other extremely low end 8-bit CPU cores that are still being used as micro-controllers might also ship volumes like that.

I've seen no indication that Sparc is anywhere in the running

Re: IBM opens up Power chips, ARM-style, to take on Chipzilla

#75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is the execution that counts. The world could use a third mass architecture. Especially one that is not too tightly IP locked. The whole web 0.1, 1.0,2.0 came from the fact that PC clones were everywhere.

Its not clear if it is third or fourth now. MIPS may be third after ARM.

Depends if you count by revenue, or by units.

In shipped units, MIPS is quite likely either second after ARM, or third after ARM and PPC.

MIPS was estimating an expected 500 million units for last year, I believe - I don't know if they met it. PPC has been estimated in the same ballpark.

Unless Via's x86 sales are far higher than expected, x86 is likely below 400 million units shipped a year.

Re: IBM opens up Power chips, ARM-style, to take on Chipzilla

#76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its not clear if it is third or fourth now. MIPS may be third after ARM.

It really depends on whether your counting number of chips or dollars in sales. POWER chips sell at a premium inside high end enterprise systems, while MIPS is embedded in lots of places like handheld consoles and routers for more chips sold but for less money.

The high end POWER chips from IBM makes up a miniscule fraction of the overall Power/PPC market in terms of units. PPC sells in comparable unit numbers to MIPS, but mostly from architecture licensees like Freescale.

Re: IBM opens up Power chips, ARM-style, to take on Chipzilla

#77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those post-date the G5 by several years, though. Things had gotten better for POWER by then, but it had already lost much of its market.

Kindof true. I'd forgotten how much of a Mhz bump the P6 was -- It came out 12 months after the first intel Mac Pro (and ran at 4.7Ghz at the high end). The P5 was a contemporary of the G5 (although the G5 was really a P4). But it wasn't quite the beast the P6 was.

And the G5 (the PPC 970 in IBM's nomenclature) was an "ultra-light" POWER4 — the POWER5 was ~30% quicker than the G5. POWER never really fell behind at the high end — there was just no real focus on anything except the high-end.

Re: IBM opens up Power chips, ARM-style, to take on Chipzilla

#78
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work in automotive software, and PowerPC CPUs (albeit from Freescale and STMicroelectronics, not IBM) are more popular than ever. It's a very common choice for powertrain ECUs.

Big in avionics for some reason too. Wasn't it the F/22 which received an upgraded PPC that was in the news a while back?

It's also in the Airbus A400M, and other Airbus vehicles.

Re: IBM opens up Power chips, ARM-style, to take on Chipzilla

#79
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Next couple of years are going to be interesting. Intels been winning for so long that it seems that theyre immune to the innovators dilemna. Will be interesting to see if the arm platform will break into the mainstream of desktop / server computing or if Intel will prevail and have 80% of the desktop and mobile market.

How good is ARM at running just generic ARM binaries? There are all the custom hardware parts, we can ignore them, but can I build a 32bit ARM binary that will run on a wide range of ARM cores with good/great performance? Historically, it has been my experience that pretty much all the non-x86 platforms the compiler and hardware specific optimizations tend to have a pretty dramatic impact. Intel just has so much code…

Historically the big thing has been the variety of floating point units — nowadays VFP3 is pretty much a de-facto standard on the high-end ARM chips (it's required from Cortex-A8 onwards in the application profile), and what's done on Android (where you have a huge diversity of hardware, some with FPUs, some without) where performance matters is you ship one hardfloat binary and one softfloat binary.

Re: IBM opens up Power chips, ARM-style, to take on Chipzilla

#80

I would love to see a Rasperry Pi type device with a PPC chip on it, a 603e equivalent for example, or even better, a 7400 series "G4" chip.

The problem is that the PPC's with decent performance are ludicrously expensive in small volumes - you can "easily" spend $1000 for relatively anaemic PPC models, so a manufacturer would need to either be able to bet big, or costs are going to be crazy. ARM is much simpler in that respect because of the much wider choice in manufacturers targeting the low end of the market.
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