I assume this is mostly targeted at the very high-end - servers and super-computers and such.
The vast majority of Power Architecture CPU's, by units shipped, go into lower end devices, so I'm not so sure that's the only area they'd target.
IBM opens up Power chips, ARM-style, to take on Chipzilla
81–90 of 96 posts
Re: IBM opens up Power chips, ARM-style, to take on Chipzilla
#82Earlier 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.
any particular reason? error rate, power use, ?
The ISA is not better than others in any real way, but IBM put a lot of early work into RAS features for their server chipsets, and this sort of leaked into the automotive and aviation world.
If you want to run 3 cpus lockstep, verifying each other's results, the PPC world already has the infrastructure. This and other similar things make it an easy choice for some applications.
Re: IBM opens up Power chips, ARM-style, to take on Chipzilla
#83"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.
Not so much in cars and airplanes, but somewhat ironically, a typical x86 pc has many more ARM cores than it has x86 cores. My hard drive has 3 arm cores, my ssd has 2, my sound chip has one, my network chip has one...
Re: IBM opens up Power chips, ARM-style, to take on Chipzilla
#84Earlier 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…
ARM realized that this was a problem when they got into smartphones, and while the lineup was a total and complete mess in 2008, their modern high-end chips actually provide a pretty uniform experience.
The half-watt microcontroller replacements still need custom builds, but the chips used in top-line smartphones can now all run the same compiled OS and apps. They are going to do a 64-bit transition soon, it will be very interesting how that will turn out.
Re: IBM opens up Power chips, ARM-style, to take on Chipzilla
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
>The whole web 0.1, 1.0,2.0 came from the fact that PC clones were everywhere. Can you explain that? Because I cannot make any sense out of it.
Cheap IBM PC clones make possible having a lot more computing devices in every home, which allowed the dot com boom in the late 90's. The clones were possible because IBM due to various business, legal and other stuff could not stamp them down. So we got to the point where computing penetration was fast and high enough for the whole net thing to make sense.
Well, OK, I guess.
I just hope people realize that the Internet was the most compelling and most popular way to "get online" even before there were significant numbers of PC clones on the Internet.
Specifically, although it was technically possible to give a Windows machine a direct TCP/IP connection to the Internet, if you were using a PC clone to access the internet before July 1993, you were probably using the PC clone to run a terminal-emulation program (e.g., Kermit) to log in to a Unix shell account.
(I chose July 1993 as the date by the way because that was the month in which the New Yorker ran the cartoon, "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog," which was the first reference to the Internet in a mainstream publication that seemed to arouse the interest or the curiosity of large numbers of readers.)
Re: IBM opens up Power chips, ARM-style, to take on Chipzilla
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
any particular reason? error rate, power use, ?
The ISA is not better than others in any real way, but IBM put a lot of early work into RAS features for their server chipsets, and this sort of leaked into the automotive and aviation world. If you want to run 3 cpus lockstep, verifying each other's results, the PPC world already has the infrastructure. This and other similar things make it an easy choice for some applications.
IIRC, the service processor on IBM x86 servers is a PPC. (runs the light-path diagnostics, and manages remote boots, etc)
Re: IBM opens up Power chips, ARM-style, to take on Chipzilla
#87I 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.
Is there any reason why this is necessarily the case? Also if these are being used in embedded applications, I highly doubt it costs $1,000 per unit in quantity.
They're making a kajillion PPC based processors for the Xbox 360, PS3, and Wii, so it's not like they don't have designs for current manufacturing processes. The chip in the 360 can't cost more than $50 today, and if stripped down (2 cores vs. 3), clocked less aggressively (1GHz vs. 3.2GHz) could probably be cut to $25 or less.
Re: IBM opens up Power chips, ARM-style, to take on Chipzilla
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's really just the standard Innovator's Dilemma effect where low-cost, high-volume products often tend to eat their way up the market. Now that the semi-RISC ARM processor is attacking Intel from the low end it's having the same sort of success as x86 did over MIPS, etc.
Cheap Mips and other RISC chips were supposed to replace all the clunky old x86 style processors, so it's one case where the Innovator's Dilemma effect turned out to be wrong.
Neither RISC nor CISC won in the end. Intel's current generation processors, like most others of similar performance specifications, break down the incoming instruction stream into micro ops (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro-operation), the units of processing that are actually executed. This renders the difference between CISC and RISC a case of semantics.
Before this, the idea was that RISC was simpler to implement and could be optimized more easily, ultimately be more cost effective. What wasn't factored in was how good Intel is at optimizing, and how hard they'd push their process, beating the RISC side despite all the disadvantages CISC had.
Now it's the GPU that's eating Intel's lunch, high performance floating point code on the CPU is several orders of magnitude slower than a high-end GPU, so Intel's trying to fight back with their "pile of CPUs" strategy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larrabee_(microarchitecture)). It's not working out very well so far.
Re: IBM opens up Power chips, ARM-style, to take on Chipzilla
#89Earlier 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.
You're right, I meant to write PowerPC.
Re: IBM opens up Power chips, ARM-style, to take on Chipzilla
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cheap Mips and other RISC chips were supposed to replace all the clunky old x86 style processors, so it's one case where the Innovator's Dilemma effect turned out to be wrong.
Neither RISC nor CISC won in the end. Intel's current generation processors, like most others of similar performance specifications, break down the incoming instruction stream into micro ops ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro-operation ), the units of processing that are actually executed. This renders the difference between CISC and RISC a case of semantics. Before this, the idea was that RISC was simpler to imple…
Quite. But there was plenty of "Intel is doomed" hype in the 1980s when RISC chips first appeared. Indeed, Microsoft didn't write either of its home grown operating systems -- NT and CE -- on x86 processors.
Of course, "Intel is doomed" (and "Microsoft is doomed") have been staples of clueless fanboy hype for 40 years. I'm still waiting for one of them to be right....