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June 9, 2005 12:58 PM PDT
Unfazed, IBM pumps Power chip program
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clusters, which can be used on systems such as IBM's JS20 blade servers. And, Staats added, "Things are already in motion to enable a world of greater Power Architecture diversity."
Colin Charles, a lead programmer for the effort to bring the Fedora version of Linux to PowerPC chips, pledged future support for the project.
"I'm not going to back off the project, even if it means that its real use will only last another two more years, and after that, it'll just be for big iron IBM (computers)," Charles said. "IBM hardware will always still exist, though consumer Apple stuff is going away in about two years, sadly--I think it's a big mistake."
Snubbed in public
The Apple divorce was very public. Apple CEO Steve Jobs sharply criticized IBM's PowerPC production during his Worldwide Developer Conference
keynote address Monday, spotlighting the fact that his company couldn't deliver a promised 3GHz PowerPC processor or a laptop with the latest G5 generation chip.
"We can envision some amazing products we want to build for you, but we don't know how to build them with the future PowerPC road map," Jobs said.
IBM's response is to fight back with numbers, calling out In-Stat statistics forecasting that the game console market will grow from 3.5 million units this year to 33.5 million in 2008. Sony, the top seller of game consoles, is using the Cell chip in its future PlayStation 3, due in 2006. And Microsoft's Xbox 360, due later this year, uses a Power processor that Beck said is code-named Waternoose.
IBM hopes Cell will be used by new customers beyond gaming, though. To that end, Big Blue released an open-source version of Power computer "firmware"--software that runs beneath the operating system, helps a computer boot up and provides operating system access to many hardware features.
It also released software specifications that let programmers use the unusual architecture of Cell itself. The chip has a single Power processing core aided by eight other cores IBM calls specialized processor units. In game consoles, the eight helper cores handle graphics tasks, but IBM wants to let programmers use them for other tasks, such as encryption or image processing.
Using the extra cores is unwieldy now, though. "We need to make the programming model simpler," Beck said, and IBM hopes opening the Cell specification will help others steer IBM in the right direction for programming tool improvement.
Beyond gaming
Two nongaming customers are using Cell, Beck said, though he wouldn't name them. One is involved in medical imaging, and the other is tapping the chip for military use in image recognition and targeting, he said.
Though others in the Power.org consortium may offer suggestions on what features should be added to Power processors, IBM isn't giving up control over chip design features such as the set of instructions it can execute. Power.org members "wanted transparency--to see proposals for the instruction set architecture coming in and out--but they did not want democracy," Beck said.
Eleven new organizations joined the 16 existing members of the Power.org consortium. Among them are AboveMicro Technologies, which provides custom chip design services; Celestica, which designs and builds computers often sold under other companies' names; Rapport, which sells chips that can be reconfigured on the fly; TimeLab, which builds chips to replace analog circuitry; and Universal Scientific Industrial, which designs Power-based home media centers.
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statistics forecasting that the game console market will grow
from 3.5 million units this year to 33.5 million in 2008. Sony,
the top seller of game consoles, is using the Cell chip in its
future PlayStation 3, due in 2006. And Microsoft's Xbox 360,
due later this year, uses a Power processor that Beck said is
code-named Waternoose."
What??? Are you guys serious? Is this management by attention
deficit disorder?
Lest we for forget, it was IBM, along with Apple, that promised a
3ghz G5 in a year. IBM, didn't deliver that processor, as we all
know, and left it to the CEO of Apple to make your excuses for
you. The video game market, as I recall, was absent from the list
of reasons given. Perhaps that was an oversight by Apple's CEO.
Well, what exactly did IBM do? Subsequent updates to the G5,
few and far between when IBM got around to them, and were in
fact less then stellar. The 2.5 - 2.7 ghz updates IBM delivered
were unusable out of the box. Apple had to design it's own
liquid cooling system just to get them to work in a Powermac.
No delivery of a G5 whatsoever for any of Apple's laptops. Not to
mention the fabrication issues delaying shipments of existing
product. It couldn't be more obvious that this "partnership" was
a disaster for Apple, and a complete collapse on IBM's part from
the outset.
And your best response is: "Hey everybody, look at all of those
neat video games out there!" Is IBM's partnership integrity that
discountable now?
Game over, IBM.
statistics forecasting that the game console market will grow
from 3.5 million units this year to 33.5 million in 2008. Sony,
the top seller of game consoles, is using the Cell chip in its
future PlayStation 3, due in 2006. And Microsoft's Xbox 360,
due later this year, uses a Power processor that Beck said is
code-named Waternoose."
What??? Are you guys serious? Is this management by attention
deficit disorder?
Lest we for forget, it was IBM, along with Apple, that promised a
3ghz G5 in a year. IBM, didn't deliver that processor, as we all
know, and left it to the CEO of Apple to make your excuses for
you. The video game market, as I recall, was absent from the list
of reasons given. Perhaps that was an oversight by Apple's CEO.
Well, what exactly did IBM do? Subsequent updates to the G5,
few and far between when IBM got around to them, and were in
fact less then stellar. The 2.5 - 2.7 ghz updates IBM delivered
were unusable out of the box. Apple had to design it's own
liquid cooling system just to get them to work in a Powermac.
No delivery of a G5 whatsoever for any of Apple's laptops. Not to
mention the fabrication issues delaying shipments of existing
product. It couldn't be more obvious that this "partnership" was
a disaster for Apple, and a complete collapse on IBM's part from
the outset.
And your best response is: "Hey everybody, look at all of those
neat video games out there!" Is IBM's partnership integrity that
discountable now?
Game over, IBM.
Brian,
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Brian,
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again when they suggest that Apple abandoning the Power PC
architecture will have little to no impact on their business?
Or perhaps unlike someone else's claims, they actually did inhale!
Now, can they(IBM) keep everyone else from jumping ship off the PPC? Will the PPC still be considered viable by Lunix, UNIX, or any of the other large scale players? That is the real question.
Come on, you know that Intel want something to update their x86 chips for P.C.s and to make it different from other x86 chips, it might as well be a PowerPC design, though the update have to be cleverly disguised so it wouldn't look as if Intel is switching TO PowerPC. Neither Apple nor Intel want a straight plain x86 design. I suspect that by the end of the decade and at the beginning of the decade, Intel's x86 design will look more like a PowerPC design than its other x86 counterparts.
Why not? Apple done the same thing when it proposed to merged Motorola's 680x0 design with I.B.M.'s POWER design which in turn give the birth of the PowerPC, a relatively compact and low power version of the POWER design. And also when Apple proposed for Motorola to use the V.M.X. (AltiVec/Velocity Engine) from I.B.M.'s POWER in Motorola's PowerPCs (now Freescale's PowerPCs), and also when Apple too proposed to include them in I.B.M.'s PowerPC, giving both I.B.M. and Motorola (now Freescale)'s PowerPC to have POWER's V.M.X..
ANd also shouldn't Apple as a PowerPC partner (like I.B.M. and Motorola/Freescale) had the right to use some or all of the PowerPC's design to be used on other chip made by other chip manufacturers? Apple isn't just a mere customer (they are a big customer on the P.C. area though), they ARE the PowerPC alliance.
Instead of thinking Apple dumping the PowerPC and I.B.M. is exhausted on designing the PowerPC. Think of it as Intel going to be largest PowerPC manufacturer for P.C.s, Apple and Intel might have even spin off a separate company for it.
In the end, the PowerPC road will go like this:
Apple-Intel = Focused on PowerPC-ish designs for P.C.s.
I.B.M. = Focused on PowerPC designs for servers and miscellaneous stuff.
Freescale = Focused on PowerPC designs for embedded applications.
As for I.B.M.'s PowerPC design without Apple as a big customer.
Well... The impact is that the 'main' PowerPC design wouldn't have a P.C. version of it. While it's a big impact, it wouldn't hurt the PowerPC design fatally.
Personally, I think that this recent 'switch' is just only a mere a stunt to make people fight each other, since it's obvious that things have recently gone relatively quiet in the community of Apple, I.B.M., and so on, and 'they' just love to make people from all sides to fight each other. I mean that if some people claimed that Apple is only a 'small' player, why the big deal over it?
again when they suggest that Apple abandoning the Power PC
architecture will have little to no impact on their business?
Or perhaps unlike someone else's claims, they actually did inhale!
Now, can they(IBM) keep everyone else from jumping ship off the PPC? Will the PPC still be considered viable by Lunix, UNIX, or any of the other large scale players? That is the real question.
Come on, you know that Intel want something to update their x86 chips for P.C.s and to make it different from other x86 chips, it might as well be a PowerPC design, though the update have to be cleverly disguised so it wouldn't look as if Intel is switching TO PowerPC. Neither Apple nor Intel want a straight plain x86 design. I suspect that by the end of the decade and at the beginning of the decade, Intel's x86 design will look more like a PowerPC design than its other x86 counterparts.
Why not? Apple done the same thing when it proposed to merged Motorola's 680x0 design with I.B.M.'s POWER design which in turn give the birth of the PowerPC, a relatively compact and low power version of the POWER design. And also when Apple proposed for Motorola to use the V.M.X. (AltiVec/Velocity Engine) from I.B.M.'s POWER in Motorola's PowerPCs (now Freescale's PowerPCs), and also when Apple too proposed to include them in I.B.M.'s PowerPC, giving both I.B.M. and Motorola (now Freescale)'s PowerPC to have POWER's V.M.X..
ANd also shouldn't Apple as a PowerPC partner (like I.B.M. and Motorola/Freescale) had the right to use some or all of the PowerPC's design to be used on other chip made by other chip manufacturers? Apple isn't just a mere customer (they are a big customer on the P.C. area though), they ARE the PowerPC alliance.
Instead of thinking Apple dumping the PowerPC and I.B.M. is exhausted on designing the PowerPC. Think of it as Intel going to be largest PowerPC manufacturer for P.C.s, Apple and Intel might have even spin off a separate company for it.
In the end, the PowerPC road will go like this:
Apple-Intel = Focused on PowerPC-ish designs for P.C.s.
I.B.M. = Focused on PowerPC designs for servers and miscellaneous stuff.
Freescale = Focused on PowerPC designs for embedded applications.
As for I.B.M.'s PowerPC design without Apple as a big customer.
Well... The impact is that the 'main' PowerPC design wouldn't have a P.C. version of it. While it's a big impact, it wouldn't hurt the PowerPC design fatally.
Personally, I think that this recent 'switch' is just only a mere a stunt to make people fight each other, since it's obvious that things have recently gone relatively quiet in the community of Apple, I.B.M., and so on, and 'they' just love to make people from all sides to fight each other. I mean that if some people claimed that Apple is only a 'small' player, why the big deal over it?
IBM do that exclaiming PC's are not important.
IBM do that exclaiming PC's are not important.
Of course, all of them sold their gaming consoles at a loss. So the money for the chips have to come from these companies' profit, which is obviously isn't going to come from the profit from the game consoles hardware division.
Of course, all of them sold their gaming consoles at a loss. So the money for the chips have to come from these companies' profit, which is obviously isn't going to come from the profit from the game consoles hardware division.
While I do like the lack of negativity on I.B.M.'s part regarding their recent 'loss' of a big customer and focused on the good things about their new big customers, I don't like the negativity on other issues.
As for game consoles.
Well... Game consoles are sold at a loss, so... the money for the chips have to come from non-hardware game consoles profit. I.B.M. should be asking more than per chip prices from their new customers.
While I do like the lack of negativity on I.B.M.'s part regarding their recent 'loss' of a big customer and focused on the good things about their new big customers, I don't like the negativity on other issues.
As for game consoles.
Well... Game consoles are sold at a loss, so... the money for the chips have to come from non-hardware game consoles profit. I.B.M. should be asking more than per chip prices from their new customers.