05/21/2007, 3:50pm, EDT
Monday, May 21stIBM's new Power6 CPU pushes 5GHz
In shipping the new chip, IBM is hoping to buck the trend of decreasing or stagnant clock-speed in favor of more cores, and instead show that it can deliver more cycles per core while still conserving power.
Although the industry-leading performance of the new chips will lead some Mac users to lament the move to the Intel-based architecture, the new chips are not drop-in replacements for the legacy PowerPC chips produced by both Motorola and IBM. Those chips were used in legacy Macs since the mid-90s, but were dropped in favor Intel's more power-efficient Core architecture and due to future performance concerns. Since then, Intel has revved its Core-based chips twice and delivered quad-core Xeon chips for Apple's workstations.
While the PowerPC processor is based largely on the POWER architecture, and there is a high degree of compatibility between the two chip lines (POWER chips contain the a superset of the PowerPC instructions), PowerPC chips with specs matching those of their POWER counterparts generally lag significantly. Pricing is also a factor. Although IBM hasn't yet released exact details on the POWER6's price, IBM's high-end servers will purportedly fetch more than $50,000 at lauch.
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@ gudin: Good one!
This doesn't necessarily mean Apple's decision was bad, as there were many other factors involved switching to intel, such as portability, heat dissipation, etc.
This is about the Powerbook G6!!! Woohoo! Finally, in your face you Powerbook G5 rumor mongers! You missed this one completely!
And sosa, this has nothing to do with Apple's decision. I guess they could have sat on their G5's for another year, maybe trying to push 4 of them into a Mac tower, and just hoping people didn't notice just how far behind the performance curve they were lagging. All for the hope of something better coming out (yeah, I think that's the kind of hope that had us stuck at 500MHz in the late 90s, wasn't it?).
Finally, person man, of course the Power6 != powerPC g6. The Gx moniker was derived by Apple to label their computers/chips. It has/had no bearing on the actual chip or anything, just something apple started doing. In theory, Apple could have called their MacIntels G6's and been perfectly fine in doing it (of course, that's not saying every poster here wouldn't be up in arms of the naming, but its just a name). And the chip itself is priced right up Apple's alley. It'd be perfect for them to keep those prices high!
And since this chip doesn't have Altivec, its really crap anyway!
"...because they sure seem like power hogs compared to their old stuff and to other intel notebooks."
Macbook pros run some of the fastest Core 2 Duos on the market, and absolutely demolish any G4 notebook out there; using CS3 on my Core Duo MacBook at 1.83GHz is as fast as using it on a G5 DP 2.5. For so much more power, I can sacrifice the hour or so more battery life my G4 would give me.
Of note is that, even with these fast CPUs, the MacBook and MacBook Pro get equal or better battery life than what my colleagues are using in the Windows world; AMD Turions in particular conk out within 2h of being away from a power cord.