Priest of the Order of the Butterfly
Posts: 750 from 2003/2/14
From: Earth
The 7447 is as it is guys. There is not much we can do about that. The 7447A lowers the power requirements and we should be able to have a passive solution in the not too distant future. We will sell a single CPU card upgrade when it is ready.
In the meanwhile, keep in mind that the 970 has the same problem, in fact even more. When you throw in other issues like AltiVec it becomes a big balancing act to create the best result with many factors under heavy consideration. For example, using AltiVec makes IBM's G3 not viable and then you have the performance issues (but, it is still fast and good enough for most things). The 970 and 7447 support AltiVec, but then you need an active cooling solution (not that AltiVec has anything directly to do with that). Of course, you could always lower the frequency, but then again you are balancing other issues against the performance. And, as long as we are at it lets go to the 64 bits discussion on the 970, which creates some disadvantages outside of server applications. In the end, you are faced with a range of choices and balancing these in the best way possible still makes *we think* the PowerPC architecture more attractive to consumers. Now, we need to think about the best way to market this...
Ultimately, the goal will be to work closer and closer with the CPU vendor so that together we approach OEMs, get the volumes up lowering costs and engineering better and better performance and efficiency as we move ahead.
R&B