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  • Order of the Butterfly
    Order of the Butterfly
    minator
    Posts: 365 from 2003/3/28
    Quote:

    Your posts contained the first speculation about Power8 featuring SPEs that I'd seen,


    Not really, IBM have pretty much said this themselves.

    Quote:

    but it does look like this is going to happen.
    The PS4 is a complete unknown since Sony doesn't want the public to focus on that yet. I think they're afraid it would hurt PS3 sales.


    Sony are keeping quiet but there's been rumours about a 16 SPE+2 PPE version.
    Sony have said they want to keep costs down and give an architecture change would be a huge cost I take that to confirm Cell again.

    As to whether the new PPE is Out-of-Order is another question altogether. They should be able to get the power down by now, but it's really a question of if it provides that much benefit to the target applications.
  • »02.07.11 - 22:39
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  • Jim
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    Jim
    Posts: 4977 from 2009/1/28
    From: Delaware, USA
    >Sony are keeping quiet but there's been rumours about a 16 SPE+2 PPE version.

    That would make for an interesting design, basically doubling the Cell BE.
    Considering the finer process IBM is making the Cell on now it could be just that (two Cells on one die).
    "Never attribute to malice what can more readily explained by incompetence"
  • »02.07.11 - 23:07
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  • Yokemate of Keyboards
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    Andreas_Wolf
    Posts: 12058 from 2003/5/22
    From: Germany
    > Not really, IBM have pretty much said this themselves.

    You missed the "that I'd seen" part of Jim's post it seems :-) Obviously my posting where I reported what an IBM executive had told in an interview some days before was where he read it first.
  • »02.07.11 - 23:10
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  • Jim
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    Jim
    Posts: 4977 from 2009/1/28
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    Yes, I'd not heard about the interview with Jai Menon before that.
    And after the cancellation of the PowerXCell8i, it was welcomed news.
    "Never attribute to malice what can more readily explained by incompetence"
  • »02.07.11 - 23:31
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  • Yokemate of Keyboards
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    Andreas_Wolf
    Posts: 12058 from 2003/5/22
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    > the cancellation of the PowerXCell8i

    Err, PowerXCell 8i is there. You mean PowerXCell 32ii and PowerXCell 32iv, right?
  • »02.07.11 - 23:39
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  • Jim
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    Jim
    Posts: 4977 from 2009/1/28
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    Sorry, bad cut and paste.
    Did I at least get the name of the CTO correct?
    "Never attribute to malice what can more readily explained by incompetence"
  • »03.07.11 - 00:50
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    Andreas_Wolf
    Posts: 12058 from 2003/5/22
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    > Did I at least get the name of the CTO correct?

    I think so ;-)
  • »03.07.11 - 01:12
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  • Yokemate of Keyboards
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    Andreas_Wolf
    Posts: 12058 from 2003/5/22
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    > Your posts contained the first speculation about Power8 featuring SPEs
    > that I'd seen, but it does look like this is going to happen.

    There're dissenting opinions as well:

    "IBM [...] hinted that in the future its commercial-grade Power chips would incorporate many of the functions of the Cell chips. This [...] could happen with Power7+ or Power8 chips -- or, more likely, not at all. It seems far more likely that IBM will now focus on hybrid CPU-GPU combinations for certain HPC customers"
    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/06/28/ibm_kills_qs22_blade/
  • »04.07.11 - 19:21
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  • Jim
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    Jim
    Posts: 4977 from 2009/1/28
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    @ Andreas_Wolf

    Speculation. I bet we don't get a solid answer about this for a year or more.
    "Never attribute to malice what can more readily explained by incompetence"
  • »05.07.11 - 02:54
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  • Yokemate of Keyboards
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    Andreas_Wolf
    Posts: 12058 from 2003/5/22
    From: Germany
    > I bet we don't get a solid answer about this for a year or more.

    First solid information on POWER7 preceded its official release by 1.5 years. Going by that, 1 year from now plus 1.5 more years would mean early 2014 for POWER8 release. But as we know that POWER8 is scheduled for 2013 (and rather early than late that year), solid information may be imminent ;-)
  • »05.07.11 - 03:59
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  • Order of the Butterfly
    Order of the Butterfly
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    Posts: 365 from 2003/3/28
    Quote:


    > MorphOS is designed to have separate boxes. You could run the existing
    > A-Box in an emulated PPC environment. That in turn runs the 68K stuff.
    > You then have another A-Box2 that only runs ARM compiled stuff. Yes the
    > 68K and PPC stuff will suffer but anything native will fly along.

    Reminds me of this proposal, only with ARM instead of x86:

    https://morph.zone/modules/newbb_plus/viewtopic.php?topic_id=6570&forum=3


    It's not quite the same.

    As I understand it, on ARM the problem would be intermixing big endian code (68K, PPC) with little endian code (ARM). In both cases the data is all big-endian.

    On IA32 everything is little-endian, code and data.


    What I had suggested is essentially 2 A-Boxes. One includes a PPC emulator to run PPC and 68K code.

    The second A-Box (B-Box?) would only run natively compiled ARM code. No intermixing.


    This has a big advantage for moving things forward:
    If you are building a new box that you know requires at least a re-compile, you could also add other conditions. e.g. Forbid() could be either be ignored or forbidden (pardon the pun).

    You could also put down plans for moving towards things like full memory protection and multi-processing.

    I'm not sure how you'd go about this but you could possibly do it with proxies. The app would talk to the proxy thinking it was the OS. The Proxy then does the interaction with the OS.

    Then, you build a "C-Box" with memory protection etc. In this box your app still speaks to the proxy but this time it doesn't write directly into kernel memory as the Amiga does.

    I don't know how easy or difficult that would be in practice but it would give you an ordered transition that would allow you to migrate today's software into a rather more modern environment. A sudden leap is not likely to work.

    There would be a cost to using proxies of course but given how much ARM's performance will shoot up over the next couple of years it's not something you're likely to even notice.
  • »08.07.11 - 22:55
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  • Order of the Butterfly
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    _ThEcRoW
    Posts: 298 from 2008/10/27
    Is MorphOS going the arm route?. Whatever route it chooses, i hope it gets powerful hardware. :-D
    Mac Mini G4 1,4ghz 1gb ram & MorphOS 3.11
  • »09.07.11 - 00:08
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  • Order of the Butterfly
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    minator
    Posts: 365 from 2003/3/28
    Quote:

    Is MorphOS going the arm route?


    No idea, but that's the rumour.
    They have to go somewhere after the G5.

    Quote:

    Whatever route it chooses, i hope it gets powerful hardware


    I think that's a given whatever they do.
  • »09.07.11 - 13:37
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  • Order of the Butterfly
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    _ThEcRoW
    Posts: 298 from 2008/10/27
    The g5 route is interesting. I tried to get a dual g5 on ebay but got overbid on the last minute, damn!.
    Still looking for a good deal also on a g4 tower.
    The problem, is that the arm processors i know, aren't powerful enough for desktop, only for phone/tablet use. Are out there more powerful arm cpus?
    Mac Mini G4 1,4ghz 1gb ram & MorphOS 3.11
  • »09.07.11 - 18:51
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    Andreas_Wolf
    Posts: 12058 from 2003/5/22
    From: Germany
    > The problem, is that the arm processors i know, aren't
    > powerful enough for desktop, only for phone/tablet use.
    > Are out there more powerful arm cpus?

    More powerful than the ones you know? Nobody can answer this as long as you don't list the ARM CPUs that you know ;-)
    In any case, the most powerful one currently still seems to be the one that I mentioned back in January in the last sentence of that posting:

    https://morph.zone/modules/newbb_plus/viewtopic.php?forum=3&topic_id=7001&start=525

    Latest information on that:
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ibShHKLjMM
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yq9TW6xQOw

    At 1.6 GHz and below it's still a chip intended mainly for mobile computing including notebook/netbook, not only phone/tablet. In the first video however they also show an AIO computer prototype based on it, and in the second video they call this prototype a reference design. So from that I conclude that they also intend to target general desktop computing with this chip, presumably with the 2.0 GHz version.
    That said there seems to be a little confusion regarding the 2.0 GHz version and laptops. In the first video it's said that the 2.0 GHz chip will be used in laptops because its power consumption is too much for mobile devices. Some might say that a laptop is a mobile device as well...
  • »09.07.11 - 19:48
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  • Order of the Butterfly
    Order of the Butterfly
    minator
    Posts: 365 from 2003/3/28
    Quote:

    the most powerful one currently still seems to be the one that I mentioned back in January in the last sentence of that posting:


    The Nufront chip is fastest announced but I've no idea if it's actually shipping yet. They have shown it working a few times so i guess it'll be soon. That said, that clock and memory system should put it faster than any G4.

    There will be others at a similar speed later in the year though.

    Next year is where it gets really interesting with the A15 :-D At 2.5GHz that should match any G5.

    [ Edited by minator 10.07.2011 - 02:20 ]
  • »10.07.11 - 00:18
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    Andreas_Wolf
    Posts: 12058 from 2003/5/22
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    > I've no idea if it's actually shipping yet.

    According to the Nufront representative in the first video it is, including the 2.0 GHz version. The video is from early June btw.

    > There will be others at a similar speed later in the year though.

    Yes, but it won't be Cortex ones it seems ;-)

    https://morph.zone/modules/newbb_plus/viewtopic.php?topic_id=7675&forum=3&start=168

    > Next year is where it gets really interesting with the A15
    > At 2.5GHz that should match any G5.

    We will see if there'll really be 2.5 GHz Cortex-A15 based chips as early as 2012. OMAP5 at least is only announced to go as fast as 2.0 GHz for 2012:

    http://www.ti.com/ww/en/omap/omap5/omap5-OMAP5430.html
    http://www.ti.com/ww/en/omap/omap5/omap5-OMAP5432.html
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-QzNpN77go
  • »10.07.11 - 01:32
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  • Order of the Butterfly
    Order of the Butterfly
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    Posts: 365 from 2003/3/28
    Quote:

    > There will be others at a similar speed later in the year though.

    Yes, but it won't be Cortex ones it seems ;-)


    I meant the ~1.8 GHz chips meant for later in the / year early 2010.
  • »11.07.11 - 00:11
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    Andreas_Wolf
    Posts: 12058 from 2003/5/22
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    > I meant the ~1.8 GHz chips meant for later in the / year early 2010.

    I guess that should read "later in the year / early 2012" ;-)
    If you're now talking about early 2012 as well instead of just later this year like you did before then yes, there should be 1.8 GHz OMAP4470 in Q1/2012.
  • »11.07.11 - 00:44
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  • Jim
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    Jim
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    So I have to wait till next year for an ARM processor that runs as fast as my G4?
    I think I'd prefer the G5.
    Then, later, we can consider ARM (as more powerful CPUs come to market).
    "Never attribute to malice what can more readily explained by incompetence"
  • »13.07.11 - 00:35
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    Andreas_Wolf
    Posts: 12058 from 2003/5/22
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    > So I have to wait till next year for an ARM processor that
    > runs as fast as my G4?

    As I said, Nufront claimed in early June that their 2.0 GHz Cortex-A9 chip was available. Is their claim true? I don't know.

    > I think I'd prefer the G5.

    Yes, at least there're already desktop systems built around that :-)

    > Then, later, we can consider ARM

    You mean "we" as in "the MorphOS Team"? ;-)
  • »13.07.11 - 02:37
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  • Priest of the Order of the Butterfly
    Priest of the Order of the Butterfly
    Crumb
    Posts: 730 from 2003/2/24
    From: aGaS & CUAZ Al...
    @Jim

    ARM can't compete with x86 on desktop. IMHO choosing ARM would be a suicide. It doesn't fix any problem, it doesn't bring any advantage to customers, it's yet another hard to find hardware platform. If MorphOS was going to migrate to other cpu it should be x86 because you can buy x86 machines everywhere, there's enough variety. I'm not interested in vapour cpus with inflated benchmarks. ARMs performance sucks. 1Ghz ARM cpus are slower than all PPC equivalents. There's no ARM machine that can compete with a QuadG5 machine in price/performance right now.

    If we switched to other architecture it should be x86 (it's cheap, it has a wide variety of models from low consumption to high performance, it's easy to find, it won't dissapear)
  • »13.07.11 - 09:50
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  • MorphOS Developer
    Henes
    Posts: 507 from 2003/6/14
    So BAF could also mean Blind ARM Follower? :-)
  • »13.07.11 - 10:20
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    Andreas_Wolf
    Posts: 12058 from 2003/5/22
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    > It doesn't fix any problem, it doesn't bring any advantage to customers

    It would at least make hardware available that you can buy unused. If you see that as an advantage would depend on whether you see the non-availability of unused hardware as a problem, though.

    > 1Ghz ARM cpus are slower than all PPC equivalents.

    I'm not sure that's a true statement. A comparison for instance between a 1 GHz PPC440 based chip (e.g. PPC460EX) and one core of a 1 GHz Cortex-A9 based chip would prove interesting I bet. We have NBench figures for 1 GHz Cortex-A9 for example. Now we'd only need someone with a Sam460ex to run this benchmark for us to get an idea of the trueness of your statement. Unless you think of NBench as an "inflated benchmark" that is ;-)

    > There's no ARM machine that can compete with a QuadG5 machine in
    > price/performance right now.

    ...and not in performance alone either :-)
  • »13.07.11 - 11:20
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    Andreas_Wolf
    Posts: 12058 from 2003/5/22
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    > So BAF could also mean Blind ARM Follower? :-)

    A MorphOS Team member making fun of ARM fans doesn't sound too good for an (allegedly rumoured) ARM port of MorphOS ;-)
  • »13.07.11 - 11:32
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