Order of the Butterfly
Posts: 370 from 2003/3/28
Quote:
ARM can't compete with x86 on desktop.
True but ARM doesn't try to compete on the desktop - at the moment.
They're moving up very rapidly though.
Currently, the highest end stuff is based on phone chips but that's changing as tablet chips become available. It'll get really interesting when server chips appear.
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IMHO choosing ARM would be a suicide. It doesn't fix any problem, it doesn't bring any advantage to customers
Since when has cheap, available, new hardware been a disadvantage?
Quote:
it's yet another hard to find hardware platform.
Actually, at 6 billion a year they're pretty hard to avoid.
They're not exactly well represented in the desktop space (in the west) but there are
some and there's more due at the end of the year.
If you just want a cheap ($149 - $199) dev board there's a few here:
http://www.linaro.org/low-cost-development-boards
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you can buy x86 machines everywhere, there's enough variety.
Can't argue with that.
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I'm not interested in vapour cpus with inflated benchmarks.
Good. Neither am I.
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ARMs performance sucks. 1Ghz ARM cpus are slower than all PPC equivalents.
You base this on what exactly?
Quote:There's no ARM machine that can compete with a QuadG5 machine in price/performance right now.
Quote:
Correct, but that's only because there's no ARM at that performance level today. That'll change next year. The year after, the opposite will be true.
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)
»14.07.11 - 20:39
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Order of the Butterfly
Posts: 370 from 2003/3/28
Quote:So BAF could also mean Blind ARM Follower?
Of course you can't be referring to me because this is one area where I can't be described as blind...
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»14.07.11 - 21:08
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Yokemate of Keyboards
Posts: 12146 from 2003/5/22
From: Germany
>> There's no ARM machine that can compete with a QuadG5
>> machine in price/performance right now.
> That'll change next year. The year after, the opposite will be true.
Don't be so sure about that. While it's true that ARM performance will increase over time and actually make a jump next year with the advent of Cortex-A15 based chips, leading also to an improvement in price-performance ratio, used quad-G5 Macs are becoming even cheaper, improving their price-performance ratio as well, all the time. Currently, the average price that a (fully functional) quad-G5 Mac is sold for on eBay Germany is about 530 EUR, whereas 16 months ago it was still
910 EUR, which is a reduction by 42%. If that trend continues (and I guess it does) new machines with future ARM chips will definitely have a rough ride beating used quad-G5 Macs in terms of price-performance ratio for some time to come.
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»14.07.11 - 21:48
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Yokemate of Keyboards
Posts: 12146 from 2003/5/22
From: Germany
Addendum:
> Page 12 of
FTF11_NET_F1176 document mentions "Improved load /store
> to ease bit alignment" and "New instructions for video analytics".
Found another interesting comment on the new AltiVec in the QorIQ AMP:
"
An important note regarding AltiVec is that some users have previously found the ISA difficult to use. AMP marks its relaunch in a form that allows a far easier definition of parameters."
http://www.techdesignforums.com/embedded/embedded-topics/freescale%E2%80%99s-qoriq-amp-series-illustrates-growing-demand-on-the-control-and-data-plane/
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»15.07.11 - 13:45
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Yokemate of Keyboards
Posts: 12146 from 2003/5/22
From: Germany
> The PA6T CPU paves the way for the introduction of SMP with AmigaOS4.x.
OS4 core developer tonyw:
"I would expect OS5 will be 64-bit and SMP."
http://amigaworld.net/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=33968&forum=33&start=20#622636
Seems SMP got postponed to "OS5".
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»19.07.11 - 23:39
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Yokemate of Keyboards
Posts: 12146 from 2003/5/22
From: Germany
Update:
> 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 ;-)
Found three interesting files:
http://www.csiltd.co.uk/PDFS/ISD/Itanium%20-%20Reasons%20to%20Act%20Now.pdf (May 2011, page 10)
https://www-950.ibm.com/events/wwe/grp/grp006.nsf/vLookupPDFs/POWER7/$file/POWER7.pdf (June 2011, page 6)
http://maben.homeip.net/static/computers/aix/brochure/IBM%20Roadmap%20cf%20sparc%20itanium%20201106.ppt (June 2011, page 2)
They list as a POWER8 feature among others something called "Accelerators". And what is the real surprise for me here, those "Accelerators" are listed for the POWER7+ as well.
Edit:
Found a PDF where the POWER8's "Accelerators" became "Imbedded accelerators" (and also "Dynamic TurboCore" was added to the chip's features):
ftp://ftp.software.ibm.com/la/documents/stg/z/itso-mx/executive_briefing/power_systems_soluciones_para_un_planeta_mas_inteligente_freddy_alves.pdf (October 2011, page 27)
[ Edited by Andreas_Wolf 21.03.2012 - 10:21 ]
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»22.07.11 - 00:38
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Yokemate of Keyboards
Posts: 4977 from 2009/1/28
From: Delaware, USA
Power8
Accelerators+?
"Never attribute to malice what can more readily explained by incompetence"
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»22.07.11 - 17:08
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Yokemate of Keyboards
Posts: 12146 from 2003/5/22
From: Germany
> Power8
> Accelerators+?
Yes, that's exactly what I'm referring to :-)
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»22.07.11 - 17:09
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Order of the Butterfly
Posts: 370 from 2003/3/28
Good find!
Look up the PowerEN and that might have some clues. Probably special blocks for crypto, network etc.
Another thing that IBM actually said in the past is Cell will merge into things like POWER. So don't be surprised if SPEs turn up at some point.
What I thought interesting was the mention of a very large cache, as if 32MB wasn't big enough already!
That said the IBM mainframes can have 196MB cache...
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»22.07.11 - 19:40
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Order of the Butterfly
Posts: 370 from 2003/3/28
Of course being a "BAF" I had to mention
this.
Netbooks were an early skirmish. Now things are about to get really interesting...
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»22.07.11 - 19:44
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Yokemate of Keyboards
Posts: 12146 from 2003/5/22
From: Germany
> Probably special blocks for crypto, network etc.
I hope not, but rather this:
> don't be surprised if SPEs turn up at some point.
...as that's exactly what Jim and I are talking about here in this thread regarding POWER8 all along. So no surprise from us I'm afraid. Seems you lost track a bit ;-) To see where this sub-discussion started in this thread three weeks ago refer to:
https://morph.zone/modules/newbb_plus/viewtopic.php?forum=3&topic_id=7183&start=294
So I think that the mention of "Accelerators" in the PDF files I linked to might refer to SPEs rather than crypto or network accelerators.
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»22.07.11 - 19:45
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Order of the Butterfly
Posts: 370 from 2003/3/28
Quote:..as that's exactly what Jim and I are talking about here in this thread regarding POWER8 all along. So no surprise from us I'm afraid. Seems you lost track a bit
To see where this sub-discussion started in this thread three weeks ago refer to:
You expect people to read the entire thread before posting???
Think of it as a drive by posting.
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»22.07.11 - 20:59
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Yokemate of Keyboards
Posts: 12146 from 2003/5/22
From: Germany
> You expect people to read the entire thread before posting???
No, but I expect people who
took part in a discussion before to not act as if it didn't happen. At least I wouldn't know why you say I shouldn't "be surprised if SPEs turn up at some point" in IBM POWER when three weeks ago you, Jim and me discussed exactly that and
you even got to know that Jim and me had discussed this long before even.
> Think of it as a drive by posting.
Hard for me considering the history of this thread :-P
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»22.07.11 - 21:32
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Order of the Butterfly
Posts: 370 from 2003/3/28
Was that only 3 weeks ago. Wow.
I couldn't tell you what I posted tonight never mind 3 weeks ago!
Really - I visit a lot of different sites...
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»24.07.11 - 00:06
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Yokemate of Keyboards
Posts: 12146 from 2003/5/22
From: Germany
> I couldn't tell you what I posted tonight never mind 3 weeks ago!
So my assessment that you lost track was correct obviously. I'm looking forward to you telling us to not be surprised if IBM POWER will come with SPEs and acting as if this discussion never happened, again, and again, and again... :-P
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»24.07.11 - 09:53