Presentation of the POWER6 at ISSCC (free slides with every thread read)

[Farhan]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability,_Availability_and_Serviceability

 

[Skrying]

Anyhow, doesn't Intel have plans to unify the Itanium and Xeon lines sometime in the future?

How would that work? They're fairly different and use very different ISA.

 

[Farhan]

They were planning to unify the socket.

 

[Fox5]

They were planning to unify the socket.

Yeah, I believe that's it, CSI memory connection, same pin layout, probably unlikely you'll be able to have x86 and Itanium in the same motherboard at the same time, though such a thing could be very useful. Afterall, if they can build super computers with Opterons and Cells, why couldn't Intel do something like AMD's Torrenza and have a motherboard that can accept more than one type of processor at once? (though I believe the cells in the super computer are using pci express and not torrenza)

 

[pakotlar]

I somehow doubt that it will be very similar. It may be a derivative of some sort, but it doesn't need the extensive RAS features which take up a substantial chunk of space. I don't think a console CPU would need a decimal unit either. It's also made to clock very high and leaks power like crazy.



Completely different processor for a completely different market. Cell is an in-order streaming/parallel-processing monster, this beast is OoO and looks like it will tear through individual threads. Plus the stuff i said above.

Yeah, i suspect that bleeding 42% of your energy on tunneling electrons enjoying your 1nm gate dielectric isn't a great idea if you're building a console.

Also, I somehow doubt that xbox720/3 will have any l3 cache. Doesn't make much sense if you are going for UMA, with wide fast buses, which seems to be the trend Sony/Microsoft are following going into the future.

Also, something tells me we won't be seeing such high clockspeeds in next-gen consoles. I'm guessing frequency will stay within +/- 20%, but the # of symmetric cores will skyrocket. I wouldn't be surprised to see 8-12 identical gp cores, in order, with seriously beefed up FP capabilities, better branching capabilities.

 

[ADEX]

The best IBM chip the Mac saw was the G5, a Power4 based processor. This processor's Mac derivative would have been many many years off, probably close to a decade, if Apple were still using IBM.

There will be a derivative version and it won't be delayed at all - it's been designed to be scalable so they don't need to make a completely new chip. The low end versions are the "derivative" versions.

If Apple were still using PPC they might have even shipped it early since Apple doesn't need all the extensive qualification work the big servers need.