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IBM opens up Power chips, ARM-style, to take on Chipzilla
- tommi 13y ago"With its embedded Power chip business under assault from makers of ARM and x86 processors" I didn't know Power chip business still existed.
- spatulon 13y agoI work in automotive software, and PowerPC CPUs (albeit from Freescale and STMicroelectronics, not IBM) are more popular than ever. It's a very common choice for powertrain ECUs.
- Groxx 13y agoany particular reason? error rate, power use, ?
- zerohp 13y agoGeneral Motors was a big user of Motorola 68k variants. Workstations and personal computers that used the 680x0 series switched to the Power series, maybe the developers just find them easier to migrate to.
- duaneb 13y agoPersonally I've just found the architecture clean and well-designed. Even if this only helps the developers I'd say it's worth it.
- Tuna-Fish 13y agoThe ISA is not better than others in any real way, but IBM put a lot of early work into RAS features for their server chipsets, and this sort of leaked into the automotive and aviation world. If you want to run 3 cpus lockstep, verifying each other's results, the PPC world already has the infrastructure. This and other similar things make it an easy choice for some applications.
- chiph 13y agoIIRC, the service processor on IBM x86 servers is a PPC. (runs the light-path diagnostics, and manages remote boots, etc)
- bluedino 13y agoBig in avionics for some reason too. Wasn't it the F/22 which received an upgraded PPC that was in the news a while back?
- trafficlight 13y agoA bit of research says that the F-22 uses a pair of Raytheon CIPs, which are PowerPC based. http://www.raytheon.com/capabilities/products/f22_cip/ http://www.raytheon.com/capabilities/products/f22_cip/
- wcfields 13y agoPower Architecture is used in spacecrafts as well: The [PowerPC] 603e processors also power all 66 satellites in the Iridium satellite phone fleet. The satellites each contain seven Motorola/Freescale PowerPC 603e processors running at roughly 200 MHz each.[1] There is a radiation hardened version called "RHPPC" based on PowerPC 603e made by Honeywell & Freescale. RHPPC is equivalent to the commercial PowerPC 603e processor with the minor exceptions of the phase locked loop (PLL) and the processor version register (PVR). [2] [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerPC_600#PowerPC_603e_and_603ev http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerPC_600#PowerPC_603e_and_60... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RHPPC http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RHPPC
- neurotech1 13y agoThe F-22 uses PowerPC processors in the upgraded Common Integrated Processor(CIP) avionics, partly for compatibility with the F-35 Integrated Core Processor (ICP) avionics. F/A-18s also use PowerPC processors in the Advanced Mission Computer (AMC) avionics.
- tirant 13y agoIt's also in the Airbus A400M, and other Airbus vehicles.
- gngeal 13y agoOf course it still exists. They're doing this now because they don't want to be steamrolled by the raging success that is the OpenSPARC project.
- jfb 13y agoI laughed.
- venomsnake 13y agoIt is the execution that counts. The world could use a third mass architecture. Especially one that is not too tightly IP locked. The whole web 0.1, 1.0,2.0 came from the fact that PC clones were everywhere.
- justincormack 13y agoIts not clear if it is third or fourth now. MIPS may be third after ARM.
- Symmetry 13y agoIt really depends on whether your counting number of chips or dollars in sales. POWER chips sell at a premium inside high end enterprise systems, while MIPS is embedded in lots of places like handheld consoles and routers for more chips sold but for less money.
- vidarh 13y agoThe high end POWER chips from IBM makes up a miniscule fraction of the overall Power/PPC market in terms of units. PPC sells in comparable unit numbers to MIPS, but mostly from architecture licensees like Freescale.
- vidarh 13y agoDepends if you count by revenue, or by units. In shipped units, MIPS is quite likely either second after ARM, or third after ARM and PPC. MIPS was estimating an expected 500 million units for last year, I believe - I don't know if they met it. PPC has been estimated in the same ballpark. Unless Via's x86 sales are far higher than expected, x86 is likely below 400 million units shipped a year.
- joenathan 13y agoThe Xbox 360, Wii, Wii U, and the PS3 all use Power PC chips.
- supergauntlet 13y agoRight, but the Xbox One and PS4 are x86. PowerPC isn't nearly as dominant in the console market as it once was.
- Nelson69 13y agoIt's completely dominant in the console market. That is going to change with the new generation though but if you go buy a console today, you're buying and IBM PowerPC.
- scholia 13y agoThat's PowerPC-based chips, not actual off-the-shelf PowerPC CPUs. Big difference. Also, the main thing with the PS3 was the Cell architecture which was going to appear in every type of device from TVs to mainframes and make the rest of the processor industry obsolete.
- Millennium 13y agoAll three of the PS3/XBox360/Wii generation consoles used POWER-derived chips: very different chips, of course, but POWER all the same. The Wii U uses a POWER chip too. POWER stalled in the performance/watt category around the time of the Power Mac G5: unfortunate, since this was around the time that performance/watt was starting to be considered a real thing. That hurt the architecture's standing terribly. But it's still around.
- syncopate 13y agoAny ideas why PowerPCs stalled in performance? Is PowerPC really an architectural dead end?
- whatusername 13y agoI think it's truer to say that PowerPC stalled in performance per watt. The high end Power7/Power8 chips are massively powerful but that comes with Power and Cooling requirements that aren't going to work in a laptop.
- gsnedders 13y agoThe high end POWER stuff always had crazy cooling, though.
- Millennium 13y agoThose post-date the G5 by several years, though. Things had gotten better for POWER by then, but it had already lost much of its market.
- whatusername 13y agoKindof true. I'd forgotten how much of a Mhz bump the P6 was -- It came out 12 months after the first intel Mac Pro (and ran at 4.7Ghz at the high end). The P5 was a contemporary of the G5 (although the G5 was really a P4). But it wasn't quite the beast the P6 was.
- rch 13y agoThey still show up in HPC systems from time to time. It's a nice architecture.
- axman6 13y agoFrom time to time? So 5 out of the top 10 on the top500 is from time to time?
- Shivetya 13y agoAIX and iOS; AS/400 Big data still requires a lot of power to move it.
- bashinator 13y agoBesides the fact that PowerPC is still very common in embedded systems (and provided the CPU in all three of the last generation of game consoles), POWER != PowerPC. IBM Watson was a POWER7 system, as are a bunch of the top 500 supercomputers and many many large business big iron servers running AIX.
- montecarl 13y agoCurrently 5 out of the top 10 supercomputers are POWER: http://top500.org/ http://top500.org/
- ArbitraryLimits 13y agoARM chips outsell x86 chips by at least a factor of two, and I'm pretty sure more than that. For each Intel desktop/laptop there are twenty ARM chips in microwaves, cars and airplanes. In the beginning it had a lot to do with toolchain support, these days I think it's a combination of force of habit and the fact that you can fry an egg on an x86 floating point unit.
- axman6 13y agoFrom what I know of the space, ARM is not used very much at all in cars or aviation. These are both areas where PowerPC dominates. I'd guess most modern cars have at least a dozen PowerPC chips. And both ARM and PowerPC outsel x86 by a hell of a lot more than a factor of 2. It's at least a factor of 10, and that's almost certainly low too. x86, in terms of units sold, is an extremely small market.
- TsiCClawOfLight 13y agoat first, I took factor 10 for a binary joke :)
- ArbitraryLimits 13y agoYou're right, I meant to write PowerPC.
- vidarh 13y agoMore like a factor of 10.
- Tuna-Fish 13y agoNot so much in cars and airplanes, but somewhat ironically, a typical x86 pc has many more ARM cores than it has x86 cores. My hard drive has 3 arm cores, my ssd has 2, my sound chip has one, my network chip has one...
- duaneb 13y agoIf I weren't tied to consumer electronics I'd use POWER in a heartbeat.
- vidarh 13y agoLast I heard (it's been about a year since I looked into numbers), Power/PPC chips appeared to be outselling x86 chips by a substantial margin with the caveat that it's hard to come by numbers from the "smaller" x86 vendors (like Via) that might very well be selling larger numbers than expected of the low end alternatives but at much lower prices and margins and so fly under the radar. x86 is likely something like the 4th or 5th largest chip architecture by volume shipped today. Last estimate I've seen was in the 360 million range per year, maybe as high as 400 million. That's after ARM, likely to ship 3 billion this year, MIPS and PPC probably in the 500+ million range each unless there's been massive unexpected changes over the last year. X86 gets all the attention because it's on desktops and in laptops and because Intel is disproportionally important because their revenue is several times that of any other CPU manufacturer because nobody else ships nearly as many high end chips (e.g this puts Intel at 7 times Qualcomm, at second place, in revenue from CPU/MPU's last year: http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/cpu/display/20130521205843_Intel_Dominates_Microprocessor_Sales_as_AMD_s_Shipments_Drop_Below_Qualcomm_and_Samsung.html http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/cpu/display/20130521205843_Inte... ) And for the surprise contender, it is unclear where the 6502 architecture falls: It ships in "hundreds of millions" a year according to Western Design Centre). Note that this might very well largely be in the form of licenses for embedding the cores in custom ASICs or in FPGAs, so whether you'd want to count that is another matter (as an example, some Amiga's had keyboards with an embedded 6502 core + PROM and a tiny amount of RAM). It's possible that some of the other extremely low end 8-bit CPU cores that are still being used as micro-controllers might also ship volumes like that. I've seen no indication that Sparc is anywhere in the running
- chokolad 13y agoStrong feeling of deja vu http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Hardware_Reference_Platform http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Hardware_Reference_Platf...
- astrodust 13y agoThere was even a version of Windows NT 4.0 for that. It was great. Then Motorola decided they had no clue what they were doing with computers, IBM gave up and shut the whole thing down.
- bluedino 13y agoAll of the RISC chips were dying anyway. Intel was starting to build steam with the Pentium Pro and Pentium II, Wintel servers were getting cheaper and more common, Windows was becoming 'good enough' and Linux started to push the expensive traditional Linuxes off the table.
- Symmetry 13y agoThat's really just the standard Innovator's Dilemma effect where low-cost, high-volume products often tend to eat their way up the market. Now that the semi-RISC ARM processor is attacking Intel from the low end it's having the same sort of success as x86 did over MIPS, etc.
- dman 13y agoNext couple of years are going to be interesting. Intels been winning for so long that it seems that theyre immune to the innovators dilemna. Will be interesting to see if the arm platform will break into the mainstream of desktop / server computing or if Intel will prevail and have 80% of the desktop and mobile market.
- Nelson69 13y agoHow good is ARM at running just generic ARM binaries? There are all the custom hardware parts, we can ignore them, but can I build a 32bit ARM binary that will run on a wide range of ARM cores with good/great performance? Historically, it has been my experience that pretty much all the non-x86 platforms the compiler and hardware specific optimizations tend to have a pretty dramatic impact. Intel just has so much code and existing code streams to factor in to their designs for new hardware. Maybe this has changed. It's a hard road if mismatched or non-hardware optimized binaries are slow and pokey and hardware specific optimized binaries are competitive. Come out with a great 64bit ARM core that can run nearly all ARM binaries with decent performance (clearly, excluding stuff that needs custom hardware..) and ARM could be pretty disruptive.
- pvdm 13y agoChipzilla = Intel.
- astrodust 13y agoI would love to see a Rasperry Pi type device with a PPC chip on it, a 603e equivalent for example, or even better, a 7400 series "G4" chip.
- AnthonyMouse 13y agoFWIW: http://www.ebay.com/sch/Desktops-AllInOnes-/171957/i.html?_sop=15&_from=R40&_nkw=g4+mini&LH_BIN=1 http://www.ebay.com/sch/Desktops-AllInOnes-/171957/i.html?_s... Costs more than the Raspberry Pi though.
- jevinskie 13y agoWatch out for used G5s that have leaked their coolant.
- AnthonyMouse 13y agoJust avoid the G5s whatsoever. They're enormous, hot, and very poor value for money because they're the fastest Macs that can run Classic, which means they continue to get bid up by people with legacy software. For the same money you can get a Core 2 Duo which will be superior in every way provided you don't need to run MacOS on it.
- wmf 13y agohttp://www.genesi-tech.com/products/efika/5200b http://www.genesi-tech.com/products/efika/5200b
- xradionut 13y agoWhich has been replaced by: Low cost, low power ARM based computer...
- rogerbinns 13y agoGet out your time machine and you can http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeBox http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeBox - note the geekport. Admittedly it was a smidgeon more expensive than the Raspberry Pi.
- bitbckt 13y agoThe final paragraph sounds like an answer to the AMD/ARM-driven HSA Foundation.
- mtgx 13y agoI assume this is mostly targeted at the very high-end - servers and super-computers and such.
- vidarh 13y agoThe vast majority of Power Architecture CPU's, by units shipped, go into lower end devices, so I'm not so sure that's the only area they'd target.
- gvb 13y agoI'm not quite sure where the news is here. IBM has been licensing the architecture and cores for years (2007 is mentioned[1]). All I see in the actual announcement[2] is marketing hype (not news) about software that already exists ("open firmware" == U-Boot, "open software" == linux) and hardware that has been licensable for years. [1] http://en.wikipedia.or/wiki/Power_Architecture#Licensing http://en.wikipedia.or/wiki/Power_Architecture#Licensing [2] http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/41684.wss http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/41684.wss
- wmf 13y agoReading between the lines, it sounds like a Tyan whitebox with Power8 processors, Nvidia GPUs, and Mellanox NICs running Linux. Might be good for HPC.
- xradionut 13y agoProbably will cost $50,000 and run as fast a new smartphone...
- marshray 13y agoDon't forget the $30000 every year thereafter for the maintenance contract.
- Spooky23 13y agoDon't worry, you can pay $1,000/day to unlock a new core when you need the power of two smartphones.
- raverbashing 13y agoDon't forget the million dollar annual license for their "top notch" coffcoff* sw
- aray 13y agoReading the press release, the firmware mentioned is neither das u boot (a bootloader) nor "open firmware" [1] a boot standard used by IBM's Power systems. It is the actual chip firmware, and this is the first I've ever heard of a silicon vendor doing this! I'm excited to see what the open source community will be able to do with it. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Firmware http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Firmware
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]