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"With its embedded Power chip business under assault from makers of ARM and x86 processors" I didn't know Power chip business still existed.
by 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