Intel employees: What do you guys think about the G5?

[ndee]

I'm just watching the keynote. What do you guys think about that CPU? Were you surprised at the G5?

 

[Mday]

i am not an intel employee.

but obviously it's no surprise, cpu wise.

personally, i find it interesting that they may be the first to bring 64bit to the consumer.

note, opteron is not for the consumer, nor is itanium.

 

[borealiss]

i think there's a lot of questionable things about what jobs said. look around the web concerning the validity of jobs' claims that the g5 outperforms the p4/hammer/k7 at spec and then look at the spec website. i also question how well the g5 will be able to take advantage of that high speed bus. was it 1 ghz or something? it must have prefetch like a mofo. even if it is double the precision of the g4, that seems like overkill.

edit...
oh yeah. i'm not an intel employee.

 

[AEB]

i dont work for intel but the G5 isnt a miracle. aside from the 1 Ghz bus and pci express, it doesnt offer more than itanium and opteron (because g5 will probably be expensive) besides august is a way aways, and the hammer has an "august" launch date also you need mac os 10.3 for 64 bit apps.

 

[ndee]

OK, I also meant the others, not only Intel employees Did you guys think that Apple had something like that up it sleeves? That Photoshop benchmark was kinda impressive, if that wasn't a fake.

 

[Lynx516]

Not very surprising the Architecture has been known for some time (go to arstechnica and there are articles on it ) IF anything I am a bi disapointed by teh results as in theory it should be doing quite alot better but as it has lots of execution units and a deep pipline it must need prefetch up to the eyeballs to work effectivly.

 

[Fencer128]

Originally posted by: AEB
i dont work for intel but the G5 isnt a miracle. aside from the 1 Ghz bus and pci express, it doesnt offer more than itanium and opteron (because g5 will probably be expensive) besides august is a way aways, and the hammer has an "august" launch date also you need mac os 10.3 for 64 bit apps.

Hi,

I don't think that PCI-X = PCI Express, and so the G5 systems do not feature PCI Express.

Cheers,

Andy

 

[sgtroyer]

I think you're right. PCI-X is not the same thing as PCI-Express.

 

[Mday]

read the pci express article on the main site for the "difference"

 

[AEB]

i didnt say it was the same i ask people "does it come with pci express" and they said "yeah it comes iwht pci X" so i assumed it was the same thansk for clearing it

 

[Buddha Bart]

Its a really nifty "throw everything and the kitchen sink in" CPU design.

I think the block parallel execution is an interesting way to extract as much ILP out of incoming code as possible. At first you'd think it would cause a latency problem, but I guess if engineered well and run at a high enough clock speed it won't cause a problem.

I kind a view it as the last huzzah of the CISC/RISC era. From here on out major cpu releases are either going to focus on ILP with EPIC like designs that push the onus to the compiler, or TLP with multi-core designs that make it up to the programmer. Actually it'll probably be a case of "i'll take both".

Anyway, if you want to know more about the "G5" (Power 970), check these out:
Ars Technica: A Brief Look at the PowerPC 970 (10/2002)
Ars Technica: Inside the IBM PowerPC 970 (10/2002)
Ars Technica: Inside the IBM PowerPC 970, Part II (5/2003)
You'll notice from the dates on the links, as Lynx said, the G5 wasn't a suprise.

 

[microAmp]

Originally posted by: ndee
I'm just watching the keynote. What do you guys think about that CPU? Were you surprised at the G5?

I can tell you that my fellow friends over at Motorola's MOS 13 aren't too happy about that... they made the G4 with super low yields.... you would freak if you heard what the Apple laptop CPU yields were.