In Part 1 I discussed how the software development world is about to be turned on it’s head. Now in Part 2 I look at how the hardware world may be about to undergo even bigger changes and why it wont be a hardware manufacturer leading the way.
I’ll get royally slagged off for this so I’ll get this bit over with first…
PowerPC takes the lead from x86
The IBM PowerPC 970 (aka G5) is close to the x86 in performance with differences due to compiler and code quality currently holding it back. The new 90 nanometer 970FX will increase clock rates to well beyond 2.0GHz and IBMs compiler has already shown >30% gains over GCC on existing 970s. When updated CPUs ship and software using the IBM compiler gets into production I expect the PowerPC will finally again pull ahead of x86 after a long period in the doldrums. With 3GHz PowerPCs due later in the year long rumoured to be based on the more advanced POWER 5 architecture, I expect both Intel and AMD will remain behind.
I do expect that Intel could stay ahead in SPEC marks (or perhaps AMD [1]) but it’ll become increasingly obvious that even the best intended benchmarks can be tamed by a sufficiently determined marketing department. Intel’s newly announced Prescott core is proving to show little if any performance improvement over the existing Northwood core at the same clock speed yet SPEC scores are up markedly [2].
That said Prescott is only starting out and it has clearly been designed for high clock rates, the first CPUs shipping are not even beginning to show what this CPU is capable of. However, Intel are currently facing problems with high transistor leakage current in their 90 nm process and this increases power consumption dramatically, this could hold the Prescott core back from it’s true potential. In any case we can expect top end Intel CPUs to climb to well past 100 Watts power consumption this year, Intel themselves have talked about water cooling and given the power consumption of early Tejas samples [3] that might not be such a bad idea.
On the other hand both IBM and AMD are using Silicon-On-Insulator technology which reduces leakage current, consequently the 970FX already has considerably lower power consumption than the 970. We can expect both the Opteron and Athlon64 to follow the same pattern. Intel will get it’s power back to sensible levels when 65 nm manufacturing comes on line sometime around 2005-06.
What happens in 2005 is anyone’s guess, but with a third player in the performance desktop CPU scene things will be very good for consumers. Many readers no doubt will have a different prediction for performance levels this year but one thing we can all be sure of is the performance levels of the different CPUs will be discussed, discussed and discussed…
Will the Itanic sink?
For many years the dominant computer system has been Windows running on an x86 CPU.
Both Microsoft and Intel have both tried to change this to no effect, Windows NT initially ran on multiple platforms but this is no longer the case today. Intel wants us to all to switch to the Itanium but the initial performance was weak and even today it’s promised performance gains over RISC CPUs have never materialised [4]. With Intel themselves now looking likely to produce a 64 bit x86 CPU, it looks like the Itanium and it’s 13 year, multi-billion development cost could potentially turn out to be the biggest mistake in commercial history.
On the other hand Intel now have most of the team who developed the Alpha CPUs and they are working on the 3rd generation Itanium called “Tanglewood” due in 2005, perhaps Itanium has only had a difficult childhood and it may yet become blossom into a highly successful adult.
x86 will die
One of the x86 providers sell x86 chips which are not x86 chips. They do have some hardware to address the oddities of the x86 instruction set but nevertheless they cannot natively run x86 code. If you are into chips you’ll know that it is Transmeta I am talking about.
The AMD Opteron / Athlon64 has more registers than the standard x86 instruction set defines but software has to be recompiled in order to use them. I’m curious to know what would happen if AMD was to include “code-morphing” software which recompiled the 32 bit x86 code to use these extra registers, would 32 bit performance be as good as it is in the hardware compatibility mode? Could performance even go up? If performance was comparable the 32 bit hardware mode could be largely removed, simplifying the CPU and making it both faster and cheaper.
What is more interesting is if such a technique worked on an AMD processor could it also work on something completely different? Well, yes, Transmeta have already proved this, but none of the Transmeta designs to date are not high performance CPUs. x86 code has ran on non-x86 performance platforms before and sometimes at very high performance [5].
Advantage Alpha
In the 1990s DEC produced Alpha processors and these ran Windows NT. However being incompatible with the x86 instruction set meant most of the existing software base would not run. In order to address this DEC produced a technology called “FX!32” which could emulate x86 CPUs at reasonable speed using a technique not unlike that Transmeta uses. In addition to this the Windows NT libraries were native Alpha code and a lot of programs spent a lot of time in them, this in combination with the Alpha’s then huge speed advantage meant that x86 programs ran faster on the Alpha than they did on the x86.
Performance is no longer important for the vast majority of computing needs. As such, when CPUs can be made which can execute x86 code at high performance and / or low cost compared to native x86 designs there will be little point making them native any more. When x86 performance which is “good enough” and cost sufficiently low we could see the end of the native x86 processor.
Raise the Itanic
The Itanium had a hardware x86 emulator but it’s performance has always been lacking to say the least. Intel now intends to remove this hardware and use the very same FX!32 technology to run x86 binaries on Itaniums with better results. It can already match a low end Pentium 4 and it’ll certainly be interesting to see how well Tanglewood will handle x86 code. It’ll be even more interesting to see how it handles 64 bit x86 code which should be a lot simpler than x86-32, Emulators should do a lot better job when the machine they are emulating is simpler. Once a large body of software has moved to 64 bit and 32 bit performance is “good enough” in software I expect we will see a lot of the original x86 ISA removed from the native x86 CPUs – the primary idea extolled by the RISC movement – the simplification of the ISA – will have finally won.
I expect Intel will use this enhanced performance to move the PC world to Itaniums. Some see the apparent pending announcement of an Intel x86-64 as being a major climb down for the worlds largest CPU company, Intel may view it rather differently, they may be using x86-64 as nothing more than a stepping stone to the Itanium and in this case AMD may have unintentionally saved them a lot of effort. Moving into the x86 domain however will make the Itanium’s future as a high end CPU rather questionable, perhaps Itanium will replace the x86 as the main desktop CPU and become the major low end server CPU as Xeon is today. Of course it’ll be up against the Opteron and it’s successors – oddly enough also designed by ex-Alpha designers.
The x86 ISA will eventually become a purely software problem, CPU architects will be free to be truly creative once again and we should see some interesting designs as a result. With Transmeta, AMD’s x86-64 extensions and Intel’s x86 emulation on Itanium we are seeing the beginning of this process, the x86 is being killed, not by competition from other processors or ISAs, but by the very companies who make them.
Whatever happens this bodes well for the future of Microprocessors, with the x86 instruction set changing into a purely software problem we could see a wider range of CPUs moving into the PC field. Transmeta, Opteron and Itanium all look to be future contenders for your future PCs. One has to wonder what the results would be if IBM was to run Transmeta style “code-morphing” software with a PowerPC 970FX, could PowerPC also be a future PC processor?
The future on the CPU front certainly looks like it is going to be active and interesting. Unfortunately not everything looks good in the future of the PC.
Microsoft will attempt to take over your computer
You may think they have got control of most computers already but this is not the case, they only control the software, I expect Microsoft to try and control the hardware. Why would they want to do such a thing? Simple, if they control the hardware they can make money from it.
There was a time when Microsoft could insist on companies on paying a license fee for all computers whether Windows was included or not. They can’t do things like that anymore but you can bet they would sure like to. One way would to do this again would be to get something they have patents on included in PC hardware, they could then get a share of profits from all PCs – even if they are not running Windows.
However that involves adding something to the PC, Intel and AMD are not going to want to share their profits so wont agree to this, not even Microsoft can force something to be added against their wishes. Microsoft need to find a way to force them to agree to add their IP and I think they’ve found it.
With the X-Box 2 Microsoft can switch to any CPU they want and indeed they are doing exactly that.
But, Microsoft are going much further than just swapping parts. With X-Box 2 Microsoft are becoming a hardware company, or to be more precise, a semiconductor company [6].
The change of CPU in the X-Box 2 may only be a taste of what’s to come, Microsoft could also use the same hardware to produce an “Office-Box”, it’ll be plenty fast enough for the majority of applications and with a reasonable emulator it can run the huge back catalogue of x86 applications, most of which do not need massive computing speed.
Microsoft already have much of the technology they need to do this. The .Net CLR (Common Language Runtime) allows them to host .Net applications on different hardware. The VirtualPC emulator they purchased last year allows them to run the existing x86 software base. It can all run on Windows or perhaps the newer cut down version of XP they’ve just announced. This new version of XP is important because it means they can build a low cost thin client, which will make them difficult to compete with. Of course all this would mean a serious amount of rewriting of the OS, Oddly enough Longhorn is talking a remarkably long time for an OS update, indeed some rumours have suggested it could debut as late as 2007-08. This is a very long time and the resulting development cost will be amazingly expensive, it’ll run to several $billion.
Microsoft now have the option of switching to another processor architecture altogether. If AMD or Intel do not want to bend to their wishes Microsoft can threaten to dump x86, with the X-Box 2 they can prove their point. IBM or Motorola may not be keen on adding Microsoft IP either but I doubt either would turn down the opportunity of producing over a hundred million high margin processors a year.
It could be that the widely rumoured multi-CPU PowerPC based X-Box 2 is correct and this is the weapon that they intend to use against AMD and Intel. That the X-Box 2 is PowerPC is almost beyond doubt – what other “state of the art CPU technology” does IBM have? A multi-CPU design allow Microsoft to run not only applications at speed but also removes the need for various hardware devices (sound chip etc.) This is useful in a consumer games machine but this sheer power will also enable emulated x86 applications to be run alongside native apps at speed, a multi-PowerPC X-Box 2 makes a powerful – and low cost – competitor to a PC.
One company who this could effect almost by accident is Apple, they will have more powerful PowerPC processors by then but a low cost box with multiple processors will bring their pricing structure into sharper focus ever before. There are other ways to boost computing power – potentially massively – and I expect Apple will be looking at these to differentiate future Macs.
Tax .Net
If Microsoft can control the hardware it means they make money from it, it doesn’t matter if you are running Windows or Linux, MS will still get their pound of flesh. Microsoft are and always have been in it for the money, this ensures that even if Microsoft loses their Operating System dominance they’ll still make plenty of money. Of course other Operating Systems will need to access the hardware to operate and this will be arranged by licensing a piece of Microsoft code. Run Linux and you’ll not only pay the hardware tax but you’ll also pay Microsoft more for the pleasure of running Linux.
Having said that this may prove problematic for Linux. If running an OS involves adding NDA’s code to the OS, BSD licensed software will not have a problem, they can work with closed source code.
Linux on the other hand is covered by the GPL, the GPL like any other license has terms and conditions which you are not free to break. If running on MS hardware requires including NDA’d closed source code this may break the GPL and Linux may not legally be able to run on a Microsoft computer[7]. This will not be the fault of Microsoft, it will be the fault of the GPL – free software is not quite as free as one might think, if the GPL was truly free there would be no terms and conditions to break [8] and there would be no problem. I expect this will not really be a problem however, the answer will be a binary driver of some form, but again you’ll have to pay Microsoft for it.
Could this work?
If Microsoft actually tried this would it work? This is a difficult question but Microsoft are probably the one company who could do it. Microsoft’s attempts to get into other markets have to date met come up with pretty feeble results, but in the computer industry when Microsoft say Jump the only answer they get is “how high?”. Microsoft have the power, the determination and the staying power to actually do something like this. But, is even their power enough?
IBM, Intel and even Microsoft have all tried to get the market to change and have never succeeded. However conditions are different now and Microsoft have the technology to force this on the industry if they want it or not. The combination of the .NET CLR, VirtualPC and the lessening need for performance means the industry can jump. The CPU itself is becoming irrelevant, what is relevant is Palladium, because this is the part Microsoft own and most likely the part they want to put in every desktop computer on the planet. It’s meant to be a protection system but it’ll probably be hacked so it doesn’t matter if it works or not, what matters is that your PC includes it and you pay the tax.
And then of course you’ll have to pay next year, and the year after that. With hardware in the PC Microsoft will be able to charge you rent for your own PC. Who needs upgrade fees when people are not upgrading as they used to, charging them rent instead is equally lucrative and you don’t have to pay for R&D.
Now I don’t know if this is what Microsoft are actually planning but consider the facts:
.Net CLR
VirtualPC
X-Box 2 with non x86 CPUs
Longhorn’s highly expensive extended development.
Palladium & Microsoft’s apparent openness with it.
A lessening dominance of the industry.
Slowing upgrade rates.
Microsoft’s money supply is increasingly under threat and they need to do something about.
Microsoft have motive and opportunity.
Then, Chaos
If Microsoft can get the hardware they want into standard PCs and switch to another processor architecture the result on the PC industry will be chaotic to say the least. Other companies will attempt to jump in with alternative solutions with different processors most likely running Linux. Linux however still has the problem of being overly and unnecessarily complex, it’s ready for many users desktops but clearly not ready for all of them, it needs to get a move on to get ready in time. It’s not necessary to remove the complexity, just hide it from casual users, a user should be able to use Linux without ever having to use the command line, if OS X can do it…
There is the distinct possibility such a drastic move could backfire for Microsoft and give Linux and other Operating Systems the chance they’ve been waiting for. On the other hand it could also backfire in other ways, if entire PCs can be emulated couldn’t the Microsoft hardware also be emulated? Would you need to pay the tax then?
It seems there are some battles ahead in the computer industry, could we end up some day running Windows on a PowerPC PC, part of which we’ve leased for Microsoft?
I can’t say I know the answer to that but what I do know is that the answer is irrelevant.
Even If Microsoft win their battles there is another battle they will lose.
This one which will change the technology industry forever. The challenge will come out of nowhere, it will be laughed off by most of the industry, the very same industry it will go on to replace.
It will win because it will strike at the very economic rules and assumptions that this entire industry is built upon.
Stay tuned for Part 3…
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References & Notes
[1] Opteron does very well on SPEC with the Intel compiler, but requires a flag Intel have disabled.http://www.realworldtech.com/forums/index.cfm… [2] Prescott improves on SPEC but not much else – according to Intel!
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=13851 [3] Early samples of future Intel CPU “Tejas” use 150 Watts.
http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/cpu/display/20040111115528.html [4] A Register reader points out how Itanium isn’t so great outside of SPEC marks.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/61/35154.html [5] Wolves in CISC clothing – x86 CPU Emulation
http://www.realworldtech.com/page.cfm?ArticleID=RWT122803224105 [6] Microsoft and Chips
http://www.mdronline.com/publications/mpw/issues/mpw114.html#item2 [7] That’s not quite true, you would be able to run Linux but would not be able to distribute it. [8] The GPL is Free as in “out in the open”, it is not Free as in “unrestricted”. This difference is not made clear by the FSF.
Copyright (c) Nicholas Blachford February 2004
Disclaimer:
This series is a purely personal work about the future and as such is nothing more than informed speculation on my part. I suggest future possibilities and actions which companies may take but this does not mean that they will take them or are even considering them.
“if AMD was to include “code-morphing” software which recompiled the 32 bit x86 code to use these extra registers, would 32 bit performance be as good as it is in the hardware compatibility mode? Could performance even go up?”
HP’s Dyanamo project did precisely this. It translated PA-RISC code to PA-RISC code and achieved an average speedup of about 20% over the output of the optimizing C compiler. A native-to-native dynamic translator like Dynamo has the advantage that it does not have to do extensive translation (the native code can run as-is) and so can focus on making dynamic optimizations (eliminating branches are runtime, etc). I wouldn’t be surprised if some form of Dynamo resurfaced to get better performance out of the Itanium.
The Itanium is interesting for other reasons. Basically, Itanium has more functional units than code can use effectively. Getting 3-way parallelism out of C code is tough, and the Itanium2 has 6 (!) integer units. One can easily see a good compiler taking advantage of those extra units to do stuff like range-checking, dynamic type-checks, etc. It also has a short 8-stage (!) pipeline that minimizes the cost of branches. Combined with something like Dynamo to help optimize-out the cost of dynamic dispatch, and and Itanium becomes one hell of an attractive CPU for dynamic/polymorphic languages.
The author tries to paint a picture made of self speculation about a computer armageddon, streight out of a movie! We have plot twists, bad guys, good guys, and the final saviors coming in just in the nick of time (Will the linux desktop be ready in time?)
Sadly, things in real life are much more boring. Microsoft are not going to be selling ‘Office Boxs’ due to it not being worth the price. With XBox, they can use the games for the profits, but with this supposidly ‘Office Box’ it would have to be considerably cheaper then what someone can get elsewhere.
From dell, one can get the lowest end system with windows for $200. For companies buying in bulk, they can probably get such prices for less.
So where will the profit from these office boxs come from? Hardware? They gotta be cheaper then the competition of a full fledged computer, and so just like with the XBox, they will lose money on the hardware.
Software? The minute you actually have to pay money for software, you lose the vendor lockin, and people will start looking for alteernatives (i.e. SUN will push star office as a replacement etc…)
well, if MS sold those boxes for 150 bucks, then had a subscription service for businesses for their software, that would be a good deal.
“A multi-CPU design allow Microsoft to run not only applications at speed but also removes the need for various hardware devices (sound chip etc.) This is useful in a consumer games machine but this sheer power will also enable emulated x86 applications to be run alongside native apps at speed, a multi-PowerPC X-Box 2 makes a powerful – and low cost – competitor to a PC. ”
This does not make much sense to me… Why dedicate an entire powerPC cpu to doing sound when you could use a dedicated dsp like an Atmel for much cheaper?
Other dedicated hardware like GPUs are also much cheaper and faster at what they do than a general purpose CPU.
What other hardware do you need a PowerPC dedicated processor for? The joystick?
I guess running x86 apps alongside native ones would be cool, but I don’t see Microsoft paying for extra CPUs just to make this work a little smoother.
I bet that if the other processors in the XBox2 are at all related to PowerPC, they will not be general purpose, or able to run code efficiently enough for emulation of X86, but rather highly modified versions, more like a normal DSP or GPU.
I don’t see how it would be wise for Microsoft to enter the hardware market. Right now their OS and Office business units are the only ones that make money. If they enter the hardware market they are then competing againt those same companies that currently buy products from these two units.
Think about it, if I was Dell and all of a sudden Microsoft was comepeting against me (whether their product was cheaper or not), I would very quickly be looking for an alternative to be installing on my PCs. I think the old term for this is “biting the hand that feeds you”.
It’s just not feasible. The whole world — big companies, big countries — is arrayed against anything like this happening. I can’t tell you how this fails, or how MS’s current dominance comes undone. But one way or the other, MS will fail. They got something almost by accident – this ridiculous monopoly. It’s an accident of history, a blip. It’ll be gone. The only question is how long it lasts. I expect a lot of thrashing about from MS to prolong it, but so what.
While I don’t agree with it all this is another good article in the main. Particually MS trying to use Palladium to extend their computer tax to hardware even if it doesn’t come with there OS, or from a company that has to charge you for their OS even if you don’t want it.
I don’t beleive that the Office Box thinish client idea will pan out. At the moment the XBox hardware looses them money, which they recoupe in lincencing development kits (the same as the rest of the Console industry, the hardware is a loss leader for getting users that will get you developers who you get your money off). So an Office box would not get them any real revenue when they can have the same type of thing produced and have the OEM foot the hardware bill, remember most OEM’s have razor thin margins, while they reap the larger profits.
Let’s say that IBM, Intel, and AMD won’t or can’t hold off the ridiculous scenario written up here. How long do you think one of the Korean or other CPU manufacturers would take to make a total non MS computer for installing Linux on? A few days? Maybe a few weeks? Actually they are already out there. Linux users would just change to those and bypass MS.
But what is proposed isn’t going to happen. IBM, Intel, AMD, Dell, etc., aren’t going to let it happen.
Microsoft building a computer… Honestly, I do actually like the sound of that. I have yet to run into any major problems with Windows or any Microsoft hardware (mouse, keyboard, etc.), so if MS went into the computer building business, I would certainly take a look at what they had to offer.
You can say a lot of things about these articles, but the author sure knows how to write a great cliff hanger.
Tax.Net :
it the old dream of MS to sell serices via the net on certificated Hardware. From Born to Death, you pay to MS not less….
it’s so easy : don’t buy it.
it’s so easy : would you buy socks which sues you if you use them with the wrong shoes ?
Hopefully, Europe is far away from the US-Law and, hopefully, the EU will resist.
krgds,
Frank
What does the Xbox have to do with a hill of beans? Just because MS is able to choose what processor they want for the Xbox(duhh, they make it), what does that have to do with the PC? Microsoft can’t just choose what processor they want(well, they can, but that would be utterly stupid). What about all the x86 code out there? No, you can’t just throw .NET out there yet. It’s going to take years and years and years for .NET to come out in shrink-wrap, and even then there will be billions of lines of x86 code out there. I guess they could throw some kind of emulation layer into the OS, but I still don’t see it happening anytime soon. People have been predicting for years that some kind of hybrid game-console, web browser thingie will take over the computing needs of the majority of the public. I just don’t see that happening.
Like someone else pointed out, this guy seems to want to spin this into some kind of mystery novel.
Three points. 1) Rumors as fact and lots of speculation aren’t going to lead to much. 2) hate to burst your bubble but PowerPC isn’t going to be taking over the world. 3) You say that MS can force Intel, AMD, and IBM to do what it wants. Sorry but that is simply NOT possible.
try reading what he said after the comment.
he is claiming that PPC will take back the speed crown because of IBMs ne compiler, the fact that Intell is having a huge leakage problem, and a few other things…all of which make sense to me….infact, I think that intel is in for a huge fall if it can not get the power consumption problem solved soon.
Well, let me guess at Part 3… not only will the concepts behind the cell processor change the nature of computing “power” and where it is located, but the cell phone will change the nature of location based computing. This would both make a company such as, but not necessarily, Microsoft more like a Bell company, and allow the subscription like charges to be spread over the lifetime of devices (12-18 months generally). Not only is this an issue, but DRM should appropriately be placed at the purchasing point, and personal technology allows for both DRM and smart money-like capabilities. Fun!
Depending how far in the future you look, controlling the desktop top might mean controling mini-nets.
Wireless technology provides interesting capabilities. In theory you could have a PDA or cell phone as a remote interface to a server or two. An example I am thinking about is for home use but could be applied elsewhere. A typical home could have a wireless box controlling various media such as movies and music. The PDA or cellphone would have the GUI interface to select what movies to watch or what music to play. The wireless server wouldn’t need a monitor. Wireless keyboards could be used to enter long strings of data. If TVs have high resolution, people could surf the net. You could perform a Google search on a PDA and the result could be piped to the nearest video display.
Some day, you might be able to gather data off your home server remotely through the use of either PDA or cellphone and it wouldn’t matter where you were located. If you are in a grocery store and need your grocery list, use you cellphone to grab the list off your home server. Some kind of wireless VPN connection could be made. I am not good with technical details but hopefully you get the idea.
Full time connections to the internet, wireless technology, and the proliferation of cellphones and PDAs, computing may not be sitting in front of a desktop computer.
It might be hard for one company to control cellphones, PDAs, and servers/desktops.
Will this come to be? The technology is either here or almost here.
Itanium was obviously an awful business mistake. AMD has made the right decision by producing IP which they can leverage across both commodity desktop and server lines (Athlon64/Opteron). In this way the high volume commodity market helps offset the cost of a server processor.
Unlike the Athlon 64, Intel has almost no means of cutting the Itanium down into a processor for use in the commodity (x86) market, which was certainly never a design requirement for the Itanium but may be the only way for Intel to recoup their losses from a business perspective. Unfortunately, given the added R&D that would be required to repurpose the Itanium as a commodity chip, it’s an investment Intel is unlikely to make.
Article: “…it looks like the Itanium and it’s 13 year, multi-billion development cost could potentially turn out to be the biggest mistake in commercial history.”
Not that it’s of any consequence, but I can think of several business ventures which were considerably worse. The $8 billion Iridium satellite cluster which is in the process of burning up in Earth’s atmosphere comes to mind. So does VeriSign’s purchase of NSI for $21 billion, especially when coupled with the recent $100 million sale of NSI.
cheezwog: This does not make much sense to me… Why dedicate an entire powerPC cpu to doing sound when you could use a dedicated dsp like an Atmel for much cheaper?
Other dedicated hardware like GPUs are also much cheaper and faster at what they do than a general purpose CPU.
What other hardware do you need a PowerPC dedicated processor for? The joystick?
Okay, first, let’s get the rumors straight. Despite claims that the XBox Next will have “four or more IBM processors”, it’s much more likely (and insider knowledge has suggested) that the XBox Next will instead contain four chips manufactured by IBM. As to whether this will be something like two PPC9*0 processors and two HyperTransport bridges for the processors is uncertain.
Given that Microsoft will be targeting HDTVs with resolutions of up to 1920×1080, it doesn’t seem unreasonable that two processors would be advantageous. The Sega Saturn and 32X both shipped with dual processors (an omen of dismal failure for the XBox Next?) One processor could be dedicated to managing the virtual world being presented, and another could handle the actual presentation.
Although given that the XBox Next will supposedly be smaller than the current XBox, and that IBM will be providing custom fabrication for Microsoft, it seems odd that Microsoft simply wouldn’t use a multicore processor, which in the case of a Power5 derived architecture would support up to 4 hardware threads.
I wouldn’t take the rumors of an SMP XBox too seriously at this point.
x86 will die
x86 won’t die. IA32 will die… eventually, once both Intel and AMD are pushing 64-bit chips backwards compatible with IA32. x86 will evolve.
Inted doesn’t hold any sort of speed crown right now. Everything I’ve seen shows the Opteron/AthlonFX series blowing the crap out of Intel’s stuff for every day usage.
No matter how much the guy might hope for software to become more and more hardware independent, there would have to be some kind of massive acceleration of Moore’s law to make any sort of instruction set emulation patalable to any gamers. Why would a gamer buy a PPC based machine that emulates his current games way slower than an x86 currently plays them? I would think that someone would have to release a non x86 processor with 5x or more the speed of the current fastest x86 to be able to emulate it properly. Not to mention be cheaper.
And gamers are the ones who spend the big bucks which currently drive the vendor high end products.
About his PPC claims: what’s more likely (but still unlikely) to happen is that the PPC will ultimately go the way of the DEC Alpha. It’s a crying shame that architecture was killed off. It was a damn good processor.
PowerPC is a major technological cornerstone for IBM, its not just for Apple.
It is significant to IBM’s Linux corporate desktop initiative. A processor platform and OS that IBM controls fully that is cost effective to deploy in low and midrange enterprise applications. I’m not saying that IBM is going to forego Intel or AMD solutions, just that it will favor deploying PowerPC anywhere it can. I can see PowerPC being around for a long time.
My computing days are over if I have to pay MS to run Linux. Period.
I believe Microsoft is in fact singular.
Interesting article.
Xbit labs has an early sample of hte Tejas where Dissapates 150W @ 2.8GHz.
http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/cpu/display/20040111115528.html
I don’t take sides, but Intel has some serious work to do to Prescott and Tejas to make them worth while upgrade options. Who knows what all the extra transistors are for but the way things look now it could be a good year for AMD.
BTW, with the current trend of Intel and AMD moving into the server side of the market I expect that we will see more R&D from both companies in the server area. With the introduction of 64 bit desktop processors means an entirely new class of low end servers. It will be a sad day at Sun Microsystems when Dell starts selling Linux and windows servers on 64 bit Xeon processors. It will be difficult to get into a price war with AMD/Intel when the R&D for their server chips are masked by their massive desktop sales.
Oh how many times have articles like this been published… “this will be the future!” and it never is. Historically, things have ended up significantly less sensational than commentators prophesize. We’re not all using VR, are we? We still have film cameras, right (and professionals still use them extensively)? We’re still not renting software, are we (for the most part)? All of these things were predicted to have not only happened but been totally ubiquitous by now by writers like this in the past.
The future of hardware is much less fantastic than this writer imagines. Already technology has slowed down drastically from its boom period in the 90s and even up until this time last year. No new amazing video card technologies every three months, no new motherboard chipsets every month and a half, and processor speeds may still be climbing but their performance gains between clock speed increases are diminishing rapidly. Prescott has an enormous advantage over Northwood when dealing with large blocks of data in multitasking environments — the author doesn’t seem to have done his research in this matter at all, beyond reading the first paragraph of some TH or other typically uninformative processor review and paraphrasing it. The Prescott core is up to 35% faster than an equivalent-speed Northwood in business environments using real-world software.
PPC is not going to forge ahead in the desktop world because it’s too expensive and has virtually no hardware support compared to IA32. Apple and IBM have their niche markets, and they will not expand significantly in the near future even if they offered twice the performance of IA32 (which is almost dead anyway, to be replaced by AMD64 or some other extended architecture with full backwards compatibility) because the simple fact of the matter is that practically everyone is broke and no one really needs a new computer to accomodate new software. Software drives hardware upgrades, not vice-versa. Proprietary hardware is dying, not advancing. It is far more likely that the PPC will die in the future because of its high price and poor hardware and software support when compared to cheaper desktop IA32 and AMD64 hardware. The only thing keeping SPARC, MIPS, IA64, and PPC hardware alive right now is proprietary software on the high end (and the fanaticism of Apple people). If the same engineering, visualization and virtualization software was available for GNU/Linux and Windows, that would be the end of proprietary designs by the end of the decade. Who would pay $10,000 for an IntelliStation POWER when you could buy several dual Opterons for the same price — and the AMD machines would be faster and more easily and cheaply fixed.
I don’t know why people think that closed designs are the wave of the future. The only way that could happen is if they were so cheap that you’d think little of throwing them away when they break.
Besides, for many years the 68k and PPC Apple machines were faster and easier to use than x86 PCs were, yet they have consistently failed to dominate any markets. If it didn’t happen before when conditions were much more favorable, there is no reason to believe that this industry shift to PPC will take place in the future.
-Jem
If Microsoft actually tried this would it work? This is a difficult question but Microsoft are probably the one company who could do it. —> how? when? all they have is a crap OS..
Regardless of all the personal prognistication presented here, I implore of the author to PLEASE write correctly. It’s much harder to read an article with so many grammar mistakes as found here.
I’m also of the opinion that in many ways, the author is smoking pot in terms of just how much power Microsoft will be able to employ. Why? All the open source zealots will get out the word to the common people, regardless of whether they want to hear it or not. Also, Microsoft is only one potential vendor of hardware, and when people learn of just how restrictive the terms proposed by this article are, there will be a huge backlash by the consumers. How will Microsoft truly pressure people into buying their hardware? I know of people still using ancient versions of Windows, even DOS, and being sufficiently satisfied with what they’ve currently got that they wouldn’t upgrade their system unless and until it dies.
No, the only way Microsoft would be able to command such things from consumers with any significant penetration would require Microsoft to figure a way for countries to pass laws that require something that only Microsoft provides. Now, how likely is THAT concept?
Prescott has an enormous advantage over Northwood when dealing with large blocks of data in multitasking environments — the author doesn’t seem to have done his research in this matter at all, beyond reading the first paragraph of some TH or other typically uninformative processor review and paraphrasing it. The Prescott core is up to 35% faster than an equivalent-speed Northwood in business environments using real-world software.
I beg to differ. The current Prescott chips do not have “enormous” advantage over the Northwood ones. If anything, the new Prescott chips are inefficient compared to their Northwood cousins. No Prescott chip in the market performs better than a comparable Northwood chip at the same clock speed.
In fact, Intel’s fastest processor is their new 3.4GHz Pentium 4 Extreme Edition processor which is built upon a Northwood architecture. These chips marginally outperform their Prescott cousins at the same clock rate.
However, Prescott does have subtle advantages over Northwood, which will become more conspicuous at much higher clock speeds, analyst suggest 3.6GHz/4.0GHz and above. Prescott has a better branch predictor, a revamped scheduler, improvements on integer multiplication(I think they added a new ALU), a much larger cache, introduction of SSE3(13.new instructions), to mention a few.
Should you run out to buy a Prescott processor tomorrow? Absolutely not! The first few Prescott processors from Intel will suffer severe penalties as a result of Intel increase the Pentium 4 pipeline from 20 stages to over/approximately 31 stages, beginning with the Prescotts.
In fact, I won’t be purchasing a Prescott processor until they hit the 5GHz barrier. Then, I’d wager that they have an enormous advantage over their Northwood predecessors. Today, however, they don’t. And they won’t for a while(sometime in 2005/6).
With regards to the article, I think it is poorly researched and based on unfounded speculation, hearsay and bias.
http://www.anandtech.com/cpu/showdoc.html?i=1956
More worthless semantic bickering…
By Bascule (IP: —.atmos.colostate.edu) – Posted on 2004-02-10 00:41:21
x86 will die
x86 won’t die. IA32 will die… eventually, once both Intel and AMD are pushing 64-bit chips backwards compatible with IA32. x86 will evolve.
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IA32 is x86 emulation… so how can that be “Backwards compatible… x86 itself is the compatability goal (for AMD Intel HAS to follow in it’s footsteps!) (GO AMD)
n fact, I won’t be purchasing a Prescott processor until they hit the 5GHz barrier. Then, I’d wager that they have an enormous advantage over their Northwood predecessors. Today, however, they don’t. And they won’t for a while(sometime in 2005/6).
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Somehow I think Presscott (yes I HISSED the snake-ish name out)is a mistake… too many problems.. and ppl are the BETA testers, most of the presssscott instructions (and more) will be implemented in TEJES which will certainly clock over 5GHz (but be no better than AMD’S offerings)
Microsoft… is singular,
Intel… is singular,
AMD… is singular.
Individual corporations/companies are *not* groups.
Not if you are from the UK. In British english, collective nouns are plural. Ie: “The government are passing new laws.”
Juding from Nicholas Blachford’s name, I had a hunch that he’s European, which is confirmed by his webpage (blachford.info).
IA32 is x86 emulation… so how can that be “Backwards compatible… x86 itself is the compatability goal (for AMD Intel HAS to follow in it’s footsteps!) (GO AMD)
IA32 refers to the 386 instruction set, the last time the x86 architecture saw a significant change.
A32 refers to the 386 instruction set, the last time the x86 architecture saw a significant change.
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Don’t fully know what I was Thinking…. my apologies
x86 is much more dependant of the desktop computer ( and low end workstations ) market than the PowerPC is. Actually, PowerPC would survive even without Apple as they are much used in embedded ( industrial & others ) platforms, alongside with ARMs and others. That market uses from 100MHz to 600MHz PPC’s.
Without PCs, current x86s wouldn’t survive enconomically as it cannot stand comparison with others families ( for example, TODAY, the fastest industrial temperature grade x86 is a 166MHz Pentium MMX ). Nevertheless, 386 and 486 are still used TODAY for these applications.
For example of multi-PPC components, watch Xilinx Virtex II Pro ( http://www.xilinx.com ) programmable gate arrays. The biggest part have 4 embedded PPC cores. They are IBM manufactured low end PPC cores ( 400MHz, no FPU ) embedded in the programmable logic fabric. With a few thousand $ or euros, you could build your own multi ppc cores chip.
If the better architecture would win, we would have seen 68000 based PC replaced by Alphas, They would have run CP/M initially and then somemthing similar to AmigaOS … PowerPCs have been superiors platforms for more than 10 years by now …
And I thought that the king of this kind of me-no-understand-markets/cheeky/say-whatever/throw-caution-in-the-wind speculation was mr. John C. Dvorak.
Long live the new king.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. The P4 Extreme Edition is not based on Northwood, it’s based on Gallatin, which is the Xeon core.
If anyone finds that Northwood is the same performance level as Prescott then that only attests to their poor benchmarking skills. In a *real world* multitasking environment, the Prescott is faster than the Northwood. When using software from Adobe, Microsoft and McAffee at the same time (Photoshop, Word, VirusScan) the Prescott is 35% faster than Northwood. If Anand or anyone else didn’t find that or know how to elicit the better performance of the Prescott then he didn’t read his press kit carefully enough or design his benchmarking procedure with accuracy in mind.
-Jem
If Anand or anyone else didn’t find that or know how to elicit the better performance of the Prescott then he didn’t read his press kit carefully enough or design his benchmarking procedure with accuracy in mind.
Oh I see, it’s faster if I’m careful about selecting tests that it’s fast in? I didn’t realise!
You on Intel payroll? :p
While P4EE is a Xeon part, the Xeon is based on Northwood, so you can hardly repeat wrong three times. I’ll bet you enjoyed it so though.
When you say DRM, I think “Digital Radio Mondial”, so, don’t use the term DRM unless you mean Digital Radio. Digital Rights management is either nose dive, or nosebleed. I leave that to you to decide. The future is bleak, actually. With isa addressing gone- you have no base structure you can run to when you need to. everyone hates “windmodems”, not because they don’t use isa adressing, but because driver sources are protected from anyone but microsoft. I don’t think pci on macs means pci anywhere, and to me, that’s more conflicted that you can ever imagine. Granted, the Power processor finding it’s way onto desktops will be a boon, it will just mean apple will lose some of it’s protective padding that microsoft uses it for.
It won’t be until quantum optical channel processing comes around, until you begin to see revoloutionary things occur.
Industry chip makers are die cut competeting, mm thickness, and not really rethinking the technology. The pentium HT offers some hope, as really, they can add as many extra instruction set banks as they want, for paralell virtualization. but, dont’ get me wrong- I love the power processor. It will change the playing field, but it’ll change the die hard apple lovers forever, because apple won’t be allowed to be the only ones to have it. That’s where it’s going. And where it should go.
a very interesting set of opinions.
Microsoft… is singular,
Intel… is singular,
AMD… is singular.
Individual corporations/companies are *not* groups.
They are if you live just about anywhere except North America.
It has to do with culture. Whereas US culture perceives a corporation as simply a legal entity to hide its members behind, other countries see a corporation as a reference to a group of people working together (note that I’m talking from a cultural, not legal, perspective).
If you go to England, Australia, New Zealand or, as I said, just about any other part of the English speaking world, corporations are referred to as a group of individuals, not an individual entity.
Oh I see, it’s faster if I’m careful about selecting tests that it’s fast in? I didn’t realise!
It’s pretty trivial to design a benchmark that can give similar – if not identical – results on platforms with vastly different levels of overall performance.
The point is that, yes, you *do* need to be careful about selecting tests if you want to throughly test performance. A single threaded high CPU load test isn’t going to show much of a difference on a multi- vs single-CPU machine, even though other benchmarks could show nearly a 100% performance difference.
If you didn’t realise this, you should probably go and research a bit more about the theory and practice of benchmarking, because you certainly aren’t able to objectively assess benchmark results.
One thing is for sure, Intel is loosing the crown more and more.
Within a few months intel processors will be completely out of the price/performance charts. The Athlon64/Opteron are a winning team.
But Intel has a weapon under the coat… the Pentium M, if Intel expands the “M” with a licence of the AMD 64bit extensions, and spend time and money on it it can result in a nice desktop/server processor.
My bust. I’m thinking way too “Ameri-centric”.
From dell, one can get the lowest end system with windows for $200. For companies buying in bulk, they can probably get such prices for less.
I saw this and just laughed. If you think businesses are buying such boxes (and for less than $200) you’re nuts.
That said, the Microsoft hardware angle is about control and control is about money.
While mastering the skill of patronisation you seem to have no grasp of sarcasm. Congratulations.