4 Sep
2007
4 Sep
'07
2:53 a.m.
On Monday 03 September 2007 17:41, Liam Proven wrote:
On 03/09/07, William Donzelli <wdonzelli at
gmail.com> wrote:
Arguably, this may be so, but I'd submit two rather important riders
on to that.
[1] Whereas this was the case with the 601/603/604 and so on, I'm not
sure it's really true any more. The "G5" is pretty much a 2-core
POWER4, AIUI
As I've read, the 601 is more POWER than the rest of the PPC chips.
Still much slower and dumbed down than the proper POWER (non-PC)
versions.
And you have that backwards, the G5 is 1/2 of a POWER4 chip. I guess a
dual-core G5 is close to a POWER4, but it's still lacking some things,
like cache. And, the G5 has VMX/Altivec, which the POWER4 doesn't.
Mostly, the POWER4 was designed to be a enterprise server grade CPU,
and the G5 is designed to be a consumer-grade CPU. There's a lot of
trade-offs that they made when designing one vs the other.
I guess that a POWER3 is technically also a "PowerPC 630", but no
resemblance to the PPC60x series of chips.
The POWER5 and POWER6 are quite a bit more interesting than any PowerPC
chip.
I have a
number of PowerMacs for that side of things. :?)
The PowerPCs in Macs are the retarded little brothers of the real
POWER processors. [2] All the interesting apps and the desktop-relevant
stuff is on
PowerPC. Specifically, on OS X. Even a 10y old G3 Mac with OSX makes
a pleasant and usable machine for the Web today and for day-to-day
use. I can't think of a lot of use for a 10yo RS/6000 except as a
server - as a workstation running Motif or something, it wouldn't be
much use on the desktop today.
Interesting depends on what you mean by it.
POWER has AIX and i5/OS / OS/400. by themselves, much more interesting
to me than anything that runs on MacOSX. Of course, I'm "one of those
people" who runs Linux on their work-provided PowerMac G5. I just
can't seem to get my boss to want to pay $10k for a proper POWER5
workstation from IBM. ;)
Pat
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