i remember all the apple ads trashing intel as a snail and claims of up to twice as fast as.
i remember powerpc as i remember star trek TNG and voyager and michael jordan championships.
i remember the debates of risc vs cisc.
i remember the power mac 6100 7100 8100 nubus
powerpc is a clean design unlike x86. no legacy baggage.
steve jobs promised 3ghz g5's.
i remember the rumors apple would dump powerpc and how the apple faithful scoffed.
even in 2003 osnews predicted x86 would level off while powerpc would exponentially surpass it.
Analysis: x86 Vs PPC - OSNews
www.osnews.com/story/3997
Jul 9, 2003 – CISC CPUs such as the 68040 and the Intel 80486 onwards picked up ... Even some RISC CPUs such as the POWER4 / PowerPC 970 use this ...
i remember reading this and repeated everywhere
4) Heat problems
What is going to be a hurdle for x86 systems is heat. x86 CPUs already get hot and require considerable cooling but this is getting worse and eventually it will hit a wall. A report by the publishers of Microprocessor Report indicated that Intel is expected to start hitting the heat wall in 2004.
x86 CPUs generate a great deal of heat because they are pushed to give maximum performance but because of their inefficient instruction set this takes a lot of energy. In order to compete with one another AMD and Intel will need to keep upping their clock rates and running their chips at the limit, their chips are going to get hotter and hotter.
You may not think heat is important but once you put a number of computers together heat becomes a real problem as does the cost of electricity. The x86's cost advantage becomes irrelevant when the cooling system costs many times the cost of the computers.
RISC CPUs like the 970 are at a distinct advantage here as they give competitive performance at significantly lower power consumption, they don't need to be pushed to their limit to perform. Once they get a die shrink into the next process generation power consumption for the existing performance will go down. This strategy looks set to continue in the next generation POWER5.
The POWER5 (of which there will be a "consumer version") will include Simultaneous Multi-Threading which effectively doubles the performance of the processor unlike Intel's Hyper Threading which only boosted the performance by 20% (although this looks set to improve). IBM are also adding hardware acceleration of common functions such as communications and virtual memory acceleration onto the CPU. Despite these the number of transistors is not expected to grow by any significant measure so both manufacturing cost and heat dissipation will go down.
so um what happened to powerpc? i thought risc and clean room design was superior? why couldn't ibm and moto and apple outperform intel?
could intel outperform arm in the current mobile wars?