Well I hope people are expecting something from Apple. The "MP" could very well be a dual core 970, but I honestly think the 970 series is dead in the water. So you have the possibility of either a Power5 device or something along the lines of a PPE derived device.
Apple would hopefully choose a device that would provide good performance in their systems (assuming that they even have a choice). Now the question is how well would a PPE derived device work in a MAC? For some work loads I would suspect very well. The problem then becomes how well does it work on specific work loads that Apples machines are used extensively in. If the processor performance does revert back to a crawl when running popular MA codes, then PPE/XBOX/whatever processors would be a hard sell in the MAC market place.
The other issue is the need to manage expectations. One can not always expect that a multithreaded proecessors performance can be easily related to the clock rate its running at. From the perspective of the PPE it does appear at this time that wone thread performance can be significantly impacted by the behavior of another thread. So getting good benchmarks may be vary interesting to say the least. On top of all that you will have all those other cores to support the PC, so thread interaction and intterrupt overhead won't be like what we see on current hardware.
What it boils down to is that nobody at this point in time can truely say how a MAC with a three core XBOX processor would perform. My feeling is that it would be a huge win for the MAC but that don't mean much. Hard data and real hardware are the only way to answer the questions.
By the way I don't believe that Apple needs to move completley away from 970 hardware. These new processors (XBOX/PPE/etc) could end up in specific hardware such as portables.
Dave
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Originally Posted by m0rpheen
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Can we expect Apple to be getting the same for their processors? I know I know, an xbox isnt a Powermac, and I dont know much about processors, but I'd like to know thoughts  |