PPC vs x86 in 2007 was: How Secure is Windows, Really?

On 12/29/06, Mark Phippard <markphip@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

This is just so typical of all your posts and their general lack of any
value or accuracy.  Everyone should save this snippet and bring it back out
anytime they feel the urge to take something you say seriously.

The POWER chip has been multi-core since the POWER4, long before AMD or
Intel even announced intentions in this area.  See:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POWER4
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power5

Yes, the IBM PowerPC has had the lead in terms of servers with many
cores. But I am not clear that IBM technology on this front is any
better than what Intel is selling. ( For IBM execs, this means it is
time to bail out of the market ):

http://www.itjungle.com/tlb/tlb111406-story01.html

"...Intel is really keen on the quasi-quad approach to making chips,
as is IBM, which does the same thing for its Power5+ quad core
modules. "There is a challenge of making monolithic dies versus a
dual-die packages," explains Skaugen. ..."

|> In addition, from day one IBM has supported multiple CPU's each with

multiple cores.  Something that Intel and AMD are still somewhat struggling
to pull off.  Intel and AMD hold major press conferences to announce a new
chip every time they increase the clock speed, IBM does it when they unveil
a new design.  Perhaps IBM should focus more on marketing, but I think the
difference is that IBM is selling their chips to system builders, not
consumers as AMD and Intel are.

IBM is run by system designers, Intel by chip designers.  IBM produces a
complete system that works hand in hand with the chip, where as Intel is
still using the same memory bus design that came out with the Pentium.

This reads like wishful thinking to me, but whatever. The Intel
systems, designed by your so called chip designers, are getting faster
and faster.

"...The Clovertown Xeon 5300s represent a more than quadrupling of
performance compared to the single-core "Irwindale" Xeon DP chips
Intel was trying to sell against dual-core Opterons as the year began.
..."
http://www.itjungle.com/tlb/tlb111406-story01.html

 It
can barely keep up with feeding today's dual core chips and will struggle to
be able to keep their future chips busy at all.  At least AMD is much better
in this area, with their use of Hyper Transport.  Here are some supporting
articles:

http://www.infoworld.com/article/06/07/24/30NNmontecito_1.html
http://www.infoworld.com/article/06/09/27/40OPcurve_1.html

Yes, good articles, esp the 2nd one:

"...AMD is revamping AMD64's total design for quad-core so that even
when cores get stuck in contention, the busses run so fast that the
traffic clears quickly. AMD is taking a run at getting third-party
vendors signed up to place their peripherals directly on its
Hypertransport serial bus. If AMD can make that work, then,
potentially, every core can have direct access to system peripherals.
That would be a quantum leap for x86. ..."

Unlike Intel and AMD, IBM has been able to go the multi-core route AND
increase clock speed.  Given that very few software problems benefit from
multiple cores, but all benefit from clock speed, this is a good thing.
Read this article about Photoshop and its problems with Intel multi-cores as
an example:

http://blogs.adobe.com/jnack/2006/12/photoshop_and_multicore.html

SQL likely benefits from as many threads of execution the system can
support. Discrete transaction based web serving and web service
benefit from multiple cores. i5/OS is ideally suited to get the most
out of a many cored system ( each active job could be assigned to a
different CPU. )

Whatever the outcome, 2007 is shaping up to be decisive in the server wars.

-Steve