ZnU wrote:
In article <Cp1qe.26441$J12.21905@newssvr14.news.prodigy.com>, Kelly Hall <khall@acm.org> wrote:Sean Fahey wrote:The PPC wasn't going to go where Apple needed , fast enough. The Pentium 4 is actually a pretty good processor, with better branching and latency then the PPC. Now they've got dual cores, hyper-threading - it was a good time to make the change. Get over it already.Apple doesn't want Pentium 4, although perhaps the dual core versions will sell to a segment of their market. What Apple wants is the Pentium M for the notebooks.I'm quite certain Apple also wants the later desktop chips that will be based on it. Processors that evolve from the current Pentium-M architecture are eventually going to take over Intel's entire lineup, or so say the roadmaps. Even the high-end Xeon's market segment will be filled by such chips by the end of 2007. Turns out Intel can design a pretty good chip when it's not buying into its own MHz myth (which it isn't with this architecture, unlike with the P4).
Bingo. Hopefully, we'll see an end to 30+ stage pipelines that blow away hugenumbers of in-process instructions on every "surprising" branch, and fewer four-level deep caching systems that only work well for little
loops with little data sets--but get the GHz rating up. ;-) "Whatever it gains in the straightaways, it gives up in the turns." -michael 8-voice music synthesizer using NadaNet networking! Home page: http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/