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DMN: Chakib, let me ask you a question here.
Chakib Akrout, (IBM): Yes.
DMN: Can you give us an idea of what the difference between this new G5 is and the Power4 chip that existed a year ago or so? Just give us a roadmap of where you've gone from there to here.
Akrout: The G5 is actually a derivative of Power4. It's basically the same processor which we took from the Power4 and we brought it to G5. We've added in the G5 beside the processor, the Velocity Engine, which optimized with the same kind of pipeline, with more enhancements we were able to put there. It connected to the fastest front-side bus, which we developed with Apple, which is able to get up to 1GHz. For this we used the most leading-edge process technology we have today. 130 millimeters, with the silicon-on-insulator, copper technology, eight levels. This is our leading edge technology from architecture, micro-architecture optimization and process technology.
Rubinstein: And our memory controller is made in the same technology, in the same fab, at IBM.
Akrout: With the one-gigahertz bus.
DMN: How much headroom do you have on this chip design here? Can we expect to see 3GHz, 4GHz any time soon?
Akrout: You're ahead of your time!
Rubinstein: Funny thing you should ask that. What was announced today is that Apple and IBM together are committed to delivering 3GHz in the next 12 months.
Akrout: So this is just the beginning of a long road map, with new technology coming.
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DMN: How scalable are these dual processors? Say you have one processor, if you add another, does the computer go twice as fast, or is it 95% as fast?
Rubinstein: It depends on what you are doing. But Mac OS X is very good at symmetric multiprocessing, so you will get pretty close to linear speedup.
Akrout: Yes, these kind of architectures are fully symmetrical-processor capable. You can really take advantage of two processors, you can get close to 2X in a separate application without any problem.
DMN: You guys have probably watched the development of the AMD Opteron chip. How does this compare to the Opteron -- the way it works, the speed? What do you think are the differences and similarities between the two chips?
Akrout: They are both 64-bit, but as you know, the PowerPC is RISC architecture and they're more like, kind of CISC architecture. So there's that fundamental architecture difference. So there are some differences. You mentioned how they already have a desktop -- I'll have to double check that. I wasn't aware of that. What we've done here with the G5 -- it provides us with the first 64-bit architecture for the desktop.
DMN: Would you say that hertz-per-hertz, is it the same speed? Would a 1.8GHz Opteron 244 be comparable to a 1.8GHz G5 chip?
Rubinstein: I don't think we can really answer that. What we've done is, we've benchmarked against the fastest machines that are available out there today. And that's the 3GHz Pentium 4, and the dual 3.06 GHz Xeon. Those are machines you can go to places like Dell -- it's where we get them from -- and then we ran a variety of benchmarks. We took GCC 3.3 and we ran SPEC and SPEC Rate across both of them. We have run a variety of applications that run on both machines, and it's very clear that the G5 is the winner, hands-down.
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