IBM, Come Back to the World of PCs, You’re Needed

The landscape of the PC realm is pretty stagnant right now, with very little happening that is not incremental in nature. Many things are happening, but it’s all small noises, with nothing that is revolutionary in nature. The fire has gone out of the PC industry, and it’s not because everyone has moved on. The opposite is true.

Everyone has moved on because the fire is gone. Intel makes small changes and acts as though everyone should be amazed at the changes, and grateful that the cost is not higher. AMD can’t seem to get its mojo back, which is odd, as the design team has not gone brain dead. Via is pretty much out of the picture, no matter what they might want.

It’s worse with video chips, with Intel not yet shipping anything yet, and AMD/ATi shipping great hardware, with drivers that suck like a positive-displacement pump, along with nVidia too busy thinking up yet another naming convention, to confound the casual user.

If IBM came back, it could/would have the marketing muscle to change things, in a way like Intel, but on a grander scale. Is it not time for a completely new architecture?

The first information about the Power 7 chip is coming out right now - wouldn’t another player, with some muscle to push a change be great? We lost something when Apple abandoned PowerPC. The world is big enough for another player… besides Wintel.

from The Bright Side of News

This weekend, Sheraton Hotel in Palo Alto is hosting Hot Chips 21, high-level conference bringing details of new developments in the world of chips. According to David Kanter of RealWorldTech, the star of the show should be IBM’s first public disclosure of POWER7 architecture.

IBM has two presentations, one should focus on the architecture itself, while the second one should address the system interfaces. Currently known information about POWER7 is nothing short of amazing: both IBM and Intel did a wrong turn with previous architectures [IBM - POWER6, Intel - NetBurst e.g. Pentium 4], focusing on high clocks instead of efficiency. But unlike Intel, IBM’s designs achieved launch speeds of 3.5, 4.2 and 4.7 GHz, and the POWER6+ upgrade brought the 5.0 GHz clock.

If you recall, IBM’s Cell was supposed to work at 4.0 GHz, and two of them were supposed to be the base for PlayStation 3. Ultimately, Cell hit a clock wall at 3.2 GHz [interestingly though, Intel hit the thermal wall at the identical 3.2 GHz clock] and nVidia came into picture with re-designed GPU codenamed “NV47/RSX” [We all know that NV47 was GeForce 7900GTX].

Getting back on the subject of POWER7, IBM plans to use eDRAM memory for its L3 cache, and that is without the doubt – presedan{not sure what this word was supposed to be- perhaps precedent -oracle} in the world of CPUs. If eDRAM does good on this low-volume high-performance architecture, given its high density - we could see AMD and Intel moving from SRAM to eDRAM for their caches, almost tripling the capacity of their caches for the same die space.

Imagine Intel Core i7 with 24MB of L3 cache by using eDRAM instead of 8MB SRAM - 24MB would do nicely for a native 12-16 core design without cache starvation.

According to the information we have, POWER7 should debut as up to octa-core design at 4.0 GHz clock and serve as a base for next generation of BlueGene HPC architecture - BlueGene/Q.

So without much fanfare, IBM is showing a way of change for the better. Imagine if it was really immersed in personal computing.

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Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.Albert Einstein