Next-Generation PowerPC Chips.
>Small size, low cost, and frugal power requirements are all well and good, but only if a part can hold its own in the performance wars. According to Alliance documents, the new parts should do very well, thank you. Quote: "With a 1MB L2 cache operating at half the processor clock frequency and a system bus operating at 50MHz in a 5x mode, the processor performance is estimated at 10 SPECint95." Don't sweat the details; just compare that score of 10 on the industry-standard SPECint95 benchmark test with that of a top-of-the-line 200-MHz Pentium Pro: a hair over 8.5.
But high benchmark scores are only part of the story. Remember "smarter, not harder?" As maddening as that advice may seem, Alliance engineers have taken it to heart, crafting their new parts to work hand in glove with the Mac OS. Without getting into such dweebian technical niceties as on-chip L2-cache tag RAM and dynamic branch prediction, let's just quote the projected results: 40- to 45-percent real-world improvement over the 604e and 80- to 90-percent improvement over the 603e. What's impressive about these claims is that they're based on MHz-to-MHz comparisons, even though the new parts are expected to first appear at 250 MHz and then increase to 400 MHz by the end of their life cycle.<
zdnet.com |
