Part 2
Jobs' announcement was good news for Motorola, whose 128-bitAltiVec technology, rechristened the Velocity Engine, is present on all of Apple's G4 Power Macs.
In Motorola's parlance, the G4 chip is really the MPC7400, a next-generation PowerPC chip. The MPC7400 will be produced in 350-, 400-, 450-, and 500-MHz varieties at first. All but the 500-MHz chip are sampling. Apple said the Velocity Engine gives the G4 a sustainable performance of 1gigaflop and peak performance of 4 Gflops.
Not to be counted out is what many architects consider the most elegant of all the 64-bit designs: Compaq's Alpha. The next-generation version, the EV-7 (or 21364), is scheduled to tape out in December. It's intended to support clock speeds in excess of 1 GHz and will include 1.5 Mbytes of integrated L2 cache, a 6-Gbyte/second direct Rambus memory controller, a 3-Gbyte/s I/O interface and a direct processor-to-processor interface. The package is designed to support large-scale multiprocessing and high-availability systems.
Even with Alpha and Ultrasparc in the picture, Intel said it believes it has licked the one paper spec that has kept it from pushing to the front of the pack: floating-point performance. Merced will deliver 6 Gflops of single-precision floating-point and 3 Gflops double precision.
"The competition is on our minds, but we're not in a paper battle with them," Curry said |
