Advantages of PPC over Intel or AMD?

[Wally Balljacker]

I was looking at this Genesi Open Desktop PPC Workstation, and I can't help but wonder, why this over an Intel or AMD based machine? NVIDIA and ATI don't release their drivers for PPC Linux, and AMD/Intel seem to be the most supported by closed source/proprietary technologies. Is the performance of Linux on PPC noticeably better than x86 or AMD64?

[Tsuroerusu]

I was looking at this Genesi Open Desktop PPC Workstation, and I can't help but wonder, why this over an Intel or AMD based machine?

Maybe the "pride" or the ability to say: I use PowerPC

NVIDIA and ATI don't release their drivers for PPC Linux, and AMD/Intel seem to be the most supported by closed source/proprietary technologies.

Try to understand them, how many people uses PPC Linux? The group is very small compared to vast amount of users of Intel and AMD CPUs, and supporting such a low percentage of the userbase is probably not worth their time. I'd love to see them open source their drivers, but in reality, thanks to software patents, it will never happen.

Is the performance of Linux on PPC noticeably better than x86 or AMD64?

I don't buy the idea that a 1 GHz PowerPC machine with 512 MB of RAM is faster than an AMD X2 4200+ with 1 GB of RAM + an nForce4 motherboard.
Also, next year Intel and AMD will go quad-core and dual core will drop massivly in price, so maybe look at the X2 4800+ when it drops in price

Also, judging by the opinions of the independant people who've tried the new Intel Macs, it would seem that the dual-core x86 CPUs are vastly superior in speed at the same, or lower price.

[thetza]

short answer: no.
long answer: google for "cisc vs risc" and "von neumann bottle neck".

[Gomer_X]

I was looking at this Genesi Open Desktop PPC Workstation, and I can't help but wonder, why this over an Intel or AMD based machine? NVIDIA and ATI don't release their drivers for PPC Linux, and AMD/Intel seem to be the most supported by closed source/proprietary technologies. Is the performance of Linux on PPC noticeably better than x86 or AMD64?

This is obviously not trying to be a high end machine, so I wouldn't expect better performance. That's kind of like comparing minivans based on 0-60 times.

In this case it looks like they might be using PPC for lower power requirements. I can't imagine most people need much more than a 1Ghz G4 for most desktop tasks, but if you're expecting a game machine, you'd be unhappy. They don't market it as a game machine, though.

It bothers me that they don't list prices.

[Tsuroerusu]

This is obviously not trying to be a high end machine, so I wouldn't expect better performance. That's kind of like comparing minivans based on 0-60 times.

In this case it looks like they might be using PPC for lower power requirements. I can't imagine most people need much more than a 1Ghz G4 for most desktop tasks, but if you're expecting a game machine, you'd be unhappy. They don't market it as a game machine, though.

It bothers me that they don't list prices.

The main reason Apple switched to Intel is because the poor performance-per-watt of the G5, laptops and the iMacs are packed together and would simply die with the G5 in them. And the G4 CPU was aging and much slower than the new dual-core stuff AMD and Intel and pushing out.
One of the main things I like x86 is that it's available everything, it's cheap and there are standards for the size of motherboards, so if you build your own machine you don't risk vendor lock-in, for example, Dell uses custom made cases and motherboards. And if you build a machine yourself, you don't have to buy crap software, M$ Windows and M$ Works, to get the PC.
All in all, I don't see what the big deal is about PPC for desktop purposes, I might be able to understand why McDonalds uses POWER servers, because that seems like a super robust server architecture, but they're also expensive as all hell.

Bottom line is, if you want a lightning fast system, get an AMD X2 machine and use a very well optimized Linux, or maybe FreeBSD, and you'll be happy. Actually, if you go with FreeBSD, once you get the base system installed, you could rebuild the entire userland (Doesn't take very long) with a few more optimizing compiler flags, and making the system even more tuned for your system. The reason I mention FreeBSD is that it's implementation of SMP, which is used to take advantage of dual-core, should be a little more solid than the SMP implementation in Linux, although anything is better than Windows

[snarkout]

I don't know about fast - I generally don't care about "speed" as much as I do ability to handle multiple processes. I can tell you for certain that my 800 mhz G4 stomps a 1200 mhz athlon when it comes to handling large numbers of processes well.

[Tsuroerusu]

I don't know about fast - I generally don't care about "speed" as much as I do ability to handle multiple processes. I can tell you for certain that my 800 mhz G4 stomps a 1200 mhz athlon when it comes to handling large numbers of processes well.

Dude, do you know how old a 1200 MHz Athlon is? It's like 4½ years!
I'd like to see modern PPC CPUs benchmarked against the AMD X2.

The good thing about the GHz-race being almost dead is that AMD and Intel will do other and more effective stuff that will make processors faster, such as adding ridiculous amounts of L2 cache, I'd like to see a quad-core CPU with 8 MB of L2 cache!

[Wally Balljacker]

I don't know about fast - I generally don't care about "speed" as much as I do ability to handle multiple processes. I can tell you for certain that my 800 mhz G4 stomps a 1200 mhz athlon when it comes to handling large numbers of processes well.

Dude, do you know how old a 1200 MHz Athlon is? It's like 4½ years!
I'd like to see modern PPC CPUs benchmarked against the AMD X2.

The good thing about the GHz-race being almost dead is that AMD and Intel will do other and more effective stuff that will make processors faster, such as adding ridiculous amounts of L2 cache, I'd like to see a quad-core CPU with 8 MB of L2 cache!

An 800Mhz G4 is atleast as old as that Athlon. I'd say they're comparable.

[Tsuroerusu]

An 800Mhz G4 is atleast as old as that Athlon. I'd say they're comparable.

OK fair enough, but what PPC chip would then be comparable with the AMD X2 or the Pentium D?

[CptnObvious999]

I don't know about fast - I generally don't care about "speed" as much as I do ability to handle multiple processes. I can tell you for certain that my 800 mhz G4 stomps a 1200 mhz athlon when it comes to handling large numbers of processes well.

Dude, do you know how old a 1200 MHz Athlon is? It's like 4½ years!
I'd like to see modern PPC CPUs benchmarked against the AMD X2.

The good thing about the GHz-race being almost dead is that AMD and Intel will do other and more effective stuff that will make processors faster, such as adding ridiculous amounts of L2 cache, I'd like to see a quad-core CPU with 8 MB of L2 cache!

The more L2 Cache doesn't always mean better performance in some cases it means worse performance. If the information isn't in the cache then it has wasted all that time looking in the cache only to realize it needs it isn't in there. More cache means more variance on performance so photoshop could be slower than normal (without as much cache) and a games performance could be better.
http://computer.howstuffworks.com/cache.htm

[Tsuroerusu]

I don't know about fast - I generally don't care about "speed" as much as I do ability to handle multiple processes. I can tell you for certain that my 800 mhz G4 stomps a 1200 mhz athlon when it comes to handling large numbers of processes well.

Dude, do you know how old a 1200 MHz Athlon is? It's like 4½ years!
I'd like to see modern PPC CPUs benchmarked against the AMD X2.

The good thing about the GHz-race being almost dead is that AMD and Intel will do other and more effective stuff that will make processors faster, such as adding ridiculous amounts of L2 cache, I'd like to see a quad-core CPU with 8 MB of L2 cache!

The more L2 Cache doesn't always mean better performance in some cases it means worse performance. If the information isn't in the cache then it has wasted all that time looking in the cache only to realize it needs it isn't in there. More cache means more variance on performance so photoshop could be slower than normal (without as much cache) and a games performance could be better.
http://computer.howstuffworks.com/cache.htm

I didn't say that L2 cache was the only thing they did, I said it was one of the things Intel and AMD are doing. AMD went ahead and invented a 64-bit x86 architecture, after Intel had ruled x86 dead and wanted to focus on Itanium, and stuff like that. Then AMD got smart and Intel had to follow the leader

[Gomer_X]

I don't know about fast - I generally don't care about "speed" as much as I do ability to handle multiple processes. I can tell you for certain that my 800 mhz G4 stomps a 1200 mhz athlon when it comes to handling large numbers of processes well.

Add to that the fact that PPC chips scale well. Two 800 Mhz chips in a machine is actually twice as fast as one. You can't get that with any x86 chip (although the Opterons are pretty good).

Personally I can't think of anything I'd want to do that I can't do on my Athlon 2600+.