64 bit linux on Intel T9600

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Fri, Jun 19, 2009 at 09:56:03AM -0700, Tyler Aviss wrote:
> I tend to see powerPC in most cases where PPW (Processing Power per
> WATT) seems to be a bigger concern. Definitely a big issue on any
> battery-powered embedded device, and often in gaming computers or
> large machines where heat output (and/or noisy fans) becomes a
> considerable factor.

Well IBM has the power6 series as in the 575 and 595, which are seriously
powerful boxes.  They also make clusters of those.  For the larger
clusters they often use power4 chips instead, since they use a lot less
power (but also run slower), but packing them in very densely works
out well.  Then again they also have the cell (especially the new cell
variant with much higher floating point performance), which has been
used in some clusters by mixing blades with opterons and blades with
2nd gen cell chips.  The cell is of course powerpc with 8 coprocessors
for doing the real work on streaming capable jobs.

In the embedded market freescale has lots of nice power efficent chips
with huge numbers of I/O ports, for doing ethernet (often multiple 1gbit
ethernet ports), ATM, T1/E1, T3/E3, OC3, etc.

For gaming the xbox360 has a 3 core IBM design at 3.2GHz, while the PS3
of course has the Cell (1st gen) (the 3 cores in the xbox360 are related
but a bit more flexible than the powerpc core in the cell that controls
the SPE coprocessors), and of course then the wii has yet another IBM
design, although at lower cost and power than the other two.  Even the
gamecube had an IBM powerpc chip in it.

A lot of engine control units use ibm and freescale powerpc chips as well.

The IBM mainframes these days are using power6 derived designs as well,
and that's not necesarily for power efficiency reasons.  power6 chips
are anything but.

The powerpc seems to range from the low end power efficient all the way
to the huge superfast, but not efficient at all range.  The powerpc is
a very nice design.  It is very very good at running emulation and
translation code, which is part of why apple could move from 68k to
powerpc and manage to emulate the 68k sufficiently fast to still be an
upgrade over the 68k machines.  Similarly the xbox360 can emulate the
xbox's pentium3 based cpu without major problems at all.  x86 on the
other hand is terrible at emulation of other instruction sets in general.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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