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MacSlash and the Demise of Apple's PowerPC Product Line

Ubuntu PPC

Power6 is Almost Here

    The POWER6 will be using approximately 790 million transistors and 341 mm² large fabricated on an 65 nm process. It will be released 8th June 2007, at speeds of 3.5 Ghz, 4.2 Ghz and 4.7 Ghz, but the company has noted prototypes have reached 6 GHz. POWER6 reached first silicon in the middle of 2005. The processor is a dual core design and will have 128 KiB of L1 cache (64 KiB data + 64 KiB instruction), an eight-way, set-associative design with a two-stage pipeline supporting two independent 32-bit reads or one 64-bit write per cycle. Each core will have a 4 MiB "semi shared" L2 cache, where the cache is assigned a specific core, but the other has a fast access to it. The two cores share a 32 MiB large L3 cache which is off die, using an 80 GB/s bus. Each core will have two integer units, two binary floating-point units, and a decimal floating-point unit, and is capable of two way SMT. The binary floating-point unit incorporates many microarchitectures, logic, circuit, latch and integration techniques to achieve a 6-cycle, 13-FO4 pipeline, according to a company paper. The POWER6 will have support for decimal arithmetic. 50 new floating point instructions handle the decimal math and conversions between binary and decimal. This is a feature currently present in the processors powering IBM's System z and is a necessity in POWER6 if the eClipz-mission is to succeed. There will be an AltiVec unit to POWER6, and the processor will be fully compliant with the new Power ISA v.2.03 specification. POWER6 will also take advantage of ViVA-2, Virtual Vector Architecture, that enables the combination of several POWER6 nodes so act as a single Vector processor.

64 bit 5x1.5Ghz Core Power5 Linux 2.6.5-7.267-pseries64

64 bit 8 Core Power5 Linux 2.6.11

Recent PPC Changes in the Linux kernel: 2.6.20

    • Enable DEEPNAP power savings mode on 970MP (commit) Without this patch, a idle 4-way system gets 103.8W. With this patch: 65.0W. LoweringHZ to 100 can get it as low as 60.2W. Another (older) Quad G5 went from 54W to 39W at HZ=250. Coming back out of Deep Nap takes 40-70 cycles longer than coming back from just Nap (which already takes quite a while).

    • Efika platform support (commit)

    • New MPC5200 Interrupt Controller support (commit)

    • Cell: Add support for adding/removing spu sysfs attributes (commit), remove /spu_tag_mask file (commit), cell iommu support (commit), add oprofile support for cell (commit), add isolated-mode SPE recycling support (commit), native cell support for MPIC in southbridge (commit), add a sd command (spu dump) to xmon to dump spu local store (commit), add cpufreq driver for Cell BE processor (commit), prepare for spu disassembly in xmon (commit), add support for nonschedulable contexts (commit), implement /mbox_info, /ibox_info, and /wbox_info. (commit), add support for dumping spu info from xmon (commit), import spu disassembly code into xmon (commit), add spu disassembly to xmon (commit), add temperature to SPU and CPU sysfs entries (commit), add /lslr, /dma_info and /proxydma files (commit), add SPU elf notes to coredump. (commit), add shadow registers for pmd_reg (commit), add low-level performance monitoring code (commit), add support for registering sysfs attributes to spus (commit), add support for stopping spus from xmon (commit),

    • Add non-Open Firmware serial console support (commit), add Kurobox(HG)/Linkstation-I NAS systems by Buffalo Technology support (commit), support ibm,dynamic-reconfiguration-memory nodes (commit), add xserve cpu-meter driver (commit), add lite5200 board support to arch/powerpc (commit), (commit), (commit), allow CONFIG_BOOTX_TEXT on iSeries (commit), import updated version of ppc disassembly code for xmon (commit), allow xmon to build on legacy iSeries (commit), make 970MP detectable by oprofile (commit), lazy interrupt disabling for 64-bit machines (commit), support for DCR based MPIC (commit)

Recent PPC Changes for Linux kernel: 2.6.19

    • PA Semi PWRficient platform support (commit),

    • Enable XMON on PPC 4xx boards (commit)

    • Cpufreq support for Xserve G5 (commit)

    • Add support for briq machines (commit), (commit)

    • Emulate power5 popcntb instruction on non-power5 machines (commit)

    • A new iSeries console (commit)

    • Cell interrupt rework (commit), add NUMA support to the the spufs scheduler (commit), add infrastructure needed for gang scheduling (commit)

    • Add MPC8360EMDS board support (commit), add initial support for the Freescale e300c2 core found in the MPC832x processor line (commit), add support for the mpc832x mds board (commit), add support for the mpc8560 eval board (commit)