Now This Is a Horse Race

On June 23, Apple announced new PowerMac G5 computers based on IBM's PowerPC 970 processor, which debuted at Microprocessor Forum last October. Apple CEO Steve Jobs made a series of dramatic claims for the new machine: world's first 64-bit personal computer, world's fastest PC, world's highest-frequency 64-bit processor, and world's fastest front-side bus. To support these claims, Jobs announced the results of SPEC CPU2000 testing by independent test lab VeriTest and application-based testing performed by Apple.

Individually, these claims are highly questionable. Some are simply not true: there were 64-bit processors in several RISC-based Windows NT desktops in the mid-1990s. Some are overstated: published SPEC scores for the Pentium 4 and P4 Xeon comparison systems are considerably higher than those Apple reported. Some are irrelevant: Apple knows perfectly well that clock frequency per se is essentially meaningless.

Taken together, however, along with a proper understanding of the new G5 system architecture and Apple's share of the PC market, these claims support a more favorable conclusion: Macs are once again fully competitive with Windows PCs in performance and have feature advantages that should help Apple expand its market. Not long ago, it appeared that the Windows PC had taken an insurmountable lead.

VIA, another independent PC platform developer, recently established its right to compete with Intel on the desktop. VIA is focused on the low end of the Windows and Linux business, but these days, that's where the high-volume sales opportunities lie.

It was also taken for granted, until recently, that RISC-based servers were on the way out. Intel's x86 chips would own the low end of the server space, its IA-64 processors would take over the high end, and between them they would squeeze out the competition. As if accepting an inevitable fate, competing server vendors announced plans to cease developing their proprietary architectures.

But they didn't. Only Alpha development has effectively ceased. PA-RISC and MIPS server chips are on life support, but there is as much competition as ever. AMD is investing heavily in Opteron, and Sun has pledged to revitalize its SPARC architecture with Throughput Computing, a combination of chip multiprocessing and multithreading. IBM is in this picture too with its Power series of server processors.

Instead of watching the market dwindle to a single vendor with two architectures, we have five strong CPU vendors with seven architectures among them. Only Sun is eschewing the PC desktop space; indeed, Sun's Throughput Computing initiative seems to suggest the company is devaluing its workstation business as well in favor of strengthening its servers.

Seven horses make a good horse race, and this one should become even more exciting over time. Each company is betting on a particular sequence of architectural advances. Intel has two-way simultaneous multithreading in its x86 chips and will use dual-core multiprocessing in Itanium. AMD has upgraded its x86 chips with 64-bit support, something Intel is rumored to be considering, and has put some thought (but little public comment) into multicore designs. IBM has multiprocessing and multithreading expertise, and Sun is moving in that direction even more quickly.

All these decisions will have a greater influence on the end-user experience than previous architectural advances like superpipelining and superscalar design. Those approaches delivered raw speed, but the next wave of processor technology will affect the way applications run, not just how fast they run. Programmers will change the way they develop software, end users will adapt to the new platforms and programs, and we at Microprocessor Report will try to explain it all.