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PowerPC/PENTIUM
The PowerPC is jointly developed by Apple, IBM and Motorola. The life of PowerPC is a very interesting story, which involves IBM trying to make Intel x86 compatible processor... in hardware, almost like the codemorphing technology Transmeta uses for their Crusoe. Pentium is the boss of x86 compatiblity mode and it has greater brand recognition than any other processor in history. The Pentium began its life in 1993 and was continually improved until its retirement in 2008. Even today, most people are crazy even about this brand.It is famous for home uses and most of the people only know only one brand on processor i.e Pentium. DESIGN DIFFERENCES IN PENTIUM AND PowerPC The Pentium family has traditionally been designed on the principles of CISC(Complex Instruction Set Computing). Some of the traditional characteristics ofCISC machines are :
- Small register file
- Complex instructions that perform more than one or two simple operations
- Some systems like the IA‐ 32 family had variable length instruction encoding schemes.
- Complex addressing modes like memory‐indirect addressing that might cause multiplememory access from a single instruction PowerPC The PowerPC is based on IBM’s highly successful POWER architecture. The POWER architecture was designed for scientific workstations, and has been optimized for both integer and floating‐point math operations. The POWER architecture also incorporates a “branch processor” which attempts to minimize the impact of branch instructions on the processor’s performance. Some of the features of this design are: Fixed length, consistently encoded instructions A register‐to‐register (load/store) architecture, with support for aligned data accesses, misaligned data accesses, and both big‐endian and little‐endian data
A “simple” instruction set, with instructions which may be tailored to the task at hand (for example, setting the condition codes at the end of an arithmetic operation is an option, not a requirement) Simple, yet powerful, addressing modes applied consistently across the instruction set A large register set which includes both general‐purpose and floating‐point registers Floating‐point as a first‐class data type. This means that floating‐point is a standard part of the architecture and therefore is better integrated than it is in many other RISC architecturers A LITTLE COMPARISON OF BOTH PRODCUTS Now we will go through some of the products of both technologies and relate each other....
Pentium ("Classic")
The very first Pentium has a maximum clock speed of 66 MHz. It consisted of around 3 millions inner transistors.and a initial L1 cache which had 8K for instructions and data.This was the start of the craze people follow even today about Pentium.After the introduction of this processor , good sales were observed throught the market and the develepors were enchoraged to work on next improved version.
Pentium II
It was the result of the demand and hardwork on Intel’s developors that Pentium II began its life in the form of another processor, the Pentium Pro. All processors .It had a cache part itself which makes a computer work much faster. The only problem observed with this design was about a economical issue i.e if either the cache or the processor malfunctions one had to change whole system.It had a maximum speed of around 455 MHZ which was a big improvement from the previous version.
Pentium III
At start , Pentium 3 was very similar to the Pentium II. It used the same slotted form factor, with the processor and cache on the same card. However, the Pentium III included a new instruction set, called SSE.It made certain operations much faster. The revolution came with the second‐generation Pentium III, nicknamed "Coppermine". Coppermine managed to shrink the elements of the processor core from 250 nm to 180 nm, allowing Intel to place the cache inside the processor with minimal defects. This increased the efficiency of the Pentium III, and it was a massive success until its retirement in 2003. This made the processor to clock up to extermely faster speeds compared to old versions (around 1.5 GHZ)
PowerPC
The 620, which is currently still in the design phase, is a high‐performance microprocessor that Motorola and IBM believes will be well‐suited for very high‐end personal computers, workstations, servers, and multiprocessor systems.
PowerPC G
These are the 3rd generation processors.It is the direct descendant of the first RISC CPU ever brought to silicon. The 740 and 750. Both are software‐ and bus‐compatible with the PowerPC 603e and PowerPC 604e processors. The only difference between the two is that the 750 contains a L2 cache controller and the tag ram necessary to support the L2 cache, while the 740 has no capacity for L2 cache whatsoeve
FEATURES :
Six execution units capable of processing three operations per cycle (superscalar) Three power saving modes on top of a 2.6 or 1.9 volt design for low power consumption and dissipation 32kb L1 cache Up to 1MB L2 cache (MPC750 only) Separate MMUs for instructions and data allowing 4GB physical memory or 4 petabytes virtual memory 64 bit data bus 32 bit address bus 32 general purpose registers 32 floating point registers
PowerPC G
This processor is an average of 2.94 times faster than the Pentium III 600MHz shown in several tests published by Intel to demonstrate Pentium's speed. Theoretically, the architecture could sustain performance of over 5 gigaflops. These systems are configured standard with a Rage video card, ATA/66 hard drives, USB, FireWire, and 1 MB backside L2 cache, and PC‐ 100 SDRAM. Bit‐wise it is fairly standard with 32 ‐bits internally and 64 ‐bit externally at the data bus. This usually sits on top of a 100/133mHz system bus (older/newer); this may seem slow in comparison to the Athlon 200/266 mHz bus and the Pentium IV 400 mHz bus, but keep in mind that that the Athlon
bus is a double pumped 100/133 mHz bus and the P‐IV is 4 concurrent 16 ‐bit 100 mHz busses. The G4 has a 4 or 7 pipeline stage.What this means in real terms is that while the Pentium IV can cram in more stuff inside itself at one time, but the G4 will actually finish working on each instruction quicker because it has a smaller number of steps to get through.
PowerPC G
The is the next processor to be used in the Apple line of professional systems. It’s the first 64 ‐bit chip to be used in an Apple computer and will put Apple back in the processor race against AMD and Intel. It was introduced with three models, sharing the same physical case, but differing in features and performance.This is a very potential processor and Apple is introducing very latest inductions in this series...e.g two dual‐core 2.5GHz PowerPC G5 processors 512MB of 533 MHz DDR2 SDRAM expandable up to 16GB 250GB Serial ATA hard drive running at 7200 rpm NVIDIA GeForce 6600 with 256MB of GDDR SDRAM These are some specs from the Power Mac G5 Quad Machine which just shows the compatibility and flexiblity of this technology.
From all our discussion we come to a point that both the
families compete with each other very hard.IBM claims to
deliver maximum output and good speeds however Intel
claim that applications run faster on their systems because of
their improved technologies.So at the end decision between
the two totally depends on the nature of work you want to
take from the machine.
