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http://www.insanely-great.com/news.php?id=1612
Intel: We Will "Blow Away" the PowerPC 970
By Remy Davison, Insanely Great Mac
January 31st 2003
We will bury you, promises Intel.
Despite Apple's likely adoption of IBM's 64-bit PowerPC 970 later this year, Intel
boasts that its forthcoming Itanium will "blow away" any power advantage the 970 may
have, according to a story at Newsfactor.
Intel's next version of its Itanium chip, code-named 'Deerfield', is scheduiled for a
develper preview in February. The company claims that the Xeon, which can execute 74
fewer instructions simultaneously than the 970, will trump the PowerPC chip, although
Intel did not announce any numbers.
The 970 also holds considerable advantages over the Xeon in terms of its power
consumption, which could make a low-power 970 suitable for portable applications,
while high-octane versions can run servers and desktops alike.
Nevertheless, analysts do not think that the PowerPC 970 can make serious inroads into
Intel's dominance. The key factor is the standardization of the Intel instruction set,
with OEMs queuing up to use Itanium 2.
However, an IDC analyst argues that Linux's ability to run on 37 different chips means
Intel's instruction set is less important. The barrier to real PowerPC v. Intel
competition is IBM's reliuctance to enter the chip market feet first.
Analysis: True enough. IBM has never been a chip company. That's a business they
leave to Motorola to lose money at. Dominant Intel may be, but we find it interesting
that Intel isn't exactly falling over itself to shout out how many gigaflops Itanium 2
can do. Nor, understandably enough, how many fewer clock cycles than the P4 it's going
to be running. After all, when you invest that much in clock speed marketing, it's not
a great idea to tell everyone, as if you're Dr. Evil, that your new chips run at "...1
GHz..."
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