The Inquirer: If Longhorn runs on Power PC, what need for Intel?
OK, assuming that Microsoft isn't deliberately putting FUD in the channel surrounding Xbox 2 (my original theory was that MS were trying to deceive Sony, but the information is beginning to look a bit too solid for that), what will this mean?
Microsoft won't buy Apple to get access to PowerPC-based hardware. Their customers' investment in x86-compatible hardware and software is too great. The PowerPC G5 only just barely matches the performance of Intel's top-of-the-range chips, and we're about to see another big step in clock speed with the Prescott chips. Nevertheless, the G5s can probably manage to emulate an x86 quickly enough to run original Xbox games (after all, the Xbox only has a 733MHz PIII-class processor). I expect that Intel were too expensive and unwilling to reduce the massive power and cooling requirements of the P4 series - given that one of Microsoft's goals for Xbox 2 is to reduce the physical size, weight and noise of the console, which caused problems selling into the Japanese market. (Actually, an Xbox isn't much larger than a PS2 - it just looks bigger because the PS2 has a rather deceptive case design, with the bottom half of the front panel recessed).
Windows has run on PowerPC processors before. NT 3.51 and NT 4.0 CDs shipped with support for four processor families: x86, Alpha, MIPS and PowerPC. The PowerPC HAL, however, was designed for the Common Hardware Reference Platform - which never took off; the Power Macs aren't CHRP-compliant. Windows 2000 was to have dropped this to two, x86 and Alpha, but Compaq, having bought DEC, decided they would no longer promote or support Windows on Alpha. (This wasn't the end of the story: much of 64-bit Windows was first developed on 64-bit Alpha chips).
I don't expect Microsoft to release a new general port of Windows to Apple hardware. The market simply isn't there - you'd have to persuade an installed base of Apple owners (since Microsoft will never be able to get Windows pre-installed on Macs) that they would prefer to use a system with even less software available than their own. OK, Longhorn's WinFX API will largely be accessed through the .NET Framework, which performs JIT compilation from the Common Intermediate Language (CIL) stored in the binaries to an execution stream suitable for the host processor - but there's a whole host of legacy applications which won't run. Longhorn isn't intended to be all-or-nothing in this way.
Indeed, it looks like the other attempt to move the PC market to a more modern architecture - Itanium - could fall on the sword of poor x86 compatibility. In essence, an Itanium running x86 code using hardware emulation performs like a 1.5GHz 386 - not very well relative to modern machines - because it doesn't do any out-of-order execution or branch prediction. Software emulation (such as the IA-32 Execution Layer) could improve matters - benchmarks indicate that it can get close to the performance of a processor with a similar clock speed. Unfortunately, clock speeds for x86 processors are already over twice that of the fastest Itanium 2 - 3.4GHz for the newest P4Es compared with 1.5GHz for the Itanium 2.
On native code, the Itanium often blitzes a P4 Xeon at double the clock speed, largely because the instruction set is more expressive and the architecture reduces the need to hit main memory. While a modern x86 processor has many more registers internally than are visible through the instruction set, it can't easily tell whether writes to memory are actually only used because the program has run out of registers - so it has to take the whole hit of writing to and reading from RAM just in case the program depends on this state. Yes, writes and reads are cached - but writing to the caches still causes a bit of a stall.
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