PowerPC 970

Last updated

PowerPC 970
PowerPC-970.jpg
Artist's rendering of a PowerPC 970 CPU
General information
Launched2002
Designed by IBM
Common manufacturer
Performance
Max. CPU clock rate 1.0 GHz  to 2.7 GHz 
Cache
L1 cache 64 KB instruction
32 KB data
L2 cache512–1024 KB
Architecture and classification
ApplicationDesktop
Technology node 130 nm to 90 nm
Microarchitecture ppc970, POWER4
Instruction set 32/64-bit PowerPC 2.01
Physical specifications
Cores
  • 1-2
Products, models, variants
Variant
  • 970, 970FX, 970MP
History
Predecessor POWER4

The PowerPC 970, PowerPC 970FX, and PowerPC 970MP are 64-bit PowerPC CPUs from IBM introduced in 2002. Apple branded the 970 as PowerPC G5 for its Power Mac G5.

Contents

Having created the PowerPC architecture in the early 1990s via the AIM alliance, the 970 family was created through a further collaboration between IBM and Apple. [1] [2] The project was codenamed GP-UL or Giga Processor Ultra Light, where Giga Processor is the codename for the POWER4 from which the core was derived. When Apple introduced the Power Mac G5, it stated that this was a five-year collaborative effort, with multi-generation roadmap. This forecast however was short-lived when Apple later had to retract its promise to deliver a 3 GHz processor only one year after its introduction. IBM was also unable to reduce power consumption to levels necessary for laptop computers. Ultimately, Apple only used three variants of the processor.

IBM's JS20/JS21 blade modules and some low-end workstations and System p servers are based on the PowerPC 970. It is also used in some high end embedded systems like Mercury's Momentum XSA-200. IBM is also licensing the PowerPC 970 core for use in custom applications.

Design

PowerPC 970FX processor PPC-970fx.jpg
PowerPC 970FX processor

The PowerPC 970 is a single core derivative of the POWER4 and can process both 32-bit and 64-bit PowerPC instructions natively. It has a hardware prefetch unit and a three way branch prediction unit.

Like the POWER4, the front-end is nine stages long. The PowerPC 970 can fetch and decode up to eight instructions, dispatch up to five to reserve stations, issue up to eight to the execution units and retire up to five per cycle. The execution pipelines were lengthened compared to the POWER4 to achieve higher IPC. It has eight execution units: two arithmetic logic units (ALUs), two double-precision floating-point units, two load/store units and two AltiVec units. [3]

One of the AltiVec units executes integer and floating-point instructions, and the other only permute instructions. The latter has three subunits for simple integer, complex integer and floating-point instructions. These units have pipelines of varying lengths: 10 stages for simple integer and permute instructions, 13 stages for complex integer instructions and 16 stage for floating-point instructions. [3]

The processor has two unidirectional 32-bit double data rate (DDR) buses (one for reads, the other for writes) to the system controller chip (northbridge) running at one quarter of the processor core speed. The buses also carry addresses and control signals in addition to data so only a percentage of the peak bandwidth can be realized (6.4 GB/s at 450 MHz). As the buses are unidirectional, each direction can realize only half the aggregate bandwidth, or 3.2 GB/s. [3]

Generations

All generations of 970 processors were manufactured in IBM's East Fishkill plant in New York on a white ceramic substrate that was typical for IBM's high end processors of the era.

PowerPC-970.jpg
The first PowerPC 970 was manufactured on a 130 nm process in week 20 of 2003. [4]
PowerPC-970FX.jpg
The PowerPC 970FX was manufactured on a 90 nm process in week 25 of 2004, [4] with the smaller die.
PowerPC-970MP.jpg
The PowerPC 970MP has two cores on the same die and twice the L2 cache per core than the 970FX so its size is much larger. It was manufactured in week 24 of 2005. [4]

PowerPC 970

The PowerPC 970 was announced by IBM in October 2002. It was released in Apple Computer's Power Mac G5 in June 2003. Like its naming convention of G3 and G4, Apple branded the PowerPC 970 based products as G5, for the fifth generation of PowerPC. IBM released its first PowerPC 970 blade servers, the BladeCenter JS20, in November 2003.

The PowerPC 970 has 512 KB of full-speed L2 cache and clock speeds from 1.6 to 2.0 GHz. The front side bus runs at half the processor's clock speed.

PowerPC 970FX

The PowerPC 970FX has a 90 nm manufacturing process and has a maximum power rating of 11 watts at 149 degrees Fahrenheit (65 °C) while clocked at 1 GHz and a maximum of 48 watts at 2 GHz. [5]

It has 10 functional units  2 Fixed-Point Units, 2 Load/Store Units, 2 Floating Point Units, 1 Branch Unit, 1 SIMD ALU unit, 1 SIMD Permute unit, and 1 Condition Register. It supports up to 215 instructions in-flight: 16 in the Instruction Fetch Unit, 67 in the Instruction Decode Unit, 100 in the Functional Units, and 32 in the Store Queue. It has 64 KBs of directly mapped Instruction Cache and 32 KBs of D-Cache. [6]

Apple released 970FX-powered machines throughout 2004: the Xserve G5 in January, the Power Mac G5 in June, and the iMac G5 in August. The Power Mac introduced a top clock speed of 2.5 GHz while liquid-cooled (eventually reaching as high as 2.7 GHz in April 2005). The iMac ran the front side bus at a third of the clock speed.

Market demand was intense for a faster laptop CPU than the G4, but Apple never delivered a G5 series CPU in PowerBook laptops. The original 970 uses far too much power and was never seriously viewed as a candidate for a portable computer. The 970FX reduced thermal design power (TDP) to about 30 W at 1.5 GHz, which led many users to believe a PowerBook G5 might be possible. However, several obstacles prevented even the 970FX from being used in this application. At 1.5 GHz, the G5 was not substantially faster than the 1.5 and 1.67 GHz G4 processors, which Apple used in PowerBooks instead. Furthermore, the northbridge chips available to interface the 970FX to memory and other devices were not designed for portable computers, and consumed too much power. Finally, the 970FX had inadequate power saving features for a portable CPU. Its minimum (idle) power was much too high, which would have led to poor battery life figures in a notebook computer.[ citation needed ]

PowerPC 970MP

IBM announced the PowerPC 970MP, codenamed "Antares", on July 7, 2005, at the Power Everywhere forum in Tokyo. The 970MP is a dual-core derivative of the 970FX with clock speeds between 1.2 and 2.5 GHz, and a maximum power usage of 75 W at 1.8 GHz and 100 W at 2.0 GHz. Each core has 1 MB of L2 cache, twice that of the 970FX. Like the 970FX, this chip was produced at the 90 nm process. When one of the cores is idle, it will enter a "doze" state and shut down. [7] The 970MP also includes partitioning and virtualization features. [8] [9]

The PowerPC 970MP replaced the PowerPC 970FX in Apple's high-end Power Mac G5 computers, while the iMac G5 and the legacy PCI-X Power Mac G5 continued to use the PowerPC 970FX processor. The PowerPC 970MP is used in IBM's JS21 blade modules, IBM Intellistation POWER 185 workstation and YDL PowerStation by Fixstars Solutions (Yellow Dog Linux (YDL) PowerStation).

Due to high power requirements, IBM discontinued units above 2.0 GHz.

Northbridges

Two dedicated northbridges for PowerPC 970-based computers were manufactured by IBM:

A CPC965 northbridge was canceled. Slated for release in 2007, it was to be a uniprocessor-only northbridge. Its features were a 533 MHz DDR2 controller that supported up to 8 GB ECC memory, a 8x PCIe bus, integrated four-port Gigabit Ethernet with IPv4 TCP/UDP offloading, USB 2.0 ports, a Flash-interface. The northbridge contains an integrated PowerPC 405 core to provide system management and configuration capabilities. [11]

Buses

IBM uses its proprietary Elastic Interface (EI) bus in the modules.

See also

Related Research Articles

i486 Successor to the Intel 386

The Intel 486, officially named i486 and also known as 80486, is a microprocessor. It is a higher-performance follow-up to the Intel 386. The i486 was introduced in 1989. It represents the fourth generation of binary compatible CPUs following the 8086 of 1978, the Intel 80286 of 1982, and 1985's i386.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">PowerPC</span> RISC instruction set architecture by AIM alliance

PowerPC is a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture (ISA) created by the 1991 Apple–IBM–Motorola alliance, known as AIM. PowerPC, as an evolving instruction set, has been named Power ISA since 2006, while the old name lives on as a trademark for some implementations of Power Architecture–based processors.

AltiVec is a single-precision floating point and integer SIMD instruction set designed and owned by Apple, IBM, and Freescale Semiconductor — the AIM alliance. It is implemented on versions of the PowerPC processor architecture, including Motorola's G4, IBM's G5 and POWER6 processors, and P.A. Semi's PWRficient PA6T. AltiVec is a trademark owned solely by Freescale, so the system is also referred to as Velocity Engine by Apple and VMX by IBM and P.A. Semi.

HyperTransport (HT), formerly known as Lightning Data Transport, is a technology for interconnection of computer processors. It is a bidirectional serial/parallel high-bandwidth, low-latency point-to-point link that was introduced on April 2, 2001. The HyperTransport Consortium is in charge of promoting and developing HyperTransport technology.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">64-bit computing</span> Computer architecture bit width

In computer architecture, 64-bit integers, memory addresses, or other data units are those that are 64 bits wide. Also, 64-bit central processing units (CPU) and arithmetic logic units (ALU) are those that are based on processor registers, address buses, or data buses of that size. A computer that uses such a processor is a 64-bit computer.

The PowerPC 7xx is a family of third generation 32-bit PowerPC microprocessors designed and manufactured by IBM and Motorola. This family is called the PowerPC G3 by Apple Computer, which introduced it on November 10, 1997. A number of microprocessors from different vendors have been used under the "PowerPC G3" name. Such designations were applied to Mac computers such as the PowerBook G3, the multicolored iMacs, iBooks and several desktops, including both the Beige and Blue and White Power Macintosh G3s. The low power requirements and small size made the processors ideal for laptops and the name lived out its last days at Apple in the iBook.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Power Mac G5</span> Line of tower computers designed and manufactured by Apple

The Power Mac G5 is a series of personal computers designed, manufactured, and sold by Apple Computer, Inc. from 2003 to 2006 as part of the Power Mac series. When introduced, it was the most powerful computer in Apple's Macintosh lineup, and was marketed by the company as the world's first 64-bit desktop computer. It was also the first desktop computer from Apple to use an anodized aluminum alloy enclosure, and one of only three computers in Apple's lineup to utilize the PowerPC 970 CPU, the others being the iMac G5 and the Xserve G5.

The IBM RS64 is a family of microprocessors introduced in the mid 1990s, and used in IBM's RS/6000 and AS/400 servers.

PowerPC G4 is a designation formerly used by Apple to describe a fourth generation of 32-bit PowerPC microprocessors. Apple has applied this name to various processor models from Freescale, a former part of Motorola. Motorola and Freescale's proper name of this family of processors is PowerPC 74xx.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">POWER5</span> 2004 family of multiprocessors by IBM

The POWER5 is a microprocessor developed and fabricated by IBM. It is an improved version of the POWER4. The principal improvements are support for simultaneous multithreading (SMT) and an on-die memory controller. The POWER5 is a dual-core microprocessor, with each core supporting one physical thread and two logical threads, for a total of two physical threads and four logical threads.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">POWER4</span> 2001 family of microprocessors by IBM

The POWER4 is a microprocessor developed by International Business Machines (IBM) that implemented the 64-bit PowerPC and PowerPC AS instruction set architectures. Released in 2001, the POWER4 succeeded the POWER3 and RS64 microprocessors, enabling RS/6000 and eServer iSeries models of AS/400 computer servers to run on the same processor, as a step toward converging the two lines. The POWER4 was a multicore microprocessor, with two cores on a single die, the first non-embedded microprocessor to do so. POWER4 Chip was first commercially available multiprocessor chip. The original POWER4 had a clock speed of 1.1 and 1.3 GHz, while an enhanced version, the POWER4+, reached a clock speed of 1.9 GHz. The PowerPC 970 is a derivative of the POWER4.

The PowerPC 400 family is a line of 32-bit embedded RISC processor cores based on the PowerPC or Power ISA instruction set architectures. The cores are designed to fit inside specialized applications ranging from system-on-a-chip (SoC) microcontrollers, network appliances, application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) and field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) to set-top boxes, storage devices and supercomputers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Broadway (processor)</span> 32-bit CPU for the Wii

Broadway is the codename of the 32-bit central processing unit (CPU) used in Nintendo's Wii home video game console. It was designed by IBM, and was initially produced using a 90 nm SOI process and later produced with a 65 nm SOI process.

The PowerPC 600 family was the first family of PowerPC processors built. They were designed at the Somerset facility in Austin, Texas, jointly funded and staffed by engineers from IBM and Motorola as a part of the AIM alliance. Somerset was opened in 1992 and its goal was to make the first PowerPC processor and then keep designing general purpose PowerPC processors for personal computers. The first incarnation became the PowerPC 601 in 1993, and the second generation soon followed with the PowerPC 603, PowerPC 604 and the 64-bit PowerPC 620.

The PowerPC e600 is a family of 32-bit PowerPC microprocessor cores developed by Freescale for primary use in high performance system-on-a-chip (SoC) designs with speed ranging over 2 GHz, thus making them ideal for high performance routing and telecommunications applications. The e600 is the continuation of the PowerPC 74xx design.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alpha 21264</span> RISC microprocessor

The Alpha 21264 is a RISC microprocessor developed by Digital Equipment Corporation launched on 19 October 1998. The 21264 implemented the Alpha instruction set architecture (ISA).

IBM POWER is a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture (ISA) developed by IBM. The name is an acronym for Performance Optimization With Enhanced RISC.

IBM Power microprocessors are designed and sold by IBM for servers and supercomputers. The name "POWER" was originally presented as an acronym for "Performance Optimization With Enhanced RISC". The Power line of microprocessors has been used in IBM's RS/6000, AS/400, pSeries, iSeries, System p, System i, and Power Systems lines of servers and supercomputers. They have also been used in data storage devices and workstations by IBM and by other server manufacturers like Bull and Hitachi.

References

  1. "Apple Unleashes the World's Fastest Personal Computer—the Power Mac G5". Apple. June 23, 2003. Archived from the original on December 16, 2021. Retrieved December 4, 2017.
  2. "Apple and IBM Introduce the PowerPC G5 Processor". Apple. June 23, 2003. Archived from the original on April 21, 2022. Retrieved December 4, 2017.
  3. 1 2 3 Halfhill, Tom R. (October 28, 2002). "IBM Trims Power4, Adds AltiVec". Microprocessor Report .
  4. 1 2 3 "IBM production dates CPU-World". Archived from the original on April 20, 2018. Retrieved March 2, 2013.
  5. "IBM PowerPC 970FX RISC Microprocessor Datasheet" (PDF). 01.ibm.com. Retrieved November 2, 2010.
  6. "IBM PowerPC 970FX RISC Microprocessor User's Manual V 1.7" (PDF). www-01.ibm.com. Archived (PDF) from the original on May 22, 2014. Retrieved May 21, 2014.
  7. Paul Hales: Friday, July 8, 2005, 5:28 PM (July 8, 2005). "IBM introduces dual-core PowerPC 970 chip – The INQUIRER". Theinquirer.net. Archived from the original on August 12, 2006. Retrieved September 22, 2008.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link) CS1 maint: unfit URL (link)
  8. "Next IBM-Apple chip getting high-end feature". ZDNet. Archived from the original on April 17, 2008. Retrieved September 22, 2008.
  9. "IBM BladeCenter JS21 Express". 03.ibm.com. Archived from the original on September 10, 2007. Retrieved September 22, 2008.
  10. Steve Jobs, Apple (June 25, 2003). "WWDC 2003 Keynote". Archived from the original on December 21, 2021. Retrieved October 16, 2009 via YouTube.
  11. LaPedus, Mark (March 10, 2006). "IBM rolls low-power processors, IP cores" Archived September 26, 2007, at the Wayback Machine . EE Times.

Further reading