61–70 of 96 posts
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I think it's truer to say that PowerPC stalled in performance per watt. The high end Power7/Power8 chips are massively powerful but that comes with Power and Cooling requirements that aren't going to work in a laptop.
Those post-date the G5 by several years, though. Things had gotten better for POWER by then, but it had already lost much of its market.
The P5 was a contemporary of the G5 (although the G5 was really a P4). But it wasn't quite the beast the P6 was.
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Of course it still exists. They're doing this now because they don't want to be steamrolled by the raging success that is the OpenSPARC project.
Some of us had m88k systems (not bad actually) and 88open helped that architecture take over the world. It even merits two whole sentences at wikipedia! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/88open
For some reason that was the first thing that came to mind, reading your comment ;-)
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Of course it still exists. They're doing this now because they don't want to be steamrolled by the raging success that is the OpenSPARC project.
It is the execution that counts. The world could use a third mass architecture. Especially one that is not too tightly IP locked. The whole web 0.1, 1.0,2.0 came from the fact that PC clones were everywhere.
Can you explain that? Because I cannot make any sense out of it.
I would love to see a Rasperry Pi type device with a PPC chip on it, a 603e equivalent for example, or even better, a 7400 series "G4" chip.
FWIW: http://www.ebay.com/sch/Desktops-AllInOnes-/171957/i.html?_s... Costs more than the Raspberry Pi though.
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Some of us had m88k systems (not bad actually) and 88open helped that architecture take over the world. It even merits two whole sentences at wikipedia! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/88open
"Mostly harmless." For some reason that was the first thing that came to mind, reading your comment ;-)
The M88K system had big vertically stackable blocks with ribbon cable connectors at the back between the units for power and data. [1] [2] One unit consisted of a tape drive and a floppy drive. The floppy drive was actually SCSI and very fast (over 100kb/s when most floppy drives top out at 25kb/s). I can't imagine how much that drive must have cost.
The system arrived in a massive box and for some bizarre reason they stuffed the empty space with O'Reilly books. There were lots of "read me first" and "read me first" for the read me firsts. I ignored all of them.
About a year later the machine failed. It turned out there was a filter by one of the fans and one of the readme firsts told you to clean it once a month. Eventually the system had overheated and shut down.
We also had a Data General system that used the m88k. They called it the Aviion which was annoying to read and type. The DG folk we dealt with were by far the nicest out of all the vendors. Both the DG system and the Motorola system ran lightly modified SVR4. It was basically Unix of the time, and worked just fine.
The Motorola system ended up acting as the office server for various things because of its high spec. Hold onto your chair - it was blazingly fast at 40MHz, and had a whopping 64MB of memory. At one point we spent a thousand pounds to get a 1GB hard drive and used it as a Usenet server.
[1] Front view: http://www.openbsd.org/images/mvme187-1.jpg
[2] Back view although the system I used didn't have that much networking http://www.openbsd.org/images/mvme187-2.jpg
I would love to see a Rasperry Pi type device with a PPC chip on it, a 603e equivalent for example, or even better, a 7400 series "G4" chip.
Admittedly it was a smidgeon more expensive than the Raspberry Pi.
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It is the execution that counts. The world could use a third mass architecture. Especially one that is not too tightly IP locked. The whole web 0.1, 1.0,2.0 came from the fact that PC clones were everywhere.
>The whole web 0.1, 1.0,2.0 came from the fact that PC clones were everywhere. Can you explain that? Because I cannot make any sense out of it.
The clones were possible because IBM due to various business, legal and other stuff could not stamp them down. So we got to the point where computing penetration was fast and high enough for the whole net thing to make sense.
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Reading between the lines, it sounds like a Tyan whitebox with Power8 processors, Nvidia GPUs, and Mellanox NICs running Linux. Might be good for HPC.
Probably will cost $50,000 and run as fast a new smartphone...
