IBM have actually been quite good, but Motorola and VIA have been keeping the best kept secrets to themselves and its
been really really quite difficult to do that,
...
To give you an example of the sort of problems that we've had, it turns out that when
we've been struggling with the level 3 cache on the Motorola board, all the
chips are in place, the cache is there, we're only getting 3% performance
increases, over the level 2 and level 1 caches. Motorola said "Oh yeah, didn't
you know that? We know thats the case". So thats a few weeks of struggling
that we could have found out if the documentation had been correct.
...
We have other issues. There had been a few stability problems initially with
the 7451 module, until somebody very kindly at Motorola eventually pointed out
that yes, it is designed to run at less than 40° centigrade, so it does need
a reasonable sized fan on it.
Is Motorola 'serious' about PowerPC?
