IBM tries ARM-style Licensing of PPC Processors

[psxphill]

" The PPC market is still larger than the x86 market in number of units shipped"
 
Really?

They did alright with the current games console generation as PPC was used by all three. Next year they will likely take a beating.

[psxphill]

The combined lifetime sales of the current generation games consoles only adds up to 4-5 months worth of PPC sales - losing them won't make much of a dent in terms of units. It will hurt worse in revenue.

I'd like to see evidence of that, my google searches haven't shown that anyone is shipping more powerpc's than sony/Microsoft/Nintendo are right now.
Freescale, LSI and AppliedMicro are moving to Arm, because PowerPC isn't selling. IBM are still using them in their servers, but those are low number of sales with a high revenue

[psxphill]

So the compatibility to PowerPC doesn't exist at all ?

PowerPC has big compatibility problems itself, so POWER is as pretty much compatible as they get.
 
You wouldn't be using the same Linux distro on a PowerPC and POWER processor anyway.

[psxphill]

Hmmmm ... So G5 and PA Semis are Power4 generation (or Power5?) ...
 
So if somebody was to make a PowerPC CPU out of coming Power8 how
compatible would that be to Mac G5 processor ?
 
Are we talking difference between 68k and Coldfire or the difference between 68k and PPC or even worst ? :huh:

The G5 is based on POWER4 with Altivec.
The PA6T is Power ISA v.2.04, POWER6 is Power ISA v.2.03.
 
 
It's more like the difference between a Cyrix 486 and a Pentium 2.

[psxphill]

PA6T is a G5 derivative

No, they have different heritage. It might have been designed as a G5 replacement, in the same way a 486 was a 386 replacement. Doesn't mean that one was derived from the other.