ARM vs. PPC (why continue the PPC path?)

[commodorejohn]

Be interesting to see how newer PPC processors stack up - certainly there's more memory bandwidth to go around than with the G4s, which never got past 166MHz (not even DDR-capable.)

[commodorejohn]

AFAIK, the MPC8610 (the last of the "G4"?) from Freescale had an on-chip DDR/DDR2 SDRAM memory cotroller @ 533 MHz (1066 DDR)...?

You might be right, though either way it never saw use in Mac or Amiga-like systems...

[commodorejohn]

Show me some ARM machine I can buy that is faster than a Powermac G5 QuadCore from 7 years ago. If there are no faster ARM machines available in the mass market then ARM is 7 years behind PPC.

Yeah, this is really the crux of the issue: there just isn't any good ARM platform out there, not for general-purpose computing. Don't get me wrong, I'm looking forward to the Raspberry Pi and everything, but I've spent the last two years watching semiconductor manufacturers pour quadzillions of dollars into ever-better ARM cores for tablets and smartphones and screaming "Give it to me in a laptop already!" at my screen. (And no, tablet + keyboard is not the same thing. Give me something I can put 4GB RAM and a 320GB hard drive in, damn it.) Even the couple attempts at an ARM netbook I've seen are based on old cores that don't come close to matching my old, janky P4 laptop from 2004 for horsepower, let alone my trusty Eee.

Those complains about cpus usually come from ex-amiga users or people who doesn't use amiga at all. My powerbook G4 at 1.67Ghz runs MorphOS nicely and MorphOS would fly on a 2.5-2.7Ghz G5.

Quite. My PowerBook/Linux attempt may have been abortive, but one thing I did find is that a 1.67GHz PowerBook is perfectly satisfactory for everything except streaming video; if there were one based on a newer chip with a faster FSB I can't imagine I'd have any complaints at all.

[commodorejohn]

There was BBRV's blog post about a new Efika MX model coming sometime this year.  It might not be so powerful as what you're looking for, but it should be a bit faster than the existing Efika MX.

Huh, that's definitely an improvement over the current model. If they'd go with one of the multi-core variants they might actually be getting somewhere...

Of course, there's still the problem that the Efika has zero RAM/storage expandability.

[commodorejohn]

Really?

http://cache.freescale.com/files/32bit/doc/fact_sheet/T4240T4160FS.pdf?fpsp=1

12 cores, 1.8 GHz, 6.0 DMIPS/MHz per core not good enough for you?

But you don't get it, mongo! PowerPC is dead! Because they say it, it must be so!

[commodorejohn]

They already have something like that. It's called a DVD player.

Zing!