So PowerPC is dead you say?

[commodorejohn]

The main problem is that IBM hasn't been interested in consumer-level development...well, pretty much since the PS/2/MCA debacle. They even sold off their ThinkPad line, and they gave Apple a hell of a time about supporting Altivec on the G5. I'm sure they're not going to be abandoning POWER as long as there's money in it, but I very much doubt they're going to be looking at going back into the consumer market any time soon.

[commodorejohn]

PowerPC is even dead in the console market. The next generation is abandoning it, except for Nintendo who are just taking the Wii and doubling the cpu cores.

How do you figure? The Wii U is still using PowerPC, and if it sells like the Wii did you can hardly call it dead, the only rumor I've seen for the XBox 720/"Durango" posits a 16-core PowerPC system, and evidently even the Playstation 4 isn't abandoning it entirely (though why they need an entirely different CPU architecture in an x86 box with an explicit lack of backwards compatibility is beyond me.) That's a pretty curious definition of "dead."

[commodorejohn]

3) or they can take an off the shelf CPU/Mobo/GPU and come within a few percentage either side of their competitors whilst saving a HUGE (billions dollars) amount of money.

I think they've chosen route #3 because finally someone slightly less insane is at the helm at Sony.

Yeah, I get that, but as I've read the tentative PS4 design also includes a PowerPC CPU for some reason (not sure if it's Cell or not.) That's what I don't get, since they've explicitly stated there won't be any backwards compatibility...

[commodorejohn]

Desktops account for about 20% of computer sales and has remained relatively flat line at 20% over the past several years.  It's not on it's death bed, but it's certainly nothing what it use to be like either as industry continues to project desktops around 20% while portables (laptop/notebooks/tablets/smartphones) eat up the rest of the 80% of the computer market.

It's problematic to count laptops in with tablets and smartphones, though - with the exception of a few sub-notebooks like the Efika MX and those chintzy $75 things that failed to make waves a year or two ago, the vast majority of laptops are simply PCs in a mobile form factor, whereas tablets and smartphones are (largely, though also not without exception) entirely different animals. It's hard to argue that the PC is dying because more people are buying their PCs in portable form-factors. And as fishy_fiz points out, even if you don't count laptops with PCs, it's not so much that the PC is dying as that the market overall is expanding.

[commodorejohn]

And no matter what CPU architecture Microsoft/Sony/Nintendo is going to use in their next generation consoles, there will *never ever again* be a viable desktop market around the PPC architecture! [...] It surely doesn't change the fact that nobody is building viable PPC desktop motherboards, and nobody will do that ever again!

The Apple PPC HW was the last of its kind, nothing has followed and nothing ever will. [...] it won't change the fact that nobody will ever be building a viable desktop motherboard usable by OS4 ever again!

Hey, Nostradamus, while you're declaring the course of the future with absolute certainty, would you mind handing out some stock tips?

There is absolutely *NO* connection between future *game consoles* and future viable PPC motherboards for Amiga!

Isn't there? Hackers have been running homebrew OSes on game consoles since the Dreamcast; why is it that, say, MorphOS Team couldn't use the Wii U as a target platform, if they were so inclined?

[commodorejohn]

Because they won't port to a hacked console. Legal reasons.

Fair point. Still, it's not like AROS couldn't.

[commodorejohn]

Of course it's *technically possible* to make a desktop motherboard based on obscure PPC CPU's (it can't compete with any *real* desktop motherboard though).

Why is that? Are "real" desktop boards magic? Have Asus, Dell, et al made a pact with the Old Gods?

[commodorejohn]

ok, lets look at this closely...

"nobody will ever be building a viable desktop motherboard usable by OS4 ever again!"

from that statement, we infer the following:

as some point, somebody (ACube, A-Eon , not really clear.) did make a viable desktop usable by OS4, otherwise you would not include "ever again"

whoever made this motherboard clearly learned their lesson and they won't do it again.

nobody else will try. Ever! EVER!! EVER!!! EVER!!!! AGAIN!!! (evil laugh)

No, see, the trick is that you just keep redefining "viable" to mean "something other than what's actually been accomplished." As long as you keep moving the goalposts, the other guys can't score...

[commodorejohn]

Well, it doesn't qualify because takemehomegrandma says it doesn't qualify! Obviously!

[commodorejohn]

Depends on what you mean. If you're looking for something that's equally low-cost and high-power as, say, an i3 or i5 system, you're not going to find anything like that in the modern POWER/PowerPC lineup, since the modern lineup is divided sharply between embedded chips and megalithic IBM server equipment, with only a few items anywhere in between (usually application-specific, like the Wii's Broadway CPU.) There's nothing at all dissatisfactory about the architecture itself, though; I have a 1GHz PowerBook G4 that gives my 1.6GHz Atom N270-based Asus Eee a run for its money on basically everything but video playback (and that mostly because the Eee has 667MHz DDR2 RAM, as compared to the PowerBook's PC133.)

[commodorejohn]

PPC is **DEAD** as a desktop platform, even if the suitable CPU's would be here (which they aren't) it's simply not possible to build a viable desktop machine in the ultra-low volumes Acube/Aeon can afford, and those who *could* manage (like ASUS, Abit, MSI, etc) certainly won't do it, and I have asked this question previously in this thread: "Why doesn't anyone build desktop motherboards using PPC today?", and of course nobody has answered it.

You keep saying this, yet you keep failing to provide any reasoning by which it makes sense that you can claim this with such certainty. Certainly PPC is seeing little meaningful action in the consumer-level computing market now (but not none - even putting aside the X1000, which for all its prohibitive pricing is actually getting a second run, there's the LimePC Z9, which according to their specifications is up to 800MHz now, though they don't have a direct-order facility so I don't know if the price has come down, and probably others I've never even heard of.)

But you keep saying that it's "not possible" to build a decent custom board using chips that already exist (though you imply they don't,) yet you keep failing to provide any reason why that would be so. Computer design isn't magic - as others have said, that kind of thing is basically a senior project for an electronics-engineering major, it doesn't require Lost Knowledge of the Ancients and goat sacrifices at midnight on a new moon. Nor is there any reason it can't be financially feasible - production of custom multi-layer PCBs is dirt-cheap these days. I got one for a hobby project on the Vintage Computer Forum for $20; the parts cost more than that. Assembly is trickier, but there are people who do hobby surface-mount soldering, that isn't magic either, and I'd bet there are facilities that you can get to do it for you, just like board production. Let me ask again: what makes it so impossible?