IBM tries ARM-style Licensing of PPC Processors

[dammy]

Maybe the Chinese will pick up on this and develop some interesting new PPC driven systems.

Why when they can have dirt cheap ARM in volume and not have to reinvent the wheel?  I can't see the embedded network folks forking over that type of risky investment to do R&D and then production when Freescale is producing PPCs that are capable of doing the job.

[dammy]

All the big companies want more power with lower energy consumption.  x86 provides lots of grunt, but even the most modern x86 chips consume massive amounts of power compared to ARM and such.  ARM so far doesn't have adequate grunt for datacenters, but the chips are insanely efficient.  There's a reason we aren't seeing ARM chips in real computers - thus far, anyways.  There's also a reason why AMD and Intel are scrambling to make their offerings more power efficient.

I think your not looking at the bigger ARM picture with the A15 Cortex series.  The A15 could make a sweet low power consumption search engine server.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_Cortex-A15_MPCore

[dammy]

A15 shows promise but is still too anemic for enterprise use cache and address space wise.  I have no doubts it will transform into something quite impressive in the future, though.

The future development of the A15 (or follow on) is what I am referring to when compared to any type of future development of the POWER.    I just don't see the POWER Licensing issue being taken that seriously because it's so late to the dance.  Add in the rumor that significant number of POWER engineers are being shown the door in a month or two which creates a dicey for future development by IBM when ARM has a forward, but slow, development pace.

I've used an A15 machine in the past (Chromebook) and found it to be a hideous experience, and Google went back to Intel CPU's for the Chromebook Pixel.  That being said, for the price the ARM Chromebook was well received, but I found the machine to be darned near unusable.

OTOH, the ARMs being used in tablets are getting pretty decent and cheap: http://hothardware.com/Reviews/Google-Nexus-7-2013-Review-Improving-Upon-the-Best-Android-Tablet/?page=1

For $229, I'm tempted in getting one.