Hi,
next sunday me and a friend of mine will attend a Linux fair in my city. We're going to show an AmigaOne running Debian, it will be an opportunity to show off the motherboard as an alternative to x86 ones for Linuxes. I'm in search for any type of documentation about advantages of ppc type cpus over x86, as many people will certainly ask us why, for a Linux user, a PPC would be a "better" choice.
So far I've only found the recent article on OsNews, which is far from being objective IMHO. There is the heating advantage, but for others? What about the following:
- the evolution path, how does it compare against the newer 64 bit cpus from Intel and AMD? Is IBM commited in continuing the research and development?
- has ppc any advantage when used in multiprocessor machines? Some native support for this?
- how do the A1's ram and cpu buses compare against modern PCs?
- I've read that most of the next generation consoles will have a PPC, is this true? If so, will this help reducing the prices of ppc machines?
Thanks in advance for your help!
Varthall
That's a actually a really good question.
My next computer purchace will either be an Athlon64 or a PPC970+ CPU...
Frankly in terms of performance/architecture/etc... I don't think there's much in them, but at the moment I'm very much leaning towards the Athlon64... For one simple reason "Bang Per Buck".
I think the PPC biggest advantage is maybe heat output... that said the Athlon64 only has around 60Watts output, even though AMD say designers should allows for 80Watts... I expect this will allow for significant ramping in terms of clock speed of the A64.
But maybe the biggest advantage the PPC has is die size, which I believe is smaller than the A64.
If IBM can get the price of the G5 down (it's possible/likely use in future games consoles should help that) then it wil be a serious contender in the desktop market.
Though, who knows what AMD have in store with their K9 architecture... which threatens to be rather quick...
