So PowerPC is dead you say?

[bbond007]

It's just a little bit too big for my living room, I'll pass on this new PPC technology and happily continue use my Intel Core2Duo

http://www.characterblog.com/assets/58914-ibm-watson.jpg

Admit it, you asked but the wife would not allow it, right?

[fishy_fiz]

While I find it unusual to see myself agreeing with tmhg I can only assume he means commercially viable, which for the moment appears to be true. Price, performance and most other properties make it not an option in anything other than homebrew/hobbyist circles where rational decisions arent important. If anything Id have to say the ppc systems youve mentioned support that idea rather than negate it.

[bbond007]

While I find it unusual to see myself agreeing with tmhg I can only assume he means commercially viable, which for the moment appears to be true. Price, performance and most other properties make it not an option in anything other than homebrew/hobbyist circles where rational decisions arent important. If anything Id have to say the ppc systems youve mentioned support that idea rather than negate it.

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 (without failing). Ever! EVER!! EVER!!! EVER!!!! AGAIN!!! (evil laugh)

If you mean that they collective they have NEVER produced a viable OS4 motherboard and probably won't do so in the future, I might be inclined to agree with that, but its not what was said

[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...

[bbond007]

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...

1. Capable of living, developing, or germinating under favorable conditions.
2. Capable of living outside the uterus. Used of a fetus or newborn.
3. Capable of success or continuing effectiveness; practicable:

so lets go with #3, definitely not #2 (if you are wanting to discuss something involving an x1000 and a uterus, that is your business, leave me out of that...)

they made x number of boards and sold them all and there is chatter about doing it again. I'm not sure how that does not qualify under #3 which says nothing about making boatloads of money.

if making money is part of the definition, then i guess the Red Cross and Credit unions are not viable...

[commodorejohn]

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

[Jose]

Wasn't ARexx stated as a good implementation example of IBM's Rexx language on their documentation ? Maybe when AOS4/MOS get updated to a reasonable set of features (for them anyway) you'll see it ported to IBM hardware.

[billt]

I am curious, regardless of business viability or number that can be sold  or whether its some obscure thing, is powerpc technically competent to be a desktop processor? What is suitable, and what details are not?

[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.)

[Tripitaka]

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

Well put! TMHG lost my respect today, I just can't be done with his attitude.

...and with that, I'm off to bed. Their really is no point arguing with some people so I'm just not going to bother.

[Iggy]

Well put! TMHG lost my respect today, I just can't be done with his attitude.

...and with that, I'm off to bed. Their really is no point arguing with some people so I'm just not going to bother.

The scary thing is that he regularly posts on MorphZone and all the negativity is damned counterproductive.
Have a good night's rest.

[bbond007]

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

Obviously

but even if it was dead its still not dead.

Look at MIPS. I thought that was dead a long time ago but now they are making a MIPS tablet.

http://www.androidcentral.com/mips-tablet-promises-7-inches-ice-cream-sandwich-99

I had a prototype MIPS machine made by Olivetti, it ran Windows 2000 if i remember right. It was one of those ARC bios things that were a huge flop. I only used it as a SQL server but was faster than a x86 machine with 2x the clock-speed. I ruined the kboard port using a cheap KVM.

[itix]

I am curious, regardless of business viability or number that can be sold  or whether its some obscure thing, is powerpc technically competent to be a desktop processor? What is suitable, and what details are not?

Every CPU can be used as a desktop processor, even 6502 was used on a desktop. MPC5200B was designed for automotive industry but can run OWB and GCC very well in full HD resolution on my new 27" TFT.

What powerpc is lacking as a desktop processor is lack of inexpensive multicore G4 class processors. POWER7 is way too expensive while AMCC's processors are slow and dated. Freescale is probably the best source for powerpc desktop processors (i.e. e6500 core looks nice), too bad that nobody is building desktop computers from their processors.

[Manu]

Admit it, you asked but the wife would not allow it, right?

No but I know she would want to expand the house right after and since I would
go broke by getting into this PPC thing and building more rooms I would end up selling the whole lot :-P

[psxphill]

Wii-U is a multicore PPC but it's not based on the older GameCube/Wii cpu.

We'll see. The word from a game developer I know who has a Wii-U is that it is. It would be stupid of him to lie, but it might not be the final product. The first Wii devkits were basically gamecube devkits with extra bits added. Although with the launch not that far off, they'll need to get a move on.
 
The "based on POWER7 architecture" is probably just marketing talk. Like Nintendo did when they said the N64 was based on a Silicon Graphics workstation. It sort of was, just a heavily cut down version of an older generation. The POWER7 is not actually that fast to start with though, watson is fast because there are >2000 of them.
 
After the hard to program PS3, I would expect the PS4 to be a linux based x86-64 box with a lot of GPGPU cores used with OpenCL. The 720 is a tougher call, but something similar with windows instead of linux & directcompute instead of opencl would not suprise me.

[yssing]

As long as its being produced, it really cant be dead can it?