JetRacer wrote:
Floid: thanks for not biting and flaming my ass off. I realize now that my responce wasn't very... ...diplomatic. To say the least. Sorry about that.
Heh, no worries. In return, I'll apologize for being snide about it, but a) I want to pretend I called this on ANN a few months ago (though I have no idea what thread the post was in, so it's tough finding out how close I was), and b) if I see one more press article saying this is 'just like their Linux initiative' -- which, thankfully, News.com didn't do -- I'm going to strangle something. :-D
I think the problem is that I talk in theoretical future and you talk in practical present. And maybe I should have bumped the figures by factor two instead of one (A4/P4 and PS4) to emphasize that.
Actually, it was just opaque how you got from "IBM's new initiative" to "USB something." But then I noticed where you were from, and that put my brain's language parser into a different mode. (This isn't to say your English is bad, more like what you chose to say with it was unexpected. Or something.)
Everyone here's guilty of speculation at one time or another. It just itches when the practical idea of something (in this case, IBM allowing third parties to modify and run off PPCs at all) gets lost for all the speculation around it (OMG!!! POWER TO TEH PEOPLE).*
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Speaking of speculation, making follow-the-money guesses, I'm going to wager Chartered and TSMC bear the brunt of the 'costs' for the IP, so
if you're contracting with them it probably looks roughly 'free' (as a perk of their services). For a business like Sony that probably wants to run the design on some other fab... or another fab trying to get in the game... they'd have to negotiate their own thing with IBM. (I haven't kept track of where the EE gets run off these days; I'm not sure who else is left in terms of 'other fabs' -- Samsung already has some kind of relationship -- but maybe Phillips or something, if they're even still in the business.) I'd also wager Chartered and TSMC probably got a good deal given IBM's sudden desire to Make This Happen(TM), so they might be feeling emPOWERed compared to what ARM/Xscale might cost them.
If I'm even halfway right, then for now the whole thing is similar to the spirit of the AFPL (which we spent some time going over on ANN, if you missed it) -- no sense in screwing the little guy who can't afford to use it otherwise (getting it from Chartered or TSMC is doubtless a bit cheaper than, again, the proverbial case of trying to license the P4 blueprints from Intel; small and fabless fish are going to have to contract with someone
like Chartered or TSMC to get chips anyway); players big enough to have their own fabs (or demand the freedom to choose same) should have the dosh to pay up.
The only company they can't milk 'fairly'** under that setup is Microsoft (since they're a big fish, but would be using IBM's foundry, if they're even going PPC at all), but if you try to milk Microsoft for too much they'll just wander off somewhere cheaper. We all know how much they don't care about design. ;-)
(I have no idea how well *that* idea flows in, but I was going to wedge it into the last post anyway.)
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Anyhow, don't take any mentioning of brands (beyond Power) literall. I couldn't care less if the label said Sega, Nintendo, Sony, or X-Box. Well, to be honest I would find the X-Box option offensive :-)
Well, it's a bit disappointing that all of those are now similar enough to stand in for each other, but that in itself is an argument for not bothering to chase compatibility unless it comes 'free' (via Intent or whatever; 'free' here == 'available in a way that doesn't set up a sign pointing straight to your competitor'). If everyone else is off doing the same thing, surely there's a way to do something
different and succeed for it.
Now, speaking of doing things different, there are two theories punting around the XBox2/IBM relationship. First one is that what MS
really wants is to launch the first MS-designed CPU core, which, if successful, would tend to blow a large hole in the side of the industry for fairly obvious reasons. If so, this action by IBM is one way to head that off at the pass (who's going to license MS_Core with the existing bulk of PowerPC free/cheap/friendly?), and MS is now a little deep into the design cycle to look for another partner (plus MS would need IBM's world-beating facilities to make their design relevent) ... Second is that MS just wants to come up with some sort of licensable or patentable extension to existing processors (like vector units were a decade ago), one so 'necessary' that the CPU-design world will beat a monetary path to its door. If that's the case, IBM is more pandering to MS's needs while ensuring everyone else gets the same opportunity. (Which, in turn, does temper any negative impact MS can have, since they won't be alone...)
Edit: Third and most likely is that different parts of IBM (even just within the chip division) have entirely different perspectives, predictions, and motivations, but this is finally coming together because no matter what happens,
they can't lose. Every possible outcome, even wholly conflicting ones, amounts to a dramatic increase in IBM's sales.
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All this skullduggery sucks, but it has to be worked through to get to the point where you can do something as sensible as 'game' and 'compute' with a single device. For one thing, as much as it hurts to say it, that experience
is available to major extent with MS... For another, the only reason Sony
doesn't offer it with their existing line of PCs (even in space-starved Japan, where an integrated unit would go over big) is because those PCs are 'owned' by MS. As it stands right now, the PS2 itself
is the peripheral, and you plug it into your multi-input monitor or plasma display or TV-card equipped Vaio; much safer for them than handing the ability to run the software to the competition.
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Hmm.. I don't think IBM just "happened" to mention RedHat, though. The brand and what it implies were probably there for reasons other than to score a few cheap points in the Linux sphere, nor to please RedHat.
This is where "What." comes from; where exactly was RHAT mentioned?
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*Nice slogan. I do think they'll fulfill on the meaning of it eventually (since they already
are reaping the benefits of Linux, and once people have the design docs in their grubby hands, it'll be hard to put the genie back in the bottle)...
**'Fairly' in this case meaning "From each according to his ability."
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Meanwhile,
this post has become an unedited and digressive mess, but the window's been sitting open for a day or two, so I'm going to post it for the simple sake of not throwing it out. Feel free to poke inconsistencies, just pointing out that I know they're there.
