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Linux Software

Perfect Pair: PowerPC And Linux 152

Posted by timothy from the hardware-diversity dept.
grubby writes: "A member of my local LUG NCOLUG has written an article in LinuxJournal about what the PowerPC and Linux could do together. He brings up many good points about the history of the WinTel PC and what he hopes the future may bring. I have personally had numerous conversations with him about his ideas and would like to know what the slashdot population thinks about them. Check it out, it's a good read." This piece takes a somewhat broad view of things -- which makes sense, given that radical changes can take time to grow in the background before they actually make public waves. Also of interest on the PPC front: kilaasi writes "Looks like IBM is getting back to it's PowerPC which is/was/will be co-developed with Motorola. IBM has some tricks that will increase speed and at the same time decrease power consumption." Here's CNET's brief story on upcoming PPC developments."
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Perfect Pair: PowerPC And Linux More

Perfect Pair: PowerPC And Linux

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  • Getting closer. Kindall was out. His wife would not sign the NDA.
  • I have been dreaming/wishing for a company to make a small, "tuck under the desk in the back office" style server for small buisnesses. A PPC chip and linux would do perfectly.

    The goal of this prodject wouldn't be the fastest desktop avaliable. Infact, I would imagine that stability would a much more useable feature.

    Imagine a small linux box, sold for, say $300, and with optional subscription support... A machine that can be your companies Webserver, Firewall, Internet Gateway, Mail server, File server, Print server... And it's all useable with a simple web interface from (only) the internal network.

    Obviously, this little machine couldn't take care more than a small buisness, but it would be enough to get a small buisness on it's feet on the internet, as so many are using the current "model" of having somebody do all the hosting/webserice for you. (Blech, most of those suck, BTW.)

    I guess what I want to see is an inexpensive linux box, you can take out of the box, plug in to your network, plug into your internet connection (weather it be modem or ethernet), and get the basic funtionality out of the box. The instructions should have the user use a web browser to setup his initial settings (Donaim name, Services on/off, passwords, etc.) and that should be about everything.

    And, now getting back to the article, the PPC chip would do this just as well, or better than an intel chipset.

    I guess I'm just wishing here. I'd love to make something that's that easy to do.

    Pathway

    Forgive my spelling.

  • The ONLY problem with PPC is that it's very closed hardware. I.e. If you buy a PPC based system you will likely have a single source for upgrades and replacement parts. As is typical in such situations this single source charges an arm and a leg for everything.

    What this translates to is that you should not be considering low end or midrange PPC systems for anything that doesn't absolutely depend on that architecture. High end is different in that sometimes you just have to have the fastest no matter what. As for stuff that's bound to PPC. If you have it you have no choice. Linux isn't one of those things.

    Everything I have said here applies to Spark, PA-Risk, S390 and some very proprietary, name brand PCs. For most jobs generic x86 is the best choice because after you choose it you can still decide where to buy each and every component, thus forcing the vendors to jump through hoops to get at your money.

    --
    Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
    Whatever is said in Latin sounds profound.
  • The potential for chips frying is the cost of an open market and it is a low cost indeed. You see you can get the case, motherboard, CPU and fans from different vendors. You have to make sure they all work together well.

    With PPC the burnouts aren't as common because the whole thing is designed by a single vendor. The upshot is that when you buy X86 from one of the better vendors (And there are still literally thousands of "better vendors") the fan is big enough for the chip and the Motherboard is compatible.

    As for the design features. Shorter pipelines and cleaner design doesn't mean squat when your database can't handle 1/2 the users mine dose despite us spending the same amount on our systems.

    For the record $5,000 buys you dual P3s at 1GH, a GB of RAM and RAID. You will still have change left over for 1/2 dozen Ethernet adapters including a couple of gigabit ones. Sure it's more stuff and perhaps lower quality stuff but it still gets a larger portion of the job done.

    Finally there is the situation where I can get a new ATX motherboard or ATX case from any of 80+ vendors within a 25 minute drive (in heavy traffic) of where I live. I speak definitively about Kingston Jamaica on this but I am willing to lay money on that this is typical in other cities worldwide.

    For closed stuff you have little if any choice in vendors and the WILL gauge your eyes out. I have seen grown men discard a whole system because the power supply failed. On a PC this is a $15 part. On that Mac it was a $250 part which had to be flown in from a distant dealer at additional cost.

    When you get a grasp of the real cost advantages come back to me.

    PS: Even if I buy a 3rd CPU for each of my dual systems it would still leave me ahead of the game.
  • We have different definitions of "plenty".

    You can get X86 CPUs from at least 4 vendors who compete aggressively. PPC chips are manufactured by a 3 member cartel ( Apple, IBM and Motorola ). 3rd party PPC vendors exist at the mercy of this cartel since they totally own the architecture.

    Those 3rd party vendors who do supply PPC systems are few and far between. The prices are also considerably higher. Yes I mean that in terms of performance. I.e. If you buy a $5000 PPC-Linux server to run your business on the $5000 x86 Linux server will run rings around it. Until you have the legions of vendors who openly hate each others guts, PPC will not be price/performance competitive.

    the news sucks but it's still true.

    --
    Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
    Whatever is said in Latin sounds profound.
  • The article mentions it, yes.

    I'm just pointing out that, in my opinion, this is the key reason that PowerPC hasn't caught on as an architecture like it could.
  • Restricted and limited in that I have to buy a system preconfigured by Apple, according to what they want to sell me.

    There isn't a lot of choice. . . I'm forced to buy what they're willing to sell me, and that's it.

    Now, in a PC, if it starts becoming obsolete, I can go out and buy a new motherboard and CPU, slap it in, and bang, my computer's ready to live another few years.

    What do I do with my becoming obsolete Mac? Doorstop, anyone? ;-)

    Or, what happens if I want a desktop machine with SCSI disks? As I recall (and I may be slightly wrong on this), Apple no longer offers non-IDE drives in their desktops. I don't want to buy a machine just to rip out half of it to replace it.

    The fact that they finally moved to the industry standard PCI bus is a great thing (Although, I don't know that I've yet seen a Mac with more than 2 slots), don't get me wrong, and the USB is nice (firewire is nifty, but still poorly supported by devices, though it's getting better). However, there's a lot more to flexibility than that, and I don't like being limited to only what one company is willing to sell me.
  • Laptops are a completely different world from desktops. When dealing with laptops, Apple machines aren't as bad of a buy.

    However, as impressive as the PowerPC processor is, you will *not* get the same performance for the buck out of a Mac that you will out of an x86 machine. It won't happen.

    Period. This isn't FUD, this is reality. When you are dealing with a single vendor who has to subsidise their research and development costs through hardware sales, that's what happens.

    And don't pull that "Total Cost of Ownership" crap. TCO is based very heavily on the previous experience and knowledge of the users. If they have Mac experience, they'll have less trouble with Macs. If they have Windows experience, they'll have less trouble with Windows. Same thing with administrator experience. What you know will cost you less.
  • First of all, the RS/6000 is a very different beast from a PC or a Macintosh. It's an enterprise level Unix workstation/server comparable with a Sun UltraSPARC, Compaq/DEC AlphaStation, or an SGI workstation.

    Additionally, if you want to be strict, the Power CPU used in RS/6000's is not exactly the same as the PowerPC processor. It's a more advanced 64 bit version.

    So, there is a *huge* difference in what you get betweeen an RS/6000 and a Macintosh. They have different purposes, different uses, and shouldn't really be directly compared.

    Now, as to my second point, I never said I would buy an RS/6000. In fact, I was trying to make the point that for general use, they are much too expensive. Your average person cannot afford to spend that much on a machine.

    Lastly, I don't 'hate' Apple. I dislike many of their business practices, as well as their Operating System (pre-MacOS x), but I don't hate them. Honestly, I don't care enough about them as a company to hate them.

  • You do the PPC injustice. The benchmarks here show that while you'll save a couple bucks with an x86, a properly tuned G4 system is superior.

    That's very amusing. You provided a link to a page which back up my argument, and failed to counter it. If you read what I said, I stated that you "you will *not* get the same performance for the buck" with Mac vs. x86.

    I am *not* saying that the PowerPC is a bad processor, in fact if you read an earlier comment, you'll see that I specifically state that if I could buy PowerPC CPU's and motherboards directly, without buying a Mac, I'd be the first in line for one. Now, here's a direct quote from the URL you gave:

    On a strictly cost basis, the Macintosh is the clear loser. Though Mac enthusiasts like myself may cite intangible advantages like "more elegant look and feel," that does little to convince Wintel lovers that they should spend $700 to $900 more just for the right to be abused verbally by their friends for buying a Macintosh.

    On a cost/performance basis, the Athlon system is clearly the overall winner.

    This is exactly what I said above. You get more bang for the buck with an x86 system than you do with a Mac.

    The fact of the matter is that TCO is a valid argument, which is probably why you are trying to derail it. Go on eBay, and you can find three-year old Macs being sold for 50% of what they were purchased originally. How does your x86 stand up to that?

    Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) is one of the most subjective and misleading statistics ever created. It's sole purpose is for computer/software/OS manufacturers to use to convince you that it's better to pay more money for their stuff than someone elses, because you'll save money in the long run.

    The fact is, TCO depends as much, or often times more, on the people you have and the experience and knowledge they have, than anything else. You can't give a single TCO for a system, and have it be realistic for every buyer of that system.

    As for your statements about buying Macs on eBay, that is unrelated to this argument. All that does is prove that Apple has a restrictive stranglehold on the Macintosh market, and that they artificially inflate prices in order to create revenue.

    Also, remember that Apple/Mac and PowerPC are not necessarily synonymous, and should be treated as separate entities. I love the PowerPC processor, however I dislike many of Apple's business practices, and don't like how they inflate hardware prices to cover research and development costs, as well as software costs. They should either make up their mind and choose to be a software or a hardware company, or they should separate their products more and open up to allow for outside R&D.

  • Short answer is nobody bought them. Do you expect it to be any different this time?

    Yes, actually, I do. ;-)

    Many things have changed since the mid '90s. Computers have become ubiquitous. Back then, they were still a very expensive and somewhat uncommon item, even if they were gaining in popularity. You didn't find them in millions of homes across the US, as well as throughout the world.

    The PowerPC processor never had a real opportunity to break into the general PC market, because of lack of support. When it was first introduced, Apple was the only major non-embedded user, and shortly after, IBM. Availability of PowerPC CPU's and motherboards was never at the same level as Intel compatible parts. Additionally, that was a different world of PCs. Five years ago, it was almost unheard of for someone without a technical degree to build their own computer, while it's become very common today.

    Also, on the Operating System front, if you built a PowerPC system, what OS would you run? Until Windows NT was released, with PowerPC support, there was no Microsoft compatible operating system. There was MacOS, if your BIOS would support it, but then why not just buy a Macintosh? Also, shortly after NT 4 was released, Microsoft stopped suporting NT on PowerPC.

    Today, there is a very viable Operating System in Linux that can be run on it, and two lesser known alternatives, BeOS and NetBSD (and OpenBSD) which can be used on PowerPC systems. None of these existed in a viable form five years ago.

    Five years ago, if I were building a PowerPC system myself, I would be worried about what OS I would put on it, what applications I would run, and where I would find them. With Linux and the plethora of available, that question has an easy answer.

    Five years ago, if there were PowerPC CPU's and motherboards available to build a PC with, I wouldn't have cared much. I didn't have any use for it. Today, if they were available, I'd be among the first in line to purchase one. So yeah, again, I do think things would be different today. ;-)

  • What I think we really need, before we'll see the PowerPC really take off, is the ability to build PowerPC Systems.

    For example, if I want to build an Intel (or compatible) system, I buy a CPU, a motherboard, memory, any devices I need, I put it together, and boom. A system is born.

    I can even do that with Alpha systems, though it's a little more work.

    However, has anyone ever seen PowerPC CPU's and motherboards available anywhere?

    I love PowerPC systems, I think they're absolutely amazing. However, I don't have the $10k to drop on an RS/6000, and I have no interest in purchasing an over-price Macintosh computer. They're too restrictive and limited.

    As soon as I can buy a PowerPC CPU and motherboard somewhere, though, and build a system myself, I'll be the first in line to do it. Linux runs amazingly well on PowerPC processors.
  • The primary reason to make the switch then is that the x86 intel clones are all CISC proccesors, which is an archaic and limited architecture, destined to grow bigger and more power-hungry over time.

    Not really. Sure, there's a complex instruction set, but these days, it's essentially a RISC core, and the x86 opcodes get mapped to internal RISC ops for execution. Furthermore, PPC (and SPARC and the others) have been moving further and further away from true RISC, and their instruction sets are anything but reduced now -- although admittedly, they're nowhere near as bloated as the x86 ISA. The only true RISC chip left with any sizeable market share is probably ARM. Personally, I miss the Motorola m88k. One of the nicest instruction sets I've come across since the 6502...

  • Heck, you don't even need a laptop.

    The [NEC SimpleEm], available from Dynamism [dynamism.com], is truly cool.

    Flat panel, touchpad, keyboard -- all connected by IR. No cables. Sweet.

    And very much eye-candy!

    --
  • Rubbish! Motorola remained a force in the microcomputer market by developing initially the 6502 which competed with Zilog's Z80 processors in the home computer boom of the early 80s, and then releasing the 68000 series which were used in the Apple Macintosh, Commodore Amiga, Atari ST etc.
    Er... Motorola didn't make the 6502, MOS TECHNOLOGY did. The 6502 was a cheap & performing knock-off of the 6800, the latter chip being Motorola's.

    --

  • Apple would be highly unlikely to help take potential Mac OS X seats away from themselves in such a way.


    Apple makes a lot of money off of sales of their PowerPC-based hardware.

    They don't make dick off of Mac OS, X or otherwise.

    Very few people have as part of their PC-buying decision the mental exchange "should I use Linux or MacOS?" The markets don't overlap that much.

    It would be in Apple's economic best interest to continue to support PowerPC Linux development, and to actively market their hardware to Linux users when they feel the OS is mature enough on their platform.

    The only real change they need to make in the hardware to support this is the addition of another flippin' mouse button or two.
  • However, every Unix person that I know that has played with OS X is impressed... It's a sharp OS.

    Every Unix person I know is impressed with OS X, too; and still running Linux.
  • Two of the three web sites listed in the article are dead. So where was this wonderfully huge market that was tauted?

    Methinks a little more market research and a little less empty speculation might be in order.

  • more bang for the buck - ppc (Score:4)

    by mr_burns ( 13129 ) on Thursday May 10, 2001 @05:26PM (#231331)
    Intel and Apple have both admitted it in their digital hub rhetoric. Desktop pc's are losing their sex appeal. Rich Gold from Xerox Parc's "Ubi-Comp" is the way things are going. For recent terms...that's ubiquitous computing. "puters are all around us. Cell Phones, Palms...Microwave Ovens.

    Do they run on x86....hell no. the only ubiquitous computing machine that could benefit from that 20+ year old architecture is a toaster...'cause the heat could do some good there.

    Own a tivo?....guess what...you have a Linux PowerPC box in your house that you rely on more than your x86 Linux box.

    That's how this is going to go down. You're going to buy all these gadgets that have nifty comm features. the PowerPC takes a whole lot less energy and MHZ to be just as powerful as an x86. Guess what Linux will be in your embedded systens....the one who sucks less.....power that is.

    The other end of this fork is the lifespan of hardware. x86 PC's usually are useful for 3 years before bloat renders them useless. Macs usually take 6 years to be annoyingly slow.

    Seriously...I bought the Mac I'm typing this on in 1996. It was only a month ago that I had to switch to SuSE on it to keep it tolerable.

    so yeah. If your goal is world domination of Open Source...then x86 Linux is a pitfall. The landscape is moving away from PC's and into nifty gadgets running PPC or ARM.

    Stop wasting your time with that packard bell in the dumpster and focus on todays cool tech. embedded Linux on PPC...and some cool desktop hardware as well
  • Comparing prices of lots of 1000 processors, back in 1997 when it's 2001... Not especially useful information.

    And i don't know what exactly you're talking about in reference to the PCI bus, but taking sound off of it spares 150KB/sec out of 132 MB/sec per CD quality channel... basically a drop in the bucket. And videos' been off of the PCI bus in x86 computers for years now... AGP, remember?
  • love PowerPC systems, I think they're absolutely amazing. However, I don't have the $10k to drop on an RS/6000, and I have no interest in purchasing an over-price Macintosh computer. They're too restrictive and limited.

    WHAT?!? You'd buy an RS/6000 if only you had $10,000, but find $1700 for a 466 MHz G4, with IDE, Firewire, USB, 64-bit/33 MHz PCI slots, a 32 bit/66 MHz PCI slot, CD-RW drive, and gigabit ethernet "over priced, restictive and limited?"

    How is that or is it that you're predisposed to hate apple, in which case you should have just said that.
  • before anyone posts a rant saying they cant get hold of stuff

    apples are Power systems and your local electronics shop are able to order them from MOT and IBM (at least they where here in the UK via RS electronics ) and thats with a ATX board

    IBM has released some nice docs and BOM's on building the hardware you can find it on the semi page

    MOT seem to want to push the Power Arch hard and have seen various roadshows and freebees to entice developers

    you can find alot of people useing it e.g. TIVO
    and lineo likes it alot

    what I would like is for GCC to get sorted because the code output is not as optermised as it could be personaly I just cant wait for GCC 3.0

    but IBM keep the powerPC code under bitkeeper wich is a bit (haha) strange at first but works well try it out

    just a couple of veiws

    regards

    john jones

  • So the whole "Apple killed the Open PowerPC market" story is complete and total bullshit. Windows users killed that market by not buying the product.

    How can you say that end customers killed the product by not buying it, when there never was a product? At worst, you could say they killed it by being predicted to not buy it.


    ---

  • [Wild guess] 20 bit addressing, maybe? "640K is enough for anyone" doesn't sound nearly so stupid when your competitors are limited to 64K.


    ---

  • Actually, PPC is a tactical choice too. Look at recent Macs: no fans, and they only sip the juice compared to my AMD-brand guzzlers.

    PPC may be a good choice if you wanna build a box that is going to be powered on 24x7, such as a server.

    All we need now is for something to happen that makes people think about power and cooling issues. But what are the chances of that happening? [yahoo.com]


    ---

  • A non-Apple box to run it on... (Score:4)

    by Sloppy ( 14984 ) on Thursday May 10, 2001 @03:02PM (#231338) Homepage Journal

    ...might actually materialize from the years of vapor.

    bplan [bplan-gmbh.de] just a couple of weeks ago released images [bplan-gmbh.de] of their prototype PPC ATX motherboards. Part of the reason for this board is to appeal to us Amiga nuts so we can run AmigaOS clones like MorphOS [morphos.de] on it, but Ralph has said that the board will be fairly generic and that Linux will also run on it. (Which is a good idea if bplan actually wants some serious sales volume.)

    So maybe some day, a sensibly-priced PPC box will be available (well, actually iMacs aren't such a bad deal).


    ---
  • Restricted and limited in that I have to buy a system preconfigured by Apple, according to what they want to sell me.

    The Apple Store [apple.com] offers build to order. The options are comparable to what you would find at Dell or Gateway's online stores. You can order some strange configurations, like a G4 with 2 60 gig IDE drives, 1.5 gigs of RAM, and 4 video cards.

    Now, in a PC, if it starts becoming obsolete, I can go out and buy a new motherboard and CPU, slap it in, and bang, my computer's ready to live another few years.

    I would say that if you've replaced the motherboard and the CPU, you really don't have the same computer any more, but this is a matter of opinion, so I'm not going to argue it.

    As I recall (and I may be slightly wrong on this), Apple no longer offers non-IDE drives in their desktops.

    Bullshit. Apple has 8 SCSI options for the G4 desktop ranging from a single 36 gig drive to triple 72 giggers. You can't get SCSI in an iMac, but you don't buy an iMac for that kind of speed.

    The fact that they finally moved to the industry standard PCI bus is a great thing

    Finally!? They switched to PCI in 1995!

    (Although, I don't know that I've yet seen a Mac with more than 2 slots)

    This says to me you haven't seen a Mac built since 1997, and that they were the low-end family targetted models at that. Current G4s have 3 PCI slots and 1 AGP. Some earlier models, such as the ever-popular 9600, had six slots. Most models had three.

    If you want to complain about Apple, complain about real problems. Complain about the exorbitant cost of RAM and drives (just because you can get SCSI at the Apple store, that doesn't mean you should). Complain about the crufty OS. Complain about the PowerPC chips falling behind in performance. Hell, complain about the CEO being insane, I don't care. Just don't complain about problems you've imagined.

    --

  • I just have to ask: Why?

    The powerPC is a nice chip, but I don't think the 'linuxPC' concept would wash, at least not as a powerPC based system. It's been hard enough to get popular commercial software ports to intel Linux, much less different architectures. Examples: Acrobat reader, Flash plugin, Arcserve client. 'All' it would take is a re-compile to run them on PowerPC, but good luck getting commercial vendors to do it.

    Look at some of the existing attempts to package linux appliances on non-x86 CPUs: Remember the sidewinder and netwinder [netwinder.net] box that Corel used to make? Looks like their new products were switched to a transmeta (ie: x86) CPU. How about Cobalt? Gone are the MIPS based models, now they run x86 chips.

    Why would the average customer at a discount retailer like Best Buy purchase the PowerPC based linux system (running at, say 2GHz), vs. the Intel/AMD/Transmeta x86 based system (running at, say 6GHz)? (speed ratings inflated assuming this doesn't happen for a few years)

    The RISC vs. CISC point is almost moot nowadays, given that the more advanced Pentium and Athlon chips are essentially RISC chips that emulate the x86 CISC instruction set.

    Now if you'll excuse me, I'll hunker down in my anti-flame bunker.
  • well, where can I buy an ATX PPC motherboard, then?
  • What chipset is on that board? It doesn't even say...
  • It's been a while but as I recall the Z80 only had a program counter that was 16 bits wide so it would only handle 64K of memory. This was great when all we ran was CP/M on the Z80. The 8086/8088 had something like 20 bits for address so a whopping 1MB could be accessed although some of that memory space was reserved for BIOS and stuff so that left 640K to work with.

    As for IBM choice of the 8088 rather than the 8086 I heard they wanted an 8 bit data path since 8 bit devices were much more common and cheaper at the time than 16 bit devices were.
  • No, he doesn't.

    Why would he want the results of executing $DISTRO there?

    You may want to try reading the sh man page before speaking next time.
  • what about on their notebooks? I'd love to get a powerbook, but I know the one mouse button would start to irriate me(another problem is the damn touchpad --who likes these things?)
  • We do a ton of embedded PPC stuff where I work (and we have an board design that is totally in house). We are using IBM.

    Why PPC? Power consumption.
    Why IBM? Power consumption.

    Whats missing is support from IBMs notoriously slow microelectrionics division. While the uP division is churning out PPC every 6 months, it takes the uE division another year to come up with a PLB/PCI bridge to support it.

    You do realize that IBMs LATEST and GREATEST CPC710 (which is only sampling) doesn't support IBM's latest SHIPPING uC.
  • IBM had a choice of processors. Morotola's 68000 or Intel's 8088. They were afraid that Motorola couldn't produce the 68k in quantity and therefore chose the 8088. Engineers in IBM acknowledged that the 68k was the better microprocessor, closer to its mainframe architectures, and easier to work with. It was fear of shipping a product without having anything to ship that made them chose the 8088. Intel has been riding the gravy train from that one decision ever since.


    IBM went looking for an OS afterwards.

  • What does "Restrictive and limited" mean? Are you restricted by the PCI slots in the back, or the firewire and USB ports? I just don't understand your contention.
  • I don't think there are any functions in the kernel that need to do math on large streams of data.

    mem*, str* would gain from it. both in the kernel and in glibc.

  • ...or it's like saying the Ford Mustang and the Plymouth Voyager are one in the same since they were both Iacocca's babies.

    --mike

    (Self moderation down to -1 for Off-Topic. Don't waste your points on me)

  • Uh.. that ain't it (as far as I know).
    The version of the story I always heard was that Intel had licensed bubble memory technology (yikes!) and in return IBM got the rights to manufacture the 8086/8088 without paying royalties (or at least substantial royalties). Originally the IBM engineers wanted to use the 68000 series, but the 8086/8088 could be had for next to nothing so they went for it.


  • What are the strengths of the PPC? Embedded systems (=cheap/low power). What are the strengths of Linux? Cheap servers.

    Why not unite the two strengths? Make super cheap/lower power/tiny foot print racks mounted units with the *embedded* version of the PPC running Linux! You can optimize the server for its purpose while still having the flexibility of Linux.

  • I don't know of anyone who is running Linux who doesn't keep Windows as a dual boot for running games. That alone will doom the efforts of a "consumer" Linux PPC.
  • I see no reason to assume the any Linux PPC would be Macintosh compatible any more than any box with an x86 runs Windows. CPU is only one element of machine design.
  • Indeed, I spoke too soon and my apologies for my snippy reply. Thanks for giving a pointer to the Mac-On-Linux project. Frankly, I'm a little amazed that they can get a Mac to emulate on pretty much any PPC platform as I figured there'd be way too many hardware dependencies.
  • The major marketing difference between apple and wintel, is the number of companies it takes to deliver a product.

    Nobody wants to run production on Intel, and why would I dump HP-UX or Solaris in favor of Linux, voiding my support contract in the process? This article has a lot of vision, but what Linux needs is the warrantied support of a chip manufacturer.

    (note: If the author is mainly refering to personal computers, I would question his reference to "the IT Industry" which the last time I checked, included but was not defined by PC sales.)

  • Well, since there was no #! at the top, it was probably a makefile...

    Or not.
    ------

  • Slight logical fallacy (Score:5)

    by imac.usr ( 58845 ) on Thursday May 10, 2001 @02:00PM (#231358) Homepage
    If Apple can use its knowledge and influence to help convert annual production of about 25 million WinTel boxes into LinuxPCs, then, together with its own use of roughly 5 million PowerPCs, that 30 million piece annual volume would give the PowerPC a fair chance at gaining further market share against the roughly 95 million box market that WinTel boxes would then have.

    Um, yeah, and why would Apple want to give away 25 million PowerPC chips to support an OS that it's trying to compete with? Shareholders and users alike would be infuriated.

    Make no mistake, Apple supports (or at least doesn't discourage) Linux on PowerPCs, but they are a business with a goal of dominating the market with Mac OS X just as Microsoft is a business with the goal of dominating the market with Windows and Red Hat, Caldera, SuSE, etc. are businesses with a goal of dominating the market with $DISTRO. Apple would be highly unlikely to help take potential Mac OS X seats away from themselves in such a way.


    --
  • You're just brainwashed by Jobs - PowerPC performance "at half the clockspeed" is a myth unless you're dealing with highly optimized and narrowly defined benchmark suites. Why not compare two Linux systems side by side? The G4 Mac you buy for $1500 is easily outclassed by the Athlon T-bird you get for the same money (and the Mac doesn't even include the monitor!). Compilation performance alone shows that the PowerPC is a dog. And as far as possible I'm comparing like systems - both using 512M of PC133 RAM, both using identical 7200 IBM 75GXP drives, same kernel revision, etc. etc., only the clock speeds are different - that Mac has been a big disappointment. People, if you're thinking of a used G4 just for Linux - make sure you get to test it before paying for it. I'm not saying that it's useless, just that there are more cost-effective options.

  • Well this is halfway off topic (as usual) but what I would like to know is when is someone going to focus on doing something really cool with SGI based hardware. They have some pretty hardcore boxes, and with the way the company is going (or so it seems) is they'll be going going gone soon, which means your likely to pick up some SGI boxes for dirt cheap.

    Yes I know SGI makes a Linux based box, but surely someone could create a special port of Nix focusing on maybe some hardcore graphic design packages for that machine... Anyone using an SGI running anything other than (*cough*crap*cough) Irix? And not an SGI Indy... gimme some hardcore O2, Origin freak respond to this with their pimpification of an SGI


  • Sheesh... (Score:4)

    by ktakki ( 64573 ) on Thursday May 10, 2001 @01:52PM (#231361) Homepage Journal
    From the article:
    Dream with me on how YOUR LinuxPC will be so neat with that flat monitor you are lusting after. Dream with me of the ways the ergonomics of a typical cubicle can be improved using a wall-mounted flat monitor and a LinuxPC stuck on the wall with Velcro, and soon our dreams will ring in the ears of companies like Acer, Apple, IBM, Motorola, the companies that can make our dreams come true.


    Sheesh, Henry. Lay off the 'shrooms and buy a laptop, already.

    Not from the article:
    I have a dream that one day penguins and demons will walk hand in hand. I have a dream that the chips of MIPS and the chips of SPARC and the chips of Motorola will walk together as sisters and brothers...

    ...when we let it ring from every colo and every server farm, from every desktop and every rack, we will be able to speed up that day when all of Turing's children, microprocessors and microcontrollers, Big Endian and Little Endian, 32-bit and 64-bit, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Linux spiritual, "Free from Wintel! free from Wintel! thank Linus Almighty, we are free from Wintel!"


    Amen.

    k.


    --
    "In spite of everything, I still believe that people
    are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
  • The article says, "...In the late seventies, Intel won the chip war with Motorola and Zilog by offering certain features in its 8086 chip that favored MS-DOS over then existing competitive OSes...". What were the features?
  • PPC systems will NEVER be cheap beacuse Apple wants them to be expensive, and if you want to run Linux, you already have how many cheap x86 hardware options?

    Apple may use the most PPC chips, but they don't control their manufacture or distribution.

    I see the real barrier to cheap PPC systems is good third party motherboards. How do you convince Asus, Abit, Gigabyte, and the rest that they can make money making PPC motherboards. It costs a lot of money to design a motherboard, make the test fixtures, and the margins aren't very good. If you want cheap parts you need to have volume. The first step in convincing manufacturers that volume could exist is to show them that there's a demand for current PPC hardware. This means showing that people run Linux on PowerMacs, or that OSX could run on third party hardware. That might convince them that if they can produce cheaper components, that volumes would increase. However, simply saying that price alone is the reason for relatively small PPC demand won't go far.

    Linux in general has come a long way toward becomming more user friendly, however it still has a ways to go before it's adopted by the average consumer. In my experience, PPC versions of Linux still lag behind X86 versions by quite a bit. If Linux on the PPC is the justification for mass production of PPC PCs, then there;s a lot of work to be done on PPC Linux.
  • Motorola Computer Group does make PPC ATX system boards. I don't think there's a version of Mac OS that runs on them, but you can run Linux on them, though it's not fun to set up.

    Mac OS not running on these systems isn't Motorola's fault. Apple doesn't chose to support these boards, other vendors do support them. Apple sells computers, not OSs, so they aren't interested in supporting their OS on other platforms.

    The ATX boards are Motorola's MATX series. They also have CPCI and VME boards.

    www.mcg.mot.com
  • When IBM failed at shipping a workable OS/2-PPC

    OS/2 For The PowerPC was finished and version 1.0 did ship. There was a time when you could buy a PowerPC-based computer from IBM with OS/2 PPC pre-loaded. The proof? You can still buy today an application for OS/2 PPC: The Graham Utilities for OS/2 [warpspeed.com.au]. Scroll to the bottom of that page and you'll see:

    The CD-ROM version includes versions specifically optimised for the 386, 486, 586 and Power PC 603 processors.

    --
    Lord Nimon
  • how the hell is PPC a "niche player?" PPC is no more a "niche" chip than x86 is a "niche" chip (after all, you rarely see it out of the "PC niche"). sure PPC may not be in many PCs, but christ man look around you: PCs are not the be all and end all of computing!

    - j

  • Let's see a successfully mass-marketed x86 PC with Linux preinstalled (and I define "successfully" as "I can go to Best Buy or Circuit City and pick one up"), before we move ahead with a different system architecture...

  • 1) The PPC isn't 'lost' to BSD. To call it lost, makes it a win, lose game, rather than a win-win. Too bad vast, vocal parts of the Linux world sees things as a win-lose game.

    In the 'not helping linux on PPC' department:
    1) LinuxPPC Co-founder resigns. /. story [slashdot.org]
    2) Some feel the PPC version of the kernel isn't merged with the std X86 centric kernel. /. story [slashdot.org]
    3) back in Aug 1999 a story was floated 'will PPC become the leading linux platform /. story [slashdot.org] As we know, that didn't happen. And, the more time that passes, the more likely its not gonna happen.

    Linux will be an option for PPC based machines, just like BSD and AIX is.

    Just like GNU/Linux doesn't rule the X86 world, its not going to rule the PPC world.

  • I have no interest in purchasing an over-price Macintosh computer. They're too restrictive and limited.

    When will this FUD end? The iBook does extremely well against comparably priced notebooks. [aapltalk.com] More features, plenty of new-standard (no legacy crap) ports for expansion, same price points. Desktops do, too, even without looking at Total Cost of Ownership arguments.


    I have zero tolerance for zero-tolerance policies.

  • It would be in Apple's economic best interest to continue to support PowerPC Linux development, and to actively market their hardware to Linux users when they feel the OS is mature enough on their platform.

    From a marketing standpoint, that's probably the LAST thing Apple should do; they would be diluting the Mac OS brand. Apple just spent hundreds of millions to bring its users a Mac-ified version of *nix; actively supporting Linux would only raise questions about Apple's commitment to OS X, and it might even slow development of OS X apps. No, Apple has the right idea: encouraging *nix users who are ready for a decent GUI to make the permanent switch to OS X, and pushing OS X as a better enterprise server OS.

    Besides, assuming they did promote Linux on the PPC, Apple can't guarantee that all of those Linux/PPC users would be return hardware customers; once Apple established the market, other vendors like Dell and Gateway would start producing Linux/PPC systems based on the already established CHRP specs, and margins would get slashed to pennies on the dollar overnight. Since Apple has already demonstrated that they can't compete in a cut-throat market like that, they would be forced to exit. At least by promoting OS X, Apple can maintain user loyalty and repeat hardware purchases.

    Anyway, Apple already has an open source OS in Darwin. If Apple ever did decide to tackle the internet appliance market, they would do it with Darwin.

  • You can't buy a Linux box at Best Buy or Circuit City because those places sell nothing but crap. Buying a computer there is like buying shoes at K-Mart. You think that just because you can't get Nikes at K-Mart that they aren't successfully mass-marketed?
  • I have never been a real apple fan since i started using x86's, but considering the performance you can get out of a chip with half the clockspeed, I think they ARE pretty effecient. Combined with linux, it sounds like a good deal. I still remember running an old shell server off a converted ppc machine. Too bad it had a broken chipset and melted down after two months ;)
  • This article seems to make a lot of points where the justifcations given don't match up to the points made on close examination.
    For that purpose, the Foundation will devise an open-source Linux distribution with an integral, not a ported, MD database engine...That integral database engine and OS "mix" is designed to run only on PowerPC-based hardware.

    Why? The article starts by talking about the "concern... of letting one company, Intel, supply all the processors and thus control the IT industry" and then goes on to suggest that it's a good thing that this guy's latest and greatest product will only run on PPC. The whole thing reads like a long justification for a personal obsession with PPC, and contains all sorts of inaccuracies to make the point.
    In spite of... [losing the 8086 chip war] Motorola has managed to remain an important force in computer processors, mainly because of the PowerPC."

    Rubbish! Motorola remained a force in the microcomputer market by developing initially the 6502 which competed with Zilog's Z80 processors in the home computer boom of the early 80s, and then releasing the 68000 series which were used in the Apple Macintosh, Commodore Amiga, Atari ST etc.
    Most Linux fans are not old enough to remember that Intel did not always dominate the PC processor market

    OK, maybe I'm being picky now, but I thought most Linux fans grew up on Apple ][s, ZX Spectrums, Ataris, Amigas etc. etc. none of which had any kind of Intel chip in them (well, maybe some SSI chips....).
    Red Flag Linux has given China its independence from "Win", and the LinuxPC is capable of delivering China out of the "Tel" clutches

    But "AMD" and "Cyrix" could do a very good job of getting China out of the "Tel" clutches too! I don't see why selling them overpriced PPC boxes is going to benefit them. Nope, sorry, you'll have to try harder to convince me that a wholehearted Linux Community 'Push' behind a PPC-based Linux platform is a good idea. Personally, the only way I can see PPC-based Linux boxen becoming common is if a really decent rack-mounted server were produced that consumed less power and had better performance than an Intel equivalent (we already know that Althlons run to hot...)
    I could go on, but there seems to be a marketing-style totally loaded statement in every paragraph (reminds me of a recent Microsoft press release..) and I can't be bothered to quote them all... I think that was more than $0.10...
  • You haven't looked at OS X, have you? It's a SLICK Interface on a UNIX. The system has quirks. It is definitely not a replacement for my Linux workstation yet, but it's DAMNED close. When Office for OS X comes out, those of us running two machines to use Unix on one and regular productivity software on another, are going to be NUTS not to look at OS X.

    I got a Cube with OS X 10.0.3 on my desk for evaluation, I love it, I just wish that I had some time to play with it and get it set up.

    However, the Mac faithful aren't deciding between Linux and OS X, they are mostly running OS 9 and whining a lot. However, every Unix person that I know that has played with OS X is impressed... It's a sharp OS.

    That said, I think that Apple would be smart to ship a stripped down PPC system for hackers. Let people buy a G3 machine w/o monitor. The Cube/G4-Workstation are priced a bit out of a hobbyist range (someone that likes to play with machines, and wants a computer to put new pieces in, not be useful on) and the iMac is no fun to play with and comes with a crappy monitor.

    Apple should ship some G3 Workstations... hell, pull the Beige G3 design or B&W G3 designs out of the closet and run the suckers off like there is no tomorrow.

    Or sell the motherboards. Let people play around with them.

    Alex

    Alex
  • IBM was shipping $5000-$10000 PCs to their mainframe customers. The idea was to create a HOME computer so people could work at home. The goal was to wed these machines to the Mainframe business. IBM laughed at the PC market, and never dreamed of them being cheap toys OR work machines. You would use the mainframe at work, but you could dial-in, etc. from home.

    IBM was under anti-trust investigation for bundling their OS with their mainframes, and wanted to avoid antagonizing the DOJ. Apple was scoring big with their machines because of Visicalc. IBM wanted to stop that quickly, and needed to get a machine out the door. The guys in Boca grabbed some "off the shelf" ICs and put a system together.

    Intel was in the right place at the right time with a cheap 16-bit machine. IBM wanted to cut costs, so they went with the 8088, which was the 8086 grafted onto a 8-bit bus. Remember, a simple bus is that many "wires," so 8-bit is a cheaper mobo to manufacture. They built a BIOS, and Gates gave them what seemed like a sweetheart deal. IBM thought Gates just wanted to push BASIC sales, and therefore was licensing the OS for nothing. When Compaq reverse engineered the IBM BIOS... well, MS-DOS was born.

    Remember the old days: IBM: BASICA (Advanced Basic, included support for disk drives so you weren't stuff with cassette tapes like BASIC), and MS: GW-BASIC.

    Similar, a few different quirks, etc.

    I think I have my PC-DOS 2.1 disks and MS-DOS 3.3 disks somewhere around my parent's place.

    Alex

  • IBM Killed It (Score:3)

    by alexhmit01 ( 104757 ) on Thursday May 10, 2001 @04:25PM (#231376)
    A friend of mine was in Motorola when this went down. He wasn't working in the chip division, but he was at the company. He told me this at the time after taking a tour of some stuff that they were doing in the Boca Raton facility (I actually ended up working 2 blocks from the old IBM site a while later, but this was after IBM shut it down and it's a useless tangent so I'll shut up).

    IBM had rooms filled with PPC Computers, but they all ran NT. IBM REFUSED to ship them (despite the NT port), for two reasons:

    1) Embarassment: they couldn't get OS/2 shipping, and it was always REAL SOON
    2) Dumb corporate policy: Until about 2 years ago, IBM refused to allow two divisions to compete with themselves, and NT-PPC Machines would compete with x86-OS/2 machines, so no NT-PPC machines.

    Remember, there was little PPC/NT support, and it would be running DOS/Windows applications, which OS/2 did.

    Apple didn't kill Open PowerPC, IBM's management did.

    Ironically, about 3 months after NT-PPC was dropped (largely because IBM, the one pushing PPC, wouldn't sell NT Workstations with it), was when IBM decided that they needed to sell NT Workstations... and they did so with x86 chips.

    This was a Management decision that I am certain they don't regret. Remember, Win95 didn't successfully kill the x86/DOS arena, and IBM wouldn't have gotten good application support for NT-PPC.

    Alex
  • Can anyone tell me if the platform specific parts of the linux kernal for PPC been written to take advantage of the Altivec instructions?
  • Well, you can definitely buy a linux box at best buy. They sell TiVos.
  • Wrongo. That Moto ATX board wasn't designed to run MacOS, so Apple killing the clones had nothing to do with it.

    I'm talking about the Motorola/Everex CHRP board that was fruitless to market because not only did Apple raise the MacOS price, they 'decided' not to support CHRP. You're talking about their earlier PowerPC systems designed as platforms for NT and Motorola's UNIX.

    The reason Wondows users didn't buy PowerPC machines is because they were limited-production and very expensive. Motorola's ATX board was to be at a price point comparable to the then available x86 boards.

    And even a 15% market share is more than triple the share PowerPCs have on the desktop today!

    Steve Jobs was scared. There were warehouses full of unsold Mac 6500s, and the FUD about Apple's obsolete system software was cutting into the overall growth of the Mac market. Once MicroS**t invested in Apple, and MacOS8 hit the streets, the FUD stopped (even though the OS hadn't changed that much). But the ability to commoditize PowerPC-based computers was forever lost when Jobs killed the clones, and thus the Motorola ATX CHRP board... didn't I already say that?


    blessings,

  • I don't think there are any functions in the kernel that need to do math on large streams of data.


    blessings,

  • The real end was when Apple cancelled all the clones. Motorola was readying an ATX board and was willing to sell it through mom-and-pop PC shops.

    A brand new Apple doesn't count as a reasonable Linux platform, their hardware is the antithesis of an open system, and their prices are extremely absurd. IBM's attempt last year to make an 'open system' complete with a free schematic failed.

    Despite the cheerful '2.0 ghz' (future, always sometime in the future) press release from IBM, the PowerPC lags considerably in cost and speed. Let's not try and get teary-eyed with unfounded hope of a cheap, high-performance, open PowerPC platform. It has found its home in the embedded market.


    blessings,

  • The Mac arena is one place where BSD is making a definite win over Linux, with Mac OS X promising to add a couple of million BSD sites this year.

  • Heck, I'd by a box like that just to run BeOS on. :-) And since the thermal characteristics of the ppc's are nice, I bet those guys would make great little firewalls with OpenBSD (or heck, 1U machines in general).

    I'm assuming those boards take "normal" sdram and I/O connectors (hd, mouse, kb)?


    --
    News for geeks in Austin: www.geekaustin.org [geekaustin.org]
  • That's like saying the VMS operating system owns x86 server markets, because Windows NT is VMS at it's core.
  • ... QNX RtP, MorhpOS and AmigaOS 4.x (ETA the end of this summer). All runs PPC as well.

    These links might be interesting:

    Pegasos PPC-board [bplan-gmbh.de]

    Eyetechs AmigaOne PPC-boards [eyetech.co.uk]

    What really would make my day would be to see FreeBSD running on PPC.

    Bjarne
  • You just described a Cobalt MIPS system, except for the price. $300 isn't going to be a large enough return on the product to make it viable in the long run, unless it's a turnkey system with a *large* manditory service contract.
  • Boy, that would have been a kick if IBM went with the 68000 and Apple picked the 8088 back when the choice presented itself.... We would all be laughing at the Apple users with thier 1.8Ghz cpus that couldn't keep up with our 500Mhz machines, instead of the other way around...

    Something to think about
  • I really doubt the author of the article was correct here.

    Although I am not old enough to actually remember, I am geeky enough to have read about the creation of the PC before. IBM (for obscure reasons) decided to create cheap consumer boxen. There was most likely a reason for IBM to go with 8086 instead of e.g. Z80 or m68k, but it couldn't possibly have anything to do with MS-DOS, as they made the box first, and then went out shopping for an OS.

    I very much doubt that IBM was even aware of the existence of QDOS (quick and dirty os - the precursor to MS-DOS) by the time they decided upon the hardware for the PC. From my understanding, there wasn't too much planning ahead, everything happened in record time, and the goal was to be first to market, not quality. They of course realized they needed an OS, and since time was essential, they just bought one instead of writing something themselves.

  • I think anyone that knows anything about modern systems (and is not 100% tied to Windows) would like to have a PowerPC system. But, I can get any one of 50 different motherboards for around $100 for an x86. It's really hard to justify spending 3,4, or 5 times as much for a PPC system.

    Come on Abit, VIA, Soyo, etc.. How about a cheap PPC motherboard.

    I'm sick of buying a huge heat sink with a big fan & 3 case fans to keep my crappy x86 from melting. Give me a reasonably priced motherboard for a RISC processor.

  • *sigh*

    PPC systems will NEVER be cheap beacuse Apple wants them to be expensive, and if you want to run Linux, you already have how many cheap x86 hardware options?

    You think things are "different today" because now you can put together your own box... so can anyone with a link to arsTechnica... super!

    Those who run Linux made their own boxen 5 years ago... they do so still now. Guess what, they have 5 more years practice running on x86 harware than they did 5 years ago. x86 harware is DIRT CHEAP. I run LinuxPPC on a PPC machine, and RedHat on an AMD box... the PPC box has been more trouble than it's worth.

    PPC chips have great adavantages to them, don't get me wrong... however, if Linux runs faster on them, it's not a revolution. It means .0004% of the worlds computer users might buy different next year.

  • Motorola has a mobo called the Sandpoint that seems to be the closest thing to a buildable system, but it's bare-bones by any standard -- not even USB. That's fine, you can add the stuff with a PCI card, but...

    The problem with Sandpoint is expandability -- it takes a processor daughtercard, of which something like half a dozen are available, all with extremely limited (*one* SO-DIMM) memory expansion. You can put a fairly nice processor in them (G4 boards are available), and it's ATX format, so you can put it in a standard case. But you can't expand the memory without swapping what's already in there. It's put out as an evaluation board, so *maybe* that excuses the lack of current features, but I would think it's a bit difficult to evaluate a processor on such limited system.

    Okay, how do I know all this? I'm thinking of building a Sandpoint box myself (can't find @!#$* pricing) to do a little OS hacking (Darwin, if you must know ;-) ) and I thought the fruits of my research thus far would be useful. Sandpoint will probably suit my purposes (it better; it's the only game in town as far as I can tell), but it's not the system the market needs.

    I hate to say it, but what we really need is Mac cloning again. No one, and I mean NO ONE, is going to be crazy enough to come out with a commodity PPC motherboard without it being able to boot up (at the very least) MacOS X. For a while, until the clones were Steved, Motorola sold a 603e board called Tanzania. It was a bit flaky by Mac hardware standards (Apple sold only one Tanzania machine, the 4400/7250 by name, depending on where you bought it), but it did make clone sublicensing and building your own Mac possible.

    IMHO the only way to get commodity PPC hardware is to force Apple's hand on the cloning issue by porting Darwin to systems like Sandpoint and RS/6000. Once that works (after which point we can all start buying the IBM chips, which run faster than the Motorola chips), we'll have what's needed. But we need the clones, either from the top down (which ain't gonna happen soon) or the bottom up.

    /Brian
  • What could be done is to just take one of the BSDs, shave it down to a microkernel (wait, isn't this how Avie and co. created Mach way back when?), and slap a Win32 interface on it. Use the Qt framebuffer, and you're good to go...

    /Brian
  • Depends on whose definition of PC you use. Are you talking about a personal computer (the current Jobsian definition, which is not too uncommon and includes pretty much everything desktoppish and related/developed from), or a PC, which is indeed x86-powered.

    The PC in PowerPC indicated that it was a POWER chip designed for personal computing platforms like the Mac.

    /Brian
  • I know of at least 4 companys that build systems on the PPC platform - Apple, IBM, a couple of defense contractors like Murcury. Be used to build the BeBox, but that was a long time ago. Do all of them build their own chipsets and motherboards?

    Maybe the big problem is a lack of snazzy, clear cases on the open market - IBM might not want to go public with the news that the G4 won't work unless its in a spiffy clear case or a cruise missile.

    --

  • I think that comparing the compile times for an x86 based arch to a PPC based arch to be unfair.

    If i am correct in my assumption the following things are true:
    1: x86 compilers are much more mature than PPC (gcc in this case), both in terms of optimised code generated and the speed at which that code is generated.
    2: PPC relies on the compiler to optimise the code, the chip has not optimisation that occours as the code is run at all.
    3: More than just benchmarks run faster. RC5 (http://www.distributed.net) G4's absolutely cane over x86 chips. When i did a few seti blocks because i was bored, my G3 366 was faster than my Duron733 [iBook was ~8+ hours faster](the duron is now running at 950). I am assuming that the AltiVec unit of the G4 would be used for seti, and that would mean a G4 would be even faster


    How every version of MICROS~1 Windows(TM) comes to exist.
  • This is very true. The last couple of games like e.g. Black and White show a trnd to move away from card-targetted games like quake to more intelligent world games like B&W. Oni was going to be just like that but apparently they never got further than decent character animation, probably because of the strategic buy of Bungie by MS(read: xbox). In any case, B&W is setting a new waypoint for gaming, and you better dig up your athlon 1.33 or intel 1.5 because they are going to smoke out loud.

  • Umm, What did intel add to the 8086 that made ibm take it over the z80? I thought big blue went for the 8086 because they didn't want the new pc to compete with their existing line of computers. If I recall Bob Cringley's book Accidental Empires, he said Bill G insisted that IBM go with a 16-bit cpu. So big blue picked the lamest 16-bit cpu they could find. I guess they should have used the m68k like apple did; then we would all have ppc's in our linux boxes.
  • Don't open that link if you wanna keep it G rated
  • The only proprietary parts of a PPC system are the motherboard and CPU. Thanks to PCI, USB and SDRAM, everything else should be swappable with x86.

    And there are 2 manufaturers of the PPC CPU: Mot & IBM (just like there are 2 manufacturers of x86).

    Now, all we need are the motherboards (although that Mac Cube is pretty cool).

  • Comment removed (Score:3)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Thursday May 10, 2001 @02:35PM (#231423)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • From the article:

    Most Linux fans are not old enough to remember that Intel did not always dominate the PC processor market. In the late seventies, Intel won the chip war with Motorola and Zilog by offering certain features in its 8086 chip that favored MS-DOS over then existing competitive OSes. Subsequently IBM selected the 8088 for the first PC, knocking both Motorola and Zilog out of the emerging PC market.

    I thought IBM chose MS-DOS because they refused to deal with the CP/M, and had Bill Gates & CO steal^H^H^H^H^H write their own DOS for IBM.

    Running Linux on Power PC will no more make it survive than did MS-DOS on Intel. It is a matter of power vs. price, although more for the price. That's why AMD is kicking Intel [yahoo.com] with steel-toed boots in the speed category [tomshardware.com].

  • It is interesting to see the perspective of people who were not around at the time.

    I was around at the time, and actually used all the computers I mentioned. Your comments about IBM teaching uSoft its trader are on-target. Development in C was unheard of in the microcomputer industry, which is what we were talking about. Yes, there were some advanced compilers (for their time) running on mainframes. This had no relevance to the microcomputer industry, which grew out of developments that could be made on microcomputers.

  • Re:What were the special MS-DOS features? (Score:4)

    by localroger ( 258128 ) on Thursday May 10, 2001 @04:39PM (#231426) Homepage
    What were the features?

    1. 20-bit addressing.

    Don't laugh, this was a big deal in 1981. At the time outfitting a box with the theoretical maximum of 640K would set you back several thousand bucks and an outboard power supply. At the time 64Kx1 RAM chips had just been introduced and ran IIRC somewhere around $200 per set of 9.

    2. It was not a Zilog chip.

    Zilog made the Z-80, used by then-big competitor Tandy in their machines. IBM did not want their product confused with that of a major competitor.

    3. It was not a Motorola chip.

    Motorola made the 6502, used by then-big competitor Apple in their machines. IBM did not want their product confused with that of a major competitor.

    4. Rich instruction set

    In those days before the religion of RISC had been formed, much important code was written directly in assembly language. The luxury of writing the operating system in C was not practical on a 4 MHz processor with an 8-bit bus to memory. The x86 set was designed to be used by humans, not compilers. In these days of fast CPUs and optimized computers this is considered a Bad Thing, but in those days with a rich lode of 8080 assembly source code waiting to be ported and legions of programmers familiar with the techniques it was considered a Good Thing.

    In many ways the 8088 was ahead of its time. Early MS-DOS code was notably bloated compared to code written for 8-bit platforms like the Z-80, and the first wave of PC's were terribly underpowered to be doing anything useful. The PC succeeded in those early days only because of its IBM brand; it was at least 1984 before the XT with its hard drive and AT with some actual CPU performance became serious competitors to low-end machines like the C64, TRS-80, and Apple II. Businesses kept the standard going until it became commodified, the price of useful systems came down, and its ability to do personal type applications (read: games) began to actually approach that of its competitors.

  • CP/M lost because the people who owned it blew off the meeting, believing they had no competition.

    I don't know who fed you that revisionist history, but Kildall didn't blow off the meeting for that reason. He simply wouldn't sign IBM's NDA, so IBM packed up their stuff and went over to see Gates who was happy to supply whatever signatures were necessary.

    Funny, not signing NDAs is kind of a badge of honor among FSF-types.

    Dancin Santa
  • Err, no. At the same price point, you buy lower power consumption and heat dissipation, a shorter pipeline constuction, and a whole lot less cludge. What you get is more "stuff" with less quality components. I don't think I have ever heard of a PPC ever burning out- but I have heard many times of x86 chips frying. Fry once = higher costs.
  • One thing that is not mentioned in the article is pipeline length. Intel ramps speed by extending the pipeling- P4 is at 21 (or is it 28, I forget) while the G4 PPC is at 7. People worried about this because the G3 has a 3 or 4 step pipeline. Shorter pipelines emphasize more work done per clock step, while long pipelines do less per clock tick and try to do a lot of pre-emptive execution, which can lead to total execution failure (side effect that makes 1.4GHz P4 slower at Word than 1GHz P3). A short pipeline reduces pre-emptive failure, plus can achieve a 1:2 up to a 1:4 ration for work/clock tick. This means that a 500MHz PPC can do the same as a 1GHz x86, or up to a 2GHz x86 depending on the task. Of course this is theoretical, but I hope you see my point about the relative merits of pipeline depth.
  • Go watch Pirates of Silicon Valley again.

    CP/M lost because the people who owned it blew off the meeting, believing they had no competition.

    Bill Gates won because he lied to IBM about having an OS, then went out and bought DOS for $50k.

    --Blair
  • I think that many posters fail to understand that we're talking a looooong time in the future. The primary reason to make the switch then is that the x86 intel clones are all CISC proccesors, which is an archaic and limited architecture, destined to grow bigger and more power-hungry over time. Apple made the switch to RISC with the original PPC 601 chip, which was a great idea. What started off with a compromise on lower chips (Wozniak spent the money without Jobs' permission, and they went with the then-slower motorola 68000s) has led to an early adoption of a superior technology. AMD and Intel don't have any RISC chips in the wings, and Motorola and IBM are producing speed upgrades all the time. In the future, their experience and knowlege of RISC design will let them gain greater market share, and Linux users, as early adopters, can no doubt appreciate the gains that come with experience.
    P.S. Contrary to some earlier posts, it IS possible to buy apple motherboards, and PowerPC daughtercards. I built a frankenmac that runs 4 604e proccessors, out of an old Daystar motherboard and some daughtercards that cost me $50 apiece. I call it the Beast, and it rocks my world. I'd love to drop Linux onto it, but that couldn't utilize the multiple processors. Oh well!
  • For embedded systems requiring low power, low chip count, linux and decent floating point performance, the PPC chips are better than any x86 alternatives. Ok, there are some x86 alternatives but the problem with x86 is that each chip design has a very short market life. You don't want to have to redesign your embedded motherboard every 2 years just to be able to ship products. Motorola has always been a great embedded PPC processor manufacturer.

    --jeff
  • Yes, that $1700 for the Macintosh is overpriced. You can get 1GHz+ Athlons with similar hardware plus DVD and better graphics for around $1000. They won't be as well made, but they will work quite well, and they will run a lot more software.

  • ppc is a niche processor... (Score:3)

    by mveloso ( 325617 ) on Thursday May 10, 2001 @01:59PM (#231445)
    The PowerPC chip is a niche player. That's not necessarily a bad thing, as long as the various ecologies in which it's dominant continue to be viable.

    But - promoting diversity for diversity's sake is just plain silly. Diversity is a strategic choice, not a tactical choice, and it's very difficult to push strategic choices down the throats of users, especially when cost is involved. It's going to be practically impossible to get PPC stuff down to the commodity pricing level of the x86 world, and that's fine, because they're for different markets. Is there a value proposition for PowerPCs at the current price points? Yes! Does that value proposition make sense at the commodity level? Obviously the answer is no, because, well, x86 is good enough.

    When it comes to non-standard computing environments, however, PowerPC chips are much better. Low power, low heat, good performance with few compromises, all combine into an attractive and compelling package. In restricted environments, the heat dissipation characteristics alone are compelling.

    So remember, it's just a chip. There are more important things to get worked up about, like licensing schemes and such.
  • Wrongo. That Moto ATX board wasn't designed to run MacOS, so Apple killing the clones had nothing to do with it.

    IBM and Motorola figured that Intel couldn't scale the Pentium design and plotted to take a chunk out of the PC CPU market selling business machines running Windows NT and OS/2 on an open spec PowerPC system design.

    MacOS was already long out of this market, and Apple was just along for the ride because they needed a new chip. What killed the PowerPC market was the fact that no businesses wanted to run PPC PCs. When IBM failed at shipping a workable OS/2-PPC and Moto refused to continue paying MS for NT-PPC, their only market channel left was Apple. So, of course they pointed figures at them, even though Apple's grandest market predictions only gave them 15% share for Macs + clones, and IBM/Moto was betting on a bunch more.

    So the whole "Apple killed the Open PowerPC market" story is complete and total bullshit. Windows users killed that market by not buying the product. (The Mac clones weren't standard PReP/CHRP machines anyway - they were all Apple-designed custom motherboards with an Apple ROM on them.)

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