IBM's PowerPC Motherboard Design?

bob_shoggoth asks: "A while ago IBM released a royalty-free motherboard design around their PowerPC chips. Have any computers based on this design actually been made? I would consider a PowerPC computer for running Linux if I could actually find a reasonably priced one. Since Linux (and the BSD's) have such good cross-platform support, why do I seem to be limited to just the x86 platform when there is a market that does not need binary backwards compatibility?"

Comments

Lots of reasons

[Trevor Goodchild]

First and foremost is market acceptance. Everybody knows about Intel, and most know about AMD. The PowerPC architecture has never really become well known, mainly because at the time it was released Apple was in a tailspin. Unfortunately, because it is most associated with Apple, it got tainted by Apple's situation. It was never considered a contender, so people forgot about it.

I keep mentioning it in past tense, because that's the general opinion of the news media that reports on these things. This whole implied media image has resulted in many people just not giving much consideration to PowerPC chips, despite IBM's best efforts to change that.

Another reason is a relative lack of economies of scale. The small percentage of use due to the above hasn't created enough incentive for board manufacturers to look at it seriously. Especially now with several very popular chipsets for Intel & AMD, all of them selling far more than any PowerPC-based boards. This pushes the price of the few components available much higher than comparable x86 ones.

What it all really boils down to is profits. Abit, Asus, etc., don't give a damn about variety or what's best. Board manufacturers are not innovators, they just respond to market demands. Until a company with more market pull (like Dell or Compaq) starts selling boat loads of PowerPC based systems, availability will be scarce and prices will be high.

from an old article

[feebdaed]

eternalcomputing was listed as one of the first to sign up for building one.

MacWeek has the old article.

see http://slashdot.org/articles /99 /08/24/1922212.shtml for more info

NorthBridge was never produced in Volume

[bstadil]

The IBM POP design used a NorthBridge Designed by a Non IBM company called Aleate or something. The chip had problems and could not be produced in volume. The POP design is dead but there is a few designs in the works but non in production AFAIK. You can make a PowerPC MB with mostly standard PC components except NorthBridge and cache for the PowerPC. Look at http://www.czuba-tech.com/RIORED/english/overview. htm for an open design done by SiliconFruit.