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PowerPC Open Platform Motherboards Finally Here
Cajal writes: "IBM's POP (PowerPC Open Platform) is a standard for making PowerPC-based motherboards. It's been out for years, but no one did anything with it. That's now changed. According to a story on PenguinPPC, Mai Logic is finally making POP motherboards. Finally, we can buy PowerPC motherboards without dealing with Apple."
One board costs $3,900 - I think I'll still be dealing with Apple for my PPC needs - get a dual CPU and a GeForce 4 included for that price!
--
Reverse outsourcing: it's the future
What would the advantadge of this be over an Intel/AMD system? Or is the clone AIX market going to open up?
If they're comparable in price to an intel I could see Linux folks using them for servers vs. Intel. But if the PPC is a lot more expensive (20%) I don't see the value in this.
If MacOS still ran on something other than Apple's machines like it did in the mid 90s that'd be a reason to get one, but at the moment I'm not seeing it.
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
Motorola makes a bunch of boards including the Sandpoint and the MVP (Which is a dual board). Galileo/Marvell makes boards, Tundra sells boards...
They're all ATX form factor and supported by linux too.
An Apple that isn't an Apple is quite tempting. My main complaint about those things for most of my years has been the inability to build a frankenstein like you can with the old PC architecture.
I've been planning on getting myself a new computer in the next few months, and pretty much assumed I'd be getting a Thunderbird. But now... now this makes me think. On the plus side the PPCs will be able to run Mac OS X (or will they?), but they won't be able to run any flavor of Windows (which I need for games and such). Of course, the deciding factor may just be how much more Mandrake supports their PPC code after this.
PPCs... feels like I'm talking about BattleTech...
You alreayd could get PowerPcs without dealing with apple. Terra soft [terrasoft.com] makes the iBriq. Adimitidly, its not designed for desktop use, as its about the size of a cdrom drive, and needs an adaptor to use a pci slot, but if you really don't want to deal wwith apple....
Mod point free since 2001
Why not just buy a damn Athlon +++++ whateever system. At least I can be sure my binary only applications would work (ie. Java, Games, drivers, etc). Yes, in an open-source-only world, thats cool...
If I HAVE to have a risc-based work-station I would rather do it on Solaris. You can pickup a sun-blade very cheep, throw in some ram and you have a great unix workstation. It will run all the crap you would want to run on linux, including linux itself.
If I want to use a PPC platform, I personally will buy an Apple.
I'd assume that Apple continues to tie their Operating Systems to proprietary ROMs - making a generic PPC motherboard fairly useless if you're planning to run MacOS. Not like this is a new thing - since the early 80's, Apple has used their ROM chips to sue any clone manufacturers. I remember my 1992-vintage Mac emulator for the Amiga required Mac ROMs that the emulator manufacturer would not supply.
I'd love to be wrong on this one - getting more competition in the PPC-hardware space would be great, but I doubt Steve Jobs will play along - he'll take his ball home first.
'ARRGH! Pirate Designers of the Internet, we be!'
Competition is a good and healthy thing, but part of me is a little worried by this.
I mean, if apple hardware becomes the open market that PC hardware is now, Apple will have to quickly adapt.
Microsoft understood from the beginning that the real profit is to be made in software, but Apple is still a proprietary hardware company that happens to also sell the software which their machines require.
If the market truly opens up, Apple may face the really tough choice of dumping their hardware line entirely. When the time comes, will they make the right choice and make the shift to software-only gracefully?
If they don't then I fear that one of the last strongholds against Microsoft market share may wither and die.
On the other hand, it will be in the best interest of the companies which produce third party hardware to keep Apple in business(after all, if Apple goes under, who will buy hardware for Mac OS?), so maybe some sort of truce will be drawn. I guess as always, it's wait and see.
Really though, despite the foreshadowing, this is good news for the market.
lysergically yours
Only the core layer of OS X is open sourced: it's what we know as Darwin..
What makes Mac OS X really attractive on the surface is it's GUI, which is not open source. Check out a nifty diagram here to see how it all stacks up.
The answer is yes: Darwin will probably run easily on one of these boards, (there is an intel port of darwin). It is unlikely you'll get Aqua and the other supporting layers to run though, bearing in mind that it is unlikely Mac OS X "as is" will run on one of these boards without significant code surgery.
Be kind. There are too many mean people out there already.
Given that they are selling evaluation boards for $3,900 in quantity 1, I think sticking with Apple might be a good idea in the short term. Since the chipset is only $30 in quantity, hopefully somebody else will begin making affordable motherboards based upon the design. But Apple doesn't charge that much for a pimped out G4 tower, even with their steep RAM markup.
What's curious is that their web page seems to indicate that the same chipset works with x86, PPC, and MIPS processors. I'm sure there are 100 reasons why it's impossible, but that kind of chipset flexibility does seem to raise some interesting dual-boot or multiprocessor setups to say the least.
Moto (and many others) have been selling PPC motherboards for many years, maybe close to a decade by now. They are used for a fair number of embedded projects. The two downsides are cost, and every frickn' one of them seems to have another way to interface with PCI, or to deal with the boot sequence, or something. So all the not-so-fun parts of porting an OS have to be done again and again while the rest of it "just works" (or tends to).
P.S. for a (slow) PowerPC, just buy an old TiVo. Linux comes with it, and NTSC out. Of corse it is only 50Mhz, but it works (don't get a new TiVo by mistake, they try to rip you off with one of those 200ishMhz MIPS CPUs...)
PPC is fated to be an embedded CPU only, unless the support hardware comes down in price.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
This likely won't have much impact on Apple as a whole. Frankly, after trying to make older hardware useful spending countless hours failing to have successful installs of LinuxPPC and Yellowdog Linux, I was thrilled to see that I can in fact have BSD albiet Darwin flavored without agony (and, of course, my old hardware remains unused).
Apple's ultimate desktop success with Darwin/OSX will be because users who need that kind of OS power can now have it without the niggling driver details that plague Intel OS distributions. It amazes me that Linux has been as successful as it has with the agony that users have to endure to successfully install the OS. The bar is much higher now. Users can expect their OS install to just happen and still have the power tools of compilers and real server software without the electronic equivalent of repeatedly stabbing themselves in the leg with a fork.
Of course, the die hard slashdot crowd will always prefer Linux, but it seems to me that things are shifting to a new and friendlier approach.
I own a couple of pieces of alpha hardware and it's fun in a geeky way to have. It's nice to test code on other platforms, it's nice to be able to learn assembly to other platforms and have something to work on, and a 21264 makes a hell of a web server. I'd love to have a newer PowerPC machine to work on but the prices just aren't there. If I could buy a motherboard and processor for $400-$500 maybe even $600 then I could easily see a little clique of people doing it. I can see real market value to it as well, I've seen 6 or 7 embedded jobs over the last month that were for PowerPC products.
I hope that they are interested in lowering the prices and ramping up some mass production of the hardware. I could also see a huge market for lower priced integrated PowerPC motherboards with G3s or even 60x processors on them; put 3 NICs, IDE and a PowerPC on a motherboard for $200 and you have a nice DIY home gateway/firewall/router box.
This is one reason people were able torun OS X on unsupported machines.
The high-level components like Cocoa and Carbon don't run on Darwin/Intel because the available binary code is PPC code.
I think it would be great to have one motherboard that supported processors from multiple vendors. Mai's web site says that the Teron PX board will support PPC, MIPS, and X86 processors.
Brings a whole new meaning to "Dual Boot".
You could develop in X86 Linux, shutdown swap processors, reboot in PPC Linux recompile and test.
The obvious reason is the coolness factor. ;-)
Other reasons are coolness (in terms of low temp and fewer fans, not hip dude wearing sunglasses) and power usage. Low-power-usage (yet still fast) computers would be great for 24x7 servers.
Emulating MacOS (like Sheepshaver under BeOS did) would be somewhat nifty (although current real Macs these days are very nice, so this would be a somewhat less valid reason than it would have been a few years ago).
Another server-related idea: obscurity. Let's hypothesize you have bad, insecure source code that, for some bizarre reason (I can't think of an actual good reason) you're not going to fix. Let's say it has a buffer-overflow attack hole. All the kiddies' scripts will try to put x86 opcodes on your stack. Put when you execute them, you'll just dump core instead of getting rooted. Yes that still sucks, but it's an improvement, right? Actually, I don't remember, but I think PPC stack may grow in opposite direction than x86, so buffer overflow attacks might not work anyway?
Use your imagination; there are probably other advantages. But really when you get down to it, the coolness factor is the best one. :-)
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Check out that ugly power regulator in the upper left corner. Even if this is a demo board, a cleaner job should have been done with the prototype's part selection, mounting and soldering. This must be a joke, as that thing does not even have a heat sink on it. I think I will pass, and get one of those nifty new 1GHz dually's Apple now has.
Gerald Roebke
You'll be working with stuff that's had to evolve in a much more Darwinian environment
Am I the only one who finds this troll ironic? After all Darwin's native development environment is Apple supplied PPC systems.
What if it is just turtles all the way down?
Um, I really think you're stretching the meaning of the word "open" here, especially in the end. I can probably dig up the specs for PCI or USB without too much trouble, but show me the register-level specs for any recent ATI or nVIDIA GPU, and I'll show you a broken NDA. Those devices are not "open", in my world. But hey, I'd just love to be proven wrong, and really like links! ;^)
main(O){10<putchar(4^--O?77-(15&5128 >>4*O):10)&&main(2+O);}
Hello,
There's another PPC Motherboard with PCI, UDMA100, and Firewire coming in a couple of weeks from a German company named bPlan. It's called Pegasos, and info is here.
$650 with a G3/400 is a lot more palatable than $3000. I just hope it has OpenFirmware on it!
$3900 is a mite high, but high prices are not particularly surprising when something is being sold in its initial "units of 1 board to early implementors."
It obviously won't get wildly popular until they can get pricing a bit more competitive with the hardware emitted by Apple, but it's a little early to say that this will never happen.
MAI may be able to maintain a viable commercial business without prices ever falling to $100/unit, by the way...
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
Quite a few people here aren't really clued in on the facts. First, the $3900 price tag is for an evaluation model. Intel and AMD do the same thing to vendors... nothing new. And, yes, there have been many $4000 PPC motherboards around.
Second, if you read the PR on MAI's site, you can see that they plan to release the boards for SIGNIFIGANTLY less then $3900. The bigger flipside to this is that they also plan to produce (or license to produce) PCI cards and embedded g4 devices from $300-$600 with SMP capabiliy. (cool.. i can dual boot now.) similar cards sell now for $2000+
Third, nobody seems to mention this chipset's ability to use PC hardware. I suppose this would be pretty easy to accomplish, but it's still a cool feature. The only limitation here would be driver support (not a HUGE issue. i dobut many people will be playing quake on this anytime soon. the first boards would sell to developers).
Fifth, as a small sidenote, microcode solutions (http://www.microcode-solutions.com) plans to relesae a suite of ppc emulation products this spring. They plan on offering a hardware board, as well as a software based product. Of course, many are skeptical and believe it is vaporware. They currently offer a ppc amiga based macos emulator. (there are tons of amiga ppc motherboards out there. there are still a disturbing number of amiga users (shame gateway cut off their funding, right when they were about to make a comeback.)
Finally, the chipset itself sells for $20. This is comprable to what chipset vendors such as VIA charge for their hardware. I would expect to see other companies support this sometime.
Another issue is legality. It's perfectly legal to run LinuxPPC and beos. NOT macos. Sure, OS9 doens't need a hardware rom to run, but it is written specifically in the EULA that macos may ONLY RUN ON APPLE HARDWARE (yeah... it's in caps in the EULA... lawyers really abuse their shift keys!). Another project, MOL (mac-on-linux) which hopes to produce a mac compatibility layer (what wine is to windows, mol is to macos). Supposedly, it works well.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
So *that's* why they include a couple of Apple stickers with every new computer..... Stick them on the side of your clone and you can run OS X all you like...
Disclaimer: Yes, this is a joke... but an interesting concept none-the-less.